hands that would not relinquish the folder, hands that clutched it madly. She had taken peeks at the folder from across his desk and had seen the splatters that faded occasional words and caused the paper to pucker. The writing amid these drying tears was a scrawl, not as neat as his notes in the other folders. What she could see seemed to crawl angrily across the page, words slashed out violently and replaced. It was the same ferocity Deputy Marnes displayed all the time now, the boiling anger that had driven Juliette away from her desk and into the holding cell to work. She had found it impossible to sit across from such a broken soul and be expected to think. The view of the outside world that loomed before her, however sad, cast a far less depressing shadow.
It was in the holding cell that she killed time between the static-filled calls on her radio and the jaunts down to some disturbance. Often, she would simply sit and sort and re-sort her folders according to perceived severity. She was sheriff of all the silo. A job she had not shadowed for, but one she was beginning to understand. One of the last things Mayor Jahns had told her had proved truer than she could imagine: People were like machines. They broke down. They rattled. They could burn you or maim you if you weren’t careful. Her job was to not only figure out why this happened, and who was to blame, but also to listen for the signs of it coming. Being sheriff, like being a mechanic, was as much the fine art of preventive maintenance as it was the cleaning up after a breakdown.
The folders scattered on the floor were sad cases of the latter. Complaints between neighbors that got out of hand. Reported thefts. The source of a poisonous batch of amateur shower gin. Several more cases stemming from the trouble this gin had caused. Each folder awaited more findings, more legwork, more hikes down the twisting stairs to engage in twisted dialog, sorting lies from truth.
Juliette had read the Law portion of the Pact twice in preparation for the job. Lying in her bed in the down deep, her body exhausted from the work of aligning the primary generator, she had studied the proper way to file case folders, the danger of disturbing evidence, all of it logical and analogous to some part of her old job as mechanic. Approaching the scene of a crime or an active dispute was no different than walking into a pump room where something was broken. Someone or some thing was always at fault. She knew to listen, to observe, to ask questions of anyone who could have had anything to do with the faulty equipment or the tools that had served the equipment, following a chain of events all the way down to the bedrock itself. There were always confounding variables—you couldn’t adjust one dial without sending something else a-kilter—but Juliette had a skill, a talent, for knowing what was important and what could be ignored.
She assumed it was this talent that Deputy Marnes had originally seen in her, this patience and skepticism she employed to ask one more stupid question and stumble eventually onto the answer. It was a boost to her confidence that she had helped solve a case before. She hadn’t known it then, had been more concerned with simple justice and her private grief, but that case had been job training and an interview all in one.
She picked up that very folder from years gone by, a pale red stamp on its cover reading “Closed” in bold block letters. She peeled the tape holding its edges together and flipped through the notes. Many of them were in Holston’s neat hand, a forward-slanting print she recognized from just about everything on and inside her desk, a desk that had once been his. She read his notes about her, re-familiarized herself with a case that had seemed an obvious murder but had actually been a series of unlikely events. Going back through it, something she had avoided until now, resurfaced old pains. And yet—she could also recall how comforting it had been to distract herself with the clues. She could remember the rush of a problem solved, the satisfaction of having answers to offset the hollowness left by her lover’s death. The process had been similar to fixing a machine on extra shifts. There was the pain in her body from the effort and exhaustion, offset slightly by the knowledge that a rattle had been wrenched away.
She set the folder aside, not yet ready to relive it all. She picked up another and placed it in her lap, one hand falling to the brass star on her knee—
A shadow danced across the wallscreen, distracting her. Juliette looked up and saw a low wall of dirt spill down the hill. This layer of soot seemed to shiver in the wind as it travelled toward sensors she had been trained to think of as important, sensors that gave her a view of the outside world she had been frightened as a child into believing was dear.
But she wasn’t so sure, now that she was old enough to think for herself and near enough to observe it firsthand. This up-top’s obsession with cleaning barely trickled its way to the down deep where
Rather than ponder this further, she flipped opened Holston’s folder. Behind the bio tab was a thick stack of notes about his last days as sheriff. The portion relating to his actual crime was barely half a page long, the rest of the piece of paper blank and wasted. A single paragraph simply explained that he had reported to the up-top holding cell and had expressed an interest in the outside. That was it. A few lines to spell a man’s doom. Juliette read the words several times before flipping the page over.
Underneath was a note from Mayor Jahns asking that Holston be remembered for his service to the silo and not as just another cleaner. Juliette read this letter, written in the hand of someone who was also recently deceased. It was strange to think of people she knew that she could never see again. Part of the reason she avoided her father all these years was because he was, simply put,
She flipped through Holston’s folder and asked herself forbidden questions, some for the very first time. What had seemed trivial when she lived in the down deep, where exhaust leaks could asphyxiate and broken flood pumps could drown everyone she knew, now loomed large before her. What was it all about, this life they lived in underground confines? What was out there, over those hills? Why were they here, and for what purpose? Had her kind built those tall silos crumbling in the distance? What for? And most vexing of all: What had Holston, a reasonable man—or his wife for that matter—been thinking to want to leave?
Two folders to keep her company, both marked “Closed.” Both belonging in the Mayor’s office, where they should be sealed up and filed away. But Juliette kept finding herself returning to them rather than the more pressing cases in front of her. One of these folders held the life of a man she had loved, whose death she had helped unravel in the down deep. In the other lived a man she had respected whose job she now held. She didn’t know why she obsessed over the two folders, especially since she couldn’t stomach seeing Marnes peer forlornly down at his own loss, studying the details of Mayor Jahns’ death, going over the depositions, convinced he had a killer but with no evidence to corner the man—
Someone knocked on the bars above Juliette’s head. She looked up, expecting to find Deputy Marnes telling her it was time to call it a day, but saw a strange man peering down at her instead.
“Sheriff?” he asked.
Juliette set the folders aside and palmed the star off her knee. She stood up and turned around, facing this small man with a protruding gut, glasses perched at the end of his nose, his silver IT coveralls snugly tailored and freshly pressed.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
The man stuck his hand between the bars. Juliette moved the star from one palm to the other and reached out to accept it.
“Sorry I’m late getting up here,” he said. “There’s been a lot going on, what with the ceremonies, that generator nonsense, and all the legal wrangling. I’m Bernard, Bernard Holland.”
Juliette felt her blood run cold. The man’s hand was so small around, it felt like it was missing a finger. Despite this, his grip was solid. She tried to pull back, but he refused to let go.
“As sheriff, I’m sure you already know the Pact inside and out, so you know that I’ll be acting Mayor, at least until we can arrange a vote.”
“I’d heard,” Juliette said cooly. She wondered how this man had gotten past Marnes’ desk without some sort of violence. Here was their prime suspect in Jahns’ death—only he was on the wrong side of the bars. And Juliette realized the same was true of her.
“Doing some filing, are you?” He relinquished his grip, and Juliette pulled her hand away. He peered down at
