She felt a wave of relief. She thought he’d been asking her about being with anyone. “Thirty four,” she said. “And I’m told it’s impolite to ask, but I’ve never been one for rules.”
“Says our sheriff,” Lukas said, laughing at his own joke.
Juliette smiled. “I guess I’m still getting used to that.”
She turned back to the wallscreen, and they both enjoyed the silence that formed. It was strange, sitting with this man. She felt younger and somehow more secure in his presence. Less lonely, at least. She pegged him as a loner as well, an odd sized washer that didn’t fit any standard bolt. And here he had been, at the extreme other end of the silo searching for stars, while she’d been spending what spare time she could down in the mines, as far away as possible, hunting for pretty rocks.
“It’s not going to be a very productive night for either of us, looks like,” she eventually said, ending the silence, rubbing the unopened folder in her lap.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Lukas told her. “That depends on what you came up here for.”
Juliette smiled. And across the wide room, barely audible, the computer on her desk beeped, a search routine having finally pawed through Holston’s data before spitting out its results.
6
The next morning, instead of climbing to her office, Juliette descended five flights to the upper dirt farm for Marnes’ funeral. There would be no folder for her deputy, no investigation, just the lowering of his old and tired body into the deep soil where it would decompose and feed the roots. It was a strange thought, to stand in that crowd and think of him as a folder or not. Less than a week on the job, and she already saw the manila jackets as places where ghosts reside. Names and case numbers. Lives distilled onto twenty or so sheets of recycled pulp paper, bits of string and darts of random color woven beneath the black ink that jotted their sad tale.
The ceremony was long, but didn’t feel so. The earth nearby was still mounded where Jahns had been buried. Soon, the two of them would intermingle inside the plants, and these plants would nourish the occupants of the silo.
Juliette accepted a ripe tomato as the priest and his shadow cycled among the thick crowd. The two of them, draped in red fabric, chanted as they went, their voices sonorous and complimenting one another. Juliette bit into her fruit, allowing a polite amount of juice to spatter her coveralls, chewed and swallowed. She could tell the tomato was delicious, but only in a mechanical way. It was hard to truly enjoy it.
When it became time for the soil to be shoveled back into the hole, Juliette watched the crowd. Two people dead from the up-top in less than a week. There had been four deaths total in that time, a very bad week for the silo.
Or good, depending on who you were. She noticed childless couples biting vigorously into their fruit, their hands intertwined, silently doing the math. Lotteries followed too closely after deaths for Juliette’s tastes. She always thought they should fall on the same dates of the year, just to look as though they were going to happen anyway, whether anyone died or not.
But then, the lowering of the body and the plucking of ripe fruit just above the graves was meant to hammer this home: The cycle of life is here. It is inescapable. It is to be embraced, cherished, appreciated. One departs and leaves behind the gift of sustenance, of life. They make room for the next generation. We are born, we are shadows, we cast shadows of our own, and then we are gone. All anyone can hope for is to be remembered two shadows deep.
Before the hole was completely filled, members of the feast stepped up to the edge of the farm’s soil and tossed what remained of their fruit into the hole. Juliette stepped forward and added the rest of her tomato to the colorful hail of rind and pulp. An acolyte leaned on his too-large shovel and watched the last of the fruit fly. Those that missed, he knocked in with scoops of dark, rich soil, leaving a mound that would, in time and with a few waterings, settle.
After the funeral, Juliette began the climb back to her office. She could feel the flights of stairs in her legs, even though she prided herself as being in shape. But walking and climbing were different sorts of exercise. It wasn’t turning wrenches or loosening stubborn bolts, and the endurance was of a different kind than merely staying up and alert for an extra shift. She decided it was unnatural, this climbing. Humans weren’t meant for it. She doubted they were engineered to travel much beyond a single level of a silo. But then another porter flew down the steps past her, a smile of quick greeting on his non-winded face, his feet dancing across steel treads, and she wondered if perhaps it was something that just took practice.
When she finally made it back to the cafeteria, it was lunchtime, and the room was buzzing with noisy chatter and the clinking of metal forks on metal plates. The pile of folded notes outside her office door had grown. There was a plant in a plastic bucket, a pair of shoes, a small sculpture made of colorful wire. Juliette paused over the collection. Without any family, she supposed it would be up to her to go through it all, to make sure the items went to those who would use them best. She bent down and picked up one of the cards. The writing was in unsure print, scrawled with crayon. She imagined the upper grade school had spent craft time that day making cards for Deputy Marnes. This saddened Juliette more than any of the ceremonies. She wiped tears out of her eyes and damned the teachers who thought to get the kids involved in the nastiness of it all.
“Leave them out of it,” she whispered to herself.
She replaced the card and composed herself. Deputy Marnes would have liked to have seen this, she decided. He was an easy man to figure, one of those who had grown old everywhere but in his heart, that one organ he had never worn out because he’d never dared to use it.
Inside her office, she was surprised to find she had company. A stranger sat at Deputy Marnes’ desk. He looked up from the computer and smiled at her. She was about to ask who he was when Bernard—she refused to think of him as even
“How were the services?” he asked.
Juliette crossed the office and snatched the folder out of his hand. “Please don’t tamper with anything,” she said.
“Tamper?” Bernard laughed and adjusted his glasses. “That’s a closed case. I was going to take it back to my offices and re-file it.”
Juliette checked the folder and saw that it was Holston’s.
“You do know that you report to me, right? You were supposed to have at least glanced over the Pact before Jahns swore you in.”
“I’ll hold onto this, thanks.”
Juliette left him by the open cell and went to her desk. She shoved the folder in the top drawer, checked that the data drive was still jutting out from her computer, and looked up at the guy across from her.
“And you are?”
He stood, and Deputy Marnes’ chair let out its customary squeak. Juliette tried to force herself not to think of it as his anymore.
“Peter Billings, Ma’am.” He held out his hand. Juliette accepted it. “I was just sworn in myself.” He pinched the corner of his star and held it away from his coveralls for her to see.
“Peter here was actually up for
Juliette wondered what he meant by that, or what the point was to even mention it. “Did you need something?” she asked Bernard. She waved at her desk, which had piled up the day before as she had spent most of her time managing Marnes’ affairs. “Because anything you need doing, I can add it to the bottom of one of these piles, here.”
“Anything I give you goes on
“What meeting is this?” Juliette asked. She didn’t look up at him, but busied herself sorting papers. Hopefully he would see how busy she was and leave, and she could start getting Peter up to speed on what little she herself had figured out.
