Juliette thought it was this crooked sense of fairness as much as anything else that had worn down poor Marnes. There was never any hope for true justice, a life for a life. These strange laws, coupled with the agonizing knowledge that he had carried the poison on his own body, had gravely wounded him. He had to live with being the poison’s porter, with the hurtful knowledge that a good deed, a shared walk, had been his love’s death.
Juliette held the suicide note and cursed herself for not seeing it coming. It should have been a foreseeable breakdown, a problem solved by a little preventative maintenance. She could have said more, reached out somehow. But she had been too busy trying to stay afloat those first few days to see that the man who had brought her to the up-top was slowly unraveling right before her eyes.
The flash of her inbox icon interrupted these disturbing thoughts. She reached for the mouse and cursed herself. The large chunk of data she had sent down to Mechanical some hours earlier must’ve been rejected. Maybe it was too much to send at once. But then she saw that it was a message from Scottie, her friend in IT who had supplied the data drive.
“Come now,” it read.
It was an odd request. Vague and yet dire, especially for the late hour. Juliette powered down her monitor, grabbed the drive from the computer in case she had more visitors, and briefly considered strapping Marnes’ ancient gun around her waist. She stood, went to the key locker, and ran her hand down the soft belt, feeling the indention where the buckle had, for decades, worn into the same spot on the old leather. She thought again of Marnes’ terse note and looked to his empty chair. She decided in the end to leave the gun hanging where it was. She nodded to his desk, made sure she had her keys, and hurried out the door.
7
It was thirty four levels down to IT. Juliette skipped across the steps so swiftly, she had to keep a hand on the inner railing to keep from flying outward into the occasional upbound traffic. She overtook a porter near six, who was startled from being passed. By the tenth floor, she was beginning to feel dizzy from the round and round. She wondered how Holston and Marnes had ever responded to trouble with any degree of urgency. The other two deputy stations, the one in the mids and the one in the down-deep, were nicely situated near the dead center of their forty-eight floors, a far superior arrangement. She passed into the twenties thinking about this: that her office was not ideally positioned to respond to the far edge of her precinct. Instead, it had been located by the airlock and the holding cell, close to the highest form of the silo’s capital punishment. Her legs cursed this decision as she considered the long slog back up.
In the high twenties, she practically bowled a man over who wasn’t watching where he was going. She wrapped one arm around him and gripped the railing, keeping them both from a nasty tumble. He apologized while she swallowed a curse. And then she saw it was Lukas, his lapboard strapped to his back, nubs of charcoal sticking out of his coveralls.
“Oh,” he said. “Hello.”
He smiled at seeing her, but his lips drooped into a frown when he realized she’d been hurrying the opposite direction.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve got to go.”
“Of course.”
He stood out of the way, and Juliette finally took her hand off his ribs. She nodded, not sure what to say, her thoughts only on Scottie, and then she continued her run down, moving too fast to chance a glance back.
When she finally got to thirty-four, she paused on the landing to catch her breath and let the dizziness fade. Checking her coveralls—that her star was in place and the flash drive still in her pocket—she pulled open the main doors to IT and tried to stroll in as if she belonged there.
She sized up the entrance room quickly. To her right, a glass window looked into a conference room. The light was on, even though it was now the middle of the night. A handful of heads were visible through the glass, a meeting taking place. She thought she heard Bernard’s voice, loud and nasally, leeching through the door.
Ahead of her stood the low security gates leading back to IT’s labyrinth of apartments, offices, and workshops. Juliette could imagine the floor plan; she’d heard the three levels shared much in common with Mechanical, only without the fun.
“Can I help you?” a young man in silver coveralls asked from behind the gates.
She approached.
“Sheriff Nichols,” she said. She waved her ID at him, then passed it under the gate’s laser scanner. The light turned red and the gate let out an angry buzz. It did not open. “I’m here to see Scottie, one of your techs.” She tried the card again, with the same result.
“Do you have an appointment?” the man asked.
Juliette narrowed her eyes at the man.
“I’m the sheriff. Since when do I need appointments?” Again with the card, and again the gate buzzed at her. The young man did not move to help.
“Please do not do that,” he said.
“Look, Son, I’m in the middle of an investigation here. And you’re impeding my progress.”
He smiled at her. “I’m sure you’re familiar with the unique position we maintain here and that your powers are—”
Juliette put her ID away and reached over the gate to grab the straps of his coveralls with both hands. She pulled him almost clear over the gates, her arms bulging with the sinewy muscles that had freed countless bolts.
“Listen here you blasted runt, I’m coming
The kid’s eyes were wide and all-pupil. He jerked his chin up and down.
“Then move it,” she said, letting go of his coveralls with a shove.
He fumbled for his ID—swiped it through the scanner.
Juliette pushed through the spinning arms of the turnstile and past him. Then stopped.
“Uh, which way, exactly?”
The boy was still trying to get his ID back into his chest pocket, his hand trembling. “Th-thataway, ma’am.” He pointed to the right. “Second hall, take a left. Last office.”
“Good man,” she said. She turned and smiled to herself. It seemed that the same tone that got bickering mechanics to snap-to back home worked here as well. And she laughed to herself to think of the argument she had used: Your boss is also my boss, so open up. But then, with eyes that wide and that much fear in his veins, she could’ve read him Mama Jean’s bread recipe with the same tone and gotten through the gates. This was a skill to remember.
She took the second hallway, passing by a man and woman in IT silver as they walked the other way. They turned to watch her pass. At the end of the hall, she found offices on both sides and didn’t know which one was Scottie’s. She peeked first into the one with the open door, but the lights were off. She turned to the other one and knocked.
There was no answer at first, but the light at the bottom of the door dimmed, as if someone had walked across it.
“Who’s there?” a familiar voice whispered through the door.
“Open this damn thing,” Juliette said. “You know who this is.”
The lever dipped, the door clicking open. Juliette pushed her way inside, and Scottie shoved the door closed behind her, engaging the lock.
“Were you seen?” he asked.
She looked at him incredulously. “Was I seen? Of
“But did they see you come in
“Scottie, what the hell is going on?” Juliette was beginning to suspect she had hurried all this way for
