enough to be polite, to refill her canteen, and then to shuffle the remaining twenty floors to the place she truly belonged.
Knox seemed thrilled to have her back. He wrapped her up in a crippling hug, lifting her feet off the ground and roughing up her face with his beard. He smelled of grease and sweat, a mix Juliette had never fully noticed in the down deep because she had never been free from it.
The walk to her old room was punctuated by slaps on her back, well-wishes, questions about the up-top, people calling her sheriff in jest, and the sort of rude frivolities she had grown up in and grown used to. Juliette felt more saddened by it all than anything. She had set out to do something and had failed. And yet her friends were just happy to have her back.
Shirly from second shift spotted her coming down the hallway and accompanied Juliette on the rest of the walk to her room. She updated Juliette on the status of the generator and the output from the new oil well, as if Juliette had simply been on vacation for a short while. Juliette thanked her at the door to her room, stepped inside, and kicked her way through all the folded notes slipped under the door. She lifted the strap of her daypack over her head and dropped it, then collapsed onto her bed, too exhausted and upset at herself to even cry.
She awoke in the middle of the night. Her small display terminal showed the time in green blocky numbers: 2:14 AM.
Juliette sat at the edge of her old bed in coveralls that weren’t truly hers and took stock of her situation. Her life was not yet over, she decided. It just felt that way. Tomorrow, even if they didn’t expect her to, she would be back at work in the pits, keeping the silo humming, doing what she did best. She needed to wake up to this reality, to set other ideas and responsibilities aside. Already, they felt so far away. She doubted she would even go to Scottie’s funeral, not unless they sent his body down to be buried where it belonged.
She reached for the keyboard slotted into the wall rack. Everything was covered in a layer of grime, she saw. She had never noticed it before. The keys were filthy from the dirt she had brought back from each shift. The monitor’s glass was limned with grease. She fought the urge to wipe the screen and smear the shiny coat of oil around, but she would have to clean her place a little deeper, she decided. She was viewing things with untainted and more critical eyes.
Rather than chase pointless sleep, she keyed the monitor awake to check the work logs for the next day, anything to get her mind off the past week. But before she could open her task manager, she saw that she had over a dozen wires in her inbox. She’d never
She logged onto her email account and pulled up the most recent wire. It was from Knox. Just a semicolon and a parenthesis—a half-chit smile.
Juliette couldn’t help it, she smiled back. She could still smell Knox on her skin and realized, as far as the big brute was concerned, that all the troubles and problems percolating in whispers down the stairwell about her paled in comparison to her return. To him, the worst thing that had happened in the last week was probably the challenge of replacing her on first shift.
Jules went to the next message, one from the third shift foreman, welcoming her home. Probably because of the extra time his crew was putting in to help cover her old shift.
There was more. A day’s pay of a note from Shirly, wishing her well on her journey. These were all notes they had hoped she would receive up-top to make the trip down easier, hoping she wouldn’t loathe herself and would know she shouldn’t feel humiliated, or even a failure. Juliette felt tears well up at how considerate it all was. She had an image of her desk, Holston’s desk, with nothing but unplugged wires snaking across its surface, her computer removed. There was no way she could’ve gotten these messages when they were meant to be read. She wiped at her eyes and tried not to think of the wired notes as money wasted, but rather as extravagant tokens of her friendships in the down deep.
Reading each one, trying to hold it together, made the last message she came to doubly jarring. It was paragraphs long. Juliette assumed it was an official document, maybe a list of her offenses, a formal ruling against her. She had only seen such messages from the Mayor’s office, usually on holidays, notes that went out to every silo member. But then she saw that it was from Scottie.
Juliette sat up straight and tried to clear her head. She started from the beginning, damning her blurred vision.
J-
I lied. Couldn’t delete this stuff. Found more. That tape I got you? Your joke was truth. And the program - NOT for big screen. Pxl density not right. 32,768 X 8,192! Not sure what’s that size. 8” X 2”? So many pxls if so.
Putting more together. Don’t trust porters, so wiring this. Screw cost, wire me back. Need transfr to Mech. Not safe here.
-S
Juliette read it a second time, crying now. Here was the real voice of a ghost warning her of something, all of it too late. And it wasn’t the voice of one who was planning his death—she was sure of that. She checked the timestamp of the wire; it was sent before she had even arrived back at her office the day before, before Scottie had died.
Before he had been
She leapt suddenly from her bed and grabbed one of the folded notes by the door. Digging a charcoal from her daypack, she sat back down on the bed. She copied the entire wire, every odd spelling, double-checking each number, and then deleted the message. She had chills up and down her arms by the time she finished, as if some unseen person was racing toward her, hoping to break into her computer before she dispensed with the evidence. She wondered if Scottie had been cautious enough to have deleted the note from his sent wires, and assumed, if he’d been thinking clearly, that he would.
She sat back on her bed, holding the copied note, thoughts about the work log for the next day gone. Instead, she studied the sinister mess revolving around her, spiraling through the heart of the silo. Things were bad, from top to bottom. A great set of gears had been thrown out of alignment. She could hear the noise from the past week, this thumping and clanging, this machine lumbering off its mounts and leaving bodies in its wake.
And Juliette was the only one who could hear it. She was the only one who knew. And she didn’t know who she could trust to help set things right. But she did know this: It would require a diminishing of power to align things once again. And there would be no way to call what happened next a “holiday.”
10
Juliette showed up at Walker’s electronics workshop at five, worried she might find him asleep on his cot, but smelling instead the distinctive odor of vaporized solder wafting down the hallway. She knocked on the open door as she entered, and Walker looked up from one of his many green electronics boards, corkscrews of smoke rising from the tip of his soldering iron.
“Jules!” he shouted. He lifted the magnifying lens off his gray head and set it and the soldering iron down on the steel workbench. “I heard you were back. I meant to send a note, but—” He waved around at the piles of parts with their work order tags dangling from strings. “Super busy,” he explained.
“Forget it,” she said. She gave Walker a hug, smelling the electrical fire scent on his skin that reminded her so much of him. And of Scottie.
“I’m going to feel guilty enough taking some of your time with this,” she said.
“Oh?” He stepped back and studied her, his bushy white brows and wrinkled skin furrowed with worry. “You got something for me?” He looked her up and down for a broken thing, a habit formed from a lifetime of being brought small devices that needed repairing.
