Wool Omnibus Edition (Wool 1 - 5) Page 16

  “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.

  “As you know, there’s been quite a bit of . . . turnover these past weeks. Unprecedented, really, at least since the uprising. And that’s the danger, I’m afraid, if we aren’t all on the same page.” He pressed his finger onto the folder Juliette was trying to move, pinning it in place. She glanced up at him.

  “People want continuity. They want to know tomorrow will be a lot like yesterday. They want reassurances. Now, we’ve just had a cleaning, and we’ve suffered some losses, so the mood is naturally a bit raucous.” He waved at the folders and piles of pulp paper spilling from Juliette’s desk to Peter’s. The young man across from her seemed to eye the mound warily, like more of the pile could shift toward him, giving him more of it to do. “Which is why I am going to announce a forgiveness moratorium. Not only to strengthen the spirits of the entire silo, but to help you two clear the slate so you don’t get overwhelmed while you’re getting up to speed on your duties.”

  “Clear the slate?” Juliette asked.

  “That’s right. All these drunken misdemeanors. What’s this one for?” He picked up a folder and studied the name on the label. “Oh, now what’s Pickens done this time?”

  “He ate a neighbor’s rat,” Juliette said. “Family pet.”

  Peter Billings chuckled. Juliette squinted at him, wondering why his name seemed familiar. Then she placed it, recalling a memo he had written in one of the folders. This kid, practically a boy, had been shadowing a silo judge, she thought. She had a difficult time imagining that, looking at him. He seemed more the IT type.

  “I thought owning rats as pets was illegal,” Bernard said.

  “It is. He’s the claimant. It’s a counter suit in retaliation—” She sorted through her folders. “For this one right here.”

  “Let’s see,” Bernard said. He grabbed the other folder, held the two of them together, and then dropped them both into her recycle bin, all the carefully organized papers and notes spilling out and intermingling in a jumbled pile on top of other scraps of paper to be re-pulped.

  “Forgive and forget,” he said, wiping his palms together. “That’s going to be my election motto. The people need this. This is about new beginnings, forgetting the past during these tumultuous times, looking to the future!” He slapped her on the back, hard, nodded to Peter, and headed for the door.

  “Election motto?” she asked before he could get away. And it occurred to her that one of the folders he was suggesting could be forgiven was the one wherein he was the prime suspect.

  “Oh yes,” Bernard called over his shoulder. He grabbed the jamb and looked back at her. “I’ve decided, after much deliberation, that there is no one better qualified for this job than me. I don’t see any problem with continuing my duties in IT while performing the role as mayor. In fact, I already am!” He winked. “Continuity, you know.” And then he was gone.

  ••••

  Juliette spent the rest of that afternoon, well past what Peter Billings considered “sensible working hours,” getting him up to speed. What she needed most of all was someone to field complaints and to respond to the radio. This was Holston’s old job, ranging the top forty-eight and calling on any disturbance. Deputy Marnes had hoped to see Juliette fill that role with her younger, fresher legs. He also had said that a pretty female might “do the public will some good.” Juliette had other ideas about his intentions. She suspected Marnes had wanted her away so he could spend time alone with his folder and its ghost. And she well understood that urge. So as she sent Peter Billings home with a list of apartments and merchants to call on the next day, she finally had time to sit down to her computer and see the results from the previous night’s search.

  The spellchecker had turned up interesting results. Not so much the names she had hoped for, but rather these large blocks of what looked like coded text—gibberish with strange punctuation, indentation, and embedded words she recognized but that seemed out of place. These massive paragraphs were spread throughout Holston’s home computer, first showing up just over three years ago. That made it fit the timeline, but what really caught Juliette’s eye was how often the data appeared in nested directories, sometimes a dozen or more folders deep. It was as if someone had taken pains to keep them hidden, but had wanted multiple copies stashed away, terrified of losing them.

  She assumed it was encoded, whatever it was, and important. She tore off bites of a small loaf of bread and dipped these in cornspread while she gathered a full copy of this gibberish to send down to Mechanical. There were a few guys perhaps smart enough to make some sense of the code, starting with Walker. She chewed her food and spent the next hours going back over the trail she had managed to tease out of Holston’s final years on the job. It had been difficult to narrow his activities down, to figure out what was important and what was noise, but she had approached it as logically as any other breakdown. Because that’s what she was dealing with, she decided. A breakdown. Gradual and interminable. Almost inevitable. Losing his wife had been like a seal or a gasket cracking. Everything that had rattled out of control for Holston could be traced back, almost mechanically, to that.

  One of the first things she’d realized was that his activity on the work computer held no secrets. Holston had obviously become a night rat, just like her, staying up for hours in his apartment. It was yet another commonality she felt between them, further strengthening her obsession with the man. Sticking to his home computer meant she could ignore over half the data. It also became apparent that he had spent most of his time investigating his wife, just as Juliette was now prying into him. This was their deepest shared bond, Juliette’s and Holston’s. Here she was, looking into the last voluntary cleaner as he had looked into his wife, hoping to discover what torturous cause might lead a person to choose the forbidden outside.

  And it was here that Juliette began to find clues almost eerie in their connection. Allison, Holston’s wife, seemed to be the one who had unlocked the mysteries of the old servers. The very method that had made Holston’s data available to Juliette had at some point brought some secret to Allison, and then to Holston. By focusing on deleted emails between the couple, and noting the explosion of communication around the time she had published a document detailing some un-deletion method, Juliette stumbled onto what she felt was a valid trail. She became more certain that Allison had found something on the servers. The trouble was determining what it was—and whether she’d recognize it herself even if she found it.

  She toyed with several ideas, even the chance that Allison had been driven to rage by infidelity, but Juliette had enough of a feel for Holston to know that this wasn’t the case. And then she noticed each trail of activity seemed to lead back to the paragraphs of gibberish, an answer Juliette kept looking for any excuse to reject because she couldn’t make sense of it. Why would Holston, and Allison especially, spend so much time looking at all that nonsense? The activity logs showed her keeping them open for hours at a time, as if the scrambled letters and symbols could be read. To Juliette, it looked like a wholly new language.

  So what was it that sent Holston and his wife to cleaning? The common assumption around the silo was that Allison had gotten the stirs, had gone crazy for the out-of-doors, and that Holston eventually succumbed to his grief. But Juliette never bought that. She didn’t like coincidences. When she tore a machine down to repair it, and a new problem surfaced a few days later, all she usually had to do was go back through the steps from the last repair. The answer was always there. She saw this riddle the same way: It was a much simpler diagnosis if both of them were driven out by the same thing.

  She just couldn’t see what it might be. And part of her feared that finding it could drive her crazy as well.

  Juliette rubbed her eyes. When she l
ooked at her desk again, Jahns’ folder caught her attention. On top of her folder sat the doctor’s report for Marnes. She moved the report aside and reached for the note underneath, the one Marnes had written and left on his small bedside table:

  It should have been me.

  So few words, Juliette thought. But then, who remained in the silo for him to speak to? She studied the handful of words, but there was little to squeeze from them. It was his canteen that had been poisoned, not Jahns’. It actually made her death a case of manslaughter, a new term for Juliette. Marnes had explained something else about the law: the worst offense they could hope to pin on anyone was the attempted and unsuccessful murder on him rather than the botched accident that had claimed the Mayor. Which meant, if they could nail the act on a guilty party, that person could be put to cleaning for what they had failed to accomplish with Marnes, while only getting five years probation and silo service for what had accidentally happened to Jahns. 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 through these gates or I’m coming over them and then through you. I’ll have you know that I report directly to Bernard Holland, acting Mayor, and your goddamned boss. Do I make myself clear?”

  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 famil
iar 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 course I was seen. How do you think I got in? There’re people everywhere.”

  “But did they see you come in here?” he whispered.

  “Scottie, what the hell is going on?” Juliette was beginning to suspect she had hurried all this way for nothing. “You sent me a wire, which already seemed desperate enough, but you told me to come now. So here I am.”

  “Where did you get this stuff?” he asked. Scottie grabbed a spool of printout from his desk and held it in trembling hands.

  Juliette stepped beside him. She placed a hand on his arm and looked at the paper. “Just calm down,” she said quietly. She tried to read a few lines and immediately recognized the gibberish she had sent to Mechanical earlier that day. “How did you get this?” she asked. “I just wired this to Knox a few hours ago.”