Wool Omnibus Edition (Wool 1 - 5) Page 8

  “Take it easy,” Marnes huffed.

  Jahns realized she was going too fast. She slowed her pace.

  “That bastard’s got you riled up,” he said.

  “And you better be as well,” she hissed back at him.

  “You’re passing the gardens.”

  Jahns checked the landing number and saw that he was right. If she’d been paying attention, she would’ve noticed the smell. When the doors on the next landing flew open, a porter bearing sacks of fruit on each shoulder strode out, the scent of lush and wet vegetation accompanying him and overpowering her.

  It was past dinner time, and the smell was intoxicating. The porter, even overburdened, saw that they were leaving the stairwell for the landing and held the door open with a planted foot as his arms bulged around the weight of the large sacks.

  “Mayor,” he said, bowing his head and then nodding to Marnes as well.

  Jahns thanked him. Most of the porters looked familiar to her, having seen them over and over as they delivered throughout the silo. But they never stayed in one place long enough for her to catch and remember a name, a normally keen skill of hers. She wondered, as she and Marnes entered the hydroponic farms, if the porters made it home every night to be with their families. Or did they even have families? Were they like the priests? She was too old and too curious not to know these things. But then, maybe it took a day on the stairwell to appreciate their job, to fully notice them. The porters were like the air she breathed, always there, always serving, so necessary as to be ubiquitous and taken for granted. But now the weariness of the climb had opened her senses fully to them. It was like a sudden drop in the oxygen, triggering her appreciation.

  “Smell those oranges,” Marnes said, snapping Jahns out of her thoughts. He sniffed the air as they passed through the low garden gates. A staff member in green coveralls waved them through. “Bags here, Mayor,” he said, gesturing to a wall of cubbies sporadically occupied with shoulder bags and bundles.

  Jahns complied, leaving her kit in one of the cubbies. Marnes pushed hers to the back and added his to the same one. Whether it was to save space or merely his habitual protectiveness, Jahns found the act as sweet as the air inside the gardens.

  “We have reservations for the evening,” Jahns told the worker.

  He nodded. “One flight down for the rooms. I believe they’re still getting yours ready. Are you here just for a visit or to eat?”

  “A little of both.”

  The young man smiled. “Well, by the time you’ve had a bite, your rooms should be available.”

  Rooms, Jahns thought. She thanked the young man and followed Marnes into the garden network.

  “How long since you were here?” she asked the Deputy.

  “Wow. A while back. Four years or so?”

  “That’s right.” Jahns laughed. “How could I forget? The heist of the century.”

  “I’m glad you think it’s funny,” Marnes said.

  At the end of the hallway, the twisting spiral of the hydroponic gardens diverted off both ways. This main tunnel snaked through two levels of the silo, curving maze-like all the way to the edges of the distant concrete walls. The constant sound of water dripping from the pipes was oddly soothing, the splatters echoing off the low ceiling. The tunnel was open on either side, revealing the bushy green of plants, vegetables, and small trees growing amid the lattice of white plastic pipes, twine strung everywhere to give the creeping vines and stems something to hold. Men and women with their young shadows tended to the plants, all in green coveralls. Sacks hung around their necks bulged with the day’s harvest, and the cutters in their hands clacked like little claws that were a biological part of them. The pruning was mesmerizingly adroit and effortless, the sort of task that only came from day after week after year of practice and repetition.

  “Weren’t you the first one to suggest the thievery was an inside job?” Jahns asked, still laughing to herself. She and Marnes followed the signs pointing toward the tasting and dining halls.

  “Are we really going to talk about this?”

  “I don’t know why it’s embarrassing. You’ve got to laugh about it.”

  “With time.” He stopped and gazed through the mesh fencing at a stand of tomatoes. The powerful odor of their ripeness made Jahns’ stomach grumble.

  “We were really hyped up to make a bust at the time,” Marnes said quietly. “Holston was a mess during all of this. He was wiring me every night for an update. I’ve never seen him want to take someone down so bad. Like he really needed it, you know?” He wrapped his fingers in the protective grate and stared past the vegetables as if into the years gone by. “Looking back, it’s almost like he knew something was up with Allison. Like he saw the madness coming.” Marnes turned to Jahns. “Do you remember what it was like before she cleaned? It had been so long. Everyone was on edge.”

  Jahns had long since stopped smiling. She stood close to Marnes. He turned back to the plants, watched a worker snip off a red ripe tomato and place it in her basket.

  “I think Holston wanted to let the air out of the silo, you know? I think he wanted to come down and investigate the thefts himself. Kept wiring me every day for reports like a life depended on it.”

  “I’m sorry to bring it up,” Jahns said, resting a hand on his shoulder.

  Marnes turned and looked at the back of her hand. His bottom lip was visible below his mustache. Jahns could picture him kissing her hand. She pulled it away.

  “It’s fine,” he said. “Without all that baggage, I guess it is pretty funny.” He turned and continued down the hallway.

  “Did they ever figure out how it got in here?”

  “Up the stairwell,” Marnes said. “Had to be. Though I heard one person suggest that a child could’ve stolen one to keep as a pet and then released it up here.”

  Jahns laughed. She couldn’t help herself. “One rabbit,” she said, “confounding the greatest lawman of our time and making off with a year’s salary of greens.”

  Marnes shook his head and chuckled a little. “Not the greatest,” he said. “That was never me.” He peered down the hallway and cleared his throat, and Jahns knew perfectly well who he was thinking of.

  ••••

  After a large and satisfying dinner, they retired a level down to the guest rooms. Jahns had a suspicion that extra pains had been taken to accommodate them. Every room was packed, many of them double and triple booked. And since the cleaning had been scheduled well before this last-minute interview adventure of theirs, she suspected rooms had been bumped around to make space. The fact that they had given them separate rooms, the mayor’s with two beds, made it worse. It wasn’t just the waste, it was the arrangement. Jahns was hoping to be more . . . inconvenienced.

  And Marnes must’ve felt the same way. Since it was still hours before bedtime, and they were both buzzing from a fine meal and strong wine, he asked her to his small room so they could chat while the gardens settled down.

  His room was tastefully cozy, with only a single twin bed, but nicely appointed. The upper gardens were one of just a dozen large private enterprises. All the expenses for their stay would be covered by her office’s travel budget, and that money and the fares of the other travelers helped to afford finer things, like nice sheets from the looms and a mattress that didn’t squeak.

  Jahns sat on the foot of the bed. Marnes took off his holster, placed it on the dresser, and plopped onto a changing bench just a few feet away. While she kicked off her boots and rubbed her sore feet, he went on and on about the food, the waste of separate rooms, brushing his mustache down with his hand as he spoke.

  Jahns worked her thumbs into the soreness in her heels. “I feel like I’m going to need a week of rest at the bottom before we start the climb up,” she said during a pause.

  “It’s not all that bad,” Marnes told her. “You watch. You’ll be sore in the morning, but once you start moving, you’ll find that you’re stronger than you were today. An
d it’s the same on the way up. You just lean into each step, and before you know it, you’re home.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  “Besides, we’ll do it in four days instead of two. Just think of it as an adventure.”

  “Trust me,” Jahns said. “I already am.”

  They sat quietly for a while, Jahns resting back on the pillows, Marnes staring off into space. She was surprised to find how calming and natural it was, just being in a room, alone, with him. The talk wasn’t necessary. They could just be. No badge, no office. Two people.

  “You don’t take a priest, do you?” Marnes finally asked.

  “No.” She shook her head. “Do you?”

  “I haven’t. But I’ve been thinking about it.”

  “Holston?”

  “Partly.” He leaned forward and rubbed his hands down his thighs like he was squeezing the soreness out of them. “I’d like to hear where they think his soul has gone.”

  “It’s still with us,” Jahns said. “That’s what they’d say, anyway.”

  “What do you believe?”

  “Me?” She leaned up from the pillows and rested on one elbow, watching him watch her. “I don’t know, really. I keep too busy to think about it.”

  “Do you think Donald’s soul is still here with us?”

  Jahns felt a shiver. She couldn’t remember the last time someone had uttered his name.

  “He’s been gone more years than he was ever my husband,” she said. “I’ve been married more to his ghost than to him.”

  “That don’t seem like the right thing to say.”

  Jahns looked down at the bed, the world a little blurry. “I don’t think he’d mind. And yes, he’s still with me. He motivates me every day to be a good person. I feel him watching me all the time.”

  “Me too,” Marnes said.

  Jahns looked up and saw that he was staring at her.

  “Do you think he’d want you to be happy? In all things, I mean?” He stopped rubbing his legs and sat there, hands on his knees, until he had to look away.

  “You were his best friend,” Jahns said. “What do you think he’d want?”

  He rubbed his face, glanced toward the closed door as a squealing kid thundered down the hallway. “I reckon he only ever wanted you to be happy. That’s why he was the man for you.”

  Jahns wiped at her eyes while he wasn’t looking and peered curiously down at her wet fingers.

  “It’s getting late,” she said. She slid to the edge of the small bed and reached down for her boots. Her bag and stick were waiting for her by the door. “And I think you’re right. I think I’ll be a little sore in the morning, but I think I’ll feel stronger, eventually.”

  5

  On the second and final day of their descent into the down deep, the novel gradually became the habitual. The clank and thrum of the great spiral staircase found a rhythm. Jahns was able to lose herself in her thoughts, daydreaming so serenely that she would glance up at the floor number, seventy-two, eighty-four, and wonder where a dozen landings went. The kink in her left knee was even soothed away, whether by the numbness of fatigue or an actual return to health, she didn’t know. She took to using the walking stick less, finding it only held up her pace as it often slipped between the treads and got caught there. With it tucked under her arm, it felt more useful. Like another bone in her skeleton, holding her together.

  When they passed the ninetieth floor, with the stench of fertilizer and the pigs and other animals that produced this useful waste, Jahns pressed on, skipping the tour and lunch she’d planned, thinking only briefly of the small rabbit that somehow had escaped from another farm, made it twenty floors up without being spotted, and ate its fill for three weeks while it confounded half a silo.

  Technically, they were already in the down deep when they reached ninety-seven. The bottom third. But even though the silo was mathematically divided into three sections of forty-eight floors each, her brain didn’t work that way. Floor one hundred was a better demarcation. It was a milestone. She counted the floors down until they reached the first landing with three digits, and stopped for a break.

  Marnes was breathing deeply, she noticed. But she felt great. Alive and renewed in the way she had hoped the trip would make her. The futility, dread, and exhaustion from the day before were gone. All that remained was a small twinge of fear that these dour feelings could return, that this exuberant elation was a temporary high, that if she stopped, if she thought on it too long, it would spiral away and leave her dark and moody once more.

  They split a small loaf of bread between them, sitting on the metal grating of the wide landing with their elbows propped up on the railings, their feet swinging over empty space, like two kids cutting class. Level one hundred teemed with people coming and going. The entire floor was a bazaar, a place for exchanging goods, for cashing in work chits for whatever was needed or merely coveted. Workers with their trailing shadows came and went, families yelled for one another among the dizzying crowds, merchants barked their best deals. The doors remained propped open for the traffic, letting the smells and sounds drift out onto the double-wide landing, the grating shivering with excitement.

  Jahns reveled in the anonymity of the passing crowd. She bit into her half of the loaf, savoring the fresh yeastiness of bread baked that morning, and felt like just another person. A younger person. Marnes cut her a piece of cheese and a slice of apple and sandwiched them together. His hand touched hers as he passed it to her. Even the breadcrumbs in his mustache were part of the moment’s perfection.

  “We’re way ahead of schedule,” Marnes said before taking a bite of fruit. It was just a pleasant observation. A pat on their elderly backs. “I figure we’ll hit one-forty by dinner.”

  “Right now, I’m not even dreading the climb out,” Jahns said. She finished the cheese and apple and chewed contentedly. Everything tasted better while climbing, she decided. Or in pleasant company, or amid the music leaking out of the bazaar, some beggar strumming his uke over the noise of the crowd.

  “Why don’t we come down here more often?” she asked.

  Marnes grunted. “Because it’s a hundred flights down? Besides, we’ve got the view, the lounge, the bar at Kipper’s. How many of these people come up to any of that more than once every few years?”

  Jahns chewed on that and on her last bite of bread.

  “Do you think it’s natural? Not wandering too far from where we live?”

  “Don’t follow,” Marnes said around a bite of food.

  “Pretend, just as a hypothetical mind you, that people lived in those ancient aboveground silos poking up over the hillside. You don’t think they would move around so little, do you? Like stay in the same silo? Never wander over here or up and down a hundred flights of stairs?”

  “I don’t think on those things,” Marnes said. Jahns took it as a hint that she shouldn’t, either. It was impossible sometimes to know what could and couldn’t be said about the outside. Those were discussions for spouses, and maybe the walk and the day together yesterday had gotten to her. Or maybe she was as susceptible to the post-cleaning high as anyone else: that sense that rules could be relaxed, temptations courted, the lack of pressure and the waste of a double cleaning giving excuse for a month of jubilant wiggling in one’s own skin.

  “Should we get going?” Jahns asked, as Marnes finished his bread.

  He nodded, and they stood and collected their things. A woman walking by turned and stared, a flash of recognition on her face, gone as she hurried to catch up to her children.

  It was like another world down here, Jahns thought to herself. She had gone too long without a visit. And even as she promised herself to not let that happen again, some part of her knew, like a rusting machine that could feel its age, that this journey would be her last.

  ••••

  Floors passed without care. The lower gardens, the larger farm on the one-thirties, the pungent water treatment plant below that. Jahns
found herself lost in thought, thinking on her conversation with Marnes the night before, the idea of Donald living with her more in memory than reality, when she came to the gate at one-forty.

  She hadn’t even noticed the change in the traffic, the preponderance of blue denim coveralls, the porters with more satchels of parts and tools than clothes, food, or personal deliveries. But the crowd at the gate showed her that she’d arrived at the upper levels of Mechanical. Gathered at the entrance were workers in loose blue coveralls spotted with age-old stains. Jahns could nearly peg their professions by the tools they carried. It was late in the day, and she assumed most were returning home from repairs made throughout the silo. The thought of climbing so many flights of stairs and then having to work boggled her mind. And then she remembered she was about to do that very thing.