Wool

by Hugh Howey

Page 20

 

  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 looked 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’s 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’s 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 impedi
ng 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 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 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. ”

  Scottie nodded. “And he wired it to me. But he shouldn’t have. I can get into a lot of trouble for this. ”

  Juliette laughed. “You’re kidding, right?”

  She saw that he wasn’t.

  “Scottie, you’re the one who pulled all this stuff for me in the first place. ” She stepped back and looked hard at him. “Wait, you know what this nonsense is, right? You can read it?”

  He bobbed his head. “Jules, I didn’t know what I was grabbing for you at the time. It was gigs of crap. I didn’t look at it. I just grabbed it and passed it on—”

  “Why is this so dangerous?” she asked.

  “I can’t even talk about it,” Scottie said. “I’m not cleaning material, Jules. I’m not. ” He held out the scroll. “Here. I shouldn’t have even printed it, but I wanted to delete the wire. You’ve got to take it. Get it out of here. I can’t be caught with it. ”

  Juliette took the scroll, but just to calm him down. “Scottie, sit down. Please. Look, I know you’re scared, but I need you to sit and talk to me about this. It’s very important. ”

  He shook his head.

  “Scottie, sit the hell down right now. ” She pointed at the chair, and Scottie numbly obeyed. Juliette sat on the corner of his desk and noted that the cot at the back of the room had been recently slept on, and felt pity for the young man.

  “Whatever this is—” She shook the roll of paper. “—it’s what caused the last two cleanings. ”

  She told him this like it was more than a rapidly forming theory, like it was something she knew. Maybe it was the fear in his eyes that cemented the idea, or the need to act strong and sure to help calm him. “Scottie, I need to know what it is. Look at me. ”

  He did.

  “Do you see this star?” She flicked it with her finger, causing a dull ring.

  He nodded.

  “I’m not your shift foreman anymore, lad. I’m the law, and this is very important. Now, I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but you can’t get into any trouble for answering my questions. In fact, you’re obligated to answer them. ”

  He looked up at her with a twinge of hope. He obviously didn’t know that she was making this up. Not lying—she would never turn Scottie in for all the silo—but she was pretty sure there was no such thing as immunity, not for anyone.

  “What am I holding?” she asked, waving the scroll of printout.

  “It’s a program,” he whispered.