Wool Omnibus

The landing to her right displayed the number “58.” Each landing seemed to be in view forever. Not like the trip down, where she could daydream and skip right past several floors. Now they loomed in sight gradually beyond the outer railing, and held there, taunting in the dim green glow of the emergency lights, as she struggled up one plodding and wavering step at a time.



Marnes walked beside her, his hand on the inner rail, hers on the outer, the walking stick clanging on the lonely treads between them. Occasionally, their arms brushed against one another. It felt as though they’d been away for months, away from their offices, their duties, their cold familiarity. The adventure down to wrangle a new sheriff had played out differently than Jahns had imagined it would. She had dreamed of a return to her youth and had instead found herself haunted by old ghosts. She had hoped to find a renewed vigor and instead felt the years of wear in her knees and back. What was to be a grand tour of her silo was instead trudged in relative anonymity, and now she wondered if its operation and upkeep even needed her.



The world around her was stratified. She saw that ever more clearly. The up-top concerned itself with a blurring view, taking for granted the squeezed juice enjoyed with breakfast. The people who lived below and worked the gardens or cleaned animal cages orbited their own world of soil, greenery, and fertilizer. To them, the outside view was peripheral, ignored until there was a cleaning. And then there was the down deep, the machine shops and chemistry labs, the pumping oil and grinding gears, the hands-on world of grease-limned fingernails and the musk of toil. To these people, the outside world and the food that trickled down were mere rumors and bodily sustenance. The point of the silo was for the people to keep the machines running, when Jahns had always, her entire long life, seen it the other way around.



Landing fifty-seven appeared through the fog of darkness. A young girl sat on the steel grate, her feet tucked up against herself, arms wrapped around her knees, a children’s book in its protective plastic cover held out into the feeble light spilling from an overhead bulb. Jahns watched the girl, who was unmoved save her eyes as they darted over the colorful pages. The girl never looked up to see who was passing the apartment’s landing. They left her behind, and she gradually faded in the darkness as Jahns and Marnes struggled ever upward, exhausted from their third day of climbing, no vibrations or ringing footsteps above or below them, the silo quiet and eerily devoid of life, room enough for two old friends, two comrades, to walk side by side on the crumbling steps of chipping paint, their arms swinging and every now and then, and very occasionally, brushing together.



• • • •



They stayed that night at the mid-level deputy station, the officer of the mids insisting they take his hospitality and Jahns eager to buttress support for yet another sheriff nominated from outside the profession. After a cold dinner in near darkness and enough idle banter to satisfy their host and his wife, Jahns retired to the main office where a convertible couch had been made as comfortable as possible, the linens borrowed from a nicer elsewhere and smelling of two-chit soap. Marnes had been set up on a cot in the holding cell, which still smelled of tub-gin and a drunk who had gotten too carried away after the cleaning.



It was impossible to notice when the lights went out, they were so dim already. Jahns rested on the cot in the darkness, her muscles throbbing and luxuriating in her body’s stillness, her feet cramped and feeling like solid bone, her back tender and in need of stretching. Her mind, however, continued to move. It drifted back to the weary conversations that had passed the time on their most recent day of climbing.



She and Marnes seemed to be spiraling around one another, testing the memory of old attractions, probing the tenderness of ancient scars, looking for some soft spot that remained among brittle and broken bodies, across wrinkled and dried-paper skin, and within hearts calloused by law and politics.



Donald’s name came up often and tentatively, like a child sneaking into the adult bed, forcing wary lovers to make room in the middle. Jahns grieved anew for her long lost husband. She grieved for the first time in her life for the subsequent decades of solitude. What she had forever seen as her calling—this living apart and serving the greater good—now felt more a curse. Her life had been taken from her. Squeezed into pulp. The juice of her efforts and sacrificed years had dripped down through a silo that, just forty levels below her, hardly knew and barely cared.



The saddest part of this journey had been this understanding she’d come to with Holston’s ghost. She could admit it now: A great reason for her hike, perhaps even the reason for wanting Juliette as sheriff, was to fall all the way to the down deep, away from the sad sight of two lovers nestled together in the crook of a hill as the wind etched away all their wasted youth. She had set out to escape Holston, and had instead found him. Now she knew, if not the mystery of why all sent out to clean actually did so, why a sad few would dare volunteer for the duty. Better to join a ghost than be haunted by them, Jahns now knew. Better no life than an empty one—



The door to the deputy’s office squeaked on a hinge long worn beyond the repair of grease. Jahns tried to sit up, to see in the dark, but her muscles were too sore, her eyes too old. She wanted to call out, to let her hosts know that she was okay, in need of nothing, but she listened instead.



Footsteps came to her, nearly invisible in the worn carpet. There were no words, just the creaking of old joints as they approached the bed, the lifting of expensive and fragrant sheets, and an understanding between two living ghosts.



Jahns’ breath caught in her chest. Her hand groped for a wrist as it clutched her sheets. She slid over on the small convertible bed to make room and pulled him down beside her.



Marnes wrapped his arms around her back, wiggled beneath her until she was lying on his side, a leg draped over his, her hands on his neck. She felt his mustache brush against her cheek, heard his lips purse and peck the corner of hers.



Jahns held his cheeks and burrowed her face into his shoulder. She cried, like a schoolchild, like a new shadow who felt lost and afraid in the wilderness of a strange and terrifying job. She cried with fear, but that soon drained away. It drained like the soreness in her back as his hands rubbed her there. It drained until numbness found its place, and then, after what felt like a forever of shuddering sobs, with sensation taking the place of that.



Jahns felt alive in her skin. She felt the tingle of flesh touching flesh, of just her forearm against his hard ribs, her hands on his shoulder, his hands on her hips. And then the tears were some joyous release, some mourning of the lost time, some welcomed sadness of a moment long delayed and finally there, arms wrapped around it and holding tight.



She fell asleep like that, exhausted from far more than the climb, nothing more than a few trembling kisses, hands interlocking, a whispered word of tenderness and appreciation, and then the depths of sleep pulling her down, the weariness in her joints and bones succumbing to a slumber she didn’t want but sorely needed. She slept with a man in her arms for the first time in decades, and woke to a bed familiarly empty, but a heart strangely full.



• • • •



In the middle of their fourth and final day of climbing, they approached the mid-thirties of IT. Jahns had found herself taking more breaks for water and to rub her muscles along the way, not for the exhaustion she feigned, but the dread of this stopover and seeing Bernard, the fear of their trip ever coming to an end.



The dark and deep shadows cast by the power holiday followed them up, the traffic sparse as most merchants had closed for the silo-wide brownout. Juliette, who had stayed behind to oversee the repairs, had warned Jahns of the flickering lights from the backup generator. Still, the effect of the shimmering illumination had worn on her during the long climb. The inconstancy was bothersome.



When they reached the thirty-fourth, Jahns felt like they were, in a sense, home again. Back in the realm of the familiar, at the main landing for IT. She waited by the railing, leaning on it and her walking stick, while Marnes got the door. As it was cracked open, the pale glow of diminished power was swept off the stairwell by the bright lights blooming inside. It hadn’t been widely publicized, but the reason for the severe power restrictions on other levels was largely due to the exemption IT maintained it possessed in spite of this holiday. Bernard had pointed to various clauses in the Pact to support this. Juliette had bitched that servers shouldn’t get priority over grow lights, but resigned herself to getting the main generator re-aligned, and taking what she could. Jahns told Juliette to view this as her first lesson in political compromise. Juliette said she saw it as a display of weakness.



Inside, Jahns found Bernard waiting on them, a look on his face like he’d swallowed sour fruit juice. A conversation between several IT workers standing off to the side quickly silenced with their entry, leaving Jahns little doubt that they’d been spotted on the way up and expected.



“Bernard,” she said, trying to keep her breathing steady. She didn’t want him to know how tired she was. Let him think she was strolling by on her way up from the down deep, like it was no big deal.



“Marie.”



It was a deliberate slight. He didn’t even look Marnes’s way or acknowledge that the deputy was in the room.



“Would you like to sign these here? Or in the conference room?” She dug into her bag for the contract with Juliette’s name on it.



“What games are you playing at, Marie?”



Jahns felt her temperature rise. The cluster of workers in silver IT jumpsuits were following the exchange. “Playing at?” she asked.



“You think this power holiday of yours is cute? Your way of getting back at me?”



“Getting back—?”



“I’ve got servers, Marie—”



“Your servers have their full allocation of power,” Jahns reminded him, her voice rising.



“But their cooling comes ducted from Mechanical, and if temps get any higher, we’ll be ramping down, which we’ve never had to do!”



Marnes stepped between the two of them, his hands raised. “Easy,” he said coolly, his gaze on Bernard.



“Call off your little shadow here,” Bernard said.



Jahns placed a hand on Marnes’s arm.



“The Pact is clear, Bernard. It’s my choice. My nomination. You and I have a nice history of signing off on each other’s—”



“And I told you this girl from the pits will not do—”



“She’s got the job,” Marnes said, interrupting. Jahns noticed his hand had fallen to the butt of his gun. She wasn’t sure if Bernard noticed or not, but he fell silent. His eyes, however, did not leave Jahns’.



“I won’t sign it.”



“Then next time, I won’t ask.”



Bernard smiled. “You think you’ll outlive another sheriff?” He turned toward the workers in the corner and waved one of them over. “Why do I somehow doubt that?” The worker approached. Bernard nodded to the young man, a face familiar to Jahns from level meetings. “Sign whatever she needs, I refuse to. Make copies. Take care of the rest.” He waved his hand dismissively, turned and looked Marnes and Jahns up and down one final time, as if disgusted with their condition, their age, their positions, something. “Oh, and top off their canteens and see that they have food enough to stagger back to their homes. Whatever it takes to power their decrepit legs to wherever it is they belong.”



And with that, Bernard strode off toward the barred gates that led into the heart of IT, back to his brightly lit offices where servers hummed happily, the temperature rising in the slow-moving air like the heat of angered flesh as capillaries squeezed, the blood in them rising to a boil.



8



The floors flew by faster as they approached home. In the darkest sections of the staircase, between quiet floors of people hunkered down and awaiting a return to normalcy, old hands wrapped around each other and swung between two climbers, brazenly and open, grasping each other while their other hands slid up the cool steel of the rails.



Jahns only let go sporadically to check that her walking stick was secure against her back, or to grab Marnes’s canteen from his pack and take a sip. They had taken to drinking each other’s water, it being easier to reach across than around one’s own back. There was a sweetness to it as well, this carrying the sustenance another needed, this being able to provide and reciprocate in a perfectly equitable relationship. It was a thing worth dropping hands for. Momentarily, at least.



Jahns finished a sip, screwed on the metal cap with its dangling chain, and replaced it in his outer pouch. She was dying to know if things would be different once they got back. They were only twenty floors away. An impossible distance yesterday now seemed like something that could slip away without noticing. And as they arrived, would familiar surroundings bring familiar roles? Would last night feel more and more like a dream? Or would old ghosts become more and more solid?



She wanted to ask these things, but talked of trivialities instead. When would Jules, as she insisted they call her, be ready for duty? What case files did he and Holston have open that needed tending to first? What concession would they make to keep IT happy, to calm down Bernard? And how would they handle Peter Billings’s disappointment? What impact would this have on hearings he might one day preside over as judge?



Jahns felt butterflies in her stomach as they discussed these things. Or perhaps it was the nerves of all she wanted to say, but couldn’t. These topics were as numerous as grains of dust in the outside air, and just as likely to dry her mouth and still her tongue. She found herself drinking more and more from his thermos, her own water making noises at her back, her stomach lurching with every landing, each number counting down toward the conclusion of their journey, an adventure that had been a complete success in so many ways.