Wool Omnibus

But what had once been survival was now luxury. The ability to forego sleep gave her time in the morning and at night to herself, time to invest in frivolous pursuits on top of the cases she was supposed to be working. It also gave her the opportunity to teach herself how to do the blasted job, since Marnes had become too depressed to help get her up to speed.



Marnes—



She looked at the clock over his desk. It was ten minutes after eight, and the vats of warm oatmeal and corn grits were already filling the cafeteria with the smells of breakfast. Marnes was late. She’d been around him less than a week, but she had yet to see him late to anything, ever. This break in the routine was like a timing belt stretching out of shape, a piston developing a knock. Juliette turned her monitor off and pushed away from her desk. Outside, first shift breakfast was beginning to file in, food tokens clinking in the large bucket by the old turnstiles. She left her office and passed through the traffic spilling from the stairwell. In the line, a young girl tugged on her mother’s coveralls and pointed to Juliette as she passed. Juliette heard the mother scolding her child for being rude.



There had been quite a bit of chatter the past few days over her appointment, this woman who had disappeared into Mechanical as a child and who had suddenly reemerged to take over for one of the more popular sheriffs in memory. Juliette cringed from the attention and hurried into the stairwell. She wound her way down the steps as fast as a lightly loaded porter, her feet bouncing off each tread, faster and faster in what felt like an unsafe pace. Four flights down, after squeezing around a slow couple and between a family heading up for breakfast, she hit the apartment landing just below her own and passed through the double doors.



The hallway beyond was busy with morning sights and sounds: a squealing teapot, the shrill voices of children, the thunder of feet overhead, shadows hurrying to meet their casters before trailing them off to work. Younger children were lumbering reluctantly off to school; husbands and wives kissed in doorways while toddlers tugged at their coveralls and dropped toys and plastic cups.



Juliette took several turns, winding through the hallways and around the central staircase to the other side of the level. The Deputy’s apartment was on the far side, way in the back. She surmised that Marnes had qualified for several upgrades over the years, but had passed on them. The one time she had asked Alice, Mayor Jahns’ old secretary about Marnes, she had shrugged and told Juliette that he had never wanted or expected anything more than second fiddle. Juliette assumed she meant that he never wanted to be sheriff, but she had begun to wonder in how many other areas of his life that philosophy applied.



As she reached his hall, two kids ran by holding hands, late for school. They giggled and squealed around the corner, leaving Juliette alone in the hallway. She wondered what she would say to Marnes to justify coming down, to explain her worry. Maybe now was a good time to ask for the folder that he couldn’t seem to be without. She could tell him to take the day off, let her handle the office while he got some rest, or maybe fib a little and say she was already in the area for a case.



She stopped outside his door and lifted her hand to knock. Hopefully he wouldn’t see this as her projecting authority, right? She was just concerned for him. That was all.



She rapped on the steel door and waited for him to call her inside—and maybe he did. His voice over the last few days had eroded into a dull and thin rasp. She knocked again, louder this time.



“Deputy?” she called. “Everything okay in there?”



A woman popped her head out of a door down the hallway. Juliette recognized her from school recess time in the cafeteria, was pretty sure her name was Gloria.



“Hey, Sheriff.”



“Hey, Gloria, you haven’t seen Deputy Marnes this morning, have you?”



She shook her head, placed a metal rod in her mouth and started wrapping her long locks into a bun. “I haben’t,” she mumbled. She shrugged her shoulders and jabbed the rod through her bun, locking her hair into place. “He was on the landing last night, looking as whipped as ever.” She frowned. “He not show up for work?”



Juliette turned back to the door and tried the handle. It clicked open with the feel of a well maintained lock. She pushed the door in. “Deputy? It’s Jules. Just checkin’ in on ya.”



The door swung open into the darkness. The only light spilling in was from the hallway, but it was enough.



Juliette turned to Gloria. “Call Doc Hicks— No, shit—” She was still thinking down deep. “Who’s the closest doctor up here? Call him!”



She ran into the room, not waiting for a reply. There wasn’t much space to hang oneself in the small apartment, but Marnes had figured out how. His belt was cinched around his neck, the buckle lodged into the top of the bathroom door. His feet were on the bed, but at a right angle, not enough to support his weight. His butt drooped below his feet, his face no longer red, the belt biting deep into his neck.



Juliette hugged Marnes’s waist and lifted him up. He was heavier than he looked. She kicked his feet off the bed, and they flopped to the floor, making it easier to hold him. There was a curse at the door. Gloria’s husband ran in and helped Juliette support the Deputy’s weight. The both of them fumbled for the belt, trying to dislodge it from the door. Juliette finally tugged the door open, freeing him.



“On the bed,” she huffed.



They lifted him to the bed and laid him out flat.



Gloria’s husband rested his hands on his knees and took deep breaths. “Gloria ran for Doctor O’Neil.”



Juliette nodded and loosened the belt from around Marnes’s neck. The flesh was purple beneath it. She felt for a pulse, remembering Roger looking just like this when she’d found him down in Mechanical, completely still and unresponsive. It took her a moment to be sure that she was looking at the second dead body she had ever seen.



And then she wondered, as she sat back, sweating, waiting for the doctor to arrive, whether this job she had taken would ensure it wasn’t the last.



5



After filling out reports, discovering Marnes had no next of kin, speaking with the coroner at the dirt farm, and answering questions from nosy neighbors, Juliette finally took a long and lonely walk up eight flights of stairs, back to her empty office.



She spent the rest of the day getting little work done, the door to the cafeteria open, the small room much too crowded with ghosts. She tried repeatedly to lose herself in the files from Holston’s computers, but Marnes’s absence was incredibly sadder than his moping presence had been. She couldn’t believe he was gone. It almost felt like an affront, to bring her here and then leave her so suddenly. And she knew this was a horrible and selfish thing to feel and even worse to admit.



As her mind roamed, she glanced occasionally out the door, watching the clouds slide across the distant wallscreen. She debated with herself on whether they appeared light or dense, if tonight would be a good one for viewing stars. It was another guilt-ridden thought, but she felt powerfully alone, a woman who prided herself on needing no one.



She played some more with the maze of files while the light of an unseen sun diminished in the cafeteria, while two shifts of lunch and two shifts of dinner vibrated and then subsided around her, all the while watching the roiling sky and hoping, for no real logical reason, for another chance encounter with the strange star hunter from the night before.



And even sitting there, with the sounds and scents of everyone on the upper forty-eight eating, Juliette forgot to. It wasn’t until the second shift staff was leaving, the lights cut down to quarter power, that Pam came in with a bowl of soup and a biscuit. Juliette thanked her and reached into her coveralls for a few chits, but Pam refused. The young woman’s eyes—red from crying—drifted to Marnes’s empty chair, and Juliette realized the cafeteria staff had probably been as close to the deputy as anyone.



Pam left without a word, and Juliette ate with what little appetite she could manage. She eventually thought of one more search she could try on Holston’s data, a global spell-check to look for names that might offer clues, and eventually figured out how to run it. Meanwhile, her soup grew cold. While her computer began to churn through the hills of data, she took her bowl and a few folders and left her office to sit at one of the cafeteria tables near the wallscreen.



She was looking for stars on her own when Lukas appeared silently at her side. He didn’t say anything, just pulled up a chair, sat down with his board and paper, and peered up at the expansive view of the darkened outside.



Juliette couldn’t tell if he was being polite to honor her silence, or if he was being rude not to say hello. She finally settled on the former, and eventually the quiet felt normal. Shared. A peace at the end of a horrible day.



Several minutes passed. A dozen. There were no stars and nothing was said. Juliette held a folder in her lap, just to give her fingers something to do. There was a sound from the stairwell, a laughing group moving between the apartment levels below, and then a return to the quiet.



“I’m sorry about your partner,” Lukas finally said. His hands smoothed the paper on the board. He had yet to make a single mark or note.



“I appreciate that,” Juliette said. She wasn’t sure what the appropriate response was, but this seemed the least wrong.



“I’ve been looking for stars, but haven’t seen any,” she added.



“You won’t. Not tonight.” He waved his hand at the wallscreen. “These are the worst kinds of clouds.”



Juliette studied them, barely able to make them out with the last of twilight’s distant glow. They looked no different to her than any others.



Lukas turned almost imperceptibly in his seat. “I have a confession, since you’re the law and all.”



Juliette’s hand groped for the star on her chest. She was often in danger of forgetting what she was.



“Yeah?”



“I knew the clouds were gonna be bad tonight. But I came up anyway.”



Juliette trusted the darkness to conceal her smile.



“I’m not sure the Pact has much to say on such duplicity,” she told him.



Lukas laughed. It was strange how familiar it already sounded, and how badly she needed to hear it. Juliette had a sudden urge to grab him, to tuck her chin into his neck, and to cry. She could almost feel her body begin to piece the moves together—even though her skin would not budge. It could never happen. She knew this, even as the sensation vibrated within her. It was just the loneliness, the horror of holding Marnes in her arms, of feeling that lifeless heft of a body relieved of whatever animates it. She was desperate for contact, and this stranger was the only person she knew little enough to want it from.



“What happens now?” he asked, his laughter fading.



Juliette almost blurted out, inanely, Between us? but Lukas saved her:



“Do you know when the funeral will be? And where?” he asked.



She nodded in the darkness.



“Tomorrow. There’s no family to travel up, no investigation to make.” Juliette choked back the tears. “He didn’t leave a will, so they left it up to me to make arrangements. I decided to lay him to rest near the Mayor.”



Lukas looked to the wallscreen. It was dark enough that the bodies of the cleaners couldn’t be seen, a welcome relief. “As he should be,” he said.



“I think they were lovers in secret,” Juliette blurted out. “If not lovers, then just as close.”



“There’s been talk,” he agreed. “What I don’t get is why keep it a secret. Nobody would’ve cared.”



Somehow, sitting in the darkness with a complete stranger, these things were more easily aired than in the down deep among friends.



“Maybe they would have minded people knowing,” she thought out loud. “Jahns was married before. I suspect they chose to respect that.”



“Yeah?” Lukas scratched something on his paper. Juliette looked up, but was sure there hadn’t been a star. “I can’t imagine loving in secret like that,” he said.



“I can’t imagine needing someone’s permission, like the Pact or a girl’s father, to be in love in the first place,” she replied.



“No? How else would it work? Just any two people any time they liked?”



She didn’t say.



“How would anyone ever enter the lottery?” he asked, persisting in the line of thought. “I can’t imagine it not being out in the open. It’s a celebration, don’t you think? There’s this ritual, a man asks a girl’s father for permission—”



“Well, aren’t you with anyone?” Juliette asked, cutting him off. “I mean…I’m just asking because it sounds like, like you have strong opinions but maybe haven’t—”



“Not yet,” he said, rescuing her again. “I have a little strength left yet for enduring my mom’s guilt. She likes to remind me every year how many lotteries I missed out on, and what this did to her overall chances for a bevy of grandchildren. As if I don’t know my statistics. But hey, I’m only twenty-five.”



“That’s all,” Juliette said.



“What about you?”



She nearly told him straight away. Nearly blurted out her secret with almost no prompting. As if this man, this boy, a stranger to her, could be trusted.



“Never found the right one,” she lied.



Lukas laughed his youthful laugh. “No, I mean, how old are you? Or is that impolite?”



She felt a wave of relief. She thought he’d been asking her about being with anyone. “Thirty-six,” she said. “And I’m told it’s impolite to ask, but I’ve never been one for rules.”