羊毛战记 Part 3 Casting Off 28

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　　Juliette reported to first shift at six, the conversation with Walker playing over and over in her head.

　　There was a sustained and embarrassing applause from the handful of techs present as she entereddispatch. Knox just glared at her from the corner, back to his gruff demeanor¹. He had alreadywelcomed her home and would be damned if he’d do it again.

　　She said hello to the people she hadn’t seen the night before and looked over the job queue. Thewords on the board made sense, but she had a difficult time processing them. In the back of her mind,she thought about poor Scottie, confused and struggling while someone much larger than him—orseveral someones — choked him to death. She thought of his little body, probably riddled² withevidence but soon to feed the roots of the dirt farms. She thought of a married couple lying togetheron a hill, never given a chance to make it any further, to see beyond the horizon.

　　She chose a job from the queue, one that would require little mental exertion³ on her part, andthought of poor Jahns and Marnes and how tragic⁴ their love—if she had been reading Marnescorrectly—had been. The temptation to tell the entire room was crippling. She looked around atMegan and Ricks, at Jenkins and Marck, and thought about the small army of tight brotherhood⁵ shecould form. The silo was rotten to the core, an evil man was acting⁶ mayor, a puppet stood where agood sheriff had been, and all the good men and women were gone.

　　It was comical to imagine: her rallying a band of mechanics to storm the upper levels and right awrong. And then what? Was this the uprising they had learned about as children? Was this how itbegan? One silly woman with fire in her blood stirring the hearts of a legion of fools?

　　She kept her mouth shut and made her way to the pump room, riding the flow of morningmechanics, thinking more about what she should be doing above than about what needed repairingbelow. She descended⁷ one of the side stairwells, stopped by the tool room to check out a kit⁸ bag, andlugged the heavy satchel⁹ to one of the deep pits where pumps ran constantly to keep the silo fromfilling halfway¹⁰ up with water.

　　Caryl, a transfer from third shift, was already working near the pit basin patching rotten cement.

　　She waved with her trowel, and Juliette dipped her chin and forced herself to smile.

　　The offending pump sat idle on one wall, the backup pump beside it struggling mightily¹¹ andspraying water out of dry and cracked seals. Juliette looked into the basin to gauge¹² the height of thewater. A painted 9 was just visible above its murky¹³ surface. Juliette did some quick math, knowingthe diameter of the basin and that it was almost nine feet full. The good news was they had at least aday before boots were getting wet. Worst case, they would replace the pump with a rebuilt one fromspares and deal with Hendricks bitching at them for checking it out instead of fixing what theyalready had.

　　As she began stripping the failed pump down, pelted¹⁴ with spray from its smaller, leakingneighbor, Juliette considered her life with this new perspective provided by the morning’srevelations. The silo was something she had always taken for granted. The priests said it had alwaysbeen here, that it was lovingly created by a caring God, that everything they would ever need hadbeen provided for. Juliette had a hard time with this story. A few years ago, she had been on the firstteam to drill past ten thousand feet and hit new oil reserves. She had a sense of the size and scope ofthe world below them. And then she had seen with her own eyes the view of the outside with itsphantomlike sheets of smoke they called clouds rolling by at miraculous¹⁵ heights. She had even seen astar, which Lukas thought stood an inconceivable distance away. What god would make so muchrock below and air above and just a measly silo between?

　　And then there was the rotting skyline and the images in the children’s books, both of whichseemed to hold clues. The priests, of course, would say that the skyline was evidence that man wasn’tsupposed to exceed his bounds. And the books with the faded colored pages? The fancifulimagination of authors, a class done away with for all the trouble they inspired.

　　But Juliette didn’t see fanciful imagination in those books. She had spent a childhood in thenursery, reading each one over and over whenever they weren’t checked out, and things in them andin the wondrous¹⁶ plays performed in the bazaar¹⁷ made more sense to her than this crumbling¹⁸ cylinderin which they lived.

　　She wiggled the last of the water hoses free and began separating the pump from its motor. Thesteel shavings suggested a chewed-up impeller, which meant pulling the shaft¹⁹. As she worked onautomatic, cruising through a job she’d performed numerous times before, she thought back on themyriad of animals that populated those books, most of which had never been seen by living eyes. Theonly fanciful part, she figured, was that they all talked and acted human. There were mice andchickens in several of the books that performed these stunts²⁰ as well, and she knew their breeds wereincapable of speech. All those other animals had to exist somewhere, or used to. She felt this to thecore, maybe because they didn’t seem that fantastical. Each seemed to follow the same plan, just likeall the silo’s pumps. You could tell one was based on the other. A particular design worked, andwhoever had made one had made them all.

　　The silo made less sense. It hadn’t been created by a god—it was probably designed by IT. Thiswas a new theory, but she felt more and more sure of it. They controlled all the important parts.

　　Cleaning was the highest law and the deepest religion, and both of these were intertwined and housedwithin its secretive walls. And then there was the spacing from Mechanical and the spread of thedeputy stations—more clues. Not to mention the clauses in the Pact²¹ that practically granted themimmunity. And now the discovery of a second supply chain, a series of parts engineered to fail, areason behind the lack of progress in prolonging survival time on the outside. IT had built this placeand IT was keeping them there.

　　Juliette nearly stripped a bolt, she was so agitated²². She turned to look for Caryl, but the youngerwoman was already gone, her repair patch a darker shade of gray as it waited to dry and blend in withthe rest. Looking up, Juliette scanned the ceiling of the pump room where conduits of wire and pipingtraveled through the walls and mingled²³ overhead. A run of steam pipes stood clustered to the side tokeep from melting any of the wires; a ribbon of heat tape hung off one of these pipes in a loose coil.

　　It would have to be replaced soon, she thought. That tape might have been ten or twenty years old.

　　She considered the stolen tape that had caused so much of the mess she was in and how it would’vebeen lucky to survive twenty minutes up there.

　　And that’s when Juliette realized what she had to do. A project to pull the wool back fromeveryone’s eyes, a favor to the next fool who slipped up or dared to hope aloud. And it would be soeasy. She wouldn’t have to build anything herself—they would do all the work for her. All it wouldtake would be some convincing, and she was mighty²⁴ good at that.

　　She smiled, a list of parts forming in her head as the broken impeller was removed from the faultypump. All she would need to fix this problem was a replacement²⁵ part or two. It was the perfectsolution to getting everything in the silo working properly once more.

　　????

　　Juliette worked two full shifts, wearing her muscles to a numb²⁶ ache, before returning her tools andshowering. She took a stiff brush to her nails over the bathroom sink, determined²⁷ to keep them up-topclean. She headed toward the mess hall, looking forward to a tall plate of high-energy food ratherthan the weak rabbit stew²⁸ from the cafeteria on level one, when she passed through Mechanical’sentrance hall and saw Knox talking to Deputy Hank. The way they turned and stared, she knew theywere talking about her. Juliette’s stomach sank. Her first thought was of her father. And then Peter.

　　Who else could they take away from her that she might care about? They wouldn’t know to contacther about Lukas, whatever he was to her.

　　She made a swift turn and headed in their direction, even as the two of them moved to intercepther. The looks on their faces confirmed her every fear. Something awful had happened. Juliettebarely noticed Hank reaching for his cuffs²⁹.

　　“I’m sorry, Jules,” he said as they got close.

　　“What happened?” Juliette asked. “Dad?”

　　Hank’s brow wrinkled in confusion. Knox was shaking his head and chewing on his beard. Hestudied the deputy like he might eat the man.

　　“Knox, what’s going on?”

　　“Jules, I’m sorry.” He shook his head. He seemed to want to say more but was powerless to do so.

　　Juliette felt Hank reaching for her arm.

　　“You are under arrest for grave crimes against the silo.”

　　He recited the lines like they were from a sad poem. The steel clicked around her wrist.

　　“You will be judged and sentenced according to the Pact.”

　　Juliette looked up at Knox. “What is this?” she asked. Was she really being arrested again?

　　“If you are found guilty, you will be given a chance at honor.”

　　“What do you want me to do?” Knox whispered, his vast muscles twitching³⁰ beneath his overalls³¹.

　　He wrung³² his hands together, watching the second metal band clack around her other wrist, her twohands shackled³³ together now. The large head of Mechanical seemed to be contemplating³⁴ violence—or worse.

　　“Easy, Knox,” Juliette said. She shook her head at him. The thought of more people getting hurtbecause of her was too much to bear.

　　“Should humanity banish³⁵ you from this world … ,” Hank continued to recite, his voice cracking,his eyes wet with shame.

　　“Let it go,” Juliette told Knox. She looked past him to where more workers were coming offsecond shift, stopping to see this spectacle of their prodigal³⁶ daughter being put in cuffs.

　　“In that banishment³⁷, may you find your sins scrubbed, scrubbed away,” Hank concluded. Helooked up at her, one hand gripping the chain between her wrists, tears streaking³⁸ down his face.

　　“I’m sorry,” he said.

　　Juliette nodded to him. She set her teeth and nodded to Knox as well.

　　“It’s all right,” she said. She kept bobbing her head. “It’s all right, Knox. Let it go.”

 

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