part 2 proper gauge

14

after their meal, shirly and marck gave them directions to the bunk room. jahns watched as the

young married couple exchanged kisses. marck was coming off his shift while shirly was going onto

hers. the shared meal was breakfast for one and supper for the other. jahns thanked them both for

their time and complimented the food, then she and marnes left a mess hall nearly as noisy as the

generator room had been and followed the winding corridors toward their beds for the night.

marnes would be staying in the communal bunk room used by junior first-shift mechanics. a

small cot had been made up for him that jahns gauged to be half a foot too short. down the hall from

the bunk room, a small apartment had been reserved for jahns. the two of them decided to wait

there, biding their time in private, rubbing the aches in their legs, talking about how different

everything in the down deep was, until there was a knock on their door. juliette pushed it open and

stepped inside.

“they got you both in one room?” juliette asked, surprised.

jahns laughed. “no, they’ve got the deputy in the bunk room. and i would’ve been happy staying

out there with the others.”

“forget it,” juliette said. “they put up recruits and visiting families in here all the time. it’s

nothing.”

jahns watched as juliette placed a length of string in her mouth, then gathered her hair, still wet

from a shower, and tied it up in a tail. she had changed into another pair of overalls, and jahns

guessed the stains in them were permanent, that the fabric was actually laundered and ready for

another shift.

“so how soon could we announce this power holiday?” juliette asked. she finished her knot and

crossed her arms, leaning back against the wall beside the door. “i would think you’d wanna take

advantage of the post-cleaning mood, right?”

“how soon can you start?” jahns asked. she realized, suddenly, that part of the reason she wanted

this woman as her sheriff was that she felt unattainable. jahns glanced over at marnes and wondered

how much of his attraction to her, all those many years ago when she was young and with donald,

had been as simply motivated.

“i can start tomorrow,” juliette said. “we could have the backup generator online by morning. i

could work another shift tonight to make sure the gaskets and seals—”

“no,” jahns said, raising her hand. “how soon can you start as sheriff?” she dug through her open

bag, sorting folders across the bed, looking for the contract.

“i’m—i thought we discussed this. i have no interest in being—”

“they make the best ones,” marnes said. “the ones who have no interest in it.” he stood across

from juliette, his thumbs tucked into his overalls, leaning against one of the small apartment’s walls.

“i’m sorry, but there’s no one down here who can just slip into my boots,” juliette said, shaking

her head. “i don’t think you two understand all that we do—”

“i don’t think you understand what we do up top,” jahns said. “or why we need you.”

juliette tossed her head and laughed. “look, i’ve got machines down here that you can’t possibly

—”

“and what good are they?” jahns asked. “what do these machines do?”

“they keep this whole goddamned place running!” juliette declared. “the oxygen you breathe?

we recycle that down here. the toxins you exhale? we pump them back into the earth. you want me

to write up a list of everything oil makes? every piece of plastic, every ounce of rubber, all the

solvents and cleaners, and i’m not talking about the power it generates, but everything else!”

“and yet it was all here before you were born,” jahns pointed out.

“well, it wouldn’t have lasted my lifetime, i’ll tell you that. not in the state it was in.” she

crossed her arms again and leaned back against the wall. “i don’t think you get what a mess we’d be

in without these machines.”

“and i don’t think you get how pointless these machines are going to become without all these

people.”

juliette looked away. it was the first time jahns had seen her flinch.

“why don’t you ever visit your father?”

juliette snapped her head around and looked at the other wall. she wiped some loose hair back

from her forehead. “go look at my work log,” she said. “tell me when i’d fit it in.”

before jahns could reply, could say that it was family, that there’s always time, juliette turned to

face her. “do you think i don’t care about people? is that it? because you’d be wrong. i care about

every person in this silo. and the men and women down here, the forgotten floors of mechanical, this

is my family. i visit with them every day. i break bread with them several times a day. we work, live,

and die alongside one another.” she looked to marnes. “isn’t that right? you’ve seen it.”

marnes didn’t say anything. jahns wondered if she was referring specifically to the “dying” part.

“did you ask him why he never comes to see me? because he has all the time in the world. he has

nothing up there.”

“yes, we met with him. your father seemed like a very busy man. as determined as you.”

juliette looked away.

“and as stubborn.” jahns left the paperwork on the bed and went to stand by the door, just a pace

away from juliette. she could smell the soap in the younger woman’s hair. could see her nostrils

flare with her rapid, heavy breathing.

“the days pile up and weigh small decisions down, don’t they? that decision not to visit. the first

few days slide by easy enough; anger and youth power them along. but then they pile up like

unrecycled trash. isn’t that right?”

juliette waved her hand. “i don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“i’m talking about days becoming weeks becoming months becoming years.” she almost said that

she’d been through the same exact thing, was still piling them up, but marnes was in the room,

listening. “after a while, you’re staying mad just to justify an old mistake. then it’s just a game. two

people staring away, refusing to look back over their shoulders, afraid to be the first one to take that

chance—”

“it wasn’t like that,” juliette said. “i don’t want your job. i’m sure you’ve got plenty of others

who do.”

“if it’s not you, it’s someone i’m not sure i can trust. not anymore.”

“then give it to the next girl.” she smiled.

“it’s you or him. and i think he’ll be getting more guidance from the thirties than he will from

me, or from the pact.”

juliette seemed to react to this. her arms loosened across her chest. she turned and met jahns’s

gaze. marnes was studying all this from across the room.

“the last sheriff, holston, what happened to him?”

“he went to cleaning,” jahns said.

“he volunteered,” marnes added gruffly.

“i know, but why?” she frowned. “i heard it was his wife.”

“there’s all kinds of speculation—”

“i remember him talking about her, when you two came down to look into george’s death. i

thought, at first, that he was flirting with me, but all he could talk about was this wife of his.”

“they were in the lottery while we were down here,” marnes reminded her.

“yeah. that’s right.” she studied the bed for a while. paperwork was spread across it.

“i wouldn’t know how to do this job. i only know how to fix things.”

“it’s the same thing,” marnes told her. “you were a big help with our case down here. you see

how things work. how they fit together. little clues that other people miss.”

“you’re talking about machines,” she said.

“people aren’t much different,” marnes told her.

“i think you already know this,” jahns said. “i think you have the right attitude, actually. the right

disposition. this is only slightly a political office. distance is good.”

juliette shook her head and looked back to marnes. “so you nominated me for this, is that it? i

wondered how this came up. seemed like something right out of the ground.”

“you’d be good at it,” marnes told her. “i think you’d be damned good at anything you set your

mind to. and this is more important work than you think.”

“and i’d live up top?”

“your office is on level one. near the airlock.”

juliette seemed to mull this over. jahns was excited that she was even asking questions.

“the pay is more than you’re making now, even with the extra shifts.”

“you checked?”

jahns nodded. “i took some liberties before we came down.”

“like talking to my father.”

“that’s right. he would love to see you, you know. if you came with us.”

juliette looked down at her boots. “not sure about that.”

“there’s one other thing,” marnes said, catching jahns’s eye. he glanced at the paperwork on the

bed. the crisply folded contract for peter billings was on top. “it,” he reminded her.

jahns caught his drift.

“there’s one matter to clear up, before you accept.”

“i’m not sure i’m accepting. i’d want to hear more about this power holiday, organize the work

shifts down here—”

“according to tradition, it signs off on all nominated positions—”

juliette rolled her eyes and blew out her breath. “it.”

“yes, and we checked in with them on the way down as well, just to smooth things over.”

“i’m sure,” juliette said.

“it’s about these requisitions,” marnes interjected.

juliette turned to him.

“we know it probably ain’t nothing, but it’s gonna come up—”

“wait, is this about the heat tape?”

“heat tape?”

“yeah.” juliette frowned and shook her head. “those bastards.”

jahns mimed pinching two inches of air. “they had a folder on you this thick. said you were

skimming supplies meant for them.”

“no they didn’t. are you kidding?” she pointed toward the door. “we can’t get any of the

supplies we need because of them. when i needed heat tape—we had a leak in a heat exchanger a

few months back—we couldn’t get any because supply tells us the backing material for the tape is all

spoken for. now, we had that order in a while back, and then i find out from one of our porters that

the tape is going to it, that they’ve got miles of the stuff for the skins of all their test suits.”

juliette took a deep breath.

“so i had some intercepted.” she looked to marnes as she admitted this. “look, i’m keeping the

power on so they can do whatever it is they do up there, and i can’t get basic supplies. and even

when i do, the quality is complete crap, probably because of unrealistic quotas, rushing the

manufacturing chain—”

“if these are items you really needed,” jahns interrupted, “then i understand.”

she looked to marnes, who smiled and dipped his chin as if to say he’d told her this was the right

woman for the job.

jahns ignored him. “i’m actually glad to hear your side of this,” she told juliette. “and i wish i

made this trip more often, as sore as my legs are. there are things we take for granted up top, mostly

because they aren’t well understood. i can see now that our offices need to be in better

communication, have more of the constant contact i have with it.”

“i’ve been saying that for just about twenty years,” juliette said. “down here, we joke that this

place was laid out to keep us well out of the way. and that’s how it feels, sometimes.”

“well, if you come up top, if you take this job, people will hear you. you could be the first link in

that chain of command.”

“where would it fall?”

“there will be resistance, but that’s normal with them. i’ve handled it before. i’ll wire my office

for some emergency waivers. we’ll make them retroactive, get these acquisitions aboveboard.” jahns

studied the younger woman. “as long as i have your assurance that every one of those diverted

supplies were absolutely necessary.”

juliette did not flinch away from the challenge. “they were,” she said. “not that it mattered. the

stuff we got from them was crap. couldn’t have fallen apart better if it’d been designed to. i’ll tell

you what, we finally got our shipment from supply and have extra tape. i’d love to drop off a peace

offering on our way up. our design is so much better—”

“our way up?” jahns asked, making sure she understood what juliette was saying, what she was

agreeing to.

juliette looked them both over. she nodded. “you’ll have to give me a week to sort out the

generator. i’m holding you to that power holiday. and just so you understand, i’ll always consider

myself mechanical, and i’ll be doing this partly because i see what happens when problems are

ignored. my big push down here has been preventive maintenance. no more waiting for things to

break before we fix them, but to go around and make them hum while they’re still working. too

many issues have been ignored, let degrade. and i think, if the silo can be thought of as one big

engine, we are like the dirty oil pan down here that needs some people’s attention.” she reached her

hand out to jahns. “get me that power holiday, and i’m your man.”

jahns smiled and took her hand, admired the warmth and power in her confident handshake.

“i’ll get on it first thing in the morning,” she said. “and thank you. welcome aboard.”

marnes crossed the room to shake juliette’s hand as well. “nice to have you on, boss.”

juliette smirked as she took his hand. “well now, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. i think i’ll have

a lot to learn before you go calling me that.”