part 2 proper gauge

15

it felt appropriate that their climb back to the up top would occur during a power holiday. jahns could

feel her own energy complying with the new decree, draining away with each laborious step. the

agony of the descent had been a tease, the discomfort of constant movement disguising itself as the

fatigue of exercise. but now her frail muscles were really put to work. each step was something to be

conquered. she would lift a boot to the next tread, place a hand on her knee, and push herself another

ten inches up what felt like a million feet of spiral staircase.

the landing to her right displayed the number fifty-eight. 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 upward, 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 floor’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 steps of chipping paint, their

arms swinging and every now and then, very occasionally, brushing together.

••••

they stayed that night at the midlevel 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 callused by law and politics.

donald’s name came up often and tentatively, like a child sneaking into an adult bed, forcing

wary lovers to make room in the middle. jahns grieved anew for her long-lost husband. for the first

time in her life, she grieved for the subsequent decades of solitude. what she had always seen as her

calling—this living apart and serving the greater good—now felt more like 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 understood, if not the mystery of why all those

sent out to clean actually did so, why a sad few would dare to volunteer for the duty. better to join a

ghost than to be haunted by them. 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’s 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, sensation took over.

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 midthirties 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 nerves during the long climb. the steady pulsing reminded

her of a bad lightbulb she’d unhappily endured for the better part of her first term. two different techs

from electrical had come to inspect the bulb. both had deemed it too operational to replace. it had

taken an appeal to mclain, the head of supply even back then, to score her a replacement.

jahns remembered mclain delivering the bulb herself. she hadn’t been head of supply for long

and had fairly smuggled the thing up those many flights of stairs. even then, jahns had looked up to

her, this woman with so much power and responsibility. she remembered mclain asking her why

jahns didn’t just do what everyone else did—simply break the bulb the rest of the way.

the fact that this had never occurred to jahns used to bother her—until she began to take pride in

this failing; until she got to know mclain well enough to understand the question was a compliment,

the hand-delivery her reward.

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 the exemptions it possessed.

bernard had been quick to point out 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

realigned 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 for them, a look on his face like he’d swallowed sour fruit

juice. a conversation between several it workers standing off to the side was 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 others’—”

“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 had noticed or not, but he fell silent. his eyes, however, did not leave

jahns’s.

“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?”

one of the technicians removed himself from the whispering group and approached. jahns

recognized the young man from the cafeteria, had seen him up top on nights she worked late. lukas,

if she remembered correctly. he shook her hand and smiled an awkward hello.

bernard twirled his own hand, stirring the air with his impatience. “sign whatever she needs. i

refuse to. make copies. take care of the rest.” he waved 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 have sims top up their canteens. see that they have food enough to stagger to

their homes. whatever it takes to power their decrepit legs out of here and back 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.