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So had fallen out of alignenerator

Wool 3 – Casting Off

1

Casting Off

There was a number on each of the pockets Juliette could look down at her chest and read them, and so it occurred to her that they must be printed upside down They were there for her to read, and for no one else She nuh her helmet visor while the door behind her was sealed There was another door, a forbidden one, loo in front of her It stood silently as it waited to be opened

Juliette felt lost in this void between the two doors, trapped in this airlock full of its brightly colored pipes all jutting fro behind plastic-wrapped shrouds

The hiss of Argon being puh her helainst the plastic, crinkling it across the bench and walls, wrapping it tightly around the pipes She could feel the pressure against her suit, like an invisible hand gently squeezing

She kneas to happen next And part of her wondered how she had gotten here, a girl from Mechanical who had never cared one whit about the outside, who had only ever broken minor laws, and ould’ve been content for the rest of her life to live in the deepest bowels of the earth, covered in grease and fixing the broken things, little concern for the wider world of the dead that surrounds her--

2

Days Earlier

Juliette sat on the floor of the holding cell, her back against the tall rows of steel bars, a mean world displayed on the wallscreen before her For the past three days, while she attempted to teach herself how to be silo sheriff, she had studied this view of the outside and wondered what the fuss was all about

All she saw out there were dull slopes of ground, these gray hills rising up toward grayer clouds, dappled sunlight straining to illuminate the land with little success Across it all were the terrible winds, the frenzied gusts that whipped small clouds of soil into curls and whorls that chased one another across a landscapeinspiring about the view, nothing that aroused her curiosity It was an uninhabitable wasteland devoid of anything useful There were no resources beyond the tainted steel of cru towers visible over the hills, steel it would no doubt cost more to reclaim, transport, smelt, and purify than it would to simply pull new ore from the mines beneath the silo

The forbidden dreams of the outside world, she saere sad and empty dreams Dead dreams The people of the up-top orshipped this view had it all backwards--the future was below That’s where the oil came fro useful, the nitrogen that renewed the soil in the farms Any who shadowed in the footsteps of chey knew this Those who read children’s books, those who tried to piece together the otten and unknowable past, remained deluded

The only sense she could make of their obsession was the open space itself, a feature of the landscape that frankly terrified her Perhaps it was so with her that she loved the walls of the silo, loved the dark confines of the down deep Was everyone else crazy to harbor thoughts of escape? Or was it so about her?

Juliette looked fro of soil to the scattered folders around her It was her predecessor’s unfinished work A shiny star sat balanced on one of her knees, not yet worn There was a canteen sitting on one of the folders, safe inside a plastic reusable evidence bag It looked innocent enough lying there, having already done its deadly deed Several nu had been crossed out, cases long since solved or abandoned A new nu a folder not present, a folder filled with page after page of testi with the death of a mayor that everyone had loved--but that someone had killed

Juliette had seen some of those notes, but only from a distance They ritten in Deputy Marnes’s hand, hands that would not relinquish the folder, hands that clutched it madly She had taken peeks at the folder from across his desk and had seen the splatters that faded occasional words and caused the paper to pucker The writing a tears was a scrawl, not as neat as his notes in the other folders What she could see seee, words slashed out violently and replaced It was the same ferocity Deputy Marnes displayed all the tier that had driven Juliette away fro cell to work She had found it impossible to sit across from such a broken soul and be expected to think The view of the outside world that loo shadow

It was in the holding cell that she killed time between the static-filled calls on her radio and the jaunts down to some disturbance Often, she would si to perceived severity She was sheriff of all the silo A job she had not shadowed for, but one she was beginning to understand One of the last things Mayor Jahns had told her had proved truer than she could iine: People were like machines They broke down They rattled They could burn you or ure out why this happened, and as to bla sheriff, like being a mechanic, was as much the fine art of preventiveup after a breakdown

The folders scattered on the floor were sad cases of the latter Coot out of hand Reported thefts The source of a poisonous batch of a froin had caused Each folder awaitedstairs to engage in twisted dialog, sorting lies from truth

Juliette had read the Law portion of the Pact twice in preparation for the job Lying in her bed in the down deep, her body exhausted froenerator, she had studied the proper way to file case folders, the danger of disturbing evidence, all of it logical and analogous to so the scene of a cri into a pu was always at fault She knew to listen, to observe, to ask questions of anyone who could have had anything to do with the faulty equip a chain of events all the way down to the bedrock itself There were always confounding variables--you couldn’t adjust one dial without sending so else a-kilter--but Juliette had a skill, a talent, for knoas inored