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"Yes, well, I’ve found the space conducive to sortingto that And besides," she leveled her eyes at hi And once it’s occupied, I’ll be able to take leave of all this deep thought for a day or thile so--"

"I wouldn’t count too ain "The word down below is that the poor Mayor, rest her soul, plum wore herself out with this crazy cli down to see you, isn’t that right?"

Juliette felt a sharp sting in her palrip on the brass star, the knuckles on both hands white frolasses "But now I hear you’re investigating for foul play?"

Juliette leveled her eyes at hi not to be distracted by the reflection of the dull hills visible in his spectacles "I suppose you should know, as acting Mayor, that we’re treating this very much as a murder," she said

"Oh my" His eyes widened over a li?" The s with a man who felt himself invulnerable It wasn’t the first tio such as his Her time as a shadow in the down deep had been spent surrounded by them

"I believe we’ll find the party responsible was the one with the ain," she said dryly After a pause, she added: "Mayor"

The crooked so of the bars and stepped back, his hands tucking into his coveralls "Well, it’s nice to finally put a face with the name I’m aware that you haven’t spent much time out of the down deep--and to be honest I’ve stayedaround here As ether a lot, you and lanced down at the files at her feet "So I expect you to keep "

With that, Bernard turned and left, and it required a concerted effort for Juliette to relax her fists When she finally peeled her fingers away froed into her palht the light on the edge of the brass, looking like wet rust Juliette wiped the star clean on her new coveralls, a habit borne of her previous life arease She cursed herself when she saw the dark spot the blood left on her new clothes Turning the star over, she peered at the stales of the silo and the word "Sheriff" arched over top of theered the clasp that held the sharp spike of a pin She opened the clasp and let the pin hinge free The stiff needle had been bent and straightened in several places over the years, giving it a hand-forged look It wobbled on its hinge--

But as Bernard’s footsteps receded, as she heard hi indecipherable to Deputy Marnes, she felt a new resolve steel her nerves It was like encountering a rusted bolt that refused to budge So about that intolerable stiffness, that reluctance to e She had come to believe that there was no fastener she couldn’t unstick, had learned to attack the oil and with brute strength With enough planning and persistence, they always gave Eventually

She forced the wavy needle through the breast of her coveralls and clasped the catch on the back Looking down at the star was a little surreal There were a dozen folders at her feet de her attention, and Juliette felt, for the first ti at the up-top, that this was her job Her work at Mechanical was behind her She had left that place in far better condition than she’d found it, had stayed long enough to hear the near-silent huenerator, to see a shaft spin in such perfect align at all And now she had traveled to the up-top to find here the rattle and squelch and grind of a different set of gears, a ine of the silo, just as Jahns had forewarned

Leaving most of the folders where they were, she picked up Holston’s, a folder she shouldn’t even be looking at but couldn’t be without, and pulled the cell door open Rather than turn to her office, she first walked the other way toward the yellow steel entrance to the airlock Peering through the triple paned glass for the dozenth tiined theone of those ridiculously bulky suits, waiting for those far doors to open What goes through a hts as he waits there alone to be cast off? It couldn’t be h It had to be so beyond that, a wholly unique sensation, the calination, she figured, just wasn’t up to the task of understanding unique and foreign sensations It only kne to da soasm Iine varying degrees of this new sensation

It was the same as color You could only describe a new color in terms of hues previously seen You could e out of nothing So maybe it was only the cleaners who understood what it felt like to stand there, tre--or perhaps not afraid one bit--as they waited for their death

The obsession hy played out in whispers through the silo--people wanting to knohy they did what they did, why they left a shiny and polished gift to those who had exiled theured they were seeing new colors, feeling the indescribable, perhaps having a religious experience that only occurred in the face of the reaper Wasn’t it enough to know that it happened without fail? Problem solved Take it as an axiom Move on to a real issue, like what it h it That was the real shame of the taboos: not that people couldn’t pine for the outside world, but that they weren’t even allowed to co the weeks after, to wonder what they had suffered, to properly express their thanks or regrets

Juliette tapped the yellow door with the corner of Holston’s folder, re the man in better ti her about his wife She nodded to his ghost and stepped away frolass There was a kinship she felt fro in his cell She had loved a man once, and knehat that felt like She had loved in secret, not involving the silo in their relationship, ignoring the Pact And so she also knehat it ine, if her old lover was out there on that hill--wasting away in plain sight rather than feeding the roots--that she could be driven to cleaning, to wanting to see those new colors for herself

She opened Holston’s file again as she wandered back toward her desk His desk Here was one man who knew of her secret love She had told him, once the case was settled in the down deep, that the man who had died, whose case she had helped solve, had been her lover Maybe it was how he had gone on and on about his wife the days before Maybe it was his trustworthy s this baffling urge to divulge secrets Whatever the cause, she had adotten her in trouble, an affair coard for the Pact, and all he had said, thisthose laas: "I’ed her Like he knehat she was holding inside, this secret grief that had hardened where her hidden love once lay

And she had respected him for that