part 2 proper gauge
12
on the second and final day of their descent into the down deep, the novel gradually became the
habitual. the clank and thrum of the great spiral staircase found a rhythm. jahns was able to lose
herself in her thoughts, daydreaming so serenely that she would glance up at the floor number,
seventy-two, eighty-four, and wonder where a dozen landings went. the kink in her left knee was
even soothed away, whether by the numbness of fatigue or an actual return to health, she didn’t
know. she took to using the walking stick less, finding it only held up her pace as it often slipped
between the treads and got caught there. with it tucked under her arm, it felt more useful. like
another bone in her skeleton, holding her together.
when they passed the ninetieth floor, with the stench of fertilizer and the pigs and other animals
that produced this useful waste, jahns pressed on, skipping the tour and lunch she’d planned, thinking
only briefly of the small rabbit that somehow had escaped from another farm, made it twenty floors
up without being spotted, and ate its fill for three weeks while it confounded half a silo.
technically, they were already in the down deep when they reached ninety-seven. the bottom
third. but even though the silo was mathematically divided into three sections of forty-eight floors
each, her brain didn’t work that way. floor one hundred was a better demarcation. it was a milestone.
she counted the floors down until they reached the first landing with three digits and stopped for a
break.
marnes was breathing deeply, she noticed. but she felt great. alive and renewed in the way she
had hoped the trip would make her feel. the futility, dread, and exhaustion from the day before were
gone. all that remained was a small twinge of fear that these dour feelings could return, that this
exuberant elation was a temporary high, that if she stopped, if she thought on it too long, it would
spiral away and leave her dark and moody once more.
they split a small loaf of bread between them, sitting on the metal grating of the wide landing
with their elbows propped up on the railings, their feet swinging over empty space, like two kids
cutting class. level one hundred teemed with people coming and going. the entire floor was a
bazaar, a place for exchanging goods, for cashing in work chits for whatever was needed or merely
coveted. workers with their trailing shadows came and went, families yelled for one another among
the dizzying crowds, merchants barked their best deals. the doors remained propped open for the
traffic, letting the smells and sounds drift out onto the double-wide landing, the grating shivering with
excitement.
jahns reveled in the anonymity of the passing crowd. she bit into her half of the loaf, savoring the
fresh yeastiness of bread baked that morning, and felt like just another person. a younger person.
marnes cut her a piece of cheese and a slice of apple and sandwiched them together. his hand
touched hers as he passed it to her. even the bread crumbs in his mustache were part of the moment’s
perfection.
“we’re way ahead of schedule,” marnes said before taking a bite of fruit. it was just a pleasant
observation. a pat on their elderly backs. “i figure we’ll hit one-forty by dinner.”
“right now, i’m not even dreading the climb out,” jahns said. she finished the cheese and apple
and chewed contentedly. everything tasted better while climbing, she decided. or in pleasant
company, or amid the music leaking out of the bazaar, some beggar strumming his uke over the noise
of the crowd.
“why don’t we come down here more often?” she asked.
marnes grunted. “because it’s a hundred flights down? besides, we’ve got the view, the lounge,
the bar at kipper’s. how many of these people come up to any of that more than once every few
years?”
jahns chewed on that and on her last bite of bread.
“do you think it’s natural? not wandering too far from where we live?”
“don’t follow,” marnes said around a bite of food.
“pretend, just as a hypothetical, mind you, that people lived in those ancient aboveground silos
poking up over the hillside. you don’t think they would move around so little, do you? like stay in
the same silo? never wander over here or up and down a hundred flights of stairs?”
“i don’t think on those things,” marnes said. jahns took it as a hint that she shouldn’t, either. it
was impossible sometimes to know what could and couldn’t be said about the outside. those were
discussions for spouses, and maybe the walk and the day together yesterday had gotten to her. or
maybe she was as susceptible to the post-cleaning high as anyone else: the sense that some rules
could be relaxed, a few temptations courted, the release of pressure in the silo giving excuse for a
month of jubilant wiggling in one’s own skin.
“should we get going?” jahns asked as marnes finished his bread.
he nodded, and they stood and collected their things. a woman walking by turned and stared, a
flash of recognition on her face, gone as she hurried to catch up with her children.
it was like another world down here, jahns thought to herself. she had gone too long without a
visit. and even as she promised herself not to let that happen again, some part of her knew, like a
rusting machine that could feel its age, that this journey would be her last.
••••
floors drifted in and out of sight. the lower gardens, the larger farm in the one-thirties, the
pungent water treatment plant below that. jahns found herself lost in thought, remembering her
conversation with marnes the night before, the idea of donald living with her more in memory than
reality, when she came to the gate at one-forty.
she hadn’t even noticed the change in the traffic, the preponderance of blue denim overalls, the
porters with more satchels of parts and tools than clothes, food, or personal deliveries. but the crowd
at the gate showed her that she’d arrived at the upper levels of mechanical. gathered at the entrance
were workers in loose blue overalls spotted with age- old stains. jahns could nearly peg their
professions by the tools they carried. it was late in the day, and she assumed most were returning
home from repairs made throughout the silo. the thought of climbing so many flights of stairs and
then having to work boggled her mind. and then she remembered she was about to do that very
thing.
rather than abuse her station or marnes’s power, they waited in line while the workers checked
through the gate. as these tired men and women signed back in and logged their travel and hours,
jahns thought of the time she had wasted ruminating about her own life during the long descent, time
she should’ve spent polishing her appeal to this juliette. rare nerves twisted her gut as the line
shuffled forward. the worker ahead of them showed his id, the card colored blue for mechanical. he
scratched his information on a dusty slate. when it was their turn, they pushed through the outer gate
and showed their golden ids. the station guard raised his eyebrows, then seemed to recognize the
mayor.
“your honor,” he said, and jahns didn’t correct him. “weren’t expecting you this shift.” he
waved their ids away and reached for a nub of chalk. “let me.”
jahns watched as he spun the board around and wrote their names in neat print, the side of his
palm collecting dust from the old film of chalk below. for marnes, he simply wrote “sheriff,” and
again, jahns didn’t correct him.
“i know she wasn’t expecting us until later,” jahns said, “but i wonder if we could meet with
juliette nichols now.”
the station guard turned and looked behind him at the digital clock that recorded the proper time.
“she won’t be off the generator for another hour. maybe two, knowing her. you could hit the mess
hall and wait.”
jahns looked at marnes, who shrugged. “not entirely hungry yet,” he said.
“what about seeing her at work? it would be nice to see what she does. we’d try our best to stay
out of the way.”
the guard lifted his shoulders. “you’re the mayor. i can’t say no.” he jabbed the nub of chalk
down the hall, the people lined up outside the gate shifting impatiently as they waited. “see knox.
he’ll get someone to run you down.”
the head of mechanical was a man hard to miss. knox amply filled the largest set of overalls
jahns had ever seen. she wondered if the extra denim cost him more chits and how a man managed
to keep such a belly full. a thick beard added to his scope. if he smiled or frowned at their approach,
it was impossible to know. he was as unmoved as a wall of concrete.
jahns explained what they were after. marnes said hello, and she realized they must’ve met the
last time he was down. knox listened, nodded, and then bellowed in a voice so gruff, the words were
indistinguishable from one another. but they meant something to someone, as a young boy
materialized from behind him, a waif of a kid with unusually bright orange hair.
“gitemoffandowntojules,” knox growled, the space between the words as slender as the gap in his
beard where a mouth should have been.
the young boy, young even for a shadow, waved his hand and darted away. marnes thanked
knox, who didn’t budge, and they followed after the boy.
the corridors in mechanical, jahns saw, were even tighter than elsewhere in the silo. they
squeezed through the end-of-shift traffic, the concrete blocks on either side primed but not painted,
and rough where they brushed against her shoulder. overhead, parallel and twisting runs of pipe and
wire conduit hung exposed. jahns felt the urge to duck, despite the half foot of clearance; she noticed
many of the taller workers walking with a stoop. the lights overhead were dim and spaced well apart,
making the sensation of tunneling deeper and deeper into the earth overwhelming.
the young shadow with the orange hair led them around several turns, his confidence in the route
seemingly habitual. they came to a flight of stairs, the square kind that made right turns, and went
down two more levels. jahns heard a rumbling grow louder as they descended. when they left the
stairwell on one-forty-two, they passed an odd contraption in a wide open room just off the hallway.
a steel arm the size of several people end to end was moving up and down, driving a piston through
the concrete floor. jahns slowed to watch its rhythmic gyrations. the air smelled of something
chemical, something rotten. she couldn’t place it.
“is this the generator?”
marnes laughed in a patronizing, uniquely manly way.
“that’s a pump,” he said. “oil well. it’s how you read at night.”
he squeezed her shoulder as he walked past, and jahns forgave him instantly for laughing at her.
she hurried after him and knox’s young shadow.
“the generator is that thrumming you hear,” marnes said. “the pump brings up oil, they do
something to it in a plant a few floors down, and then it’s ready to burn.”
jahns vaguely knew some of this, possibly from a committee meeting. she was amazed, once
again, at how much of the silo was alien to even her, she who was supposed to be—nominally at least
—running things.
the persistent grumbling in the walls grew louder as they neared the end of the hall. when the
boy with the orange hair pulled open the doors, the sound was deafening. jahns felt wary about
approaching further, and even marnes seemed to stall. the kid waved them forward with frantic
gestures, and jahns found herself willing her feet to carry her toward the noise. she wondered,
suddenly, if they were being led outside. it was an illogical, senseless idea, born of imagining the
most dangerous threat she could possibly summon.
as she broke the plane of the door, cowering behind marnes, the boy let the door slam shut,
trapping them inside with the onslaught. he pulled headphones—no wires dangling from them—
from a rack by the wall. jahns followed his lead and put a pair over her own ears. the noise was
deadened, remaining only in her chest and nerve endings. she wondered why, for what cause, this
rack of ear protection would be located inside the room rather than outside.
the boy waved and said something, but it was just moving lips. they followed him along a
narrow passageway of steel grating, a floor much like the landings on each silo floor. when the
hallway turned, one wall fell away and was replaced with a railing of three horizontal bars. a
machine beyond reckoning loomed on the other side. it was the size of her entire apartment and office
put together. nothing seemed to be moving at first, nothing to justify the pounding she could feel in
her chest and across her skin. it wasn’t until they fully rounded the machine that she saw the steel rod
sticking out of the back of the unit, spinning ferociously and disappearing into another massive metal
machine that had cables as thick as a man’s waist rising up toward the ceiling.
the power and energy in the room were palpable. as they reached the end of the second machine,
jahns finally saw a solitary figure working beside it. a young-looking woman in overalls, a hard hat
on, brown braided hair hanging out the back, was leaning into a wrench nearly as long as she was
tall. her presence gave the machines a terrifying sense of scale, but she didn’t seem to fear them. she
threw herself into her wrench, her body frightfully close to the roaring unit, reminding jahns of an
old children’s tale where a mouse pulled a barb out of an imaginary beast called an elephant. the
idea of a woman this size fixing a machine of such ferocity seemed absurd. but she watched the
woman work while the young shadow slipped through a gate and ran up to tug on her overalls.
the woman turned, not startled, and squinted at jahns and marnes. she wiped her forehead with
the back of one hand, her other hand swinging the wrench around to rest on her shoulder. she patted
the young shadow on the head and walked out to meet them. jahns saw that the woman’s arms were
lean and well defined with muscle. she wore no undershirt, just blue overalls cut high up over her
chest, exposing a bit of olive skin that gleamed with sweat. she had the same dark complexion as the
farmers who worked under grow lights, but it could have been as much from the grease and grime if
her denims were any indication.
she stopped short of jahns and marnes, and nodded at them. she smiled at marnes with a hint of
recognition. she didn’t offer a hand, for which jahns was grateful. instead, she pointed toward a door
by a glass partition and then headed that way herself.
marnes followed on her heels like a puppy, jahns close behind. she turned to make sure the
shadow wasn’t underfoot, only to see him scurrying off the way he had come, his hair glowing in the
wan overhead lights of the generator room. his duty, as far as he was concerned, was done.
inside the small control room, the noise lessened. it dropped almost to nothing as the thick door
was shut tight. juliette pulled off her hard hat and earmuffs and dropped them on a shelf. jahns took
hers away from her head tentatively, heard the noise reduced to a distant hum, and removed them all
the way. the room was tight and crowded with metal surfaces and winking lights unlike anything she
had ever seen. it was strange to her that she was mayor of this room as well, a thing she hardly knew
existed and certainly couldn’t operate.
while the ringing in jahns’s ears subsided, juliette adjusted some spinning knobs, watching little
arms waver under glass shields. “i thought we were doing this tomorrow morning,” she said,
concentrating intently on her work.
“we made better time than i’d hoped.”
jahns looked to marnes, who was holding his ear protection in both hands, shifting
uncomfortably.
“good to see you again, jules,” he said.
she nodded and leaned down to peer through the thick glass window at the gargantuan machines
outside, her hands darting over the large control board without needing to look, adjusting large black
dials with faded white markings.
“sorry about your partner,” she said, glancing down at a bank of readouts. she turned and studied
marnes, and jahns saw that this woman, beneath the sweat and grime, was beautiful. her face was
hard and lean, her eyes bright. she had a fierce intelligence you could measure from a distance. and
she peered at marnes with utmost sympathy, visible in the furrow of her brows. “really,” she said.
“i’m terribly sorry. he seemed like a good man.”
“the best,” marnes sputtered, his voice cracking.
juliette nodded as if that was all that needed saying. she turned to jahns.
“that vibration you feel in the floor, mayor? that’s a coupling when it’s barely two millimeters
off. if you think it feels bad in here, you should go put your hands on the casing. it’ll jiggle your
fingers numb immediately. hold it long enough, and your bones will rattle like you’re coming apart.”
she turned and reached between jahns and marnes to throw a massive switch, then turned back to
the control board. “now imagine what that generator is going through, shaking itself to pieces like
that. teeth start grinding together in the transmission, small bits of metal shavings cycle through the
oil like sandpaper grit. next thing you know, there’s an explosion of steel and we’ve got no power
but whatever the backup can spit out.”
jahns held her breath.
“you need us to get someone?” marnes asked.
juliette laughed. “none of this is news or different from any other shift. if the backup unit wasn’t
being torn down for new gaskets, and we could go to half power for a week, i could pull that coupler,
adjust the mounts, and have her spinning like a top.” she shot a look at jahns. “but since we have a
mandate for full power, no interruptions, that’s not happening. so i’m going to keep tightening bolts
while they keep trying to shake loose, and try to find the right revolutions in here to keep her fairly
singing.”
“i had no idea, when i signed that mandate—”
“and here i thought i’d dumbed down my report enough to make it clear,” juliette said.
“how long before this failure happens?”
jahns suddenly realized she wasn’t here interviewing this woman. the demands were heading in
the opposite direction.
“how long?” juliette laughed and shook her head. she finished a final adjustment and turned to
face them with her arms crossed. “it could happen right now. it could happen a hundred years from
now. the point is: it’s going to happen, and it’s entirely preventable. the goal shouldn’t be to keep
this place humming along for our lifetimes”—she looked pointedly at jahns—“or our current term. if
the goal ain’t forever, we should pack our bags right now.”
jahns saw marnes stiffen at this. she felt her own body react, a chill coursing across her skin. this
last line was dangerously close to treason. the metaphor only half saved it.
“i could declare a power holiday,” jahns suggested. “we could stage it in memory of those who
clean.” she thought more about this. “it could be an excuse to service more than your machine here.
we could—”
“good luck getting it to power down shit,” juliette said. she wiped her chin with the back of her
wrist, then wiped this on her overalls. she looked down at the grease transferred to the denim.
“pardon my language, mayor.”
jahns wanted to tell her it was quite all right, but the woman’s attitude, her power, reminded her
too much of a former self that she could just barely recall. a younger woman who dispensed with
niceties and got what she wanted. she found herself glancing over at marnes. “why do you single out
their department? for the power, i mean.”
juliette laughed and uncrossed her arms. she tossed her hands toward the ceiling. “why? because
it has, what, three floors out of one-forty-four? and yet they use up over a quarter of all the power
we produce. i can do the math for you—”
“that’s quite all right.”
“and i don’t remember a server ever feeding someone or saving someone’s life or stitching up a
hole in their britches.”
jahns smiled. she suddenly saw what marnes liked about this woman. she also saw what he had
once seen in her younger self, before she married his best friend.
“what if we had it ratchet down for some maintenance of their own for a week? would that
work?”
“i thought we came down here to recruit her away from all this,” marnes grumbled.
juliette shot him a look. “and i thought i told you— or your secretary—not to bother. not that
i’ve got anything against what you do, but i’m needed down here.” she raised her arm and checked
something dangling from her wrist. it was a timepiece. but she was studying it as if it still worked.
“look, i’d love to chat more.” she looked up at jahns. “especially if you can guarantee a holiday
from the juice, but i’ve got a few more adjustments to make and i’m already into my overtime. knox
gets pissed if i push into too many extra shifts.”
“we’ll get out of your hair,” jahns said. “we haven’t had dinner yet, so maybe we can see you
after? once you punch out and get cleaned up?”
juliette looked down at herself, as if to confirm she even needed cleaning. “yeah, sure,” she said.
“they’ve got you in the bunkhouse?”
marnes nodded.
“all right. i’ll find you later. and don’t forget your muffs.” she pointed to her ears, looked
marnes in the eye, nodded, then returned to her work, letting them know the conversation, for now,
was over.
