Wool Omnibus Edition (Wool 1 - 5) Page 12

  Marck signaled that the bolts were secure, the lock nuts tightened down. Juliette jumped off her homemade platform and strolled over to the generator to join him. It was difficult to walk casually with so many eyes on her. She couldn’t believe this rowdy crew, this extended and dysfunctional family of hers, could be so perfectly silent. It was like they were all holding their breath, wondering if the crushing schedule of the last few days was going to be for naught.

  “You ready?” she asked Marck.

  He nodded, wiping his hands on a filthy rag that always seemed to be draped over his shoulder. Juliette checked her watch. The sight of its second hand ticking around in its constant path comforted her. Whenever she had doubts about something working, she looked at her wrist. Not to see the time, but to see a thing she had fixed. A repair so intricate and impossible—one that had taken years of cleaning and setting parts almost too small to see—that it made her current task, whatever it was, feel small by comparison.

  “We on schedule?” Marck asked, grinning.

  “We’re doing fine.” She nodded to the control room. Whispers began to stir through the crowd as they realized the restart was imminent. Dozens of them pulled sound protection from their necks and settled the muffs over their ears. Juliette and Marck joined Shirly in the control room.

  “How’s it going?” Juliette asked the second shift foreman, a young woman, small but fiery.

  “Golden,” Shirly said as she continued to make adjustments, zeroing out all the corrections that had built up over the years. They were starting from the ground up, none of the patches and fixes of old to disguise any new symptoms. A fresh start. “We’re good to go,” she said.

  She backed away from the controls and moved to stand near her husband. The gesture was transparent, leaving the controls. This was Juliette’s project, perhaps the last thing she would ever try and fix in the down deep of Mechanical. She would have the honor, and the full responsibility, of firing the generator up.

  Juliette stood over the control board, looking down at knobs and dials that she could locate in utter darkness. It was hard to believe that this phase of her life was over, that some new one was about to begin. The thought of traveling to the up-top frightened her more than this project could. The idea of leaving her friends and family, of dealing with politics, did not taste as sweet to her as the sweat and grease on her lips. But at least she had allies up there. If people like Jahns and Marnes were able to get by, to survive, she figured she’d be okay.

  With a trembling hand, more from exhaustion than nerves, Juliette engaged the starter motor. There was a loud whine as a small electrical engine tried to get the massive diesel generator moving. It seemed to be taking forever, but Juliette had no idea what normal sounded like. Marck stood by the door, propping it open so they could better hear any shouts to abort. He glanced over at Juliette as she continued to hold the ignition, creases of worry in his brow as the starter whined and groaned in the next room.

  Someone outside waved both arms, trying to signal her through the glass.

  “Shut it off, shut it off,” Marck said. Shirly hurried over toward the control panel to help.

  Juliette let go of the ignition and reached for the kill switch, but she stopped herself from pressing it. There was a noise outside. A powerful hum. She thought she could feel it through the floor, but not like the vibration of old.

  “It’s already running!” someone yelled.

  “It was already running,” Marck said, laughing.

  The mechanics outside were cheering. Someone pulled off their ear protection and hurled the muffs up into the air. Juliette realized the starter motor was louder than the rebuilt generator, that she’d been holding the ignition even as it had already started and continued to run.

  Shirly and Marck hugged one another. Juliette checked the temps and pressures on all the zeroed gauges and saw little to adjust, but she wouldn’t be sure until it warmed up. Her throat constricted with emotion, the release of so much pressure. Work crews were leaping over the railing to crowd around the rebuilt beast. Some who rarely visited the generator room were reaching out to touch it, almost with reverent awe.

  Juliette left the control room to watch them, to listen to the sound of a perfectly working machine, of gears in alignment. She stood behind the railing, hands on a steel bar that used to rattle and dance while the generator labored, and watched an unlikely celebration take place in a normally avoided workspace. The hum was magnificent. Power without dread. The culmination of so much hurried labor and planning.

  The success gave her a new confidence for what lay ahead, for what lay above. She was in such fine spirits and so fixated on the powerful and improved machines that she didn’t notice the young porter hurry into the room, his face ashen, his chest swelling with the deep gulps of a long and frantic run. She barely noticed the way the news traveled from mouth to mouth throughout the room, spreading among the mechanics until fear and sadness registered in their eyes. It wasn’t until the celebration died completely, the room falling into a different sort of quiet, one studded with sobs and gasps of disbelief, of grown men wailing, that Juliette knew something was amiss.

  Something had happened. A great and powerful thing had fallen out of alignment.

  And it had nothing to do with her generator.

  Wool 3 – Casting Off

  1

  Casting Off

  There were numbers 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 numbly stared at them through her helmet visor while the door behind her was sealed. There was another door, a forbidden one, looming 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 from the walls and ceiling, everything shimmering behind plastic-wrapped shrouds.

  The hiss of Argon being pumped into the room sounded distant through her helmet. It let her know the end was near. Pressure built against 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 knew what was 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 who would’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 landscape meant only for them.

  For Juliette, there was nothing inspiring 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 crumbling 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 saw, were sad and empty dreams. Dead dreams. The people of the up-top who worshipped this view had it all backwards—the future was below. That’s where the oil came from that provided their power, the minerals that became anything useful, the nitrogen that renewed the s
oil in the farms. Any who shadowed in the footsteps of chemistry and metallurgy knew this. Those who read children’s books, those who tried to piece together the mystery of a forgotten 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 something wrong 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 something about her?

  Juliette looked from the dry hills and the fog 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 numbers written with black ink on the bag had been crossed out, cases long since solved or abandoned. A new number stood to one side, a case number matching a folder not present, a folder filled with page after page of testimony and notes dealing 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 were written in Deputy Marnes’ 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 amid these drying tears was a scrawl, not as neat as his notes in the other folders. What she could see seemed to crawl angrily across the page, words slashed out violently and replaced. It was the same ferocity Deputy Marnes displayed all the time now, the boiling anger that had driven Juliette away from her desk and into the holding 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 loomed before her, however sad, cast a far less depressing 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 simply sit and sort and re-sort her folders according 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 imagine: People were like machines. They broke down. They rattled. They could burn you or maim you if you weren’t careful. Her job was to not only figure out why this happened, and who was to blame, but also to listen for the signs of it coming. Being sheriff, like being a mechanic, was as much the fine art of preventive maintenance as it was the cleaning up after a breakdown.

  The folders scattered on the floor were sad cases of the latter. Complaints between neighbors that got out of hand. Reported thefts. The source of a poisonous batch of amateur shower gin. Several more cases stemming from the trouble this gin had caused. Each folder awaited more findings, more legwork, more hikes down the twisting stairs 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 from the work of aligning the primary generator, she had studied the proper way to file case folders, the danger of disturbing evidence, all of it logical and analogous to some part of her old job as mechanic. Approaching the scene of a crime or an active dispute was no different than walking into a pump room where something was broken. Someone or some thing 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 equipment or the tools that had served the equipment, following 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 something else a-kilter—but Juliette had a skill, a talent, for knowing what was important and what could be ignored.

  She assumed it was this talent that Deputy Marnes had originally seen in her, this patience and skepticism she employed to ask one more stupid question and stumble eventually onto the answer. It was a boost to her confidence that she had helped solve a case before. She hadn’t known it then, had been more concerned with simple justice and her private grief, but that case had been job training and an interview all in one.

  She picked up that very folder from years gone by, a pale red stamp on its cover reading “Closed” in bold block letters. She peeled the tape holding its edges together and flipped through the notes. Many of them were in Holston’s neat hand, a forward-slanting print she recognized from just about everything on and inside her desk, a desk that had once been his. She read his notes about her, re-familiarized herself with a case that had seemed an obvious murder but had actually been a series of unlikely events. Going back through it, something she had avoided until now, resurfaced old pains. And yet—she could also recall how comforting it had been to distract herself with the clues. She could remember the rush of a problem solved, the satisfaction of having answers to offset the hollowness left by her lover’s death. The process had been similar to fixing a machine on extra shifts. There was the pain in her body from the effort and exhaustion, offset slightly by the knowledge that a rattle had been wrenched away.

  She set the folder aside, not yet ready to relive it all. She picked up another and placed it in her lap, one hand falling to the brass star on her knee—

  A shadow danced across the wallscreen, distracting her. Juliette looked up and saw a low wall of dirt spill down the hill. This layer of soot seemed to shiver in the wind as it travelled toward sensors she had been trained to think of as important, sensors that gave her a view of the outside world she had been frightened as a child into believing was dear.

  But she wasn’t so sure, now that she was old enough to think for herself and near enough to observe it firsthand. This up-top’s obsession with cleaning barely trickled its way to the down deep where true cleaning kept the silo humming and everyone alive. But even down there, her friends in Mechanical had been told since birth not to speak of the outside. It was an easy enough task when you never saw it, but now, walking by it to work, sitting before this view of a vastness one’s brain could not comprehend, she saw how the inevitable questions must surface. She saw why it might be important to squelch certain ideas before a stampede to the exits formed, before questions foamed on people’s mad lips and brought an end to them all.

  Rather than ponder this further, she flipped opened Holston’s folder. Behind the bio tab was a thick stack of notes about his last days as sheriff. The portion relating to his actual crime was barely half a page long, the rest of the piece of paper blank and wasted. A single paragraph simply explained that he had reported to the up-top holding cell and had expressed an interest in the outside. That was it. A few lines to spell a man’s doom. Juliette read the words several times before flipping the page over.

  Underneath was a note from Mayor Jahns asking that Holston be remembered for his service to the silo and not as just another cleaner. Juliette read this letter, written in the hand of someone who was also recently deceased. It was strange to think of people she knew that she could never see again. Part of the reason she avoided her father all these years was because he was, simply put, still there. There was never the threat of her not being able to change her mind. But it was different with Holston and Jahns; they were gone forever. And Juliette was so used to rebuilding devices thought beyond repair that she felt if she concentrated enough, or performed the correct series of tasks in the right order, that she should be able to bring the deceased back, be able to recreate their wasted forms. But she knew that wasn’t the case.

  She flipped through Holston’s folder and asked herself forbidden questions, some for the very first time. What had seemed trivial when she lived in the down deep, where exhaust leaks could asphyxiate and broken flood pumps could drown everyone she knew, now loomed large before her. What was it all about, this life they lived in underground confines? What
was out there, over those hills? Why were they here, and for what purpose? Had her kind built those tall silos crumbling in the distance? What for? And most vexing of all: What had Holston, a reasonable man—or his wife for that matter—been thinking to want to leave?

  Two folders to keep her company, both marked “Closed.” Both belonging in the Mayor’s office, where they should be sealed up and filed away. But Juliette kept finding herself returning to them rather than the more pressing cases in front of her. One of these folders held the life of a man she had loved, whose death she had helped unravel in the down deep. In the other lived a man she had respected whose job she now held. She didn’t know why she obsessed over the two folders, especially since she couldn’t stomach seeing Marnes peer forlornly down at his own loss, studying the details of Mayor Jahns’ death, going over the depositions, convinced he had a killer but with no evidence to corner the man—