Hugh Howey - Wool Omnibus Edition (Wool 1-5)

“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 did notice 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 lifting 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 sonic blast was immediate. 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, borne 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 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 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. Beyond, a machine beyond reckoning loomed. It was the size of her entire apartment and office put together, in a room larger than many in the gardens. 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 which 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 coveralls, a hardhat 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 coveralls.

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 defined with muscle. She wore no undershirt, just blue coveralls 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 hardhat 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’ ears subsided, Juliette adjusted some spinning knobs, watching little arms waver under glass shields. “I thought we were doing this tomorrow morning,” she said. She concentrated 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.”