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

Jahns ignored him. “I’m actually glad to hear your side of this,” she told Juliette. “And I wish I made this trip more often, as sore as my legs are. There are things we take for granted up top, mostly because they aren’t well understood. I can see now that our offices need to be in better communication, have more of the constant contact I have with IT.”

“I’ve been saying that for just about twenty years,” Juliette said. “Down here, we joke that this place was laid out to keep us well out of the way. And that’s how it feels, sometimes.”

“Well, if you come up top, if you take this job, people will hear you. You could be the first link in that chain of command.”

“Where would IT fall?”

“There will be resistance, but that’s normal with them. I’ve handled it before. I’ll wire my office for some emergency waivers. We’ll make them retroactive, get these acquisitions above board.” Jahns studied the younger woman. “As long as I have your assurance that every one of these diverted supplies were absolutely necessary.”

Juliette did not flinch away from the challenge. “They were,” she said. “Not that it mattered. The stuff we got from them was crap. Couldn’t have fallen apart better if it’d been designed to. I’ll tell you what, we finally got our shipment from Supply and have extra tape. I’d love to drop off a peace offering on our way up. Our design is so much better—”

“Our way up?” Jahns asked, making sure she understood what she was saying, what she was agreeing to.

Juliette looked them both over. She nodded. “You’ll have to give me a week to sort out the generator. I’m holding you to that power holiday. And just so you understand, I’ll always consider myself Mechanical, and I’ll be doing this partly because I see what happens when problems are ignored. My big push down here has been preventive maintenance. No more waiting for things to break before we fix them, but to go around and make them hum while they’re still working. Too many issues have been ignored, let degrade. And I think, if the silo can be thought of as one big engine, we are like the dirty oil pan down here that needs some people’s attention.” She reached her hand out to Jahns. “Get me that power holiday, and I’m your man.”

Jahns smiled and took her hand, admired the warmth and power in her confident handshake.

“I’ll get on it first thing in the morning,” she said. “And thank you. Welcome aboard.”

Marnes crossed the room to shake Juliette’s hand as well. “Nice to have you on, Boss.”

Juliette smirked as she took his hand. “Well, now, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I think I’ll have a lot to learn before you go calling me that.”

It felt appropriate that their climb back to the up-top would occur during a power holiday. Jahns could feel her own energy complying with the new decree, draining away with each laborious step. The agony of the descent had been a tease, the discomfort of constant movement disguising itself as the fatigue of exercise. But now her frail muscles were really put to work. Each step was something to be conquered. She would lift a boot to the next tread, place a hand on her knee, and push herself another ten inches up what felt like a million feet of spiral staircase.

The landing to her right displayed the number “58.” Each landing seemed to be in view forever. Not like the trip down, where she could daydream and skip right past several floors. Now they loomed in sight gradually beyond the outer railing, and held there, taunting in the dim green glow of the emergency lights, as she struggled up one plodding and wavering step at a time.

Marnes walked beside her, his hand on the inner rail, hers on the outer, the walking stick clanging on the lonely treads between them. Occasionally, their arms brushed against one another. It felt as though they’d been away for months, away from their offices, their duties, their cold familiarity. The adventure down to wrangle a new sheriff had played out differently than Jahns had imagined it would. She had dreamed of a return to her youth and had instead found herself haunted by old ghosts. She had hoped to find a renewed vigor and instead felt the years of wear in her knees and back. What was to be a grand tour of her silo was instead trudged in relative anonymity, and now she wondered if its operation and upkeep even needed her.

The world around her was stratified. She saw that ever more clearly. The up-top concerned itself with a blurring view, taking for granted the squeezed juice enjoyed with breakfast. The people who lived below and worked the gardens or cleaned animal cages orbited their own world of soil, greenery, and fertilizer. To them, the outside view was peripheral, ignored until there was a cleaning. And then there was the down deep, the machine shops and chemistry labs, the pumping oil and grinding gears, the hands-on world of grease limned fingernails and the musk of toil. To these people, the outside world and the food that trickled down were mere rumors and bodily sustenance. The point of the silo was for the people to keep the machines running, when Jahns had always, her entire long life, seen it the other way around.

Landing fifty-seven appeared through the fog of darkness. A young girl sat on the steel grate, her feet tucked up against herself, arms wrapped around her knees, a children’s book in its protective plastic cover held out into the feeble light spilling from an overhead bulb. Jahns watched the girl, who was unmoved save her eyes as they darted over the colorful pages. The girl never looked up to see who was passing the apartment’s landing. They left her behind, and she gradually faded in the darkness as Jahns and Marnes struggled ever upward, exhausted from their third day of climbing, no vibrations or ringing footsteps above or below them, the silo quiet and eerily devoid of life, room enough for two old friends, two comrades, to walk side by side on the crumbling steps of chipping paint, their arms swinging and every now and then, and very occasionally, brushing together.

They stayed that night at the mid-level deputy station, the officer of the mids insisting they take his hospitality and Jahns eager to buttress support for yet another sheriff nominated from outside the profession. After a cold dinner in near darkness and enough idle banter to satisfy their host and his wife, Jahns retired to the main office where a convertible couch had been made as comfortable as possible, the linens borrowed from a nicer elsewhere and smelling of two-chit soap. Marnes had been set up on a cot in the holding cell, which still smelled of tub-gin and a drunk who had gotten too carried away after the cleaning.

It was impossible to notice when the lights went out, they were so dim already. Jahns rested on the cot in the darkness, her muscles throbbing and luxuriating in her body’s stillness, her feet cramped and feeling like solid bone, her back tender and in need of stretching. Her mind, however, continued to move. It drifted back to the weary conversations that had passed the time on their most recent day of climbing.

She and Marnes seemed to be spiraling around one another, testing the memory of old attractions, probing the tenderness of ancient scars, looking for some soft spot that remained among brittle and broken bodies, across wrinkled and dried-paper skin, and within hearts calloused by law and politics.

Donald’s name came up often and tentatively, like a child sneaking into the adult bed, forcing wary lovers to make room in the middle. Jahns grieved anew for her long lost husband. She grieved for the first time in her life for the subsequent decades of solitude. What she had forever seen as her calling—this living apart and serving the greater good—now felt more a curse. Her life had been taken from her. Squeezed into pulp. The juice of her efforts and sacrificed years had dripped down through a silo that, just forty levels below her, hardly knew and barely cared.