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

“I’m sorry to burden you,” Holston said dryly.

“I take no pleasure in it. That’s all I’m saying. No pleasure at all.”

Holston swept his hand at the massive screen.

“But you’ll be the first to watch a clear sunset tomorrow night, won’t you?” He hated the way he sounded. Holston wasn’t angry for his death, or life, or whatever came after tomorrow, but resentment over Allison’s fate still lingered. He continued to see inevitable events from the past as avoidable, long after they’d taken their course. “You’ll all love the view tomorrow,” he said to himself.

“That’s not fair at all,” Jahns said. “The law is the law. You broke it. You knew you were breaking it.”

Holston looked at his feet. The two of them allowed a silence to form. Mayor Jahns was the one who eventually broke it.

“You haven’t threatened yet to not go through with it. Some of the others are nervous that you might not do the cleaning because you aren’t saying you won’t.”

Holston laughed. “They’d feel better if I said I wouldn’t clean the sensors?” He shook his head at the mad logic.

“Everyone who sits there says they aren’t gonna do it,” Jahns told him, “but then they do. It’s what we’ve all come to expect—”

“Allison never threatened that she wouldn’t do it,” Holston reminded her, but he knew what Jahns meant. He himself had been sure Allison wouldn’t wipe the lenses. And now he thought he understood what she’d been going through as she sat on that very bench. There were larger things to consider than the act of cleaning. Most prisoners sent outside were caught at something, were surprised to find themselves in that cell, their fate mere hours away. Revenge was on their mind when they said they wouldn’t do it. There was a reflexive obstinacy. But Allison and now Holston had bigger worries. Whether or not they’d clean was inconsequential; they had arrived here because they wanted, on some insane level, to be here. All that remained was the curiosity of it all. The wonder of the outside world beyond the veil of lies.

“So, are you planning on going through with it or not?” Jahns asked directly, her desperation evident.

“You said it yourself.” Holston shrugged. “Everyone does it. There must be some reason, right?”

He pretended not to care, to be disinterested in the why of the cleaning, but he had spent most of his life, the past three years especially, agonizing over the why. The question drove him nuts. And if his refusing to answer Jahns caused pain to those who had murdered his wife, he wouldn’t be upset.

Jahns rubbed her hands up and down the bars, anxious. “Can I tell them you’ll do it?” she asked.

“Or tell them I won’t. I don’t care. It sounds like either answer will mean the same to them.”

Jahns didn’t reply. Holston looked up at her, and the Mayor nodded.

“If you change your mind about the meal, let Deputy Marnes know. He’ll be at the desk all night, as is tradition—”

She didn’t need to say. Tears came to Holston’s eyes as he remembered that part of his former duties. He had manned that desk twelve years ago when Donna Parkins was put to cleaning, eight years ago when it was Jack Brent’s time. And he had spent a night clinging to the bars, lying on the floor, a complete wreck, three years ago when it was his wife’s turn.

Mayor Jahns turned to go.

“Sheriff,” Holston muttered before she got out of earshot.

“I’m sorry?” Jahns lingered on the other side of the bars, her gray, bushy brows hanging over her eyes.

“It’s Sheriff Marnes, now,” Holston reminded her. “Not Deputy.”

Jahns rapped a steel bar with her knuckles. “Eat something,” she said. “And I won’t insult you by suggesting you get some sleep.”

“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Allison said. “Honey, listen to this. You won’t believe this. Did you know there was more than one uprising?”

Holston looked up from the folder spread across his lap. Around him, scattered piles of paper covered the bed like a quilt—stacks and stacks of old files to sort through and new complaints to manage. Allison sat at her small desk at the foot of the bed. The two of them lived in one of the silo condos that had only been subdivided twice over the decades. It left room for luxuries like desks and wide non-bunk beds.

“And how would I have known about that?” he asked her. His wife turned and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. Holston jabbed a folder at her computer screen. “All day long you’re unlocking secrets hundreds of years old and I’m supposed to know about them before you do?”

She stuck out her tongue. “It’s an expression. It’s my way of informing you. And why don’t you seem more curious? Did you hear what I just said?”

Holston shrugged. “I never would’ve assumed the one uprising we know about was the first—just that it was the most recent. If I’ve learned one thing from my job, it’s that no crime or crazy mob is ever all that original.” He picked up a folder by his knee. “You think this is the first water thief the silo’s known? Or that it’ll be the last?”

Allison’s chair squealed on the tile as she turned to face him. The monitor on the desk behind her blinked with the scraps and fragments of data she had pulled from the silo’s old servers, the remnants of information long ago deleted and overwritten countless times. Holston still didn’t understand how the retrieval process worked, or why someone smart enough to come up with it was dumb enough to love him, but he accepted both as truth.

“I’m piecing together a series of old reports,” she said. “If true, they mean something like our old uprising used to take place regularly. Like once every generation or so.”

“There’s a lot we don’t know about the old times,” Holston said. He rubbed his eyes and thought about all the paperwork he wasn’t getting done. “Maybe they didn’t have a system for cleaning the sensors, you know? I’ll bet back then, the view upstairs just got blurrier and blurrier until people went crazy, there’d be a revolt or something, and then they’d finally exile a few people to set things straight. Or maybe it was just natural population control, you know, before the lottery.”

Allison shook her head. “I don’t think so. I’m starting to think—” She paused and glanced down at the spread of villainous paperwork around Holston. The sight of all the logged transgressions seemed to make her consider carefully what she was about to say. “I’m not passing judgment, not saying anyone was right or wrong or anything like that, I’m just suggesting that maybe the servers weren’t wiped out by the rebels during the uprising. Not like we’ve always been told, anyway.”

That got Holston’s attention. The mystery of the blank servers, the empty past of the silo’s ancestors, haunted them all. The erasure was nothing more than fuzzy legend. He closed the folder he was working on and set it aside. “What do you think caused it?” he asked his wife. “Do you think it was an accident? A fire or a power outage?” He listed the common theories.

Allison frowned. “No,” she said. She lowered her voice and looked around anxiously. “I think we wiped the hard drives. Our ancestors, I mean, not the rebels.” She turned and leaned toward the monitor, running her finger down a set of figures Holston couldn’t discern from the bed. “Twenty years,” she said. “Eighteen. Twenty-four.” Her finger slid down the screen with a squeak. “Twenty-eight. Sixteen. Fifteen.”

Holston plowed a path through the paperwork at his feet, putting the files back in stacks as he worked his way toward the desk. He sat on the foot of the bed, put a hand on his wife’s neck, and peered over her shoulder at the monitor.