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

She had been sheriff for a short time, a star appearing on her breast for but a wink, and yet she felt an incredible urge to investigate. There was something not right about Scottie killing himself. The signs were there, sure. He had been afraid to leave his office—but then, he’d also shadowed under Walker and had maybe picked up the habit of reclusiveness from the old man. Scottie had also been harboring secrets too big for his young mind, had been fearful enough to wire her to come quickly—but she knew the boy like her own shadow, and knew he didn’t have it in him. She suddenly wondered if Marnes had ever had it in him as well. If Jahns were here beside her, would the old Mayor be screaming for Jules to investigate both their deaths? Telling her that none of this fit?

“I can’t,” Juliette whispered to the ghost, causing an upbound porter to turn his head as he passed.

She kept further thoughts to herself. As she descended toward her father’s nursery, she paused at the landing, contemplating longer and harder about going in to see him than she had on her way up. Pride had prevented her the first time. And now shame set her feet into motion once again, spiraling down away from him, chastising herself for thinking on the ghosts from her past that had long ago been banished from memory.

At the thirty-fourth, the entrance to IT, she again considered stopping. There would be clues in Scottie’s office, maybe even some they hadn’t managed to scrub away. She shook her head. The conspiracies were already forming in her mind. And as hard as it was to leave the scene of the crime behind, she knew she wouldn’t be allowed anywhere near his office.

She continued down the staircase and thought, as she considered IT’s location in the silo, that this couldn’t be an accident either. She had another thirty-two floors to go before she checked in with the first deputy, who was located near the center of the mids. The sheriff’s office was thirty-three floors above her head. IT, then, was as far as it could get from any deputy station in the silo.

She shook her head at this paranoid thinking. It wasn’t how diagnoses were made. Her father would have told her so.

After meeting with the first deputy around noon, and accepting a piece of bread and fruit, along with a reminder to eat, she made good time down through the mids, wondering as she passed the upper apartments which level Lukas lived on, or if he even knew of her arrest.

The weight of the past week seemed to pull her down the stairwell, gravity sucking at her boots, the pressures of being sheriff dissipating as she left that office far behind. Those pressures were slowly replaced with an eagerness to return to her friends, even in shame, as she got closer and closer to Mechanical.

She stopped to see Hank, the down deep deputy, on level one-twenty. She had known him for a long time, was becoming more and more surrounded with familiar faces, people who waved hello, their moods somber as if they knew every detail of her time away. Hank tried to get her to stay and rest a while, but she only paused long enough to be polite, to refill her canteen, and then to shuffle the remaining twenty floors to the place she truly belonged.

Knox seemed thrilled to have her back. He wrapped her up in a crippling hug, lifting her feet off the ground and roughing up her face with his beard. He smelled of grease and sweat, a mix Juliette had never fully noticed in the down deep because she had never been free from it.

The walk to her old room was punctuated by slaps on her back, well-wishes, questions about the up-top, people calling her sheriff in jest, and the sort of rude frivolities she had grown up in and grown used to. Juliette felt more saddened by it all than anything. She had set out to do something and had failed. And yet her friends were just happy to have her back.

Shirly from second shift spotted her coming down the hallway and accompanied Juliette on the rest of the walk to her room. She updated Juliette on the status of the generator and the output from the new oil well, as if Juliette had simply been on vacation for a short while. Juliette thanked her at the door to her room, stepped inside, and kicked her way through all the folded notes slipped under the door. She lifted the strap of her daypack over her head and dropped it, then collapsed onto her bed, too exhausted and upset at herself to even cry.

She awoke in the middle of the night. Her small display terminal showed the time in green blocky numbers: 2:14 AM.

Juliette sat at the edge of her old bed in coveralls that weren’t truly hers and took stock of her situation. Her life was not yet over, she decided. It just felt that way. Tomorrow, even if they didn’t expect her to, she would be back at work in the pits, keeping the silo humming, doing what she did best. She needed to wake up to this reality, to set other ideas and responsibilities aside. Already, they felt so far away. She doubted she would even go to Scottie’s funeral, not unless they sent his body down to be buried where it belonged.

She reached for the keyboard slotted into the wall rack. Everything was covered in a layer of grime, she saw. She had never noticed it before. The keys were filthy from the dirt she had brought back from each shift. The monitor’s glass was limned with grease. She fought the urge to wipe the screen and smear the shiny coat of oil around, but she would have to clean her place a little deeper, she decided. She was viewing things with untainted and more critical eyes.

Rather than chase pointless sleep, she keyed the monitor awake to check the work logs for the next day, anything to get her mind off the past week. But before she could open her task manager, she saw that she had over a dozen wires in her inbox. She’d never seen so many. Usually people just slid recycled notes under each other’s doors—but then, she had been a long way away when the news of her arrest had hit, and she hadn’t been able to get to a computer since.

She logged onto her email account and pulled up the most recent wire. It was from Knox. Just a semicolon and a parenthesis—a half-chit smile.

Juliette couldn’t help it, she smiled back. She could still smell Knox on her skin and realized, as far as the big brute was concerned, that all the troubles and problems percolating in whispers down the stairwell about her paled in comparison to her return. To him, the worst thing that had happened in the last week was probably the challenge of replacing her on first shift.

Jules went to the next message, one from the third shift foreman, welcoming her home. Probably because of the extra time his crew was putting in to help cover her old shift.

There was more. A day’s pay of a note from Shirly, wishing her well on her journey. These were all notes they had hoped she would receive up-top to make the trip down easier, hoping she wouldn’t loathe herself and would know she shouldn’t feel humiliated, or even a failure. Juliette felt tears well up at how considerate it all was. She had an image of her desk, Holston’s desk, with nothing but unplugged wires snaking across its surface, her computer removed. There was no way she could’ve gotten these messages when they were meant to be read. She wiped at her eyes and tried not to think of the wired notes as money wasted, but rather as extravagant tokens of her friendships in the down deep.

Reading each one, trying to hold it together, made the last message she came to doubly jarring. It was paragraphs long. Juliette assumed it was an official document, maybe a list of her offenses, a formal ruling against her. She had only seen such messages from the Mayor’s office, usually on holidays, notes that went out to every silo member. But then she saw that it was from Scottie.

Juliette sat up straight and tried to clear her head. She started from the beginning, damning her blurred vision.