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

“Hello?”

She passed through the rows of tall machines, for that’s what she figured they were. They hummed with electricity, and now and then seemed to whir or clack like their innards were busy. She wondered if this were some sort of exotic power plant—providing the lighting perhaps? Or did these have stacks of batteries inside? Seeing all the cords and cables at the backs of the units had her leaning toward batteries. No wonder the lights were blaring. This was like twenty of Mechanical’s battery rooms combined.

“Is anyone here?” she called out. “I mean you no harm.”

She worked her way through the room, listening for any movement, until she came across one of the machines with its door hinged open. Peering inside, she saw not batteries but boards like the kind Walker was forever soldering on. In fact, the guts of this machine looked eerily similar to the inside of the dispatch room’s computer—

Juliette stepped back, realizing what these were. “The servers,” she whispered. She was in this silo’s IT. Level thirty-four. Of course.

There was a scraping sound near the far wall, the sound of metal sliding on metal. Juliette ran in that direction, darting between the tall units, wondering who the hell this was running from her, and where they planned to hide.

She rounded the last row of servers to see a portion of the floor moving, a section of metal grate sliding to cover a hole. Juliette dove for the floor, her tablecloth garb wrapping up her legs, her hands seizing the edge of the cover before it could close. Right in front of her, she saw the knuckles and fingers of a man’s hands gripping the edge of the grate. There was a startled scream, a grunt of effort. Juliette tried to yank back on the grate, but had no leverage. One of the hands disappeared. A knife took its place, snicking against the grate, hunting for her fingers.

Juliette swung her feet beneath her and sat up for leverage. She yanked on the grate and felt the knife bite into her finger as she did so.

She screamed. The man below her screamed. He emerged and held the knife between them, his hand shaking, the blade catching and reflecting the overhead lights. Juliette tossed the metal hatch away and clutched her hand, which was dripping blood.

“Easy!” she said, scooting out of reach.

The man ducked his head down, then poked it back up. He looked past Juliette as if others were coming up behind her. She fought the urge to check—but decided to trust the silence just in case he was trying to fool her.

“Who are you?” she asked. She wrapped part of her garment around her hand to bandage it. She noticed the man, his beard thick and unkempt, was wearing gray coveralls. They could’ve been made in her silo, with just slight differences. He stared at her, his dark hair wild and hanging shaggy over his face. He grunted, coughed into his hand, seemed prepared to duck down under the floor and disappear.

“Stay,” Juliette said. “I mean you no harm.”

The man looked at her wounded hand and at the knife. Juliette glanced down to see a thin trace of blood snaking toward her elbow. The wound ached, but she’d had worse in her time as a Mechanic.

“S-s-sorry,” the man muttered. He licked his mouth and swallowed. The knife was trembling uncontrollably.

“My name’s Jules,” she said, realizing this man was much more frightened of her than the other way around. “What’s yours?”

He glanced at the knife blade held sideways between them, almost as if checking a mirror. He shook his head.

“No name,” he whispered, his voice a dry rasp. “No need.”

“Are you alone?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Solo,” he said. “Years.” He looked up at her. “Where did—” He licked his lips again, cleared his throat. His eyes watered and glinted in the light. “—you come from? What level?”

“You’ve been by yourself for years ?” Juliette said in wonder. She couldn’t imagine. “I didn’t come from any level,” she told him. “I came from another silo.” She enunciated this last softly and slowly, worried what this news might do to such a seemingly fragile man.

But Solo nodded as if this made sense. It was not the reaction Juliette had expected.

“The outside—” Solo looked again at the knife. He reached out of the hole and set it on the grating, slid it away from both of them. “—is it safe?”

Juliette shook her head. “No,” she said. “I had a suit. It wasn’t a far walk. But still, I shouldn’t be alive.”

Solo bobbed his head. He looked up at her, wet tracks running from the corners of his eyes and disappearing into his beard. “None of us should,” he said. “Not a one.”

“What is this place?” Lukas asked Bernard. The two of them stood before a large chart hanging on the wall like a tapestry. The diagrams were precise, the lettering ornate. It showed a grid of circles evenly spaced with lines between them and intricacies inside each. Several of the circles were crossed out with thick red marks of ink. It was just the sort of majestic diagramming he hoped to one day achieve with his star charts.

“This is our legacy,” Bernard said simply.

Lukas had often heard him speak similarly of the mainframes upstairs.

“Are these supposed to be the servers?” he asked, daring to rub his hands across a continuous piece of paper the size of a small bed sheet. “They’re laid out like the servers.”

Bernard stepped beside him and rubbed his chin. “Hmm. Interesting. So they are. I never noticed that before.”

“What are they?” Lukas looked closer and saw each was numbered. There was also a jumble of squares and rectangles in one corner with parallel lines spaced between them, keeping the blocky shapes separate and apart. These figures contained no detail within them, but the word “Atlanta” was written large beneath.

“We’ll get to that. Come, let me show you something.”

At the end of the room was a door. Bernard led him through this, turning on more lights as he went.

“Who else comes down here?” Lukas asked, following along.

Bernard glanced back over his shoulder. “No one.”

Lukas didn’t like that answer. He glanced back over his own shoulder, feeling like he was descending into something people didn’t return from.

“I know this must seem sudden,” Bernard said. He waited on Lukas to join him, threw his small arm around Lukas’s shoulder. “But things changed this morning. The world is changing. And she rarely does it pleasantly.”

“Is this about… the cleaning?” He nearly said “Juliette.” The picture of her felt hot against his breastbone.

Bernard’s face grew stern. “There was no cleaning,” he said abruptly. “And now all hell will break loose, and people will die. And the silos, you see, were designed from the ground down to prevent this.”

“Designed—” Lukas repeated. His heart beat once, twice. His brain whirred its old circuits and finally computed something Bernard had said that had made no sense.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Did you say silos ?”

“You’ll want to familiarize yourself with this.” Bernard gestured toward a small desk which had a fragile-looking wooden chair tucked up against it. There was a book on the desk unlike any Lukas had ever seen, or even heard of. It stood nearly as high as it was wide. Bernard patted the cover, then inspected his palm for dust. “I’ll give you the spare key, which you are to never remove from your neck. Come down when you can and read. Our history is in here, as well as every action you are to take in any emergency.”

Lukas approached the book, a lifetime’s worth of paper, and hinged open the cover. The contents were machine printed, the ink pitch-black. He flipped through a dozen pages of listed contents until he found the first page of the body. Oddly, he recognized the opening lines immediately.