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

The climb turned into a silent, grueling ordeal. Knox let others take the lead while he slid back and checked on the status of his people. Even those in yellow, he considered his responsibility. Their lives were hanging in the balance of decisions he’d made. It was just as Walker had said, that crazy fool. This was it. An uprising, just like the fables of their youth. And Knox suddenly felt a dire kinship with those old ghosts, those ancestors of myth and lore. Men and women had done this before. Maybe for different reasons, with a less noble anger caught in their throats, but somewhen, on some level, there had been a march like this. Similar boots on the same treads. Maybe some of the same boots, just with new soles. All with the jangle of mean machines in hands not afraid to use them.

It startled Knox, this sudden link to a mysterious past. And it wasn’t that terribly long ago, was it? Less than two hundred years? He imagined, if someone lived as long as Jahns had, or McLain for that matter, that three long lives could span that distance. Three handshakes to go from that uprising to this one. And what of the years between? That long peace sandwiched between two wars?

Knox lifted his boots from one step to another, thinking on these things. Had he become the bad people he’d learned about in youth? Or had he been lied to? It hurt his head to consider, but here he was, leading a recreation of something awful. And yet it felt so right. So necessary . What if that former clash had felt the same? Had felt the same in the breasts of the men and women who’d waged it?

“It would take ten lifetimes to read all these.”

Juliette looked up from the pile of scattered tins and stacks of thick books. There was more to marvel at in their text-heavy pages than in any of the children’s books of her youth.

Solo turned from the stove where he was heating soup and boiling water. He waved a dripping metal spoon at the scattered mess she’d made. “I don’t think they were meant to be read,” he told her. “At least, not like I’ve been reading them, front to back.” He touched his tongue to the spoon, then stuck it back in the pot and stirred. “Everything’s out of order. It’s more like a backup to the backup.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Juliette admitted. She looked down at her lap where pictures of animals called “butterflies” filled the pages. Their wings were comically bright. She wondered if they were the size of her hands or the size of people. She had yet to find any sense of scale for the beasts.

“The servers,” Solo said. “What did you think I meant? The backup.”

He sounded flustered. Juliette watched him busy about the stove, his movements jerky and manic, and realized she was the one cloistered away and ignorant, not him. He had all these books, decades of reading history, the company of ancestors she could only imagine. What did she have as her experience? A life in a dark hole with thousands of fellow, ignorant savages?

She tried to remember this as she watched him dig a finger in his ear and then inspect his fingernail.

“The backup of what exactly?” she finally asked, almost afraid of the cryptic answers to come.

Solo found two bowls. He began wiping one out with the fabric in the belly of his coveralls. “The backup of everything ,” he said. “All that we know. All that ever was.” He set the bowls down and adjusted a knob on the stove. “Follow me,” he said, waving his arm. “I’ll show you.”

Juliette closed the book and slotted it into its tin. She rose and followed Solo out of the room and into the next one.

“Don’t mind the mess,” he said, gesturing at a small hill of trash and debris piled up against one wall. It looked like a thousand empty cans of food, and smelled like ten thousand. Juliette wrinkled her nose and fought the reflex to gag. Solo seemed unaffected. He stood beside a small wooden desk and flipped through diagrams hanging from the wall on enormous sheets of paper.

“Where’s the one I want?” he wondered aloud.

“What are these?” Juliette asked, entranced. She saw one that looked like a schematic of the silo, but unlike any they’d had in Mechanical.

Solo turned. He had several sheets flopped over one shoulder, his body practically disappearing between the layers of them. “Maps,” he said. “I want to show you how much is out there. You’ll shit yourself.”

He shook his head and muttered something to himself. “Sorry, didn’t mean to say that.”

Juliette told him it was fine. She held the back of her hand to her nose, the stench of rotting food intolerable.

“Here it is. Hold this end.” Solo held out the corner of a half dozen sheets of paper. He took the other side and they lifted them away from the wall. Juliette felt like pointing out the grommets at the bottom of the maps and how there were probably sticks or hooks around here somewhere for propping them up, but held her tongue. Opening her mouth just made the smell of the rotting cans worse.

“This is us,” Solo said. He pointed to a spot on the paper. Dark, squiggly lines were everywhere. It didn’t look like a map or schematic of anything Juliette had ever seen. It looked like children had drawn it. Hardly a straight line existed anywhere.

“What’s this supposed to show?” she asked.

“Borders. Land!” Solo ran his hands over one uninterrupted shape that took up nearly a third of the drawing. “This is all water,” he told her.

“Where?” Juliette’s arm was getting tired of holding up her end of the sheet. The smell and the riddles were getting to her. She felt a long way from home. The thrill of survival was in danger of being replaced with the depression of a long and miserable existence looming for years and years before her.

“Out there! Covering the land.” Solo pointed vaguely at the walls. He narrowed his eyes at Juliette’s confusion. “The silo, this silo , would be as big around as a single hair on your head.” He patted the map. “Right here. All of them. Maybe all of us left. No bigger than my thumb.” He placed a finger in a knot of lines. Juliette thought he seemed so sincere. She leaned closer to see better, but he pushed her back.

“Let those go,” he said. He slapped at her hand holding the corners of paper. He smoothed the maps against the wall. “This is us.” He indicated one of the circles on the top sheet. Juliette eyeballed the columns and rows, figured there were four dozen or so of them. “Silo seventeen.” He slid his hand up. “Number twelve. This is eight. And silo one up here.”

“No.”

Juliette shook her head and reached for the desk, her legs weak.

“Yes. Silo one. You’re probably from sixteen or eighteen. Do you remember how far you walked?”

She grabbed the small chair and pulled it out. Sat down heavily.

“How many hills did you cross?”

Juliette didn’t answer. She was thinking about the other map and comparing the scales. What if Solo was right? What if there were fifty or so silos and all of them could be covered by a thumb? What if Lukas had been right about how far away the stars were? She needed something to crawl inside, something to cover her. She needed some sleep.

“I once heard from silo one,” Solo said. “A long time ago. Not sure how well any of these others are doing—”

“Wait.” Juliette sat up straight. “What do you mean, you heard from them?”

Solo didn’t turn from the map. He ran his hands from one circle to another, a childlike expression on his face. “They called. Checking in.” He looked away from the map and her, toward the far corner of the room. “We didn’t talk for long. I didn’t know all the procedures. They weren’t happy.”