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

“Why don’t you take a break from this stuff and eat while I’m here to watch?” Shirly slid a stool away from the workbench and plopped down on it.

“Because it’s too hot,” he said, waving his hand at his mouth. He grabbed a spool of solder and touched it to the tip of the hot soldering iron, coating it with bright silver. “I need you to hold the black wire to this.” He lightly touched the iron to the tiny leg of a resistor on the board labeled “18.” Shirly leaned over the bench and squinted at the one he was indicating.

“And then you’ll finish your dinner?”

“Swear.”

She narrowed her eyes at him as if to say that she took this promise seriously, then did as he had shown her.

Her hands weren’t as steady as Scottie’s, but he lowered his magnifier and made quick work of the connection. He showed her where the red wire went and tacked that one on as well. Even if none of this worked, he could always remove it and tinker with something else.

“Now don’t let it get cold,” Shirly told him. “I know you won’t eat it if it cools, and I’m not going back to the mess hall to warm it up for you.”

Walker stared at the little board with the numbered sticker on it. He grudgingly took up the fork and scooped a sizable bite.

“How’re things out there?” he asked, blowing on the corn.

“Things are shit,” Shirly said. “Jenkins and Harper are arguing over whether or not they should kill the power to the entire silo. But then some of the guys who were there, you know, when Knox and—”

She looked away, left the sentence unfinished.

Walker nodded and chewed his food.

“Some of them say the power in IT was on to the max that morning, even though we had it shut down from here.”

“Maybe it was rerouted,” Walker said. “Or battery backups. They have those, you know.” He took another bite, but was dying to spin the potentiometer. He was pretty sure the static had changed when he’d made the second connection.

“I keep telling them it’ll do us more harm than good to screw with the silo like that. It’ll just turn the rest of them against us.”

“Yeah. Hey, can you adjust this? You know, while I eat?”

He turned the volume up on the static, needing two hands to work the loose knob as it dangled from its bright wires. Shirly seemed to shrink from the noise crackling out of his homebuilt speakers. She reached for the volume knob as if to turn it down—

“No, I want you to spin the one we just installed.”

“What the hell, Walk? Just eat your damn food already.”

He took another bite. And for all her cussing and protests, Shirly began adjusting the knob.

“Slowly,” he said around his food.

And sure enough, the static from the speakers modulated. It was as if the crunching plastic had begun to move and bounce around the room.

“What am I even doing?”

“Helping an old man—”

“— yeah, I might need you up here on this one— ”

Walker dropped his fork and held out his hand for her to stop. She had gone past it though, into the static once more. Shirly seemed to intuit this. She bit her lip and wiggled the knob the other way until the voices returned.

“ Sounds good. It’s quiet down here anyway. You need me to bring my kit?”

“You did it,” Shirly whispered to Walker, as if these people could hear her if she spoke too loudly. “You fixed—”

Walker held up his hand. The chatter continued.

“ Negative. You can leave the kit. Deputy Roberts is already here with hers. She’s sweeping for clues as I speak— ”

“ What I’m doing is working while he does nothing!” a faint voice called out in the background.

Walker turned to Shirly while laughter rolled through the radio, more than one person enjoying the joke. It had been a long time since he’d heard anyone laugh. But he wasn’t laughing. Walker felt his brows furrow in confusion.

“What’s wrong?” Shirly asked. “We did it! We fixed it!” She got off her stool and turned as if to run and tell Jenkins.

“Wait!” Walker wiped his beard with his palm and jabbed his fork toward the strewn collection of radio parts. Shirly stood a pace away, looking back at him, smiling.

“Deputy Roberts ?” Walker asked. “Who in all the levels is that ?”

Juliette flicked the lights on in the Suit Lab as she hauled in her latest load from Supply. Unlike Solo, she didn’t take the constant source of power for granted. Not knowing where it came from made her nervous that it wouldn’t last. So while he had the habit, the compulsion even, of turning every light on to full and leaving it there, she tried to conserve the mysterious energy as much as possible.

She dropped her recent scavenges on her cot, thinking of Walker as she did so. Is this how he ended up living amongst his work? Was it the obsession, the drive, the need to keep hammering away at a series of never-ending problems until he couldn’t sleep more than a few paces from them?

The more she understood the old man, the farther away from him she felt, the lonelier. She sat down and rubbed her legs, her thighs and calves tight from the most recent hike up. She may’ve been gaining her porter legs these last weeks, but they were still sore all the time, the ache in them a constant new sensation. Squeezing the muscles transformed that ache into pain, which she somehow preferred. The sharp and definable sensations were better than the dull and nameless kind. She liked feelings she could understand.

Juliette kicked her boots off—strange to think of these scavenged things as hers —and stood up. That was enough rest. It was as much rest as she could allow herself to have. She carried her canvas sacks to one of the fancy workbenches, everything in the Suit Lab nicer than what she’d had in Mechanical. Even the parts engineered to fail were constructed with a level of chemical and engineering sophistication she could only begin to appreciate now that she understood their evil intent. She had amassed piles of washers and seals, the good from Supply and the leftover bad from the Lab, to see how the system worked. They sat along the back of her main workbench, a reminder of the diabolical murderousness with which she’d been sent away.

She dumped out the parts from Supply and thought about how strange it was to have access to, to live in this forbidden heart of some other silo. It was stranger still to appreciate these workbenches, these immaculate tools, all arranged for the purpose of sending people like her to their death.

Looking around at the walls, at the dozen or so cleaning suits hanging from racks in various states of repair, it was like living and working in a room full of ghostly apparitions. If one of those suits jumped down and started moving about on its own, it wouldn’t surprise her. The arms and legs on each one was puffy as if full, the mirrored visors easily concealing curious faces. It was like having company, these hanging forms. They watched her impassively while she sorted her finds into two piles: one of items she needed for her next big project, the other of useful tidbits she had snagged with no specific idea of what she might use them for.

A valuable rechargeable battery went in this second group, some blood still on it that she hadn’t been able to wipe off. Images flashed through her mind of some of the scenes she’d found while scrounging for materials: like the two men who had committed suicide in the head office of Supply, their hands interlocked, opposite wrists slit, a rust-colored stain all around them. This was one of the worst scenes, a memory she couldn’t shake. There were other evidences of violence scattered about the silo. The entire place was haunted and marred. She completely understood why Solo limited his rounds to the gardens. She also empathized with his habit of blocking off the server room every night with the filing cabinet, even though he had been alone for years. If someone hadn’t long ago fried the electronic keypad that activated the locks on that door, he would probably be employing it to come and go. Juliette didn’t blame him. She slid the deadbolts on the Suit Lab every night before she went to sleep. She didn’t really believe in ghosts, but that conviction was being sorely tested by the constant feeling of being watched by—if not actual people—the silo itself.