Wool Omnibus Edition (Wool 1-5)

Juliette slumped down to the ground and rested her back against the desk. With her eyes shut, mic by her face, she could imagine going to sleep like that. She saw what Lukas meant. This was comfortable.

She squeezed again. “Walk? Shirly? Please answer me.”

The radio crackled to life.

Juliette opened her eyes. She stared up at the unit, her hands trembling.

A voice:

“Is this who I think it is?”

The voice was too high, too high to be Walker. She knew this voice. Where did she know it from? She was tired and confused. She squeezed the button on the mic.

“This is Juliette. Who is this?”

Was it Hank? She thought it might be Hank. He had a radio. Maybe she had the wrong silo completely. Maybe she’d screwed up.

“I need radio silence,” the voice demanded. “All of them off. Now.”

Was this directed at her? Juliette’s mind spun in circles. A handful of voices chimed in, one after the other. There were pops of static. Was she supposed to say something? She was confused.

“You shouldn’t be transmitting on this frequency,” the voice said. “You could be put to cleaning for such things.”

Juliette’s hand fell to her lap. She slumped against the wooden desk, dejected. She recognized the voice.

Bernard.

For weeks, she had been hoping to speak to this man, had been silently begging for him to answer. But not now. Now, she had nothing to say. She wanted to talk to her friends, to make things okay.

She squeezed the radio.

“No more fighting,” she said. All the will was drained from her. All desire for vengeance. She just wanted the world to quiet itself, for people to live and grow old and feed the roots one day—

“Speaking of cleanings,” the voice squeaked. “Tomorrow will be the first of many more to come. Your friends are lined up and ready to go. And I believe you know the lucky one who’s going first.”

There was a click, followed by the hiss and crinkle of static. Juliette didn’t move. She felt dead. Numb. The will was drained from her body.

“Imagine my surprise,” the voice said. “Imagine when I found out a decent man, a man I trusted, had been poisoned by you.”

She clicked the microphone with her fist but didn’t raise it to her mouth. She simply raised her voice instead.

“You’ll burn in hell,” she told him.

“Undoubtedly,” Bernard said. “Until then, I’m holding some things in my hand that I think belong to you. An ID with your picture on it, a pretty little bracelet, and this wedding ring that doesn’t look official at all. I wonder about that… ”

Juliette groaned. She couldn’t feel any part of her body. She could barely hear her thoughts. She managed to squeeze the mic, but it required every ounce of effort that she had left.

“What are you going on about, you twisted fuck?”

She spat the last, her head drifting to the side, her body craving sleep.

“I’m talking about Lukas, who betrayed me. We found some of your things on him just now. Exactly how long has he been talking to you? Well before the servers, right? Well guess what? I’m sending him your way. And I finally figured out what you did last time, what those idiots in Supply helped you do, and I want you to be assured, be very assured that your friend won’t have the same help. I’m going to build his suit personally. Me. I’ll stay up all night if I have to. So when he goes out in the morning, I can be sure that he gets nowhere near those blasted hills.”

26

• Silo 18 •

A group of kids thundered down the staircase as Lukas was escorted to his death. One of them squealed in delighted horror as if being chased. They spiraled closer, coming into view, and Lukas and Peter had to squeeze to one side to let them pass.

Peter played the sheriff role and yelled at the kids to slow down, to be careful. They giggled and continued their mad descent. School was out for the day, no more listening to adults.

While Lukas was pressed against the outer railing, he took a moment to consider the temptation. Freedom was just a jump away. A death of his own choosing, one he had considered in the past when moods turned dark.

Peter pulled him along, hand on his elbow, before Lukas could act. He was left admiring that graceful bar of steel, watching the way it curved and curved, always spinning the same amount, never ending. He pictured it corkscrewing through the earth, could sense its vibrations like some cosmic string, like a single strand of DNA at the silo’s core with all of life clinging to it.

Thoughts like these swirled as they gained another level on his death. He watched the welds go by, some of them neater than others. A few puckered up like scars; several had been polished so smoothly he almost missed them. Each was a signature by its creator, a work of pride here, a rushed job at the end of a long day there, a shadow learning for the first time, a seasoned pro who with decades of practice making it look all too easy.

He brushed his shackled hands over the rough paint, the bumps and puckers, the missing chips that revealed centuries of layers, of colors that changed with the times or with the supply of dyes or cost of paint. The layers reminded him of the wooden desk he’d stared down at for almost a month. Each little groove marked the passage of time, just as each name scratched into its surface marked a man’s mad desire to have more of it, to not let that time whisk his poor soul away.

For a long while, they marched in silence, a porter passing with a bulky load, a young couple looking guilty. Exiting the server vault had not been the stroll to freedom Lukas had longed for the past weeks. It had been an ambush, a march of shame, faces in doorways, faces on landings, faces on the stairway. Blank, unblinking faces. Faces of friends wondering if he was their enemy.

And maybe he was.

They would say he had broken down and uttered fateful taboo, but Lukas now knew why people were put out. He was the virus. If he sneezed the wrong words, it would kill everyone he knew. This was the path Juliette had walked and for the same absence of reason. He believed her, always had, always knew she’d done nothing wrong, but now he really understood. She was like him in so many ways. Except he would not survive, he knew that. Bernard had told him so.

They were ten levels up from IT when Peter’s radio buzzed with chatter. He took his hand off Lukas’s elbow to turn up the volume, see if it was for him.

“This is Juliette. Who is this?”

That voice.

Lukas’s heart leapt up a little before plummeting a very long way. He fixed his gaze on the railing and listened.

Bernard responded, asked for silence. Peter reached for his radio, turned it down but not off. The voices climbed with them, back and forth. Each step and each word ground down on Lukas, chipped away at him. He studied the railing and again considered true freedom.

A grab and a short leap up; a long flight.

He could feel himself going through the motions, bending his knees, throwing his feet over.

The voices in the radio argued. They said forbidden things. They were sloppy with secrets, thinking other ears were off.

Lukas watched his death play out over and over. His fate awaited him over that rail. The visual was so powerful, it wrecked his climbing pace, it affected his legs.