Wool Omnibus Edition (Wool 1-5)

maybe if he aimed his head, he could make it quick.

He straightened, feeling a twinge of fear and a rush of adrenaline from picturing the fall, the end, so vividly. He glanced around and checked the morning traffic to see if anyone was watching him. He had seen other adults peer over railings after things they’d lost. He’d always assumed bad thoughts were going through their heads. Because he knew, growing up in the silo, that only children dropped physical things from the landings. By the time you got older, you knew to keep a grip on all that you could. Eventually, it was something else that slipped away, something else you lost that tumbled down through the heart of the silo, that made you ponder leaping after—

The landing shivered with the beat of a hurrying porter; the sound of bare feet slapping against steel treads came next and spiraled closer. Lukas slid away from the railing and tried to focus on what he was doing that day. Maybe he should just crawl back in bed and sleep, kill some hours with unconsciousness.

As he attempted to summon some sliver of motivation, the speeding porter flew past, and Lukas caught a glimpse of the boy’s face twisted in consternation. Even as he sped out of sight—his pace swift and reckless—the image of his worry remained vividly lodged in Lukas’s mind.

And Lukas knew. As the rapid patter of the boy’s feet wound deeper into the earth, he knew something had happened that morning, something up-top, something newsworthy about the cleaning.

A seed of hope caught a taste of moisture. Some wishful kernel buried deep, where he was loathe to acknowledge it lest it poison or choke him, began to sprout. Maybe the cleaning never happened. Was it possible his petition had been reconsidered? Had the weight of all those signatures gathered over a spread of a hundred levels finally worn the judges down? What if Bernard had actually come through for him, had swayed the presiding judge to lower Juliette’s offense?

Lukas recalled his appeals to Bernard, begging him as a friend, as his boss, to intervene on her behalf. He had asked him to add his own signature to the petition, which he finally had. But Bernard had warned him that her fate was out of his hands, that the judges would decide, that his authority as interim mayor made him practically powerless.

And yet, if a porter had dire news on a day of cleaning, could it be that his friend had kept at it all night and had finally come through?

That tiny seed of hope sprang roots. It grew vine-like through Lukas’s chest, filling him with an urgency to run up and see for himself. He left the railing, and the dream of leaping after his worries, and pushed his way through the morning crowd. Whispers, he noticed, were already foaming in the porter’s wake. He wasn’t the only one who had noticed.

As he joined the upbound traffic, he realized the aches in his legs from the days before had vanished. He prepared to pass the slow-moving family in front of him—when he heard the loud squawk of a radio behind.

Lukas turned to find Deputy Marsh a few treads back fumbling for the radio on his hip, a small cardboard box clutched to his chest, a sheen of sweat on his forehead.

Lukas stopped and held the railing, waiting for the mids deputy to reach him.

“Marsh!”

The deputy finally got the volume down on his radio and glanced up. He nodded to Lukas. The both of them squeezed against the railing as a worker and his shadow passed heading upbound.

“What’s the news?” Lukas asked. He knew the deputy well, and he knew he might spill it for free.

Marsh swiped his forehead and moved the box into the crook of his other arm. “That Bernard is whoopin’ my ass this mornin’,” he complained. “Done climbed enough this week!”

“No, what of the cleaning?” Lukas asked. “A porter just hurried by like he’d seen a ghost—”

Deputy Marsh glanced up the steps. “I was told to bring her things to thirty-four as quick as grease. Hank nearly killed himself bringing ‘em partway up to me—” He started up the stairs around Lukas as if he couldn’t afford to stay. “Look, I’ve gotta keep movin’ if I wanna keep my job—”

Lukas held his arm, and traffic swelled below them as annoyed climbers squeezed past and against the occasional traveler heading down. “Did the cleaning go through or not?” Lukas demanded to know.

Marsh sagged against the railing. Quiet chatter popped through his radio.

“No,” he whispered, and Lukas felt as though he could fly. He could fly straight up the space between the stairs and the concrete heart of the silo, could soar around the landings, could go fifty levels at a leap—

“She went out, but she didn’t clean,” Marsh said, his voice low but laced with words sharp enough to pierce Lukas’s dreams. “She wandered over them hills—”

“Wait. What?”

Marsh nodded, and sweat dripped from the Deputy’s nose. “Plum out of sight,” he hissed, like a radio turned down low. “Now I’ve got to get her things up to Bernar—”

“I’ll do it,” Lukas said, reaching out his hands. “I’m going to thirty-four anyway.”

Marsh shifted the box. The poor Deputy seemed liable to collapse at any moment. Lukas begged him, just as he had two days earlier in order to see Juliette in her cell. “Let me take them up for you,” he said. “You know Bernard won’t mind. He and I are good friends, just like you and me have always been—”

Deputy Marsh wiped his lip and nodded ever so slightly, thinking on this.

“Look, I’m going up anyway,” Lukas said. He found himself slowly taking the box from an exhausted Marsh, even though the waves of emotion surging through his own body made it difficult to focus. The traffic on the stairs had become background noise. The idea that Juliette may still be in the silo had slipped away, but the news that she hadn’t cleaned, that she had made it over the hills—this filled him with something else. It touched the part of him that yearned to map the stars. It meant no one would ever have to watch her waste away—

“You’ll be careful with that,” Marsh said. His eyes were on the box, now tucked into Lukas’s arms.

“I’ll guard it with my life,” Lukas told him. “Trust me.”

Marsh nodded to let him know he did. And Lukas hurried up the stairs, ahead of those rising to celebrate the cleaning, the weight of Juliette’s belongings rattling softly in a box tucked tightly against his chest.

2

“Thy old groans ring yet in my ancient ears.”

Walker the electrician bent over a cluttered workbench and adjusted his magnifier. The great bulbous lens was attached to his head with a hoop that might’ve been uncomfortable had he not been wearing it for most of his sixty two years. As he pushed the glass into position, the small black chip on the green electronics board came into crystal focus. He could see each of the silver metal legs bent out from its body like knees on a spider, the tiny feet seemingly trapped in silver puddles of frozen steel.

With the tip of his finest soldering iron, Walker prodded a spot of silver while he worked the suction bulb with his foot. The metal around the chip’s tiny foot melted and was pulled through a straw, one little leg of sixteen free.

He was about to move to the other—he had stayed up all night pulling fried chips to occupy his mind from other things—when he heard the recognizable patter of that new porter skittering down his hall.

Walker dropped the board and hot iron to the workbench and hurried to his door. He held the jamb and leaned out as the kid ran past.

“Porter!” he yelled, and the boy reluctantly stopped. “What news, boy?”

The kid smiled, revealing the whites of youth. “I’ve got big news,” he said. “Cost you a chit, though.”

Walker grunted with disgust, but dug into his coveralls. He waved the kid over. “You’re that Sampson boy, right?”