Wool Omnibus Edition (Wool 1-5)

He bobbed his head, his hair dancing around his youthful face.

“Shadowed under Gloria, didn’t you?”

The kid nodded again as his eyes followed the silver chit drawn from Walker’s rattling pockets.

“You know, Gloria used to take pity on an old man with no family and no life. Trusted me with news, she did.”

“Gloria’s dead,” the boy said, lifting his palm.

“That she is,” Walker said with a sigh. He dropped the chit into the child’s outstretched and youthful palm, then waved his aged and spotted own for the news. He was dying to know everything and would have gladly payed ten chits. “The details, child. Don’t skip a one.”

“No cleaning, Mr. Walker!”

Walker’s heart missed a beat. The boy turned his shoulder to run on.

“Stay, boy! What do you mean, no cleaning? She’s been set free?”

The porter shook his head. His hair was long, wild, and seemingly built for flying up and down the staircase. “Nossir. She refused!”

The child’s eyes were electric, his grin huge with the possession of such knowledge. No one had ever refused to clean in his lifetime. In Walker’s, neither. Maybe not ever. Walker felt a surge of pride in his Juliette.

The boy waited a moment. He seemed eager to run off.

“Anything else?” Walker asked.

Samson nodded and glanced at Walker’s pockets.

Walker let out a long sigh of disgust for what had become of this generation. He dug into his pocket with one hand and waved impatiently with the other.

“She’s gone, Mr. Walker!”

He snatched the chit from Walker’s palm.

“Gone? As in dead? Speak up, son!”

Samson’s teeth flashed as the chit disappeared into his coveralls. “Nossir. Gone as in over the hill. No cleaning, Mr. Walker, just strode right over and out of view. Gone to the city, and Mr. Bernard witnessed the whole thing!”

The young porter slapped Walker on the arm, needing, obviously, to strike something with his enthusiasm. He swiped his hair off his face, smiled large, and turned to run along his route, his feet lighter and pockets heavier from the tale.

Walker was left, stunned, in the doorway. He gripped the jamb with an iron claw lest he tumble out into the world. He stood there, swaying, looking down at the pile of dishes he’d slipped outside the night before. He glanced over his shoulder at the disheveled cot that had been calling his name all night. Smoke still rose from the soldering iron. He turned away from the hall, which would soon be pattering and clinking with the sounds of first shift, and unplugged the iron before he started another fire.

He remained there a moment, thinking on Jules, thinking on this news. He wondered if she’d gotten his note in time, if it had lessened the awful fear he’d felt in his gut for her.

Walker returned to the doorway. The down deep was stirring. He felt a powerful tug to go out there, to cross that threshold, to be a part of the unprecedented.

Shirly would probably be by soon with his breakfast and to take away his dishes. He could wait for her, maybe talk a bit. Perhaps this spell of insanity would pass.

But the thought of waiting, of the minutes stacking up like work orders, of not knowing how far Juliette had gotten or what reaction the others might be having to her not cleaning—

Walker lifted his foot and leaned it out past his doorway, his boot hovering over untrammeled ground.

He took a deep breath, fell forward, and caught himself on it. And suddenly, he felt like some intrepid explorer himself. There he was, forty something years later, teetering down a familiar hallway, one hand brushing the steel walls, a corner coming up around which his eyes could remember nothing.

And Walker became one more old soul pushing into the great unknown—his brain dizzy with what he might find out there.

3

“Is there no pity sitting in the clouds
that sees into the bottom of my grief?
O sweet my mother, cast me not away!”

The heavy steel doors of the silo parted, and a great cloud of argon billowed out with an angry hiss. The cloud seemed to materialize from nowhere, the compressed gas blossoming into a whipped froth as it met the warmer, less dense air beyond.

Juliette Nichols stuck one boot through that narrow gap. The doors only opened partway to hold back the deadly toxins, to force the argon through with pent-up pressure, so she had to turn sideways to squeeze through, her bulky suit rubbing against the thick doors. All she could think of was the raging fire that would soon fill the airlock. Its flames seemed to lick at her back, forcing her to flee.

She pulled her other boot through—and Juliette was suddenly outside.

Outside.

There was nothing above her helmeted head but clouds, sky, and the unseen stars.

She lumbered forward, emerging through the fog of hissing argon to find herself on a sloping ramp, the corners by the walls caked high with wind-trapped dirt. It was easy to forget that the top floor of the silo was belowground. The view from her old office and the cafeteria created an illusion of standing on the surface of the earth, head up in the wild air, but that was because the sensors were located there.

Juliette looked down at the numbers on her chest and remembered what she was supposed to be doing. She trudged up the ramp, head down, focusing on her boots. She wasn’t sure how she even moved, if it was the numbness one succumbed to in the face of execution—or if it was just automated self-preservation, simply a move away from the coming inferno in the airlock, her body delaying the inevitable because it couldn’t think or plan beyond the next fistful of seconds.

As Juliette reached the top of the ramp, her head emerged into a lie, a grand and gorgeous untruth. Green grass covered the hills like newly painted carpet. The skies were intoxicatingly blue, the clouds bleached white like fancy linen, the air peppered with soaring things.

She spun in place and took in the spectacular fabrication. It was as if she’d been dropped into a book from her youth, a book where animals talked and children flew and grays were never found.

Even knowing it wasn’t real, knowing that she was looking through an eight by two inch fib, the temptation was overwhelming to believe. She wanted to. She wanted to forget what she knew of IT’s devious program, to forget everything she and Walker had discussed, and to fall instead to the soft grasses that weren’t there, to roll around in the life that wasn’t, to strip off the ridiculous suit and go screaming happily across the lying landscape.

She looked down at her hands, clenched and unclenched them as much as the thick gloves would allow. This was her coffin. Her thoughts scattered as she fought to remember what was real. Her death was real. The ugly world she had always known was real. And then, for just a moment, she remembered that she was supposed to be doing something. She was supposed to be cleaning.

She turned and gazed at the sensor tower, seeing it for the first time. It was a sturdy block of steel and concrete with a rusted and pitted ladder running up one side. The bulge of sensor pods were stuck like warts on the faces of the tower. Juliette reached for her chest, grabbed one of the scrubbing pads, and tore it loose. The note