Wool Omnibus Edition (Wool 1-5)

Shirly started to say something, but Knox waved her off. There were a lot of people in the room just waiting for this to go undiplomatically.

“Yes, I do apologize,” Knox said, grinding his teeth together and bowing his head. “And no, I just learned of this earlier today. After I found out about the cleaning, in fact.”

“So it was all your electrician,” McLain said, her thin arms crossed tightly over her chest. “One man.”

“That’s right. But—”

“I’ve meted out punishment to those involved here, let me tell you. And I suppose you’ll have to do more than banish that old fart to his room—”

There was laughter behind the counter. Knox put a hand on Shirly’s shoulder to keep her in place. He looked past McLain to the men and women arranged behind McLain.

“They came and took one of our workers,” he said. His chest may have been heavy, but his voice still boomed. “You know how it happens. When they want a body for cleaning, they take it.” He thumped his chest. “And I let them. I stood there because I trust this system. I fear it, just as any of you.”

“Well—” McLain began, but Knox continued in that voice that routinely gave calm commands over the racket of machines run amok.

“One of my people was taken, and it was the oldest of us, the wisest of us, who intervened on her behalf. It was the weakest and most scared of us who braved their neck. And whoever of you he turned to for help, and who gave it, I owe you my life.” Knox blinked away the blur and continued. “You gave her more than a chance to walk over that hill, to die in peace and out of sight. You gave me the courage to open my eyes. To see this veil of lies we live behind—”

“That’s quite enough,” McLain barked. “Someone could be sent to cleaning for even listening to such nonsense, to such drivel—”

“It’s not nonsense,” Marck cried down the line. “Juliette is dead because of—”

“She’s dead because she broke these very laws!” McLain snapped, her voice high and shrill. “And now you march up here to break even more? On my level?”

“We aim to break heads!” Shirly said.

“Leave it!” Knox told them both. He saw the anger in McLain’s eyes, but he also saw something else: The sporadic nods and raised brows among the rank and file behind her.

A porter entered the room with empty sacks in each hand and looked around at the tense silence. One of the large Supply workers by the door ushered him back onto the landing with apologies, telling him to return later. Knox composed his words carefully during the interruption.

“No person has ever been sent to cleaning for listening, however great the taboo.” He allowed that to sink in. He glared at McLain as she moved to interrupt, but she seemed to decide against it. “So let me be sent to cleaning by any of you for what I’m about to say. I will welcome it if these facts do not move you to instead push forward with me and my men. For this is what Walker and a few of you brave souls have shown us this morning. We have cause for more hope than they’ll dare give us. There’s more at our disposal to broaden our horizons than they’ll allow. We have been raised on a pack of lies, made to fear by the sight of our kinsmen rotting on the hills, but now one of us has crossed over that! They have seen new horizons! We have been given seals and washers and told that they should suffice, but what are they?”

He stared down the men and women behind the counter. McLain’s arms seemed to loosen across her chest.

“Designed to fail, that’s what! Fake. And who knows what other lies there are. What if we’d taken any cleaner back and done our best by them? Cleaned and disinfected them? Tried whatever we could? Would they survive? We can no longer trust IT to tell us they wouldn’t!”

Knox saw chins rise and fall. He knew his own people were ready to storm the room if need be; they were as amped up and driven mad by all this as he was.

“We are not here to cause trouble,” he said, “we are here to bring order! The uprising has already happened.” He turned to McLain. “Don’t you see? We’ve been living the uprising. Our parents were the children of it, and now we feed our own children to the same machine. This will not be the start of something new, but the end of something old. And if Supply is with us, we stand a chance. If not, then may our bodies haunt your view of the outside, which I now see as far less rotten than this blasted silo!”

Knox bellowed this last in open defiance of all taboo. He threw it out and savored the taste of it, the admission that anything beyond those curved walls might be better than what’s inside them. The whisper that had killed so many became a throaty roar shouted from his broad chest.

And it felt good.

McLain cringed. She took a step away, something like fear in her eyes. She turned her back on Knox and made to return to her people, and he knew he had failed. That there had been a chance, however slim, in this silent and still crowd to inspire action, but the moment had slipped him by or he had scared it off.

And then McLain did something. Knox could see the tendons in her slender neck bulge. She lifted her chin to her people, her white hair in its tight knot high on her head, and she said, quietly, “What say you, Supply?”

It was a question, not a command. Knox would later wonder if it had been asked in sadness; he would wonder if she had taken poor stock of her people, who had listened patiently during his madness. He would also wonder if she were just curious, or if she were challenging them to cast him and his mechanics out.

He would finally wonder, tears streaming down his face, thoughts of Juliette swelling inside his heart, if he could even hear his handful of compatriots shouting, so drowned out were they by the angry war cries of the good men and women of Supply.

10

“And too soon marr’d are those so early made.
The earth hath swallow’d all my hopes but she.”

Lukas followed Bernard through the halls of IT, nervous techs scattering before them like night bugs startled by the light. Bernard didn’t seem to notice the techs ducking into offices and peering through windows. Lukas hurried to keep up, his eyes darting side to side, feeling conspicuous with all these hidden others watching.

“Aren’t I a little old to be shadowing for another job?” he asked. He was pretty sure he hadn’t accepted the offer, not verbally anyway, but Bernard spoke as if the deal was done.

“Nonsense,” he said. “And this won’t be shadowing in the traditional sense.” He waved his hand in the air. “You’ll continue your duties as before. I just need someone who can step in, who knows what to do in case something happens to me. My will—”

He stopped at the heavy door to the server room and turned to face Lukas. “If it came to it, in an emergency, my will would explain everything to the next Head, but—” He gazed over Lukas’s shoulder and down the hall. “Sims is my executor, which we’ll have to change. I just don’t see that ever going smoothly—”

Bernard rubbed his chin and lost himself in his thoughts. Lukas waited a moment, then stepped beside him and entered his code on the panel by the door, fished his ID out of his pocket—made sure it was his ID and not Juliette’s—and swiped it through the reader. The door clicked open, snapping Bernard out of his thoughts.

“Yes, well, this will be much better. Not that I expect to go anywhere, mind you.” He adjusted his glasses and stepped through the heavy steel doorway. Lukas followed, pushing the monstrous enclosure shut behind them and waiting for the locks to engage.