Wool-Omnibus Edition

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?”
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 from Walker continued to stream through her mind: Don’t be afraid.
She took the course wool pad and rubbed it against the arm of her suit. The heat tape wrapping did not peel, did not flake away like the stuff she had once stolen from IT, the tape they had engineered to fail. This was the brand of heat tape Juliette was used to working with, Mechanical’s design.
They are good in Supply, Walker’s note had said. The good had referred to the people of Supply. After years of helping Juliette score spares when she needed them most, they had done something extraordinary for her. While she had spent three days climbing stairs and three lonely nights in three different holding cells on her way to banishment, they had replaced IT’s materials with those from Mechanical. They had fulfilled their orders for parts in a most devious way, and it must’ve been at Walker’s behest. IT had then—unwittingly and for once—built a suit designed to last, not disintegrate.
Juliette smiled. Her death, however certain, was delayed. She took a long look at the sensors, relaxed her fingers, and dropped the wool pad into the fake grass. Turning for the nearest hill, she tried her best to ignore the false colors and the layers of life projected on top of what was truly there. Rather than give in to the euphoria, she concentrated on the way her boots clomped to packed earth, noted the feel of the angry wind buffeting against her suit, listened for the faint hiss as grains of sand pelted her helmet from all sides. There was a terrifying world around her, one she could be dimly aware of if she concentrated hard enough, a world she knew but could no longer see.
She started up the steep slope and headed vaguely toward the gleaming metropolis over the horizon. There was little thought of making it there. All she wanted was to die beyond the hills where no one would have to watch her rot away, so that Lukas the starhunter would not be afraid to come up at twilight for fear of seeing her still form.
And suddenly, it felt good to simply be walking, to have some purpose. She would take herself out of sight. It was a more solid goal than that false city, which she knew to be crumbling.
Partway up the hill, she came to a pair of large rocks. Juliette started to dodge around them before she realized where she was, that she had followed the most gentle path up the crook of two colliding slopes, and here lay the most horrible lie of them all.
Holston and Allison. Hidden from her by the magic of the visor. Covered in a mirage of stone.
There were no words. Nothing to see, nothing to say. She glanced down the hill and spotted sporadic other boulders resting in the grasses, their arrangement not random at all but where cleaners of old had collapsed.
She turned away, leaving such sad things behind. It was impossible to know how much time she had, how long in order to hide her body from those who might gloat—and the few who might mourn.
Climbing toward the crest of the hill, her legs still sore from ascending the silo, Juliette witnessed the first rips in IT’s deceitful veil. New portions of the sky and the distant city came into view, parts that had been obscured by the hill from down below. There seemed to be a break in the program, a limit to its lies. While the upper levels of the distant monoliths appeared whole and gleamed in the false sunlight, below these sharp panes of glass and bright steel lay the rotted dinginess of an abandoned world. She could see straight through the bottom levels of many of the buildings, and with their heavy tops projected onto them, they seemed liable to topple at any moment.
To the side, the extra and unfamiliar buildings had no supports at all, no foundations. They hung in the air with dark sky beneath them. This same dark vista of gray clouds and lifeless hills stretched out across the low horizon, a hard line of painted blue where the visor’s program met its end.
Juliette puzzled over the incompleteness of IT’s deceit. Was it because they themselves had no idea what lay beyond the hills, and so couldn’t guess what to modify? Or did they deem it not worth the effort, knowing nobody would ever make it this far? Whatever the reason, the jarring and illogical nature of the view left her dizzy if she studied it too closely. She concentrated instead on her feet, taking those last dozen steps up the painted green hill until she reached the crest.
At the top, she paused while heavy gusts of wind buffeting against her, causing her to lean into their turbulence. She scanned the horizon and saw that she stood on the divide between two worlds. Down the slope before her, on a landscape her eyes had never before seen, lay a bare world of dust and parched earth, of wind flurries and small tornadoes, of air that could kill. Here was new land, and yet it looked more familiar to her than anything she’d encountered thus far.
She turned and peered back along the path she had just climbed, at the tall grasses blowing in the gentle breeze, at occasional flowers dipping their heads at her, at the bright blue and brilliant white overhead. It was an evil concoction, inviting but false.
Juliette took one last admiring gaze at this illusion. She noted how the round depression in the center of the hills seemed to mark the outline of her silo’s flat roof, the rest of her habitable home nestled deep in the belly of the soil. The way the land rose up all around made it look as though a hungry God had spooned out a large bite of the earth. With a heavy heart, she realized that the world she had grown up in was now closed off to her, that her home and her people were safe behind bolted doors, and she must be resigned to her fate. She had been cast off. Her time was short. And so she turned her back on the alluring view and bright colors to face the dusty, the dead, and the real.

As she started down the hill, Juliette pulled cautiously on the air in her suit. She knew Walker had given her the gift of time, time no cleaner before her ever had, but how much? And for what? She had already reached her goal, had managed to haul herself out of the sensors’ sight, so why was she was still walking, still staggering down this foreign hill? Was it inertia? The pull of gravity? The sight of the unknown?
She was barely down the slope, heading in the general direction of the crumbling city, when she stopped to survey the foreign landscape before her. The elevation made it possible to choose a path for her final walk, this maiden walk, across the tall dunes of dry earth. And that’s when she saw, gazing out toward the rusting city beyond, that the hollow in which her silo resided was no accident. The hills bore a clear pattern as they stretched into the distance. It was one circular bowl after another, the earth rising up between them as if to shield each spooned-out bite from the caustic wind.
Juliette descended into the next bowl, pondering this, watching her footing as she went. She kicked aside the larger rocks and controlled her breathing. She knew from working deep in the flooded basins, swimming beneath the muck that burly men cringed from as she unclogged the drains, that air could be conserved through calmness. She glanced up, wondering if she had enough in the suit to cross this bowl and make it up the next great hill.
And that’s when she saw the slender tower rising from the center of the bowl, its exposed metal glinting in the sparse sunlight. The landscape here was untouched by the program in her visor; reality passed through her helmet untarnished. And seeing this, the familiar sensor tower, she wondered if perhaps she’d gotten turned around, if she had surveyed the world once too many times from the crest of the hill, if she was in fact trudging back toward her silo, crossing ground already crossed once before.
The sight of a dead cleaner wasting away in the dirt seemed to confirm this. It was a bare outline, ribbons of an old suit, the husk of a helmet.
She stopped and touched the dome of the helmet with the toe of her boot, and the shell crumbled and caved in. Whatever flesh and bone had been inside had long ago drifted off on the winds.
Juliette looked down the hill for the sleeping couple, but the crook of those two dunes was nowhere in sight. She suddenly felt bewildered and lost. She wondered if the air had finally worked past the seals and heat tape, if her brain was succumbing to noxious fumes, but no. She was nearer the city, still walking toward that skyline, the tops of which were still rendered whole and gleaming, the sky above them blue and spotted with bright clouds.
It meant this tower below her . . . was not hers. And these dunes, these great mounds of dead earth, were not meant to block out the winds or hold back the air. They were meant to shield curious eyes. To block this sight, this view, of some other.

4
“One, two, and the third in your bosom.”

Lukas held the small box tightly against his chest as he hiked up to the landing on thirty-eight. Here was a mixed-use level of offices, shops, a plastics factory, and one of the small water treatment plants. He pushed through the doors and hurried down corridors quiet from the day’s cleaning until he reached the main pump control room. His IT master key allowed him inside. The room housed a tall and familiar computer cabinet from his Tuesday maintenance schedule. Lukas left the overhead light off to keep the small window in the door darkened to passersby. He slid behind the tall server rack and the wall, scooted to the ground, and fished his flashlight out of his coveralls.
In the soft red glow of his night light, Lukas gently peeled the flaps of the box apart, revealing the contents inside.
The guilt was immediate. It punctured the anticipation, the thrill of discovery, of intimacy. It wasn’t guilt from defying his boss or lying to Deputy Marsh, nor of delaying the delivery of items he had been told were important. It was the violation of her things. The reminder of her fate. Here were Juliette’s remains. Not her body, which was lost and gone, but the remnants of the life she had lived.
He took a heavy breath, considered closing the flaps and forgetting the contents, and then thought of what would become of them anyway. His friends in IT would probably be the ones to paw through them. They would tear open the box and trade items like kids swapping candy. They would desecrate her.
He bent the flaps open further and decided to honor her instead.
He adjusted his light and saw a stack of silo vouchers on top, wrapped in a piece of wire. He pulled these out and flipped through them. They were vacation vouchers. Dozens of them. He lifted them to his nose and puzzled over the tangy scent of grease emanating from the box.
A few expired meal cards lay underneath these vouchers, the corner of an ID badge poking out. Lukas reached for the badge, coded silver from her job as sheriff. He searched for another ID among the various scattered cards, but it appeared it had not yet been replaced with whatever color Mechanical used. There hadn’t been that much time between her being fired for one offense and being put to death for another.
He took a moment to study the picture on the badge. It looked recent, just as he remembered her. Her hair was tied back tight, leaving it flat on her head. He could see loose curls sticking out to either side of her neck and remembered the first night he had watched her work, how she had braided her long hair herself while she sat alone in a pool of light, peering at page after page in those folders of hers.
He ran his finger over the picture and laughed when he saw her expression. Her forehead was wrinkled, her eyes narrowed, as if trying to determine what the photographer was attempting or why in the heavens it was taking so long. He covered his mouth to prevent the laugh from becoming a sob.
The vouchers went back into the box, but the ID slid into the breast pocket of his coveralls as if by Juliette’s own stubborn accord. The next thing that caught his eye was a silver multi-tool, new-looking, a slightly different model from his own. He grabbed this and leaned forward to pull his own tool out of his back pocket. He compared the two, opening a few of the tools on hers and admiring the smooth motion and neat click as each attachment locked into place. Taking a moment to first clean his, wiping his prints off and removing a bit of melted rubber wire casing, he switched the tools out. He decided he would rather carry this reminder of her and have his own tool disappear into storage or be pawned off to a stranger who wouldn’t appreciate—
Lukas froze at the sound of footsteps and laughter. He held his breath and waited for someone to come in, for the overhead lights to burst on. The server clicked and whirred beside him. The noise in the hallway receded, the laughter fading.
He was pushing his luck, he knew, but there was more in the box to see. He rummaged inside again and found an ornate wooden box, a valuable antique. It was just slightly bigger than his palm and took a moment to figure out how to open. The first thing he saw as the top slid away was a ring, a woman’s wedding ring. It could’ve been solid gold, but it was difficult to tell. The red glow from his flashlight tended to wash out colors, causing everything to appear dull and lifeless.
He checked for an inscription, but found none. It was a curious artifact, this ring. He was certain Juliette hadn’t been wearing it when he’d known her and wondered if it was a relative’s, or a thing passed down from before the uprising. He placed it back in the wooden box and reached for the other item inside, a bracelet of some sort. No, not a bracelet. As he pulled it out, he realized it was a watch, the face so tiny it melded with the design of the jeweled strap. Lukas studied the face, and after a moment he realized his eyes or the red flashlight were playing tricks on him. Or were they? He looked closely to be sure—and saw that one of the impossibly thin hands was ticking away the time. The thing worked.
Before he could contemplate the challenge of concealing such an item or the consequences of being discovered with it, Lukas slid the watch into his chest pocket. He looked at the ring sitting alone in the box, and after a moment’s hesitation, palmed this and stashed it away as well. He fished through the cardboard box and gathered some of the loose chits at the bottom and placed these into the antique before sealing it shut and returning it.
What was he doing? He could feel a trickle of sweat work its way from his scalp and run the length of his jawline. The heat from the rear of the busy computer seemed to intensify. He dipped his head and lifted his shoulder to dab the itchy run of sweat away. There was more in the box, and he couldn’t help himself: he had to keep looking.
He found a small notepad and flipped through it. It contained one to-do list after another, all of the items neatly crossed out. He replaced this and reached for a folded piece of paper at the bottom of the box, then realized it was more than a piece. He pulled out a thick collection of papers held together with brass fasteners. Across the top, in handwriting similar to that in the notebook, was printed:
Main Generator Control Room Operation Manual.
He flipped it open and found inscrutable diagrams and bulleted notes lining the margins. It looked like something she’d put together herself, either as a reminder from piecing the room’s operation together over time, or perhaps a helpful guide for others. The paper was recycled without being pulped, he saw. She had just written on the back. He flipped the manual over and checked the lines and lines of printed text on the opposite side. There were notes in the margins and a name circled over and over:
Juliette. Juliette. Juliette.
He flipped the manual over and surveyed the rear, only to find it was the original front. “The Tragic Historye of Romeus and Juliette,” it said. It was a play. One Lukas had heard of. In front of him, a fan kicked on in the heart of the server, blowing air over warm chips of silicone and wire. He wiped the sweat from his forehead and tucked the bound play back into the box. He neatly arranged the other items on top and folded the cardboard flaps together. Wiggling back to his feet, Lukas doused his light and shoved it back into his pocket where it nestled against Juliette’s multi-tool. With the box secured under one arm, he patted his chest with his other hand and felt her watch, her ring, and her ID there with its picture of her. All tight against his bosom.
Lukas shook his head. He wondered what the hell he was thinking as he stole out the small and dark room, a tall panel of winking and blinking lights watching him go.


5
“Eyes, look your last!
Arms, take your last embrace! And, lips,
O you the doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss
a dateless bargain to engrossing death!”

The bodies were everywhere. Covered in dust and dirt, suits worn down by the toxic eaters that lived in the winds, Juliette found herself stumbling over more and more of them. And then, they were constant, a mass of boulders jumbled together. A few were in suits similar to her own, but most wore rags that had been eaten away into streamers. When the wind blew past her boots and across the bodies, strips of clothing waved like kelp in the down deep’s fish farms. Unable to pick her way around them all, she found herself stepping over the remains, working her way closer and closer to the sensor tower, the bodies easily in the hundreds, possibly the thousands.
These weren’t people from her silo, she realized. However obvious, the sensation was startling. Other people. That they were dead did nothing to diminish the soul-shattering reality that people had lived so close and she had never known. Juliette had somehow crossed an uninhabitable void, had gone from one universe to another, was possibly the first ever to have done so, and here was a graveyard of foreign souls, of people just like her having lived and died in a world so similar and so near to her own.
She made her way through dead bodies thick as crumbling rock, the forms becoming indistinguishable from one another. They were piled high in places, and she had to choose her path carefully. As she neared the ramp leading down to this other silo, she found herself needing to step on a body or two in order to pass. It looked as though they’d been trying to get away and had scampered over one another, creating their own small hills in a mad attempt to reach the real ones. But then, when she reached the ramp leading down, she saw the crush of bodies at the steel airlock door and realized they had been trying to get back in.
Her own imminent death loomed large—a constant awareness, a new sense worn on her skin and felt keenly in every pore. She would soon join these bodies, and somehow she was not afraid. She had passed through that fear on the crest of the hill and was now in new lands, seeing new things, a terrible gift for which she had to be grateful. Curiosity drove her forward, or maybe it was the mentality of this frozen crowd, all in scrambling repose, bodies swimming over each other and reaching toward the doors below.
She swam among them. Waded, where she had to. She stepped through broken and hollow bodies, kicked aside bones and tattered remains, and fought her way to the partly cracked doors. There was a figure there frozen between its iron teeth, one arm in, one out, a scream trapped on a gray and withered face, two eye sockets empty and staring.
Juliette was one of them, one of these others. She was dead, or nearly so. But while they were frozen in motion, she was still pushing ahead. Shown the way. She tugged the body out of the gap, her breathing loud in her helmet, her exhalations misting on the screen before her nose. Half the body pulled free—the other half collapsed inside the door. A mist of powdered flesh drifted down in-between.
She wiggled one of her arms inside and tried to push through sideways. Her shoulder slipped through, then her leg, but her helmet caught. She turned her head and tried again—and the helmet wedging tightly between the doors. There was a moment of panic as she could feel the steel jaws gripping her head, supporting the weight of her helmet, leaving her semi-dangling from its grasp. She swam her arm all the way through, trying to reach around the door for purchase, to pull herself the rest of the way, but her torso was stuck. One leg was in, the other out. There was nothing to push against or pull in order to go the rest of the way. She was trapped, an arm useless on the inside, waving frantically, her rapid breathing using up what remained of her air.
Juliette tried to fit her other arm through. She couldn’t turn her waist, but she could bend her elbow and slide her fingers across her belly through the tight space between her stomach and the door. She curled her fingers around the edge of the steel and pulled. There was no leverage in those confines. It was just the strength in her fingers, in her grip. Juliette suddenly didn’t want to die, not there. She curled her hand as if to make a fist, her fingers bent around the edge of those steel jaws, her knuckles singing out from the strain. Jerking her head against her helmet, trying to bang her face against the damned screen, twisting and shoving and yanking—she suddenly popped free.
She stumbled forward, a boot catching briefly on the gap behind her, arms windmilling for balance as she kicked through a pile of charred bones and sent a cloud of black ash into the air. It was the remains of those who had been caught in the cleansing fire of the airlock. Juliette found herself in a burnt room eerily similar to the one she had recently left. Her exhausted and bewildered mind spun with outrageous delusions. Perhaps she was already dead, and these were the ghosts awaiting her. Maybe she had burned alive inside the airlock of her own silo, and these were her mad dreams, her escape from the pain, and now she would haunt this place forever.
She stumbled through the scattered remains toward the inner door and pressed her head against the thick glass porthole. She looked for Peter Billings beyond, sitting at his desk. Or perhaps a glimpse of Holston wandering the hallways, a specter searching for his ghostly wife.
But this was not the same airlock. She tried to calm herself. She wondered if her air was running low, if sucking on her own exhaust was like breathing the fumes of a hot motor, choking off her brain.
The door was sealed. It was real. The thousands were dead, but she wasn’t. Not yet.
She tried to spin the large wheel, but it was either frozen in place or locked from the inside. Juliette banged on the glass, hoping the silo sheriff would hear her, or maybe a cafeteria worker. It was dark inside, but the thought lingered that someone must be there. People lived inside silos. They didn’t belong piled up around them.
There was no answer. No light flicked on. She leaned on the large wheel that secured the door, remembered Marnes’s instructions, how all the mechanisms worked, but those lessons felt like so long ago and she hadn’t thought them important at the time. But she remembered something: After the argon bath and the fire, didn’t the inner door unlock? Automatically? So the airlock could be scrubbed? This seemed like something she remembered Marnes saying. He had joked that it wasn’t as if anyone could come back inside once the fire had run its course. Was she remembering this or making it up? Was it the wishful thinking of an oxygen-starved mind?
Either way, the wheel on the door wouldn’t budge. Juliette pushed down with all her weight—and it felt locked to her. She stepped back. The bench hanging from the wall where cleaners got suited up before their deaths looked inviting. She was tired from the walk, from the struggle to get inside. And why was she trying to get inside? She spun in place, indecisive. What was she doing?
She needed air. For some reason, she thought the silo might have some. She looked around at all the scattered bones of an uncountable number of bodies. How many dead? They were too jumbled to know. The skulls, she thought. She could count those and know. She shook this nonsense from her head. She was definitely losing her senses.
“The wheel on the door is a stuck nut,” some receding part of her said. “It’s a frozen bolt.”
And hadn’t she made a reputation as a young shadow for working them free?
Juliette told herself that this could be done. Grease, heat, leverage. Those were the secrets to a piece of metal that wouldn’t budge. She didn’t have any of the three, but she looked around anyway. There was no squeezing back through the outer door, she knew she wouldn’t make it a second time, not that kind of straining. So she had this room. The bench was secured to the wall along the back edge and hung from two chains. Juliette wiggled the chains, but didn’t see how they could come free, or what good they would do her anyway.
In the corner, there was a pipe snaking up that led into a series of vents. It must be what delivered the argon, she thought. She wrapped her hands around the pipe, put her feet on the wall, and tugged.
The connection to the vent wiggled; the toxic air had corroded and weakened it. Juliette smiled, set her teeth, and yanked back ferociously.
The pipe came free of the vent and bent at its base. She felt a sudden thrill, like a wild rat standing over a large crumb. She grabbed the free end of the pipe and worked it back and forth, bending and wrenching the fastened end. Metal would snap if you could wiggle it even a little bit, if you did it long enough. She had felt the heat of weakened steel countless times while bending it over and over until it broke.
Sweat beaded on her brow and twinkled in the dim light allowed by her visor screen. It dripped down her nose, fogged the screen, and still she yanked and pushed, back and forth, growing frantic and desperate—
The pipe snapped, taking her by surprise. Just a faint pop bled through her helmet, and then the long piece of hollow metal was free. One end was crushed and twisted, the other whole and round. Juliette turned to the door, a tool now in hand. She slid the pipe through the wheel, leaving as much as she could hanging out the side, just long enough that it wouldn’t brush the wall. With both gloved hands wrapped around the pipe, she lifted herself to her waist, bending over the pipe, her helmet touching the door. She bounced her weight on the lever, knowing it was a jerking motion that freed a bolt, not a steady force. She wiggled her way toward the end of the pipe, watching it bend a little, worried it might snap in half long before the door budged.
When she got toward the end—maximum leverage—she threw her weight up and down with all her strength, and she cursed as the pipe snapped. There was a loud clang, barely muffled by her suit, and then she collapsed to the floor, landing painfully on her elbow.
The pipe was at an angle beneath her, digging into her ribs. Juliette tried to catch her breath. Her sweat dripped against the visor screen, blurring her view. She got up and saw that the pipe was unbroken. She wondered if it had slipped free, but it was still threaded through the spokes of the large wheel.
Disbelieving, excited, she slid the pipe out the other side. She wrapped her hands around the spokes and leaned into it.
And the wheel.
It budged.


6
“For now, these hot days, is the mad blood stirring.”

Walker made it to the end of the hallway and found himself leaving the comforting confines of a tight corridor to enter the wider entrance hall to Mechanical. The room, he saw, was full of young shadows. They hung out in groups, whispering to themselves. Three boys crouched near one wall, throwing stones for chits. Walker could hear a dozen interwoven voices spilling out of the mess hall across the room. The casters had sent these young ears away while they discussed adult things. He took a deep breath and hurried through that damned open space, focusing on each step, moving one foot ahead of him at a time, each small patch of floor a thing to conquer—
After a short lifetime, he finally crashed into the wall on the other side and hugged the steel panels in relief. Behind him, the shadows laughed, but he was too frightened to care. Sliding across the riveted steel, he grabbed the edge of the mess hall door and pulled himself inside. The relief was enormous. Even though the mess hall was several times the size of his workshop, it was at least full of crowding furniture and people he knew. With his back to the wall, his shoulder against the open door, he could almost pretend it was smaller. He slumped to the ground and rested, the men and women of Mechanical arguing amongst themselves, voices rising, agitated, competing.
“She’d be out of air by now, anyway,” Rick was saying.
“You don’t know that,” Shirly said. She was standing on a chair so she could be at least as tall as the others. She surveyed the room. “We don’t know what advances they’ve made.”
“That’s because they won’t tell us!”
“Maybe it’s gotten better out there.”
The room quieted with this last. Waiting, perhaps, to see if the voice would dare speak again and break its anonymity. Walker studied the eyes of those facing his way. They were wide with a mixture of fear and excitement. A double cleaning had removed some taboos. Shadows had been sent away. The adults were feeling frisky and free to speak forbidden thoughts.
“What if it has gotten better?” someone else asked.
“Since two weeks ago? I’m telling you guys, it’s the suits! They figured out the suits!” Marck, an oilman, looked around at the others, anger in his eyes. “I’m sure of it,” he said. “They’ve sorted the suits and now we have a chance!”
“A chance to what?” Knox growled. The grizzled head of Mechanical sat at one of the tables, digging into a breakfast bowl. “A chance to send more of our people out to wander the hills until they run out of air?” He shook his head and took another bite, then jabbed at the lot of them with his spoon. “What we need to be talking about,” he said, chewing, “is this sham of an election, this rat-ass Mayor, and us kept in the dark down here—!”
“They didn’t figure out the suits,” Walker hissed, still breathless from his ordeal.
“We’re the ones who keep this place humming,” Knox continued, wiping at his beard. “And what do we get? Busted fingers and ratshit pay. And now? Now they come and take our people and send them out for a view we don’t care about!” He slammed the table with his mighty fist, sending his bowl hopping.
Walker cleared his throat. He remained crouched on the floor, his back against the wall. No one had seen him enter or had heard him the first time. Now, while the room was scared quiet by Knox, he tried again.
“They did not figure out the suits,” he said, a little louder this time.
Shirly saw him from her perch. Her chin dropped, her mouth hinging open. She pointed, and a dozen other heads turned to follow.
They gaped at him. Walker was still trying to catch his breath and must’ve looked near death. Courtnee, one of the young plumbers who was always kind to him whenever she stopped by his workshop, left her seat and hurried to his side. She whispered his name in surprise and helped him to his feet, urging him to come to the table and take her chair.
Knox slid his bowl away from himself and slapped the table. “Well, people are just wandering all over the damned place now, aren’t they?”
Walker looked up sheepishly to see the old foreman chief smiling through his beard at him. There were two dozen other people staring at him, all at once. Walker half waved, then stared down at the table. It was suddenly too many people.
“All this shouting rouse you, old man? You setting off over the hills, too?”
Shirly jumped down from her chair. “Oh, God, I’m so sorry. I forgot to take him his breakfast.” She hurried toward the kitchen to fetch him some food even as Walker tried to wave her off. He wasn’t hungry.
“It isn’t—” His voice cracked. He tried again. “I came because I heard,” he whispered. “Jules. Out of sight.” He made a gesture with his hand, arching it over some imaginary hill running across the table. “But it wasn’t them in IT that figured nothing,” he said. He made eye contact with Marck and tapped his own chest. “I did it.”
A whispered conversation in the corner fell quiet. No one sipped their juice, no one moved. They were still half stunned to see Walker out of his workshop, much less among the crowd of them. Not a one of them had been old enough to remember the last time he’d roamed about. They knew him as the crazy electrical man who lived in a cave and refused to cast shadows anymore.
“What’re you sayin’?” Knox asked.
Walker took a deep breath. He was about to speak when Shirly returned and placed a bowl of hot oats in front of him, the spoon standing off the rim the concoction was so thick. Just how he liked it. He pressed his hands against either side of the bowl, feeling the heat in his palms. He was suddenly very tired from lack of sleep.
“Walk?” Shirly asked. “You okay?”
He nodded and waved her away, lifted his head and met Knox’s gaze.
“Jules came to me the other day.” He bobbed his head, gaining confidence. He tried to ignore how many people were watching him speak, or the way the overhead lights twinkled in his watering eyes. “She had a theory about these suits, about IT.” With one hand, he stirred his oats, steeling his resolve to say the unthinkable. But then, how old was he? Why did he care for taboos?
“You remember the heat tape?” He turned to Rachele, who worked first shift and knew Juliette well. She nodded. “Jules sorted that it weren’t no accident, the way the tape broke down.” He nodded to himself. “She sorted it all, she did.”
He took a bite of his food, not hungry but enjoying the burn of the hot spoon on his old tongue. The room was silent, waiting. The whispers and quiet play of the shadows outside could just barely be heard.
“I’ve built up favors and favors with Supply over the years,” he explained. “Favors and favors. So I called them all in. Told them we’d be even.” He looked at this group of men and women from Mechanical, could hear more standing in the hallway who’d arrived late but could read from the frozen demeanors in the room to stay put. “We’ve taken stuff out if IT’s supply chain before. I know I have. All the best electronics and wire go to them that make the suits—”
“The ratshit bastards,” someone muttered, which got more than a few of them bobbing their heads.
“So I told Supply to return the favor. Soon as I heard they took her—” Walker paused and swiped at his eyes. “Soon as I heard, I wired in those favors, said to replace anything them bastards asked for with some of our own. Best of the best. And don’t let ‘em be the wiser.”
“You did what?” Knox asked.
Walker dipped his head over and over, feeling good to let out the truth. “They’ve been making those suits to fail. Not ‘cause it ain’t bad out there, that’s not what I figure. But they don’t want your body wandering out of sight, no sir.” He stirred his oats. “They want us all right here where they can see us.”
“So she’s okay?” Shirly asked.
Walker frowned and slowly shook his head.
“I told you guys,” someone said. “She’d run out of air by now.”
“She was dead anyway,” someone else countered, and the argument began to build again. “This just proves they’re full of shit!”
Walker had to agree with that.
“Everybody, hey, let’s stay calm,” Knox roared. But he appeared the least calm of them all. More workers filed in now that the moment of silence appeared to be over. They gathered around the table, faces full of worry.
“This is it,” Walker said to himself, seeing what was happening, what he had started. He watched his friends and co-workers get all riled up, barking at the empty air for answers, their passions stirred. “This is it,” he said again, and he could feel it brewing, ready to burst out. “Thisisit thisisit—”
Courtnee, still hovering over him, tending to him like he was an invalid, held his wrist with those delicate hands of hers.
“What is it?” she asked. She waved down the others so she could hear. She leaned close to Walker.
“Walk, tell me, what is it? What is this? What’re you trying to say?”
“This is how it starts,” he whispered, the room quiet once more. He looked up at all the faces, scanned them, seeing in their fury, in all the exploded taboos, that he was right to worry.
“This is how the uprising begins—”

7
“Sharp misery had worn him to the bones;
And about his shelves, a beggarly account of empty boxes.”

Lukas arrived at thirty-four breathless and clutching the small box, more exhausted from the laws he had broken than this habitual climb to work. He could still taste the metallic tang of adrenaline in his mouth from hiding behind the servers and rummaging through Juliette’s things. He patted his chest, feeling the items there, and also his racing heart.
Once he was better composed, he reached for the doors to IT and nearly cracked a knuckle as they flew outward toward him. Sammi, a tech he knew, burst out in a hurry and stormed past. Lukas called his name, but the older tech was already gone, storming up the stairs and out of sight.
There was more commotion in the entrance hall. Voices yelling over one another. Lukas entered warily, wondering what the fuss was about. He held open the door with his elbow and slid into the room, the box tight against his chest.
Most of the yelling, it seemed, was coming from Bernard. The head of IT stood outside the security gates and barked at one tech after the other. Nearby, Sims, the head of IT security, similarly lit into three men in gray coveralls. Lukas remained frozen by the door, intimidated by the angry duo.
When Bernard spotted him there, he snapped shut and waded through the trembling techs to greet him. Lukas opened his mouth to say something, but his boss was fixated less on him and more on what was in his hands.
“This is it?” Bernard asked, snatching the box from him.
“It—?”
“Everything that greaser owned fits in this little damn box?” Bernard tugged the flaps open. “Is this everything?”
“Uh . . . that’s what I was given,” Lukas stammered. “Marsh said—”
“Yeah, the Deputy wired about his cramps. I swear, the Pact should stipulate an age limit for their kind. Sims!” Bernard turned to his security chief. “Conference room. Now.”
Lukas pointed toward the security gate and the server room beyond. “I suppose I should get to—”
“Come with me,” Bernard said, wrapping his arm around Lukas’s back and squeezing his shoulder. “I want you in on this. There seems to be fewer and fewer ratshit techs I can trust around here.”
“Unless y-you want me on the servers. We had that thing with tower thirteen—”
“That can wait. This is more important.” Bernard ushered him toward the conference room, the hulking mass of Sims preceding them.
The security guard grabbed the door and held it open, frowning at Lukas as he went by. Lukas shivered as he crossed the threshold. He could feel the sweat running down his chest, could feel guilty heat in his armpits and around his neck. He had a sudden image of being thrown against the table, pinned down, contraband yanked from his pockets and waved in his face—
“Sit,” Bernard said. He put the box down on the table, and he and Sims began disgorging its contents while Lukas lowered himself into a chair.
“Vacation chits,” Sims said, pulling out the stack of paper coupons. Lukas watched the way the man’s arms rippled with muscle with even the slightest movement. Sims had been a tech once, until his body kept growing and made him too obviously suited for other, less cerebral, endeavors. He lifted the chits to his nose, took a sniff, and recoiled. “Smells like sweaty greaser,” he said.
“Counterfeit?” Bernard asked.
Sims shook his head. Bernard was inspecting the small wooden box. He shook it and rapped it with his knuckles, listening to the rattle of chits inside. He searched the exterior for a hinge or clasp.
Lukas almost blurted out that the top slid, that it was so finely crafted you could barely see the joints and that it took a bit of effort. Bernard muttered something and set the box aside.
“What exactly are we looking for?” Lukas asked. He leaned forward and grabbed the box, pretended to be inspecting it for the first time.
“Anything. A f*cking clue,” Bernard barked. He glared at Lukas. “How did this greaser make it over the hill? Was it something she did? One of my techs? What?”
Lukas still couldn’t figure the anger. So what if she hadn’t cleaned—it would’ve been a double anyway. Was Bernard pissed because he didn’t know why she’d survived so long? This made sense to Lukas. Whenever he fixed something by accident, it drove him nearly as nuts as having something break. And he’d seen Bernard angry before, but this was something different. The man was livid. He was manic. It’s just how Lukas would feel if he’d had such an unprecedented piece of success with no cause to pin it on.
Sims, meanwhile, found the notebook and began flipping through it. “Hey boss—”
Bernard snatched it from him and tore through the pages, reading. “Someone’ll have to go through all this,” he said. He pushed his glasses up his nose. “There might be some sign of collusion in here—”
“Hey look,” Lukas said, holding out the box. “It opens.” He showed them the sliding lid.
“Lemme see that.” Bernard dropped the notebook to the table and snatched the wooden box away. He wrinkled his nose. “Just chits,” he said disgustingly.
He dumped them on the table and was about to toss the box aside, but Sims grabbed it from him. “That’s an antique,” the large man said. “You think it’s a clue, or can I—?”
“Yes, keep it, by all means.” Bernard waved his arms out toward the window with its view of the entrance hall. “Because nothing of greater f*cking importance is going on around here, is it, shit-for-brains?”
Sims shrugged noncommittally and slid the wooden box into his pocket. Lukas desperately wanted to be somewhere else, anywhere in the silo but there.
“Maybe she just got lucky,” Sims offered.
Bernard began dumping the rest of the box onto the table, shaking it to loosen the manual that Lukas knew was tightly wedged in the bottom. He paused from his efforts and squinted at Sims over the rims of his glasses.
“Lucky,” Bernard repeated.
Sims tilted his head.
“Get the f*ck out of here,” Bernard told him.
Sims nodded. “Yeah, you’re right.”
“No, I mean get out!” Bernard pointed at the door. “Getthef*ckout!”
The head of security smiled like this was funny, but lumbered for the door. He slid out of the room and gently clicked the door shut behind him.
“I’m surrounded by morons,” Bernard said, once they were alone.
Lukas tried to imagine this was not meant as an insult directed at him.
“Present company excluded,” Bernard added, as if reading his mind.
“Thanks.”
“Hey, you at least can fix a goddamn server. What the hell do I pay these other ratshit techs to do?”
He pressed his glasses up the bridge of his nose again, and Lukas tried to remember if the IT head had always cursed this much. He didn’t think so. Was it the strain of being interim mayor that was getting to him? Something had changed. It felt strange to even consider Bernard his friend anymore. The man was so much more important now, so much busier. Perhaps he was cracking under the stress that came with the extra responsibility, the pain of being the one to send good people to cleaning—
“You know why I’ve never taken a shadow?” Bernard asked. He flipped through the manual, saw the play on the reverse side, and turned the bound sheets of paper around. He glanced up at Lukas, who lifted his palms and shrugged.
“It’s because I shudder to think of anyone else ever running this place.”
Lukas assumed he meant IT, not the silo. Bernard hadn’t been mayor very long.
Bernard set the play down and gazed out the window where muffled voices argued once more.
“But I’ll have to, one of these days. I’m at that age where your friends, the people you grew up with, are dropping like flies, but you’re still young enough to pretend it won’t happen to you.”
His eyes fell to Lukas. The young tech felt uncomfortable being alone with Bernard. He’d never felt that before.
“Silos have burned to the ground before because of one man’s hubris,” Bernard told him. “All it takes is improper planning, thinking you’ll be around forever, but because one man disappears—” He snapped his fingers. “—and leaves a sucking void behind, that can be enough to bring it all down.”
Lukas was dying to ask his boss what the hell he was talking about.
“Today is that day, I think.” Bernard walked around the long conference table, leaving behind him the scattered remnants of Juliette’s life. Lukas’s gaze drifted over the items. The guilt of going through them vanished to see how they’d been treated. He wished instead that he’d stashed away more of them.
“What I need is someone who already has access to the servers,” Bernard said. Lukas turned to the side and realized the short, full-bellied head of IT was standing right beside him. He moved his hand up to his chest pocket, making sure it didn’t bulge open where Bernard could see.
“Sammi is a good tech. I trust him, but he’s nearly as old as I am.”
“You aren’t that old,” Lukas said, trying to be polite, to gather his wits. He wasn’t sure what was going on—
“There’s not many I consider a friend,” Bernard said.
“I appreciate that—”
“You’re probably the closest thing—”
“I feel the same—”
“I knew your father. He was a good man.”
Lukas swallowed and nodded. He looked up at Bernard and realized the man was holding out his hand. Had been for a while. He reached out his own to accept, still not sure what was being offered.
“I need a shadow, Lukas.” Bernard’s hand felt small in Lukas’s own. He watched as his arm was pumped up and down. “I want you to be that man.”