Wool (59 page)

There were groans; these poor refugees of silo seventeen acted like she was the one who’d lost her mind. But they stomped up the stairs after her, their pace dictated by Solo, who had seemed to rally with some fruit and water but had slowed as the levels wore on.

“Where are these friends of yours we talked to?” Rickson asked. “Can they come help?” He grunted as Solo lurched to one side. “He’s heavy.”

“They aren’t coming to help us,” Juliette said. “There’s no getting from there to here.”
Or vice versa,
she told herself.

Her stomach lurched with worry. She needed to get to IT and call Lukas, find out what was going on. She needed to tell him how horribly awry her plans had gone, how she was failing at every turn. There was no going back, she realized. No saving her friends. No saving this silo. She glanced back over her shoulder. Her life was now going to be one of a mother to these orphaned children, kids who had survived merely because the people who had been left, who had been committing the violence on each other, didn’t have the stomach to kill them. Or the
heart,
she thought.

And now it would fall to her. And to Solo, but to a lesser degree. He would probably be just one more child for her to attend to.

They made their gradual way up another flight, Solo seeming to regain his senses a little, progress being made. But still a long way to go.

They stopped in the mids for bathroom breaks, filling more empty toilets that wouldn’t flush. Juliette helped the young ones. They didn’t like going like this, preferred to do it in the dirt. She told them that was right, that they only did this when they were on the move. She didn’t tell them about the years Solo had spent destroying entire levels of apartments. She didn’t tell them about the clouds of flies she’d seen.

The last of their food was consumed, but they had plenty of water. Juliette wanted to get to the hydroponics on fifty-six before they stopped for the night. There was enough food and water there for the rest of the trip. She tried the radio repeatedly, aware that she was running down the battery. There was no reply. She didn’t understand how she’d heard them to begin with; all the silos must have used something different, some way of not hearing each other. It had to be Walker, something he’d engineered. When she got back to IT, would she be able to figure it out? Would she be able to contact him or Shirly? She wasn’t sure, and Lukas had no way of talking to Mechanical from where he was, no way of patching her through. She’d asked a dozen times.

Lukas …

And Juliette
remembered
.

The radio in Solo’s hovel. What had Lukas said one night? They were talking late and he’d said he wished they could chat from down below where it was more comfortable. Wasn’t that where he was getting his updates about the uprising? It was over the radio. Just like the one in Solo’s place, beneath the servers, locked behind that steel cage for which he’d never found the key.

Juliette turned and faced the group; they stopped climbing and gripped the rails, stared up at her. Helena, the young mother who didn’t even know her own age, tried to comfort her baby as it began to squeal. The nameless infant preferred the sway of the climb.

“I need to go up,” she told them. She looked to Solo. “How’re you feeling?”

“Me? I’m fine.”

He didn’t look fine.

“Can you get them up?” She nodded to Rickson. “Are you okay?”

The boy dipped his chin. His resistance had seemed to crumble during the climb, especially during the bathroom break. The younger children, meanwhile, had been nothing but excited to see new parts of the silo, to feel that they could raise their voices without terrible things happening to them. They were coming to grips with there being only two adults left, and neither seemed all that bad.

“There’s food on fifty-six,” she said.

“Numbers—” Rickson shook his head. “I don’t—”

Of course. Why would he need to count numbers he’d never live to see, and in more ways than one?

“Solo will show you where,” she told him. “We’ve stayed there before. Good food. Canned stuff as well. Solo?” She waited until he looked up at her, the glazed expression partly melting away. “I have to get back to your place. I have people I need to call, okay? My friends. I need to find out if they’re okay.”

He nodded.

“You guys will be fine?” She hated to leave them but needed to. “I’ll try to make it back down to you tomorrow. Take your time getting all the way up, okay? No need to rush home.”

Home
. Was she already resigned to that?

There were nods in the group. One of the young boys pulled a water bottle out of the other’s bag and unscrewed the cap. Juliette turned and began taking the stairs two at a time, her legs begging her not to.

Juliette was in the forties when it occurred to her that she might not make it. The sweat she’d worked up was chilling her skin; her legs were beyond the ache, beyond the pain: they were numb with fatigue. She found her arms doing a lot of the work as she lunged ahead, gripped the railing with clammy hands, and hauled herself up another two steps.

Her breathing was ragged; it had been for half a dozen levels. She wondered if she’d done damage to her lungs from the underwater ordeal. Was that even possible? Her father would know. She thought of spending the rest of her life without a doctor, of teeth as yellow as Solo’s, of caring for a growing child and the challenge of seeing that more weren’t made, not until the children were older.

At the next landing, she again touched her hip where her birth control rode under her skin. Such things made more sense in light of silo seventeen. So
much
about her previous life made sense. Things that had once seemed twisted now had a sort of pattern, a logic about them. The expense of sending a wire, the spacing of the levels, the single and cramped stairway, the bright colors for particular jobs, dividing the silo into sections, breeding mistrust … it was all designed. She’d seen hints of this before but never knew why. Now this empty silo told her, the presence of these kids told her. It turned out that some crooked things looked even worse when straightened. Some tangled knots only made sense once unraveled.

Her mind wandered while she climbed, wandered in order to avoid the aches in her muscles, to escape the day’s ordeals. When she finally hit the thirties it gave her, if not an end to the suffering, a renewed focus. She stopped trying the portable radio as often. The static never changed, and she had a different idea for contacting Walker, something she should have pieced together sooner, a way to bypass the servers and communicate with other silos. It was there all along, staring her and Solo in the face. There was a small sliver of doubt that she might be wrong, but why else lock up a radio that was already locked up two other ways? It only made sense if that device was supremely dangerous. Which is what she hoped it would be.

She stomped up to thirty-five dead on her feet. Her body had never been pushed this hard, not even while plumbing the small pump, not during her trek through the outside. Will alone helped her lift each foot, plant it, straighten her leg, pull with her arm, lunge forward for another grab. One step at a time now. Her toe banged on the next step: she could barely lift her boot high enough. The green emergency lights gave her no sense of the passing of time, no idea if night had come, when morning would be. She desperately missed her watch. All she had these days was her knife. She laughed at the switch, at having gone from counting the seconds in her life to fending for each and every one of them.

Thirty-four. It was tempting to collapse to the steel grating, to sleep, to curl up like her first night in that place, just thankful to be alive. Instead, she pulled the door open, amazed at the effort this required, and stepped back into civilization. Light. Power. Heat.

She staggered down the hallway with her vision so constricted it was as if she could only see through a straw at her center, everything else out of focus and spinning.

Her shoulder brushed the wall. Walking required effort. All she wanted was to call Lukas, to hear his voice. She imagined falling asleep behind that server, warm air blowing over her from its fans, the headphones tight against her ears. He could murmur to her about the faraway stars while she slept for days and days …

But Lukas would wait. Lukas was locked up and safe. She had all the time in the world to call him.

She turned instead into the Suit Lab, shuffled toward the tool wall, didn’t dare look at her cot. A glance at her cot, and she’d wake up the next day. Whatever day that was.

Grabbing the bolt cutters, she was about to leave but went back for the small sledge as well. The tools were heavy, but they felt good in her hands, one tool in each, pulling down on her arms, stretching her muscles and grounding her, keeping her stable.

At the end of the hall, she pressed her shoulder against the heavy door to the server room. She leaned until it squeaked open. Just a crack. Just wide enough for her. Juliette hurried as much as her numb muscles would allow toward the ladder. Shuffling. Fast as she could go.

The grate was in place; she tugged it out of the way and dropped the tools down. Big noise. She didn’t care—they couldn’t break. Down she went, hands slick, chin catching a rung, floor coming up faster than she’d anticipated.

Juliette sank to the floor, sprawled out, shin banging the sledge. It took a force of will, an act of God, to get up. But she did.

Down the hall and past the small desk. There was a steel cage there, a radio, a big one. She remembered her days as sheriff. They had a radio just like it in her office; she’d used it to call Marnes when he was on patrol, to call Hank and Deputy Marsh. But this one was different.

She set the sledge down and pinched the jaws of the cutter on one of the hinges. Squeezing was too hard. Her arms shook. They trembled.

Juliette adjusted herself, put one of the cutters’ handles against her neck, cradled it with her collarbone and shoulder. She grabbed the other handle with both hands and pulled toward herself, hugging the cutters. Squeezing. She felt them move.

There was a loud crack, the twang of splitting steel. She moved to the other hinge and did it again. Her collarbone hurt where the handle dug in, felt like it might be the thing to crack, not the hinge.

Another violent burst of metal.

Juliette grabbed the steel cage and pulled. The hinges came away from the mounting plate. She tore hungrily at the box, trying to get to the prize inside, thinking of Walker and all her family, all her friends, the sound of people screaming in the background. She had to get them to stop fighting. Get everyone to stop fighting.

Once she had enough space between the bent steel and the wall, she wrapped her fingers in this gap and tugged, bending the protective cage on its welds, tilting the cage away from the wall, revealing the entire radio unit beneath. Who needed keys? Screw the keys. She wrenched the cage flat, then bent her weight on it, making a new hinge of its front, warping it out of the way.

The dial on the front seemed familiar. She turned it to power the unit on and found that it clicked instead of spinning. Juliette knelt down, panting and exhausted, sweat running down her neck. There was another switch for power; she turned this one instead, static rising in the speakers, a buzz filling the room.

The other knob. This was what she wanted, what she expected to find. She thought it might be patch cables like the back of the server, or dip switches like a pump control, but it was tiny numbers arranged around the edge of a knob. Juliette smiled, exhausted, and turned the pointer to “18.” Home. She grabbed the mic and squeezed the button.

“Walker? Are you there?”

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 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 should 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 …”