Wool (33 page)

“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 cut her short, continuing 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 who braved his 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 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 was 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. 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 was just curious, or if she was challenging them to cast him and his mechanics out.

But now he wondered, 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.

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.

“But if something did happen to you, I would oversee the cleanings?” Lukas couldn’t imagine. He suspected there was more to learn about those suits than the servers. Sammi would be better at this, would actually
want
this job. Also—would he have to abandon his star charts?

“That’s a small part of the job, but yes.” Bernard guided Lukas through the servers, past number thirteen with its blank face and still fans, all the way to the back of the room.

“These are the keys to the true heart of the silo,” Bernard said, fishing a jangling set out of his overalls. They were strung on a cord of leather that hung around his neck. Lukas had never noticed them before.

“There are other features to this cabinet that you’ll learn about in time. For now, you simply need to know how to get downstairs.” He inserted the key into several locks on the back of the server, locks designed to look like recessed screws. What server was this? Twenty-eight? Lukas glanced around the room and tried to count its position, and realized he’d never been assigned to maintain this tower.

There was a gentle clang as the back came off. Bernard set it aside, and Lukas saw why he’d never worked on the machine. It was practically empty, just a shell, like it had been scrapped for parts over the long years.

“It’s crucial that you lock this after coming back up.”

Lukas watched Bernard grab a handle in the bottom of the empty chassis. Bernard pulled it toward him, and there was a soft grinding noise nearby. “When the grate’s back in place, you simply press this down to secure it.”

Lukas was about to ask
What grate?
when Bernard stepped aside and dug his fingers into the metal slats of the floor. With a grunt, he pulled the heavy surface of the flooring up and began sliding it over. Lukas jumped around to the other side and bent down to help.

“Wouldn’t the stairs … ?” he started to ask.

“They don’t access this part of thirty-five.” Bernard waved at a ladder leading down through the floor. “You go first.”

Lukas’s head spun from the day’s sudden turn. As he bent to grab the ladder he felt the contents of his breast pocket shift and shot a hand up to hold the watch, ring, and ID steady. What had he been thinking? What was he thinking now? He lowered himself down the long ladder, feeling like someone had initiated an automated routine in his brain, a rote program that had taken over his actions. From the bottom of the ladder, he watched as Bernard lowered himself down the first rungs before sliding the grate into place, sealing them both inside the dark dungeon beneath the already-fortressed server room.

“You are about to receive a great gift,” Bernard said in the darkness. “Just as I was once granted the same.”

He flicked on a light, and Lukas saw that his boss was grinning maniacally, the anger from before gone. Here was a new man before him, a confident and eager man.

“All the silo and everyone in it hinges on what I’m about to show you,” Bernard said. He beckoned Lukas down the brightly lit but narrow corridor toward a wider room beyond. The servers felt very far above. Lukas felt closed off from every other soul in the silo; he was curious, but also afraid. He wasn’t sure he wanted such responsibility and cursed himself for going along with this.

And yet, his feet moved. They carried him down that hidden passageway and into a room full of the strange and curious, a place that made the charting of stars seem insignificant, a den where the sense of the world’s scale, of
size,
took on wholly new proportions.

Juliette left her soup-slathered helmet on the floor and moved toward the pale-green glow of light. It seemed brighter than before. She wondered how much of the darkness had been because of her helmet. As her senses returned, she remembered that it wasn’t a piece of glass she’d been looking through, but some infernal screen that took the world as she saw it and overlaid it with half a lie. Maybe it had dimmed her view in the process.

She noticed the stench from her drenched suit followed her, the smell of rotten vegetables and mold—or possibly the toxic fumes from the outside world. Her throat burned a little as she crossed the cafeteria toward the stairwell. Her skin began to itch, and she couldn’t tell if it was from fear, her imagination, or truly something in the air. She didn’t dare risk finding out, so she held her breath and hurried as fast as her weary legs would take her, around the corner to where she knew the stairs would be.

This world is the same as my world,
she thought to herself, stumbling down the first flight of stairs in the wan glow of emergency-light strips.
God built more than one.

Her heavy boots, still dripping with soup, felt unsteady on the metal treads. At the landing on two, she paused and took in a few big gulps of air, less painful gulps, and considered how best to remove the infernal and bulky outfit that made every movement awkward, that reeked of the fetid smell of rot and outside air. She looked down at her arms. The thing had required help to put on. There were double zippers in the back, layers of Velcro, miles of heat tape. She looked at the knife in her hand, suddenly grateful that she hadn’t dropped it after using it to remove her helmet.

Gripping the knife with one clumsy glove, she carefully inserted the tip through the other sleeve, right above the top of her wrist. She forced the point through, pushing the blade over the top of her arm so it wouldn’t jab her even if it pierced all the way. The fabric was difficult to cut, but a tear finally formed as she worked the handle in small circles. She slid the knife into this tiny rip, the dull side of the blade facing her skin, and slid it down her arm and toward her knuckles. When the tip of the blade ripped through the fabric between her fingers, she was able to free her hand from the long gash she’d made, the sleeve flopping from her elbow.

Juliette sat down on the grating, moved the knife to her newly freed hand, and worked on the other side. She freed it as well while soup dripped from her shoulders and down her arms. She next started a tear at her chest, having better control of the knife now without the thick gloves on. She ripped the metal foil exterior away, peeling herself like an orange. The solid collar for her helmet had to stay—it was attached to her charcoal fabric undersuit as well as the reinforced zippers up her back—but piece by piece she removed the shiny outer coat, which was slathered with a nastiness she attributed partly to the soup and partly to her trek over the hills.

Next came her boots, which were cut free around the ankles until she was able to work them off, sawing a slit down the outside edge and popping one foot free, then the other.

Before she cleaned up the hanging tatters of fabric any further, or worried about the material still attached to the zipper at her back, she got up from the landing and hurried down the steps, putting more distance between herself and the air above, which seemed to scratch at her throat. She was another two flights down, swimming through the green glow of the stairwell, before she appreciated the fact that she was alive.