Wool (47 page)

“Walk! You okay?”

Jenkins held him by his overalls. Walker was pretty sure he would collapse if the boy let go.

“My magni—”

“Sir! We’ve gotta go! They’re inside!”

Walker turned toward the door, saw Harper helping Shirly to her feet. Her eyes were wide, stunned, a film of gray dust on her shoulders and in her dark hair. She was looking toward Walker, appearing as dazed as he felt.

“Get your things,” Jenkins said. “We’re falling back.” He scanned the room, his eyes drifting to the workbench.

“I fixed it,” Walker said, coughing into his fist. “It works.”

“A little too late, I think.”

Jenkins let go of his overalls, and Walker had to catch himself on his stool not to go tumbling back to the ground. The gunfire outside drew nearer. Boots thundered by, more shouting, another loud blast that could be felt through the floor. Jenkins and Harper were at the doorway shouting orders and waving their arms at the people running past. Shirly joined Walker at his workbench. Her eyes were on the radio.

“We need this,” she said, breathing hard.

Walker looked down at the glittering jewels on the floor. Two months’ wages for those magnifiers—

“Walk! What do I grab? Help me.”

He turned to find Shirly gathering up the radio parts, the wires between the boards folded up, tangled. There was a single loud pop from one of the good guns right outside his door, causing him to cower, his mind to wander.

“Walk!”

“The antenna,” he whispered, pointing to where the dust was still drifting from the rafters. Shirly nodded and jumped up on his workbench. Walker looked around the room, a room he had promised himself he would never leave again, a promise he really had meant to keep this time. What to grab? Stupid mementos. Junk. Dirty clothes. A pile of schematics. He grabbed his parts bin and dumped it on the floor. The radio components were swept in, the transformer unplugged from its outlet and added. Shirly was yanking down the antenna, the wires and metal rods bundled against her chest. He snatched his soldering iron, a few tools; Harper yelled that it was now or never.

Shirly grabbed Walker by the arm and pulled him along, toward the door.

And Walker realized it wasn’t going to be
never
.

The panic she felt from donning the suit was unexpected.

Juliette had anticipated some degree of fear from slipping into the water, but it was the simple act of putting on the cleaning suit that filled her with a hollow dread, that gave her a cold and empty ache in the pit of her stomach. She fought to control her breathing while Solo zipped up the back and pressed the layers of Velcro into place.

“Where’s my knife?” she asked him, patting the pockets on the front and searching among her tools.

“It’s over here,” he said. He bent down and fished it out of her gear bag, out from under a towel and change of clothes. He passed her the knife handle-first, and Juliette slotted it into the thick pocket she’d added on the suit’s belly. It was easier to breathe just having it within reach. This tool from the upper café was like a security blanket of sorts. She found herself checking for it the way she used to check her wrist for that old watch.

“Let’s wait with the helmet,” she told Solo as he lifted the clear dome from the landing. “Grab that rope first.” She pointed with her puffy mitts. The thick material and the two layers of undersuit were making her warm. She hoped that boded well for not freezing to death in the deep water.

Solo lifted the coils of spliced rope, a large adjustable wrench the length of his forearm knotted at the end.

“Which side?” he asked.

She pointed to where the gracefully curving steps plunged into the green-lit water. “Lower it over steady. And hold it out so it doesn’t get caught on the steps below.”

He nodded. Juliette checked her tools while he dropped the wrench into the water, the weight of the hunk of metal tugging the rope straight down to the very bottom of the great stairwell. In one pocket, she had a range of drivers. Each one was tied to the pocket with a few feet of string. She had a spanner in another pocket, cutters behind pocket number four. Looking down at herself, more memories flooded back from her walk outside. She could hear the sound of fine grit pelting her helmet, could sense her air supply running thin, could feel the clomp of her heavy boots on the packed earth …

She gripped the railing ahead of her and tried to think of something else. Anything else. Wire for power and hose for air. Concentrate. She would need a lot of both. She took a deep breath and checked the tall coils of tubing and electrical wire laid out on the deck. She had flaked them in figure eights so they would be impossible to tangle. Good. The compressor was ready; all Solo had to do was make sure everything fed down to her, didn’t get caught up—

“It’s on the bottom,” Solo said. She watched him knot the line to the stairway railing. He was in good spirits today. Lucid and energetic. This would be a good time to get it over with. Shifting the flood to the treatment plant would’ve been an inelegant, temporary solution. It was time to get those big pumps down below churning through that water properly, pumping it through the concrete walls and back into the earth beyond.

Juliette shuffled to the edge of the landing and looked down at the silvery surface of the foul water. Was this plan of hers crazy? Shouldn’t she be afraid? Or was it the years of waiting and doing this safely that was more terrifying to her? The prospect of going mad, inch by inch, seemed the greater risk. This would be just like going outside, she reminded herself, which she had already done and had survived. Except … this was safer. She was taking an unlimited supply of air, and there was nothing toxic down there, nothing to eat away at her.

She gazed at her reflection in the still water, the bulky suit making her look enormous. If Lukas were standing there with her, if he could see what she was about to do, would he try to talk her out of it? She thought he might. How well did they really know each other? They had had what, two, three encounters in person?

But then there were the dozens of talks since. Could she know him from just his voice? From stories about his childhood? From his intoxicating laughter when everything else in her day made her want to cry? Was this why wires and e-mails were expensive, to prevent this kind of life, this kind of relationship? How could she be standing there, thinking of a man she hardly knew rather than the insanity of the task before her?

Maybe Lukas had become her lifeline, some slender thread of hope connecting her to home. Or was he more like a tiny spot of light seen occasionally through the murk, a beacon guiding her return?

“Helmet?” Solo stood beside her, watching her, the clear plastic dome in his hands, a single flashlight strapped to its top.

Juliette reached for it. She made sure the flashlight was securely fastened and tried to clear her head of pointless ruminations.

“Hook up my air first,” she said. “And turn on the radio.”

He nodded. She held the dome while he clicked the air hose into the adapter she’d threaded through the collar. There was a hiss and spit of residual air from the line as it locked into place. His hand brushed the back of her neck as he reached in to flick on the radio. Juliette dipped her chin, squeezing the handmade switch sewn into her undersuit. “Hello, hello,” she said. There was a strange squeal from the unit on Solo’s hip as her voice blared out of it.

“Little loud,” he said, adjusting his volume.

She lifted the dome into place. It had been stripped of its screen and all the plastic linings. Once she’d scraped the paint off the exterior, she was left with an almost completely transparent half sphere of tough plastic. It felt good to know, clicking it into the collar, that whatever she saw out of it was really there.

“You good?”

Solo’s voice was deadened by the airtight connection between the helmet and the suit. She lifted her glove and gave him a thumbs-up. She pointed to the compressor.

He nodded, knelt down by the unit, and scratched his beard. She watched him flick the portable unit’s main power, push the priming bulb five times, then yank the starting cord. The little unit spat out a breath of smoke and whirred to life. Even with its rubber tires, it danced and rattled the landing, sending vibrations up through her boots. Juliette could hear the awful acoustics through her helmet, could imagine the violent racket echoing up through the abandoned silo.

Solo held the choke an extra second, just like she’d shown him, and then pushed it all the way in. While the machine pattered and chugged, he looked up at her, smiling through his beard, looking like one of the dogs in Supply staring up at its faithful owner.

She pointed to the red can of extra fuel and gave him another thumbs-up. He returned the gesture. Juliette shuffled toward the steps, her gloved hand on the railing for balance. Solo squeezed past and went to the railing and the knotted rope. He held out a hand to steady her while she lumbered down the slippery treads in the suit’s clunky boots.

Her hope was that it would be easier to move once she was in the water, but she had no way of knowing, just an intuitive feel for the physics of it all, the way she could gauge a machine’s intent simply by poring over it. She took the last dry steps, and then her boots broke the oily surface of the water and found the step below. She waded down two more, anticipating the frigid cold that would seep through, but it never came. The suit and her undergarments kept her toasty. Almost too warm, in fact—she could see a humid mist forming on the inside of her helmet. She dipped her chin into the radio switch and told Solo to open her valve to let the air in.

He fumbled at her collar and twisted the lever to allow the flow of air. It hissed by her ear, quite noisily, and she could feel the suit puff out around her. The overflow valve she’d screwed into the other side of the collar squealed as it opened and let out the excess pressure, preventing her suit—and her head, she suspected—from bursting.

“Weights,” she said, clicking the radio.

He ran back to the landing and returned with the round exercise weights. Kneeling on the last dry step, he strapped these below her knees with heavy Velcro, then looked up to see what was next.

Juliette struggled to lift one foot, then the other, making sure that the weights were secure.

“Wire,” she said, getting the hang of working the radio.

This was the most important part: the power from IT would run the lifeless pumps below. Twenty-four volts of juice. She had installed a switch on the landing so Solo could test it while she was down there. She didn’t want to travel with the wires live.

Solo unspooled a dozen feet of the two-connector wire and tied a loop around her wrist. His knots were good, both with the rope and the wire. Her confidence in the endeavor was growing by the minute, her discomfort in the suit lessening.

Solo smiled down through her clear plastic dome from two steps above, yellow teeth flashing in his scraggly beard. Juliette returned the smile. She stood still while he fumbled with the flashlight strapped to her helmet, clicking it on. The battery was freshly charged and would last a full day, much longer than she possibly needed.

“Okay,” she said. “Help me over.”

Releasing the radio contact with her chin, she turned and leaned against the railing, worked her belly up onto it, then eased her head over. It was an incredible sensation, throwing herself over that rail. It felt suicidal. This was the great stairwell; this was her silo; she was four levels up from Mechanical; all that space below her, that long plummet only madmen dived into, and she was going just as willingly.

Solo helped with her weighted feet. He splashed down onto the first wet step to assist her. Juliette threw her leg over the railing as he lifted. Suddenly, she was straddling that narrow bar of slippery steel, wondering if the water would truly hold her, if it would catch and slow her fall. And there was a moment of raw panic, the taste of metal in her mouth, the sinking of her stomach, and the dire need to urinate, all while Solo heaved her other foot over the railing, her gloved hands clawing madly for the rope he’d tied, her boots splashing noisily and violently into the silvery skin of the flooded waters.

“Shit!”

She blew her breath out into the helmet, gasping from the shock of splashing in so quickly, her hands and knees wrapping around the twisting rope, her body moving inside the puffy suit like a layer of too-large skin had become detached.

“You okay?” Solo shouted, his hands cupped around his beard.

She nodded, her helmet unmoving. She could feel the tug of the weights on her shins, trying to drag her down. There were a dozen things she wanted to say to Solo, reminders and tips, words of luck, but her mind was racing too fast to think of using the radio. Instead, she loosened her grip with her gloves and knees, felt the rope slide against her body with a distant squeak, and she began her long plummet down.

Lukas sat at the little desk constructed from an embarrassment of wood and stared down at a book stuffed with a fortune in crisp paper. The chair beneath him was probably worth more than he’d make in a lifetime, and he was
sitting
on it. If he moved, the joints of the dainty thing twisted and squeaked, like it could come apart at any moment.

He kept his boots firmly planted on either side, his weight on his toes, just in case.

Lukas flipped a page, pretending to read. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to be reading, he just didn’t want to be reading
this
. Entire shelves of more interesting works seemed to mock him from within their tin boxes. They sang out to be perused, for him to put away the Order with its rigid writing, bulleted lists, and internal labyrinth of page references that led in more circles than the great stairwell itself.

Each entry in the Order pointed to another page, every page another entry. Lukas flipped through a few and wondered if Bernard was keeping tabs on him. The head of IT sat on the other side of the small study, just one room of many in the well-stocked hideaway beneath the servers. While Lukas pretended to shadow for his new job, Bernard alternated between fiddling with the small computer on the other desk and going over to the radio mounted on the wall to give instructions to the security forces in the down deep.