Wool (51 page)

The light above the jack started blinking. A familiar buzzing throbbed in Lukas’s ears. He waited for her voice, for Juliette to answer.

A click.

“Name.”

A thrill of fear ran up Lukas’s back, bumps erupting across his arms. The voice, deep and hollow, impatient and aloof, came and went like a glimpse of a star. Lukas licked his lips.

“Lukas Kyle,” he said, trying not to stammer.

There was a pause. He imagined someone, somewhere, writing this down or flipping through files or doing something awful with the information. The temperature behind the server soared. Bernard was smiling at him, oblivious to the silence on his end.

“You shadowed in IT.”

It felt like a statement, but Lukas nodded and answered. “Yessir.”

He wiped his palm across his forehead and then the seat of his overalls. He desperately wanted to sit down, to lean back against server number forty, to relax. But Bernard was smiling at him, his mustache lifting, his eyes wide behind his glasses.

“What is your primary duty to the silo?”

Bernard had prepped him on likely questions.

“To maintain the Order.”

Silence. No feedback, no sense if he was right or wrong.

“What do you protect above all?”

The voice was flat and yet powerfully serious. Dire and somehow calm. Lukas felt his mouth go dry.

“Life and Legacy,” he recited. But it felt wrong, this rote façade of knowledge. He wanted to go into detail, to let this voice, like a strong and sober father, understand that he
knew
why this was important. He wasn’t dumb. He had more to say than memorized facts—

“What does it take to protect these things we hold so dear?”

He paused.

“It takes sacrifice,” Lukas whispered. He thought of Juliette—and the calm demeanor he was projecting for Bernard nearly crumbled. There were some things he wasn’t sure about, things he
didn’t
understand. This was one of them. It felt like a lie, his answer. He wasn’t sure the sacrifice was worth it, the danger so great that they had to let people,
good
people, go to their—

“How much time have you had in the Suit Labs?”

The voice had changed, relaxed somewhat. Lukas wondered if the ceremony was over. Was that
it
? Had he passed? He blew out his held breath, hoping the microphone didn’t pick it up, and tried to relax.

“Not much, sir. Bernar— Uh, my boss, he’s wanting me to schedule time in the labs after, you know …”

He looked to Bernard, who was pinching one side of his glasses and watching him.

“Yes. I do know. How is that problem in your lower levels going?”

“Um, well, I’m only kept apprised of the overall progress, and it sounds good.” He cleared his throat and thought of all the sounds of gunfire and violence he’d heard through the radio in the room below. “That is, it sounds like progress is being made, that it won’t be much longer.”

A long pause. Lukas forced himself to breathe deeply, to smile at Bernard.

“Would you have done anything differently, Lukas? From the beginning?”

Lukas felt his body sway, his knees go a little numb. He was back on that conference table, black steel pressed against his cheek, a line from his eye extending through a small cross, through a tiny hole, pointing like a laser at a small woman with white hair and a bomb in her hand. Bullets were flying down that line. His bullets.

“Nosir,” he finally said. “It was all by the Order, sir. Everything’s under control.”

He waited. Somewhere, he felt, his measure was being taken.

“You are next in line for the control and operation of silo eighteen,” the voice intoned.

“Thank you, sir.”

Lukas reached for the headphones, was preparing to take them off and hand them to Bernard in case he needed to say something, to hear that it was official.

“Do you know the worst part of my job?” the hollow voice asked.

Lukas dropped his hands.

“What’s that, sir?”

“Standing here, looking at a silo on this map, and drawing a red cross through it. Can you imagine what that feels like?”

Lukas shook his head. “I can’t, sir.”

“It feels like a parent losing thousands of children, all at once.”

A pause.

“You will have to be cruel to your children so as not to lose them.”

Lukas thought of his father.

“Yessir.”

“Welcome to Operation Fifty of the World Order, Lukas Kyle. Now, if you have a question or two, I have the time to answer, but briefly.”

Lukas wanted to say that he had no questions; he wanted to get off the line; he wanted to call and speak with Juliette, to feel a puff of sanity breathed into this crazy and suffocating room. But he remembered what Bernard had taught him about admitting ignorance, how this was the key to knowledge.

“Just one, sir. And I’ve been told it isn’t important, and I understand why that’s true, but I believe it will make my job here easier if I know.”

He paused for a response, but the voice seemed to be waiting for him to get to the question.

Lukas cleared his throat. “Is there … ?” He pinched the mic and moved it closer to his lips, glanced at Bernard. “How did this all begin?”

He wasn’t sure—it could have been a fan on the server whirring to life—but he thought he heard the man with the deep voice sigh.

“How badly do you wish to know?”

Lukas feared answering this question honestly. “It isn’t crucial,” he said, “but I would appreciate a sense of what we’re accomplishing, what we survived. It feels like it gives me—gives us a purpose, you know?”

“The reason
is
the purpose,” the man said cryptically. “Before I tell you, I’d like to hear what you think.”

Lukas swallowed. “What I think?”

“Everyone has ideas. Are you suggesting you don’t?”

A hint of humor could be heard in that hollow voice.

“I think it was something we saw coming,” Lukas said. He watched Bernard, who frowned and looked away.

“That’s one possibility.”

Bernard removed his glasses and began wiping them on the sleeve of his undershirt, his eyes at his feet.

“Consider this …” The deep voice paused. “What if I told you that there were only fifty silos in all the world, and that here we are in this infinitely small corner of it.”

Lukas thought about this. It felt like another test.

“I would say that we were the only ones …” He almost said that they were the only ones with the resources, but he’d seen enough in the Legacy to know this wasn’t true. Many parts of the world had buildings rising above their hills. Many more could have been prepared. “I’d say we were the only ones who
knew,
” Lukas suggested.

“Very good. And why might that be?”

He hated this. He didn’t want to puzzle it out, he just wanted to be told.

And then, like a cable splicing together, like electricity zipping through connections for the very first time, the truth hit him.

“It’s because …” He tried to make sense of this answer in his head, tried to imagine that such an idea could possibly verge on truth. “It’s not because we knew,” Lukas said, sucking in a gasp of air. “It’s because we
did it
.”

“Yes,” the voice said. “And now you know.”

He said something else, just barely audible, like it was being said to someone else. “Our time is up, Lukas Kyle. Congratulations on your assignment.”

The headphones were sticky against his head, his face clammy with sweat.

“Thank you,” he managed to say.

“Oh, and Lukas?”

“Yessir?”

“Going forward, I suggest you concentrate on what’s beneath your feet. No more of this business with the stars, okay, son? We know where most of them are.”

“Hello? Solo? Please say something.”

There was no mistaking that voice, even through the small speakers in the dismantled headset. It echoed bodiless in the control room, the same control room that had housed that very voice for so many years. The location was what nailed it for Shirly; she stared at the tiny speakers spliced into the magical radio, knowing it couldn’t be anyone else.

Neither she nor Walker dared breathe. They waited what felt like forever before she finally broke the silence.

“That was Juliette,” she whispered. “How can we … ? Is her voice
trapped
down here? In the air? How long ago would that have been?”

Shirly didn’t understand how any of the science worked; it was all beyond her pay grade. Walker continued to stare at the headset, unmoving, not saying a word, tears shining in his beard.

“Are these … these
ripples
we’re grabbing with the antenna, are they just bouncing around down here?”

She wondered if the same was true of
all
the voices they’d heard. Maybe they were simply picking up conversations from the
past
. Was that possible? Like some kind of electrical echo? Somehow, this seemed far less shocking than the alternative.

Walker turned to her, a strange expression on his face. His mouth hung partway open, but there was a curl at the edges of his lips, a curl that began to rise.

“It doesn’t work like that,” he said. The curl transformed into a smile. “This is
now
. This is
happening
.” He grabbed Shirly’s arm. “You heard it too, didn’t you? I’m not crazy. That really was her, wasn’t it? She’s alive. She made it.”

“No …” Shirly shook her head. “Walk, what’re you saying? That Juliette’s
alive
? Made it where?”

“You heard.” He pointed at the radio. “Before. The conversations. The cleaning. There’s more of them
out there
. More of
us
. She’s
with
them, Shirly. This is
happeningrightnow
.”

“Alive.”

Shirly stared at the radio, processing this. Her friend was still
somewhere
. Still breathing. It had been so solid in her head, this vision of Juliette’s body just over the hills, lying in silent repose, the wind flecking away at her. And now she was picturing her moving, breathing, talking into a radio somewhere.

“Can we talk to her?” she asked.

She knew it was a dumb question. But Walker seemed to startle, his old limbs jumping.

“Oh, God. God, yes.” He set the mishmash of components down on the floor, his hands trembling, but with what Shirly now read as excitement. The fear in
both
of them was gone, drained from the room, the rest of the world beyond that small space fading to meaninglessness.

Walker dug into the parts bin. He dumped some tools out and pawed into the bottom of the container.

“No,” he said. He turned and scanned the parts on the ground. “No, no, no.”

“What is it?” Shirly slid away from the string of components so he could better see. “What’re we missing? There’s a microphone right there.” She pointed to the partially disassembled headphones.

“The transmitter. It’s a little board. I think it’s on my workbench.”

“I swiped everything into the bin.” Her voice was high and tense. She moved toward the plastic bucket.

“My
other
workbench. It wasn’t needed. All Jenks wanted was to
listen in
.” He waved at the radio. “I did what he wanted. How could I have known I’d need to transmit—?”

“You couldn’t,” Shirly said. She rested her hand on his arm. She could tell he was heading toward a bad place. She had seen him go there often enough, knew he had shortcuts he could take to get there in no time. “Is there anything in here we can use? Think, Walk. Concentrate.”

He shook his head, wagged his finger at the headphones. “This mic is dumb. It just passes the sound through. Little membranes vibrating …” He turned and looked at her. “Wait—there
is
something.”

“Down here? Where?”

“The mining storehouse would have them. Transmitters.” He pretended to hold a box and twist a switch. “For the blasting caps. I repaired one just a month ago. It would work.”

Shirly rose to her feet. “I’ll go get it,” she said. “You stay here.”

“But the stairwell—”

“I’ll be safe. I’m going
down,
not up.”

He bobbed his head.

“Don’t change anything with that.” She pointed to the radio. “No looking for more voices. Just hers. Leave it there.”

“Of course.”

Shirly bent down and squeezed his shoulder. “I’ll be right back.”

Outside, she found dozens of faces turning her way, frightened and questioning looks in their wide eyes, their slack mouths. She felt like shouting over the hum of the generator that Juliette was alive, that they weren’t alone, that other people lived and breathed in the forbidden outside. She wanted to, but she didn’t have the time. She hurried to the rail and found Courtnee.

“Hey—”

“Everything okay in there?” Courtnee asked.

“Yeah, fine. Do me a favor, will you? Keep an eye on Walker for me.”

Courtnee nodded. “Where are you … ?”

But Shirly was already gone, running to the main door. She squeezed through a group huddled in the entranceway. Jenkins was outside with Harper. They stopped talking as she hurried past.

“Hey!” Jenkins seized her arm. “Where the hell’re
you
going?”

“Mine storeroom.” She twisted her arm out of his grasp. “I won’t be long—”

“You won’t be
going
. We’re about to blow that stairwell. These idiots are falling right into our hands.”

“You’re
what
?”

“The stairwell,” Harper repeated. “It’s rigged to blow. Once they get down there and start working their way through …” He put his hands together in a ball, then expanded the sphere in a mock explosion.

“You don’t understand.” She faced Jenkins. “It’s for the radio.”

He frowned. “Walk had his chance.”

“We’re picking up a
lot
of chatter,” she told him. “He needs this one piece. I’ll be right back, swear.”

Jenkins looked at Harper. “How long before we do this?”

“Five minutes, sir.” His chin moved back and forth, almost imperceptibly.

“You’ve got four,” he said to Shirly. “But make sure—”

She didn’t hear the rest. Her boots were already pounding the steel, carrying her toward the stairwell. She flew past the oil rig with its sad and lowered head, past the row of confused and twitching men, their guns all pointing the way.