Wool (37 page)

“Stay,” Juliette said. “I mean you no harm.”

The man looked at her wounded hand and at the knife. Juliette glanced down to see a thin trace of blood snaking toward her elbow. The wound ached, but she’d had worse in her time as a Mechanic.

“S-s-sorry,” the man muttered. He licked his mouth and swallowed. The knife was trembling uncontrollably.

“My name’s Jules,” she said, realizing this man was much more frightened of her than the other way around. “What’s yours?”

He glanced at the knife blade held sideways between them, almost as if checking a mirror. He shook his head.

“No name,” he whispered, his voice a dry rasp. “No need.”

“Are you alone?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Solo,” he said. “Years.” He looked up at her. “Where did”—he licked his lips again, cleared his throat; his eyes watered and glinted in the light—“you come from? What level?”

“You’ve been by yourself for
years
?” Juliette said in wonder. She couldn’t imagine. “I didn’t come from any level,” she told him. “I came from another silo.” She enunciated this last softly and slowly, worried what this news might do to such a seemingly fragile man.

But Solo nodded as if this made sense. It was not the reaction Juliette had expected.

“The outside …” Solo looked again at the knife. He reached out of the hole and set it on the grating, slid it away from both of them. “Is it safe?”

Juliette shook her head. “No,” she said. “I had a suit. It wasn’t a far walk. But still, I shouldn’t be alive.”

Solo bobbed his head. He looked up at her, wet tracks running from the corners of his eyes and disappearing into his beard. “None of us should,” he said. “Not a one.”

“What is this place?” Lukas asked Bernard. The two of them stood before a large chart hanging on the wall like a tapestry. The diagrams were precise, the lettering ornate. It showed a grid of circles evenly spaced with lines between them and intricacies inside each. Several of the circles were crossed out with thick red marks of ink. It was just the sort of majestic diagramming he hoped to achieve one day with his star charts.

“This is our Legacy,” Bernard said simply.

Lukas had often heard him speak similarly of the mainframes upstairs.

“Are these supposed to be the servers?” he asked, daring to rub his hands across a piece of paper the size of a small bedsheet. “They’re laid out like the servers.”

Bernard stepped beside him and rubbed his chin. “Hmm. Interesting. So they are. I never noticed that before.”

“What are they?” Lukas looked closer and saw each was numbered. There was also a jumble of squares and rectangles in one corner with parallel lines spaced between them, keeping the blocky shapes separate and apart. These figures contained no detail within them, but the word
Atlanta
was written in large letters beneath.

“We’ll get to that. Come, let me show you something.”

At the end of the room was a door. Bernard led him through this, turning on more lights as he went.

“Who else comes down here?” Lukas asked, following along.

Bernard glanced back over his shoulder. “No one.”

Lukas didn’t like that answer. He glanced back over his own shoulder, feeling like he was descending into something people didn’t return from.

“I know this must seem sudden,” Bernard said. He waited for Lukas to join him, threw his small arm around Lukas’s shoulder. “But things changed this morning. The world is changing. And she rarely does it pleasantly.”

“Is this about … the cleaning?” He’d nearly said
Juliette
. The picture of her felt hot against his breastbone.

Bernard’s face grew stern. “There was no cleaning,” he said abruptly. “And now all hell will break loose, and people will die. And the silos, you see, were designed from the ground down to prevent this.”

“Designed,” Lukas repeated. His heart beat once, twice. His brain whirred through its circuits and finally computed that Bernard had said something that had made no sense.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Did you say
silos
?”

“You’ll want to familiarize yourself with this.” Bernard gestured toward a small desk which had a fragile-looking wooden chair tucked up against it. There was a book on the desk unlike any Lukas had ever seen, or even heard of. It was nearly as thick as it was wide. Bernard patted the cover, then inspected his palm for dust. “I’ll give you the spare key, which you are never to remove from your neck. Come down when you can and read. Our history is in here, as well as every action you are to take in any emergency.”

Lukas approached the book, a lifetime’s worth of paper, and hinged open the cover. The contents were machine printed, the ink pitch-black. He flipped through a dozen pages of listed contents until he found the first page of the main text. Oddly, he recognized the opening lines immediately.

“It’s the Pact,” he said, looking up at Bernard. “I already know quite a bit of—”

“This is the Pact,” Bernard told him, pinching the first half inch of the thick book. “The rest is the Order.”

He stepped back.

Lukas hesitated, digesting this, then reached forward and flopped the tome open near its middle.

• In the Event of an Earthquake:

° For casement cracking and outside leak,
see
airlock breach (p. 2,180)

° For collapse of one or more levels,
see
support columns
under
sabotage (p. 751)

° For fire outbreak,
see
…

“Sabotage?” Lukas flipped a few pages and read something about air handling and asphyxiation. “Who came up with all this stuff?”

“People who experienced many bad things.”

“Like … ?” He wasn’t sure if he was allowed to say this, but it felt like taboos were allowed to be broken down there. “Like the people before the uprising?”

“The people before
those
people,” Bernard said. “The one people.”

Lukas closed the book. He shook his head, wondering if this was all a gag, some kind of initiation. The priests usually made more sense than this. The children’s books, too.

“I’m not
really
supposed to learn all this, am I?”

Bernard laughed. His countenance had fully transformed from earlier. “You just need to know what’s in there so you can access it when you need to.”

“What does it say about this morning?” He turned to Bernard, and it dawned on him suddenly that no one knew of his fascination, his enchantment, with Juliette. The tears had evaporated from his cheeks; the guilt of possessing her forbidden things had overpowered his shame for falling so hard for someone he hardly knew. And now this secret had wandered out of sight. It could be betrayed only by the flush he felt on his cheeks as Bernard studied him and pondered his question.

“Page seventy-two,” Bernard said, the humor draining from his face and replaced with the frustration from earlier.

Lukas turned back to the book. This was a test. A shadowing rite. It had been a long time since he’d performed under a caster’s glare. He began flipping through the pages and saw at once that the section he was looking for came right after the Pact, was at the very beginning of the Order.

He found the page. At the very top, in bold print, it said:

• In the Event of a Failed Cleaning:

And below this rested terrible words strung into awful meaning. Lukas read the instructions several times, just to make sure. He glanced over at Bernard, who nodded sadly, before Lukas turned back to the print.

• In the Event of a Failed Cleaning:

° Prepare for War.

Juliette followed Solo through the hole in the server-room floor. There was a long ladder there and a passageway that led to thirty-five, a part of thirty-five she suspected was not accessible from the stairwell. Solo confirmed this as they ducked through the narrow passageway and followed a twisting and brightly lit corridor. A blockage seemed to have come unstuck from the man’s throat, releasing a lone-stricken torrent. He talked about the servers above them, saying things that made little sense to Juliette, until the passageway opened into a cluttered room.

“My home,” Solo said, spreading his hands. There was a mattress on the floor in one corner, a tangled mess of sheets and pillows trailing from it. A makeshift kitchen had been arranged across two shelving units: jugs of water, canned food, empty jars and boxes. The place was a wreck and smelled foul, but Juliette figured Solo couldn’t see or smell any of that. There was a wall of shelves on the other side of the room stocked with metal canisters the size of large ratchet sets, some of them partially open.

“You live here alone?” Juliette asked. “Is there no one else?” She couldn’t help but hear the thin hope in her voice.

Solo shook his head.

“What about further down?” Juliette inspected her wound. The bleeding had almost stopped.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “Sometimes I do. I’ll find a tomato missing, but I figure it’s the rats.” He stared at the corner of the room. “Can’t catch them all,” he said. “More and more of them—”

“Sometimes you think there’s more of you, though? More survivors?” She wished he would focus.

“Yeah.” He rubbed his beard, looked around the room like there was something he should he should have been doing for her, something you offered guests. “I find things moved sometimes. Find things left out. The grow lights left on. Then I remember
I
did them.”

He laughed to himself. It was the first natural thing she’d seen him do, and Jules figured he’d been doing a lot of it over the years. You laughed either to keep yourself sane or because you’d given up on staying that way. Either way, you laughed.

“Thought the knife in the door was something I did. Then I found the pipe. Wondered if it was left behind by a really, really big rat.”

Juliette smiled. “I’m no rat,” she said. She adjusted her tablecloth, patted her head, and wondered what had happened to her other scrap of cloth.

Solo seemed to consider this.

“So how many years has it been?” she asked.

“Thirty-four,” he said, no pause.

“Thirty-four
years
? Since you’ve been
alone
?”

He nodded, and the floor seemed to fall away from her. Her head spun with the concept of that much time with no other person around.

“How
old
are you?” she asked. He didn’t seem all that much older than her.

“Fifty,” he said. “Next month, I’m pretty sure.” He smiled. “This is fun, talking.” He pointed around the room. “I talk to things sometimes, and whistle.” He looked straight at her. “I’m a good whistler.”

Juliette realized she probably had only just been
born
when whatever happened here took place. “How exactly have you
survived
all these years?” she asked.

“I dunno. Didn’t set out to survive for years. Tried to last hours. They stack up. I eat. I sleep. And I …” He looked away, went to one of the shelves and sorted through some cans, many of them empty. He found one with the lid hinged open, no label, and held it out toward her. “Bean?” he asked.

Her impulse was to decline, but the eager look on his poor face made it impossible. “Sure,” she said, and she realized how hungry she was. She could still taste the brackish water from earlier, the tang of stomach acid, the unripe tomato. He stepped closer, and she dug into the wet juice in the can and came out with a raw green bean. She popped it into her mouth and chewed.

“And I poop,” he said bashfully while she was swallowing. “Not pretty.” He shook his head and fished for a bean. “I’m by myself, so I just go in apartment bathrooms until I can’t stand the smell.”

“In
apartments
?” Juliette asked.

Solo looked for a place to set down the beans. He finally did, on the floor, among a small pile of other garbage and bachelor debris.

“Nothing flushes. No water. I’m by myself.” He looked embarrassed.

“Since you were sixteen,” Juliette said, having done the math. “What happened here thirty-four years ago?”

He lifted his arms. “What always happens. People go crazy. It only needs to happen once.” He smiled. “We get no credit for being sane, do we? I get no credit. Even from me. From myself. I hold it together and hold it together and I make it another day, another year, and there’s no reward. Nothing great about me being normal. About not being crazy.” He frowned. “Then you have one bad day, and you worry for yourself, you know? It only takes one.”

He suddenly sat down on the floor, crossed his legs, and twisted the fabric of his overalls where they bunched up at his knees. “Our silo had one bad day. Was all it took.” He looked up at Juliette. “No credit for all the years before that. Nope. You wanna sit?”

He gestured at the floor. Again, she couldn’t say no. She sat down, away from the reeking bed, and rested her back against the wall. There was so much to digest.

“How did you survive?” she asked. “That bad day, I mean. And since.”

She immediately regretted asking. It wasn’t important to know. But she felt some need, maybe to glimpse what awaited her, maybe because she feared that surviving in this place could be worse than dying on the outside.

“Staying scared,” he said. “My dad’s caster was the head of IT. Of this place.” He nodded. “My dad was a big shadow. Knew about these rooms, one of maybe two or three who did. In just the first few minutes of fighting, he showed me this place, gave me his keys. He made a diversion, and suddenly I became the only one who knew about this place.” He looked down at his lap a moment, then back up. Juliette realized why he seemed so much younger. It wasn’t just the fear, the shyness, that made him seem that way—it was in his eyes. He was locked in the perpetual terror of his teenage ordeal. His body was simply growing old around the frozen husk of a frightened little boy.

He licked his lips. “None of them made it, did they? The ones who got out?” Solo searched her face for answers. She could feel the dire hope leaking out of his pores.