Wool (30 page)

There was no answer. No light flicked on. She leaned on the large wheel, remembered Marnes’s instructions, how all the mechanisms worked, but those lessons felt like so long ago and she hadn’t thought them important at the time. But she remembered something: after the argon bath and the fire, didn’t the inner door unlock? Automatically? So the airlock could be scrubbed? This seemed like something she remembered Marnes saying. He had joked that it wasn’t as if anyone could come back inside once the fire had run its course. Was she remembering this or making it up? Was it the wishful thinking of an oxygen-starved mind?

Either way, the wheel on the door wouldn’t budge. Juliette pushed down with all her weight, but it definitely felt locked to her. She stepped back. The bench hanging from the wall where cleaners got suited up before their deaths looked inviting. She was tired from the walk, from the struggle to get inside. And why was she trying to get inside? She spun in place, indecisive. What was she doing?

She needed air. For some reason, she thought the silo might have some. She looked around at all the scattered bones of an uncountable number of bodies. How many dead? They were too jumbled to know. The skulls, she thought. She could count those and know. She shook this nonsense from her head. She was definitely losing her senses.

The wheel on the door is a stuck nut,
some receding part of her said.
It’s a frozen bolt.

And hadn’t she made a reputation as a young shadow for working them free?

Juliette told herself that this could be done. Grease, heat, leverage. Those were the secrets to a piece of metal that wouldn’t budge. She didn’t have any of the three, but she looked around anyway. There was no squeezing back through the outer door; she knew she wouldn’t make it a second time, not that kind of straining. So she had this room. The bench was secured to the wall along the back edge and hung from two chains. Juliette wiggled the chains but didn’t see how they could come free, or what good they would do her anyway.

In the corner, there was a pipe snaking up that led into a series of vents. It must be what delivered the argon, she thought. She wrapped her hands around the pipe, put her feet on the wall, and tugged.

The connection to the vent wiggled; the toxic air had corroded and weakened it. Juliette smiled, set her teeth, and yanked back ferociously.

The pipe came free of the vent and bent at its base. She felt a sudden thrill, like a wild rat standing over a large crumb. She grabbed the free end of the pipe and worked it back and forth, bending and wrenching the fastened end. Metal would snap if you could wiggle it even a little bit, if you did it long enough. She had felt the heat of weakened steel countless times while bending it over and over until it broke.

Sweat beaded on her brow and twinkled in the dim light allowed by her visor screen. It dripped down her nose, fogged the screen, and still she yanked and pushed, back and forth, growing frantic and desperate—

The pipe snapped, taking her by surprise. Just a faint pop bled through her helmet, and then the long piece of hollow metal was free. One end was crushed and twisted, the other whole and round. Juliette turned to the door, a tool now in hand. She slid the pipe through the wheel, leaving as much as she could hanging out the side, just short enough not to brush the wall. With both gloved hands wrapped around the pipe, she hoisted herself and bent at the waist over the pipe, her helmet touching the door. She bounced her weight on the lever, knowing it was a jerking motion that freed a bolt, not a steady force. She wiggled her way toward the end of the pipe, watching it bend a little, worried it might snap in half long before the door budged.

When she got toward the end—maximum leverage—she threw her weight up and down with all her strength, and she cursed as the pipe snapped. There was a loud clang, barely muffled by her suit, and then she collapsed to the floor, landing painfully on her elbow.

The pipe was at an angle beneath her, digging into her ribs. Juliette tried to catch her breath. Her sweat dripped against the visor screen, blurring her view. She got up and saw that the pipe was unbroken. She wondered if it had slipped free, but it was still threaded through the spokes of the large wheel.

Disbelieving, excited, she slid the pipe out the other side. She wrapped her hands around the spokes and leaned into it.

And the wheel.

It budged.

Walker made it to the end of the hallway and found himself leaving the comforting confines of a tight corridor to enter the wider entrance hall to Mechanical. The room, he saw, was full of young shadows. They hung out in groups, whispering to themselves. Three boys crouched near one wall, throwing stones for chits. Walker could hear a dozen interwoven voices spilling out of the mess hall across the room. The casters had sent these young ears away while they discussed adult things. He took a deep breath and hurried through that damned open space, focusing on each step, moving one foot ahead of him at a time, each small patch of floor a thing to conquer.

After a short lifetime, he finally crashed into the wall on the other side and hugged the steel panels in relief. Behind him, the shadows laughed, but he was too frightened to care. Sliding across the riveted steel, he grabbed the edge of the mess-hall door and pulled himself inside. The relief was enormous. Even though the mess hall was several times the size of his workshop, it was at least full of crowding furniture and people he knew. With his back to the wall, his shoulder against the open door, he could almost pretend it was smaller. He slumped to the ground and rested, the men and women of Mechanical arguing among themselves, voices rising, agitated, competing.

“She’d be out of air by now, anyway,” Rick was saying.

“You don’t know that,” Shirly said. She was standing on a chair so she could be at least as tall as the others. She surveyed the room. “We don’t know what advances they’ve made.”

“That’s because they won’t tell us!”

“Maybe it’s gotten better out there.”

The room quieted with this last. Waiting, perhaps, to see if the voice would dare speak again and break its anonymity. Walker studied the eyes of those facing his way. They were wide with a mixture of fear and excitement. A double cleaning had removed some taboos. Shadows had been sent away. The adults were feeling frisky and free to speak forbidden thoughts.

“What if it
has
gotten better?” someone else asked.

“Since two weeks ago? I’m telling you guys, it’s the suits! They figured out the suits!” Marck, an oilman, looked around at the others, anger in his eyes. “I’m sure of it,” he said. “They’ve sorted the suits and now we have a chance!”

“A chance to what?” Knox growled. The grizzled head of Mechanical sat at one of the tables, digging into a breakfast bowl. “A chance to send more of our people out to wander the hills until they run out of air?” He shook his head and took another bite, then jabbed at the lot of them with his spoon. “What we need to be talking about,” he said, chewing, “is this sham of an election, this rat-ass mayor, and us kept in the dark down here—!”

“They didn’t figure out the suits,” Walker hissed, still breathless from his ordeal.

“
We’re
the ones who keep this place humming,” Knox continued, wiping his beard. “And what do we get? Busted fingers and ratshit pay. And now? Now they come and take our people and send them out for a view we don’t care about!” He slammed the table with his mighty fist, sending his bowl hopping.

Walker cleared his throat. He remained crouched on the floor, his back against the wall. No one had seen him enter or heard him the first time. Now, while the room was scared quiet by Knox, he tried again.

“They did
not
figure out the suits,” he said, a little louder this time.

Shirly saw him from her perch. Her chin dropped, her mouth hanging open. She pointed, and a dozen other heads turned to follow.

They gaped at him. Walker was still trying to catch his breath and must’ve looked near death. Courtnee, one of the young plumbers who was always kind to him whenever she stopped by his workshop, left her seat and hurried to his side. She whispered his name in surprise and helped him to his feet, urging him to come to the table and take her chair.

Knox slid his bowl away from himself and slapped the table. “Well, people are just wandering all over the damned place now, aren’t they?”

Walker looked up sheepishly to see the old foreman chief smiling through his beard at him. There were two dozen other people staring at him, all at once. Walker half waved, then stared down at the table. It was suddenly too many people.

“All this shouting rouse you, old man? You setting off over the hills, too?”

Shirly jumped down from her chair. “Oh, God, I’m so sorry. I forgot to take him his breakfast.” She hurried toward the kitchen to fetch him some food even as Walker tried to wave her off. He wasn’t hungry.

“It isn’t …” His voice cracked. He tried again. “I came because I
heard,
” he whispered. “Jules. Out of sight.” He made a gesture with his hand, arching it over some imaginary hill running across the table. “But it wasn’t them in IT that figured
nothing,
” he said. He made eye contact with Marck and tapped his own chest. “I did it.”

A whispered conversation in the corner fell quiet. No one sipped their juice, no one moved. They were still half-stunned to see Walker out of his workshop, much less among the crowd of them. Not one of them had been old enough to remember the last time he’d roamed about. They knew him as the crazy electrical man who lived in a cave and refused to cast shadows anymore.

“What’re you
sayin’
?” Knox asked.

Walker took a deep breath. He was about to speak when Shirly returned and placed a bowl of hot oats in front of him, the spoon standing off the rim, the concoction was so thick. Just how he liked it. He pressed his hands against either side of the bowl, feeling the heat in his palms. He was suddenly very tired from lack of sleep.

“Walk?” Shirly asked. “You okay?”

He nodded and waved her away, lifted his head and met Knox’s gaze.

“Jules came to me the other day.” He bobbed his head, gaining confidence. He tried to ignore how many people were watching him speak, and the way the overhead lights twinkled in his watering eyes. “She had a theory about these suits, about IT.” With one hand, he stirred his oats, steeling his resolve to say the unthinkable. But then, how old was he? Why did he care for taboos?

“You remember the heat tape?” He turned to Rachele, who worked first shift and knew Juliette well. She nodded. “Jules sorted that it weren’t no accident, the way the tape broke down.” He nodded to himself. “She sorted it all, she did.”

He took a bite of his food, not hungry but enjoying the burn of the hot spoon on his tongue. The room was silent, waiting. The whispers and quiet play of the shadows outside could just barely be heard.

“I’ve built up favors and favors with Supply over the years,” he explained. “Favors and favors. So I called them all in. Told them we’d be even.” He looked at this group of men and women from Mechanical, could hear more standing in the hallway who’d arrived late but could read from the frozen demeanors in the room to stay put. “We’ve taken stuff out of IT’s supply chain before. I know I have. All the best electronics and wire go to them that make the suits—”

“The ratshit bastards,” someone muttered, which got more than a few of them bobbing their heads.

“So I told Supply to return the favor. Soon as I heard they took her—” Walker paused and swiped at his eyes. “Soon as I heard, I wired in those favors, said to replace anything them bastards asked for with some of our own. Best of the best. And don’t let ’em be the wiser.”

“You did
what
?” Knox asked.

Walker dipped his head over and over; it felt good to let out the truth. “They’ve been making those suits to fail. Not ’cause it ain’t bad out there, that’s not what I figure. But they don’t want your body wandering out of sight, no sir.” He stirred his oats. “They want us all right here where they can see us.”

“So she’s okay?” Shirly asked.

Walker frowned and slowly shook his head.

“I
told
you guys,” someone said. “She’d have run out of air by now.”

“She was dead
anyway,
” someone else countered, and the argument began to build again. “This just proves they’re full of shit!”

Walker had to agree with that.

“Everybody, let’s stay calm,” Knox roared. But he appeared the least calm of them all. More workers filed in now that the moment of silence appeared to be over. They gathered around the table, faces full of worry.

“This is it,” Walker said to himself, seeing what was happening, what he had started. He watched his friends and coworkers get all riled up, barking at the empty air for answers, their passions stirred. “This is it,” he said again, and he could feel it brewing, ready to burst out. “Thisisit, thisisit—”

Courtnee, still hovering over him, tending to him like he was an invalid, held his wrist with those delicate hands of hers.

“What is it?” she asked. She waved down the others so she could hear. She leaned close to Walker. “Walk, tell me, what is it? What is this? What’re you trying to say?”

“This is how it starts,” he whispered, the room quiet once more. He looked up at all the faces, scanned them, seeing in their fury, in all the exploded taboos, that he was right to worry.

“This is how the uprising begins …”

Lukas arrived at thirty-four breathless and clutching the small box, more exhausted from the laws he had broken than this habitual climb to work. He could still taste the metallic tang of adrenaline in his mouth from hiding behind the servers and rummaging through Juliette’s things. He patted his chest, feeling the items there, and also his racing heart.