Wool Omnibus Edition (Wool 1 - 5) (Silo series)

his chin. “The view didn’t stay on for long.

“Good luck getting IT to power down shit,” Juliette said. She wiped her chin with the back of her wrist, then wiped this on her coveralls. She looked down at the grease transferred to the denim. “Pardon my language, Mayor.” Jahns wanted to tell her it was quite all right, but the woman’s attitude, her power, reminded her too much of a former self t

It was strange to talk like this with someone his senior, someone who knew so much more, was so much wiser. He imagined this was the sort of conversation a man had with his father—only not about the planned and carried out destruction of the entire world.

But no, there were appearances to keep, illusions to maintain. He wasn’t sure why, but it was what his wife had done, what all the other cleaners before him had done.

“We’ll go down and get us a proper gauge of this Juliette, you and me. Because sometimes, sitting here, looking out on what the world makes us do—it needles me deep, Marnes. It needles me straight through.”

Better to join a ghost than be haunted by them, Jahns now knew. Better no life than an empty one—

Juliette nodded and loosened the belt from around Marnes’s neck. The flesh was purple beneath it. She felt for a pulse, remembering Roger looking just like this when she’d found him down in Mechanical, completely still and unresponsive. It took her a moment to be sure that she was looking at the second dead body she had ever seen.

If she gave a speech, if it weren’t full of the forbidden, it would be this: That no two better people had ever gone to cleaning of their own free wills, and what did that say about the lot of them who remained?

Jahns pressed on, skipping the tour and lunch she’d planned, thinking only briefly of the small rabbit that somehow had escaped from another farm, made it twenty floors up without being spotted, and ate its fill for three weeks while it confounded half a silo.