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

The idea that Juliette may still be in the silo had slipped away, but the news that she hadn’t cleaned, that she had made it over the hills—this filled him with something else. It touched the part of him that yearned to map the stars. It meant no one would ever have to watch her waste away—

And she knew she was right about the cost of sending wires, that they didn’t want people talking. Thinking was fine; they would bury you with your thoughts. But no collaboration, no groups coordinating together, no exchange of ideas.

“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.”

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

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.

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.

“They didn’t give us a chance. That’s not what this is.” He waved at the room around him. “These are prisons. Cages, not homes. Not meant to protect us, but meant to force us, by pain of death, to bring about their vision.”

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.

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.