Wool

Marnes and Jahns descend the silo’s staircase, which is crowded with tourists going up after the cleaning. Their hands touch occasionally and Jahns fantasizes that she married Marnes in her youth instead of her late husband. The trip is physically difficult for them, and they know the way up will be harder. They pass the garment district and an empty food shop next to it. Jahns realizes of the cleaning, “the barbaric practice brought more than psychological relief[…]it also buttressed the silo’s economy” (54).

They stop at the nursery on the 20th floor, where Juliette’s father works. Jahns has found out from Juliette’s file that Juliette has not seen her father in 20 years and wants to know why. Juliette’s father, Doctor Nichols, is an “imposing man” (57) who shows no emotion. He explains that when Juliette was 12, her little brother was born prematurely and died. Her mother killed herself a week later. She blamed the poor condition that the baby’s incubator was in and applied to work in Mechanical instead of the nursery. Doctor Nichols has only seen her once since, at her mother’s funeral. Jahns wonders whether Marnes’s attraction to Juliette is clouding his judgment and whether her own feelings for him is clouding hers.

Jahns starts to doubt that she is psychically fit enough for this journey. She and Marnes drink from the canteens on each other’s backpacks. On the 33rd floor they reach IT, “the most sparsely populated levels of the silo, where less than two dozen men and women—but mostly men—operated their own little kingdom (64).”The servers in IT are highly restricted, important, and take up a lot of the silo’s energy. Jahns knows that “whatever the silo had been, or had been designed for, she knew without asking or being told that these strange machines were some organ of primacy” (64). IT’s role in building the cleaning suits also gives it a rarified status.

Jahns must ask the head of IT, Bernard Holland, to sign off on her candidate for sheriff. In the past, this has been a mere formality. Jahns notices that the large entrance hall to IT has heavy security and marvels at the luxuriousness of the floor. Bernard meets them in a conference room.

Bernard and Jahns clash over their choice for sheriff. Bernard is in favor of Peter Billings, who is shadowing for a judge. He is biased against Mechanical and disapproves of the choice of Juliette. He claims that Juliette’s office has been rerouting materials from IT and has already told Peter that he has the job. This angers Jahns, who tells him it is not his right to do so. Bernard apologizes. He offers to fill their canteens before they leave and watches with interest as Marnes and Jahns reach for each other’s.

Jahns and Marnes, annoyed from their meeting with Bernard, stop for the night at one of the silo’s gardens, which also serves as a hotel. They laugh about a case Holston investigated at the farms, the culprit of which turned out to be a rabbit. Jahns is privately disappointed that they have been given separate rooms. After dinner, tired from the climb, they chat in Marnes’s room before bed. In cryptic terms, they discuss how Jahns’s former husband, who was Marnes’s best friend, would feel about them embarking on a romantic relationship. 

Jahns and Marnes reach the bazaar on the 100th level ahead of schedule. They have lunch on the landing. Enjoying their trip, they wonder why they come to the “down deep” (79) so rarely. Jahns senses that “this journey would be her last” (81).

They pass the lower gardens, a farm, and the water treatment plant until they reach the upper levels of Mechanical. They go through security and Knox, a giant bearded man who is the head of Mechanical, directs a shadow to lead Jahns and Marnes to Juliette. The shadow leads them deeper into Mechanical.

They see Juliette, a beautiful, muscular woman, working at the large, roaring generator, “a machine beyond reckoning” (85). Juliette tells them she needs a power holiday to perform necessary maintenance on the generator, which could fail at any moment. Jahns starts to agree, but Juliette tells her that IT would never agree to it due to the power needed to run the servers. Having been told of the reason for their visit, Juliette says she is not interested in being sheriff because she is needed in Mechanical.