Wool

The climb up to the holding cell takes three days. She stays in a cell overnight in the mids’ deputy station, where Lukas comes to visit her. He tells her he is collecting signatures to fight her arrest. Juliette tells him the situation is hopeless. Lukas tells her that he was coming to ask her out that day she ran past him on the staircase. Juliette sends him away, not wanting him to pine for a condemned person.

In the top-floor holding cell, Peter Billings charges Juliette with conspiracy, citing her searches on Holston’s drive as evidence. Juliette tunes him out as he talks. She receives notes from her friends in Mechanical. Walker’s says, cryptically: “No fear. Now is for laughing. The truth is a joke and they’re good in Supply” (197). In the middle of the night, she thinks she sees her father visiting her, but the figure leaves before she can talk to him.

Juliette is suited up for the cleaning. She gloomily regards the faulty design of the suit and thinks to herself that she will be the first cleaner who refuses to clean. As she leaves the airlock for the outside, Juliette realizes that the visor of her helmet is eight inches by two, the size of the display for which the deceptive program that Scottie discovered was written.

Bernard prepares to watch Juliette’s cleaning from the cafeteria. He enjoys seeing the reaction of cleaners to the illusion of the outside as “studded with soaring life, grass wavering in afresh breeze, a glimmering acropolis beckoning from over the hills” (201). Bernard finds satisfaction in seeing that the system of tricking people into cleaning works. He is stunned to see, however, that Juliette is going up the hill without first cleaning the sensors. He expects her to collapse any second, but she disappears out of sight over the hill.

Bernard runs to the server room in IT, feeling “surge of fear […] [because]his mandate, second only to preserving the data on these machines, was to never let anyone out of sight” (203). Bernard reflects on his hatred for Mechanical, and his thoughts reveal that he had been down there once “to kill a man” (204).

He reaches a server as the end of the row and squeezes behind it. Using the key he wears around his neck, he removes its back. Inside is a headset and panel from which he dials another silo. Bernard says: “Silo one? This is silo eighteen […]we might have a, uh…slight problem over here…” (208).