Wool

Lukas sits at the foot of the bed in his room, grieving for Juliette. He decides to go to work to distract himself. Lukas works for Bernard in IT maintaining the servers. He feels unmotivated and can barely get dressed.

On the silo stairs, he contemplates committing suicide by throwing himself off a landing. Lukas sees a porter running past and can tell from the expression on his face that something newsworthy regarding the cleaning has happened. He feels hopeful. Lukas remembers the petition he circulated for Juliette’s release and his “appeals to Bernard, begging him as a friend, as his boss, to intervene on her behalf” (218). Bernard told Lukas there was nothing he could do, but Lukas wonders if Bernard did manage to save Juliette.

Lukas starts to ascend the stairs and sees Deputy Marsh, who has been ordered to carry Juliette’s things to IT on the 34th floor. Marsh tells Lukas that Juliette refused to clean and disappeared over the hills. Lukas convinces Marsh to let him take Juliette’s belongings to IT.

In his workshop, Walker focuses on removing a chip from an electronics board to distract himself from the cleaning. A porter runs past, and Walker asks him for news. The porter demands chits. Walker lets out “a sigh for disgust for what had become of his generation” (222). The porter excitedly tells him that Juliette not only refused to clean but that she has walked out of sight of the cameras, neither of which has ever happened before. Walker is stunned. For the first time in 40 years, he feels the desire to leave his workshop and discuss the news with the others in the “down deep.” Taking “a deep breath,” he crosses his threshold and feels himself to be “like some intrepid explorer himself” (223).

Juliette emerges from the silo, having figured out that the lush views she sees through her headset are “a spectacular fabrication” (224) designed by IT. Juliette fights against the temptation to believe the illusion. Remembering Walker’s message—“They’re good in Supply” (226)—she rubs a wool pad against the heat tape of her suit and realizes that Supply, at Walker’s behest, has secretly replaced IT’s materials, which are designed to fail, with the more sturdy ones from Mechanical. IT has “unwittingly[…]built a suit designed to last, not disintegrate” (226).

Juliette starts to walk over the hill, aiming to die out of the sight of the cameras. From experience, she knows she can conserve the air in her suit by staying calm. She sees Holston and Allison, disguised as boulders by her visor’s program. Beyond the hill, Juliette “witnessed the first rips in IT’s deceitful veil” (227). The program of the visor is not designed for the view beyond the hill and she sees the actual desolation of the landscape. At the top of the hill, she turns back to look at the silo “[w]ith a heavy heart” (228) and sees that it is nestled between hills. In front of her, she sees that the landscape has more such hills, “one circular bowl after another, the earth rising up between them” (228). Further up ahead, she sees another silo, with a dead cleaner in front of it. At first, she thinks she is seeing her own silo or that she is “succumbing to noxious fumes,” until she realizes that this is another silo, and that the hills are not meant to block out the wind but to “shield curious eyes” (229).

Lukas goes to floor 38, a “mixed-use level of offices shops, a plastics factory, and one of the small water treatment plants”(230), and enters the main pump control room. Hiding behind the server rack, he looks into the box containing Juliette’s things and immediately feels guilty. He finds dozens of vacation vouchers and studies her ID photo, remembering the first time he saw her working in the sheriff’s office. He also finds a mysterious wedding ring and the watch Juliette has repaired. He finds a manual she has written for the main generator control room, on the backside of the script for “The Tragic Historye of Romeus and Juliette.”Wondering “what the hell he was thinking” (233), he keeps the ID, ring, and watch, and switches out his own multi-tool for hers.

Juliette finds herself stumbling over thousands of bodies of dead cleaners as she walks toward the other silo. She is startled to think that these people are not from her silo—“that they were dead did nothing to diminish the soul-shattering reality that people had lived so close and she had never known” (234). Seeing that the bodies are piled thickly by the door of the silo, she realizes that they were trying to get back into it. She senses her own impending death “keenly in every pore” (235).

The doors of the silo are cracked. She pulls out a body that is stuck in them and pushes her way through the doors but becomes stuck until she uses all her strength to jerk free. She enters a room similar to the one she has left in her silo. She wonders if she is already dead and these are her “mad dreams” (236). She bangs on the door, but no one answers. Running low on air, she knows she does not have enough energy left to squeeze through the outer door again. Remembering her mechanical training, she wrenches a pipe off the wall to use as leverage for the wheel on the door and manages to open it.