Wool Omnibus

When she got toward the end—maximum leverage—she threw her weight up and down with all her strength, and she cursed as the pipe snapped. There was a loud clang, barely muffled by her suit, and then she collapsed to the floor, landing painfully on her elbow.



The pipe was at an angle beneath her, digging into her ribs. Juliette tried to catch her breath. Her sweat dripped against the visor screen, blurring her view. She got up and saw that the pipe was unbroken. She wondered if it had slipped free, but it was still threaded through the spokes of the large wheel.



Disbelieving, excited, she slid the pipe out the other side. She wrapped her hands around the spokes and leaned into it.



And the wheel.



It budged.



6



“For now, these hot days, is the mad blood stirring.”



Walker made it to the end of the hallway and found himself leaving the comforting confines of a tight corridor to enter the wider entrance hall to Mechanical. The room, he saw, was full of young shadows. They hung out in groups, whispering to themselves. Three boys crouched near one wall, throwing stones for chits. Walker could hear a dozen interwoven voices spilling out of the mess hall across the room. The casters had sent these young ears away while they discussed adult things. He took a deep breath and hurried through that damned open space, focusing on each step, moving one foot ahead of him at a time, each small patch of floor a thing to conquer—



After a short lifetime, he finally crashed into the wall on the other side and hugged the steel panels in relief. Behind him, the shadows laughed, but he was too frightened to care. Sliding across the riveted steel, he grabbed the edge of the mess hall door and pulled himself inside. The relief was enormous. Even though the mess hall was several times the size of his workshop, it was at least full of crowding furniture and people he knew. With his back to the wall, his shoulder against the open door, he could almost pretend it was smaller. He slumped to the ground and rested, the men and women of Mechanical arguing amongst themselves, voices rising, agitated, competing.



“She’d be out of air by now, anyway,” Rick was saying.



“You don’t know that,” Shirly said. She was standing on a chair so she could be at least as tall as the others. She surveyed the room. “We don’t know what advances they’ve made.”



“That’s because they won’t tell us!”



“Maybe it’s gotten better out there.”



The room quieted with this last. Waiting, perhaps, to see if the voice would dare speak again and break its anonymity. Walker studied the eyes of those facing his way. They were wide with a mixture of fear and excitement. A double cleaning had removed some taboos. Shadows had been sent away. The adults were feeling frisky and free to speak forbidden thoughts.



“What if it has gotten better?” someone else asked.



“Since two weeks ago? I’m telling you guys, it’s the suits! They figured out the suits!” Marck, an oilman, looked around at the others, anger in his eyes. “I’m sure of it,” he said. “They’ve sorted the suits and now we have a chance!”



“A chance to what?” Knox growled. The grizzled head of Mechanical sat at one of the tables, digging into a breakfast bowl. “A chance to send more of our people out to wander the hills until they run out of air?” He shook his head and took another bite, then jabbed at the lot of them with his spoon. “What we need to be talking about,” he said, chewing, “is this sham of an election, this rat-ass Mayor, and us kept in the dark down here—!”



“They didn’t figure out the suits,” Walker hissed, still breathless from his ordeal.



“We’re the ones who keep this place humming,” Knox continued, wiping at his beard. “And what do we get? Busted fingers and ratshit pay. And now? Now they come and take our people and send them out for a view we don’t care about!” He slammed the table with his mighty fist, sending his bowl hopping.



Walker cleared his throat. He remained crouched on the floor, his back against the wall. No one had seen him enter or had heard him the first time. Now, while the room was scared quiet by Knox, he tried again.



“They did not figure out the suits,” he said, a little louder this time.



Shirly saw him from her perch. Her chin dropped, her mouth hinging open. She pointed, and a dozen other heads turned to follow.



They gaped at him. Walker was still trying to catch his breath and must’ve looked near death. Courtnee, one of the young plumbers who was always kind to him whenever she stopped by his workshop, left her seat and hurried to his side. She whispered his name in surprise and helped him to his feet, urging him to come to the table and take her chair.



Knox slid his bowl away from himself and slapped the table. “Well, people are just wandering all over the damned place now, aren’t they?”



Walker looked up sheepishly to see the old foreman chief smiling through his beard at him. There were two dozen other people staring at him, all at once. Walker half waved, then stared down at the table. It was suddenly too many people.



“All this shouting rouse you, old man? You setting off over the hills, too?”



Shirly jumped down from her chair. “Oh, God, I’m so sorry. I forgot to take him his breakfast.” She hurried toward the kitchen to fetch him some food even as Walker tried to wave her off. He wasn’t hungry.



“It isn’t—” His voice cracked. He tried again. “I came because I heard,” he whispered. “Jules. Out of sight.” He made a gesture with his hand, arching it over some imaginary hill running across the table. “But it wasn’t them in IT that figured nothing,” he said. He made eye contact with Marck and tapped his own chest. “I did it.”



A whispered conversation in the corner fell quiet. No one sipped their juice, no one moved. They were still half stunned to see Walker out of his workshop, much less among the crowd of them. Not a one of them had been old enough to remember the last time he’d roamed about. They knew him as the crazy electrical man who lived in a cave and refused to cast shadows anymore.



“What’re you sayin’?” Knox asked.



Walker took a deep breath. He was about to speak when Shirly returned and placed a bowl of hot oats in front of him, the spoon standing off the rim the concoction was so thick. Just how he liked it. He pressed his hands against either side of the bowl, feeling the heat in his palms. He was suddenly very tired from lack of sleep.



“Walk?” Shirly asked. “You okay?”



He nodded and waved her away, lifted his head and met Knox’s gaze.



“Jules came to me the other day.” He bobbed his head, gaining confidence. He tried to ignore how many people were watching him speak, or the way the overhead lights twinkled in his watering eyes. “She had a theory about these suits, about IT.” With one hand, he stirred his oats, steeling his resolve to say the unthinkable. But then, how old was he? Why did he care for taboos?



“You remember the heat tape?” He turned to Rachele, who worked first shift and knew Juliette well. She nodded. “Jules sorted that it weren’t no accident, the way the tape broke down.” He nodded to himself. “She sorted it all, she did.”



He took a bite of his food, not hungry but enjoying the burn of the hot spoon on his old tongue. The room was silent, waiting. The whispers and quiet play of the shadows outside could just barely be heard.



“I’ve built up favors and favors with Supply over the years,” he explained. “Favors and favors. So I called them all in. Told them we’d be even.” He looked at this group of men and women from Mechanical, could hear more standing in the hallway who’d arrived late but could read from the frozen demeanors in the room to stay put. “We’ve taken stuff out of IT’s supply chain before. I know I have. All the best electronics and wire go to them that make the suits—”



“The ratshit bastards,” someone muttered, which got more than a few of them bobbing their heads.



“So I told Supply to return the favor. Soon as I heard they took her—” Walker paused and swiped at his eyes. “Soon as I heard, I wired in those favors, said to replace anything them bastards asked for with some of our own. Best of the best. And don’t let ‘em be the wiser.”



“You did what?” Knox asked.



Walker dipped his head over and over, feeling good to let out the truth. “They’ve been making those suits to fail. Not ‘cause it ain’t bad out there, that’s not what I figure. But they don’t want your body wandering out of sight, no sir.” He stirred his oats. “They want us all right here where they can see us.”



“So she’s okay?” Shirly asked.



Walker frowned and slowly shook his head.



“I told you guys,” someone said. “She’d run out of air by now.”



“She was dead anyway,” someone else countered, and the argument began to build again. “This just proves they’re full of shit!”



Walker had to agree with that.



“Everybody, hey, let’s stay calm,” Knox roared. But he appeared the least calm of them all. More workers filed in now that the moment of silence appeared to be over. They gathered around the table, faces full of worry.



“This is it,” Walker said to himself, seeing what was happening, what he had started. He watched his friends and co-workers get all riled up, barking at the empty air for answers, their passions stirred. “This is it,” he said again, and he could feel it brewing, ready to burst out. “Thisisit thisisit—”



Courtnee, still hovering over him, tending to him like he was an invalid, held his wrist with those delicate hands of hers.



“What is it?” she asked. She waved down the others so she could hear. She leaned close to Walker.



“Walk, tell me, what is it? What is this? What’re you trying to say?”



“This is how it starts,” he whispered, the room quiet once more. He looked up at all the faces, scanned them, seeing in their fury, in all the exploded taboos, that he was right to worry.



“This is how the uprising begins—”



7



“Sharp misery had worn him to the bones;



And about his shelves, a beggarly account of empty boxes.”



Lukas arrived at thirty-four breathless and clutching the small box, more exhausted from the laws he had broken than this habitual climb to work. He could still taste the metallic tang of adrenaline in his mouth from hiding behind the servers and rummaging through Juliette’s things. He patted his chest, feeling the items there, and also his racing heart.



Once he was better composed, he reached for the doors to IT and nearly cracked a knuckle as they flew outward toward him. Sammi, a tech he knew, burst out in a hurry and stormed past. Lukas called his name, but the older tech was already gone, storming up the stairs and out of sight.



There was more commotion in the entrance hall. Voices yelling over one another. Lukas entered warily, wondering what the fuss was about. He held open the door with his elbow and slid into the room, the box tight against his chest.



Most of the yelling, it seemed, was coming from Bernard. The head of IT stood outside the security gates and barked at one tech after the other. Nearby, Sims, the head of IT security, similarly lit into three men in gray coveralls. Lukas remained frozen by the door, intimidated by the angry duo.



When Bernard spotted him there, he snapped shut and waded through the trembling techs to greet him. Lukas opened his mouth to say something, but his boss was fixated less on him and more on what was in his hands.



“This is it?” Bernard asked, snatching the box from him.



“It—?”



“Everything that greaser owned fits in this little damn box?” Bernard tugged the flaps open. “Is this everything?”



“Uh…that’s what I was given,” Lukas stammered. “Marsh said—”



“Yeah, the Deputy wired about his cramps. I swear, the Pact should stipulate an age limit for their kind. Sims!” Bernard turned to his security chief. “Conference room. Now.”



Lukas pointed toward the security gate and the server room beyond. “I suppose I should get to—”



“Come with me,” Bernard said, wrapping his arm around Lukas’s back and squeezing his shoulder. “I want you in on this. There seem to be fewer and fewer ratshit techs I can trust around here.”



“Unless y-you want me on the servers. We had that thing with tower thirteen—”



“That can wait. This is more important.” Bernard ushered him toward the conference room, the hulking mass of Sims preceding them.



The security guard grabbed the door and held it open, frowning at Lukas as he went by. Lukas shivered as he crossed the threshold. He could feel the sweat running down his chest, could feel guilty heat in his armpits and around his neck. He had a sudden image of being thrown against the table, pinned down, contraband yanked from his pockets and waved in his face—



“Sit,” Bernard said. He put the box down on the table, and he and Sims began disgorging its contents while Lukas lowered himself into a chair.



“Vacation chits,” Sims said, pulling out the stack of paper coupons. Lukas watched the way the man’s arms rippled with muscle with even the slightest movement. Sims had been a tech once, until his body kept growing and made him too obviously suited for other, less cerebral, endeavors. He lifted the chits to his nose, took a sniff, and recoiled. “Smells like sweaty greaser,” he said.



“Counterfeit?” Bernard asked.



Sims shook his head. Bernard was inspecting the small wooden box. He shook it and rapped it with his knuckles, listening to the rattle of chits inside. He searched the exterior for a hinge or clasp.