Read Online Wool by Hugh Howey - Free Book Online

has every vacation chit she’s ever earned.”
    “That ain’t rare for Mechanical,” Marnes said. “They do a lot of overtime.”
    “Not only does she not get out, she doesn’t have visitors.”
    “I still don’t see where you’re going with this.”
    Jahns waited while a family passed. A young boy, six or seven probably, rode on his father’s shoulders with his head ducked to avoid the undersides of the stairs above. The mother brought up the rear, an overnight bag draped over her shoulder, a swaddled infant cradled in her arms. It was the perfect family, Jahns thought. Replacing what they took. Two for two. Just what the lottery aimed for and sometimes provided.
    “Well then, let me tell you where I’m going with this,” she told Marnes. “I want to find this girl’s father, look him in the eyes, and ask him why, in the nearly twenty years since his daughter moved to Mechanical, he hasn’t visited her. Not once.”
    She looked back at Marnes, saw him frowning at her beneath his mustache.
    “And why she hasn’t once made her way up to see him,” she added.
    ••••
    The traffic thinned as they made their way into the teens and past the upper apartments. With each step down, Jahns dreaded having to reclaim those lost inches on the way back up. This was the easy part, she reminded herself. The descent was like the uncoiling of a steel spring, pushing her down. It reminded Jahns of nightmares she’d had of drowning. Silly nightmares, considering she’d never seen enough water to submerge herself in, much less enough that she couldn’t stand up to breathe. But they were like the occasional dreams of falling from great heights, some legacy of another time, broken fragments unearthed in each of their sleeping minds that suggested: We weren’t supposed to live like this .
    And so the descent, this spiraling downward, was much like the drowning that swallowed her at night. It felt inexorable and inextricable. Like a weight pulling her down combined with the knowledge that she’d never be able to claw her way back up.
    They passed the garment district next, the land of multicolored coveralls and the place her balls of yarn came from. The smell of the dyes and other chemicals drifted over the landing. A window cut into the curving cinder blocks looked through to a small food shop at the edge of the district. It had been ransacked by the crowds, shelves emptied by the crushing demand of exhausted hikers and the extra post-cleaning traffic. Several porters crowded up the stairs with heavy loads, trying their best to satisfy demand, and Jahns recognized an awful truth about yesterday’s cleaning: the barbaric practice brought more than psychological relief, more than just a clear view of the outside—it also buttressed the silo’s economy. There was suddenly an excuse to travel. An excuse to trade. And as gossip flowed, and family and old friends met again for the first time in months or perhaps years, there was a vitality injected into the entire silo. It was like an old body stretching and loosening its joints, blood flowing to the extremities. A decrepit thing was becoming alive again.
    “Mayor!”
    She turned to find Marnes almost out of sight around the spiral above her. She paused while he caught up, watching his feet as he hurried.
    “Easy,” he said. “I can’t keep up if you take off like that.”
    Jahns apologized. She hadn’t been aware of any change in her pace.
    As they entered the second tier of apartments, down below the sixteenth floor, Jahns realized she was already in territory she hadn’t seen in almost a year. There was the rattle here of younger legs chasing along the stairwell, getting tangled up in the slow climbers. The grade school for the upper third was just above the nursery. From the sound of all the traffic and voices, school had been canceled. Jahns imagined it was a combination of knowing how few would turn up for class (with parents taking their kids up to the view)