Wool

Juliette runs the 34 levels down to IT. She bumps into Lukas, who is disappointed to see she is running in the opposite direction. At IT’s security gates, Juliette intimidates the guard into letting her in.

Juliette finds Scottie in his room, terrified of being sent to cleaning after looking at the files he sent to Juliette. He is reluctant to speak about what the program he has found, but Juliette lies that her status as sheriff makes him obligated to answer her questions. He tells her that it is for a display that can make something seem real: “Jules, this thing can make brand new views. It can show you anything you like” (168). Juliette wonders whether this discovery made Allison curious enough about the real nature of the outside world to volunteer for cleaning under the guise of insanity. Scottie asks Jules to delete the files she has and asks her to find a way to transfer him back to Mechanical.

Juliette spends a sleepless night thinking about Scottie’s discovery. In the office she has a friendly chat with Peter about their backgrounds. She then asks him why “it’s cheaper to porter a paper note to someone than it is to just wire them from a computer” (172). She asks whether this is designed to make communications among the people of the silo more difficult. Peter seems to think the reasons are more banal, and Juliette lets it go.

Suddenly, they get an alert that Scottie has committed suicide. Juliette is about to go down to the scene when Peter stops her, saying he has been ordered to arrest her as a suspect.

Bernard comes to the holding cell and tells Juliette that she is being held for unauthorized entry to IT. He tells her he is sending her back to Mechanical—“I want people to be in their place” (176)—and that her computer is being combed for evidence.

Juliette walks back down to Mechanical, checking in with the deputy on the way down as instructed. On her walk, she thinks of Scottie’s suicide that she “knew he didn’t have it in him” (177) and begins to become suspicious about Marnes’s death as well.

Her friends in Mechanical are glad to have her back and joke around with her but Jules is unhappy with the unresolved situation she has left behind: “She had been sheriff for a short time[…] and yet she felt an incredible urge to investigate” (177).

Juliette wakes in the middle of the night and takes “stock of her situation” (179). She decides to focus on her mechanical work and “to set other ideas and responsibilities aside” (179). Unable to sleep, she turns on her computer and sees that she has “over a dozen wires in her inbox. She’d never seen so many” (180). Most of them are from people in Mechanical welcoming her back, and she is touched by their consideration. The last is one is from Scottie, telling her that the pixel density of the program on the chip was not right for the big screen. It is for a screen that is eight inches by two inches. He says that her joke about a heat tape he’d gotten her was “truth”(181). He ends the message saying he is not safe in IT. The note convinces Juliette that Scottie has not committed suicide but has been murdered. She copies the message down and deletes it, worried that IT will intercept it.

Early in the morning, Juliette goes to Walker’s electronics workshop. Walker is elderly and hasn’t left his workshop in many years. He was Scottie’s “caster” (95), or mentor, when Scottie was a shadow. Walker expresses regret at convincing Scottie to take the job offer from IT and says that it “just don’t seem like him” (184) to kill himself. Juliette tells Walker that she thinks Scottie was killed and that she suspects IT. Walker begins to sob. Juliette asks him: “[W]hat kind of screen would be eight inches by two inches?” (185). Walker doesn’t know, and asks what Scottie meant about her joke about the heat tape. Juliette remembers telling Scottie that “the tape couldn’t have self-destructed better if it’d been engineered to” (186).

Juliette tells Walker that they have been working on the cleaning suits for hundreds of years, not nobody gets further than the hill, “and never once have they not had enough time to clean” (187). They realize that the suits, like the heat tapes, are engineered to fail. Juliette also becomes convinced that IT charges money for wires to discourage communication throughout the silo.