Wool

Lukas goes to IT on the 34th floor and finds Bernard and Sims, the head of IT security, yelling at workers. Lukas gives Bernard the box with Juliette’s things. Bernard tells Lukas that he is one of the few people he can trust in IT. He unpacks the box while Lukas watches nervously. Bernard asks, “How did this greaser make it over the hill?” (247). Lukas is puzzled by Bernard’s anger, since, to Lukas, Juliette going over the hill means that the suit succeeded better than the others and he is not aware of Bernard’s real motives. Sims suggests that Juliette may have just gotten lucky. Bernard yells at him to get out.

Bernard tells Lukas that he can’t picture anyone but himself running IT, but that “silos have burned to the ground before because of […]improper planning” (249). His candor makes Lukas uncomfortable. Bernard tells Lukas that he is the closest thing he has to a friend and offers him the position of his shadow. 

Juliette staggers into the silo. It is dark inside. She navigates by assuming that the layouts of the silos are the same. She trips over a body and finds herself having to crawl over a pile of them to get to the sheriff’s office door. Unable to see and increasingly unable to breathe, she struggles to open the door against a barricade of tables and chairs on the other side. Nearly losing the will to live, Juliette forces herself to go further and get away from the toxic air she let in when she opened the silo door. To douse her suit, she coats herself in soup from the cafeteria’s freezer. Finally, she is forced to take off her helmet. She uses a knife from the kitchen to pry it open. She gulps for air—“rotted food, biological decay, a tepid filth of stenches invaded her mouth, tongue, nose” (255). Juliette laughs “a mad laugh” upon realizing that she is still alive.

Knox organizes Mechanical and starts leading them upstairs to Supply. He orders shift leaders Courtnee, Shirley, and Marck and their shadows to come with him. He asks his own shadow, Jenkins, to watch over Mechanical while he is away and to start stockpiling weapons, food, and water.

Heavily loaded, Knox and his crew struggle up the stairs. On the way, they see that the mood in the silo is raucous as everyone gossips about Juliette’s disappearance: “Forbidden notions were birthed on tongues and swam through the air” (258). As they pass the farm on level 126, Knox figures that they could retreat to the bottom and be self-sufficient if IT pushes them back.

At Supply, McLain, head of supply, is wary of them, saying: “I don’t want any trouble here” (259). Inside Supply, they find “silence and mistrustful glares” (259). Knox is surprised, as Mechanical and Supply have “a long history together” (260). McLain is angry that Walker cooperated with someone in Supply to put together a better suit for Juliette. At risk of being sent to cleaning for speaking taboos, Knox gives a rousing speech to persuade Supply of their cause, saying that they have all been “raised on a pack of lies” (262). Convinced, the people of Supply reply with “angry war cries” (263).

Bernard tells Lukas that he has a will in case anything happens to him and leads him to the server room. There, he takes him to a server Lukas has never seen before. Bernard calls it “the true heart of the silo” (265). Using the key he wears around his neck, he takes off the back of the server, which is hollow inside. He removes the floor, revealing stairs going down into an enormous den. Lukas follows him down, afraid but curious.