Wool Read Online Free Page A

top. Pats and double-checks. Holston heard the hollow helmet slide off its shelf; he flexed his fingers inside the puffy gloves while Nelson checked over the dome’s innards.
    “Let’s go over the procedure one more time.”
    “It’s not necessary,” Holston said quietly.
    Nelson glanced toward the airlock door leading back to the silo. Holston didn’t need to look to know someone was likely watching. “Bear with me,” Nelson said. “I have to do it by the book.”
    Holston nodded, but he knew there wasn’t any “book.” Of all the mystic oral traditions passed through silo generations, none matched the cultlike intensity of the suit makers and the cleaning techs. Everyone gave them their space. The cleaners might perform the physical act, but the techs were the people who made it possible. These were the men and women who maintained the view to that wider world beyond the silo’s stifling confines.
    Nelson placed the helmet on the bench. “You got your scrubbers here.” He patted the wool pads stuck to the front of the suit.
    Holston pulled one off with a ripping sound, studied the whorls and curls of the rough material, then stuck it back on.
    “Two squirts from the cleaning bottle before you scrub with the wool, then dry with this towel, then put the ablating films on last.” He patted the pockets in order, even though they were clearly labeled and numbered—upside down so Holston could read them—and color-coded.
    Holston nodded and met the tech’s eyes for the first time. He was surprised to see fear there, fear he had learned well to notice in his profession. He almost asked Nelson what was wrong before it occurred to him: the man was worried all these instructions were for naught, that Holston would walk out—like everyone in the silo feared all cleaners would—and not do his duty. Not clean up for the people whose rules, rules against dreaming of a better place, had doomed him. Or was Nelson worried that the expensive and laborious gear he and his colleagues had built, using those secrets and techniques handed down from well before the uprising, would leave the silo and rot to no purpose?
    “You okay?” Nelson asked. “Anything too tight?”
    Holston glanced around the airlock. My life is too tight, he wanted to say. My skin is too tight. The walls are too tight.
    He just shook his head.
    “I’m ready,” he whispered.
    It was the truth. Holston was oddly and truly very much ready to go.
    And he remembered, suddenly, how ready his wife had been as well.

5
    Three Years Earlier
     
    “I want to go out. I want to go out. Iwanttogoout.”
    Holston arrived at the cafeteria in a sprint. His radio was still squawking, Deputy Marnes yelling something about Allison. Holston hadn’t even taken the time to respond, had just bolted up three flights of stairs toward the scene.
    “What’s going on?” he asked. He swam through the crowd by the door and found his wife writhing on the cafeteria floor, held down by Connor and two other food staff employees. “Let her go!” He slapped their hands off his wife’s shins and was nearly rewarded by one of her boots to his chin. “Settle down,” he said. He reached for her wrists, which were twisting this way and that to get out of the desperate grips of grown men. “Baby, what the hell is going on?”
    “She was running for the airlock,” Connor said through grunts of exertion. Percy corralled her kicking feet, and Holston didn’t stop him. He saw now why three men were needed. He leaned close to Allison, making sure she saw him. Her eyes were wild, peeking through a curtain of disheveled hair.
    “Allison, baby, you’ve gotta settle down.”
    “I want to go out. I want to go out.” Her voice had quieted, but the words kept tumbling out.
    “Don’t say that,” Holston told her. Chills ran through his body at the sound of the grave utterances. He held her cheeks. “Baby, don’t say that!”
    But some part of him knew, in a jolting flash, what