Wool by Hugh Howey Page B

We’d try our best to stay out of the way.”
    The guard lifted his shoulders. “You’re the mayor. I can’t say no.” He jabbed the nub of chalk down the hall, the people lined up outside the gate shifting impatiently as they waited. “See Knox. He’ll get someone to run you down.”
    The head of Mechanical was a man hard to miss. Knox amply filled the largest set of overalls Jahns had ever seen. She wondered if the extra denim cost him more chits and how a man managed to keep such a belly full. A thick beard added to his scope. If he smiled or frowned at their approach, it was impossible to know. He was as unmoved as a wall of concrete.
    Jahns explained what they were after. Marnes said hello, and she realized they must’ve met the last time he was down. Knox listened, nodded, and then bellowed in a voice so gruff, the words were indistinguishable from one another. But they meant something to someone, as a young boy materialized from behind him, a waif of a kid with unusually bright orange hair.
    “Gitemoffandowntojules,” Knox growled, the space between the words as slender as the gap in his beard where a mouth should have been.
    The young boy, young even for a shadow, waved his hand and darted away. Marnes thanked Knox, who didn’t budge, and they followed after the boy.
    The corridors in Mechanical, Jahns saw, were even tighter than elsewhere in the silo. They squeezed through the end-of-shift traffic, the concrete blocks on either side primed but not painted, and rough where they brushed against her shoulder. Overhead, parallel and twisting runs of pipe and wire conduit hung exposed. Jahns felt the urge to duck, despite the half foot of clearance; she noticed many of the taller workers walking with a stoop. The lights overhead were dim and spaced well apart, making the sensation of tunneling deeper and deeper into the earth overwhelming.
    The young shadow with the orange hair led them around several turns, his confidence in the route seemingly habitual. They came to a flight of stairs, the square kind that made right turns, and went down two more levels. Jahns heard a rumbling grow louder as they descended. When they left the stairwell on one-forty-two, they passed an odd contraption in a wide open room just off the hallway. A steel arm the size of several people end to end was moving up and down, driving a piston through the concrete floor. Jahns slowed to watch its rhythmic gyrations. The air smelled of something chemical, something rotten. She couldn’t place it.
    “Is this the generator?”
    Marnes laughed in a patronizing, uniquely manly way.
    “That’s a pump,” he said. “Oil well. It’s how you read at night.”
    He squeezed her shoulder as he walked past, and Jahns forgave him instantly for laughing at her. She hurried after him and Knox’s young shadow.
    “The generator is that thrumming you hear,” Marnes said. “The pump brings up oil, they do something to it in a plant a few floors down, and then it’s ready to burn.”
    Jahns vaguely knew some of this, possibly from a committee meeting. She was amazed, once again, at how much of the silo was alien to even her, she who was supposed to be—nominally at least—running things.
    The persistent grumbling in the walls grew louder as they neared the end of the hall. When the boy with the orange hair pulled open the doors, the sound was deafening. Jahns felt wary about approaching further, and even Marnes seemed to stall. The kid waved them forward with frantic gestures, and Jahns found herself willing her feet to carry her toward the noise. She wondered, suddenly, if they were being led outside . It was an illogical, senseless idea, born of imagining the most dangerous threat she could possibly summon.
    As she broke the plane of the door, cowering behind Marnes, the boy let the door slam shut, trapping them inside with the onslaught. He pulled headphones—no wires dangling from them—from a rack by the wall. Jahns followed his lead and