Wool (Silo #1)

by Hugh Howey

“You’re saying that someone wiped out our history to stop us from repeating it?”

“Do you think it’s natural? Not wandering too far from where we live?”

“It could happen right now. It could happen a hundred years from now. The point is: it’s going to happen, and it’s entirely preventable. The goal shouldn’t be to keep this place humming along for our lifetimes”—she looked pointedly at Jahns—“or our current term. If the goal ain’t forever, we should pack our bags right now.”

“Down here, we joke that this place was laid out to keep us well out of the way. And that’s how it feels, sometimes.”

Better to join a ghost than to be haunted by them. Better no life than an empty one—

There was a sweetness to it as well, carrying the sustenance another needed and being able to provide and reciprocate in a perfectly equitable relationship.

One of the last things Mayor Jahns had told her had proved truer than she could imagine: people were like machines. They broke down. They rattled. They could burn you or maim you if you weren’t careful. Her job was not only to figure out why this happened and who was to blame, but also to listen for the signs of it coming. Being sheriff, like being a mechanic, was as much the fine art of preventive maintenance as it was the cleaning up after a breakdown.

But then, the lowering of the body and the plucking of ripe fruit just above the graves was meant to hammer this home: the cycle of life is here; it is inescapable; it is to be embraced, cherished, appreciated. One departs and leaves behind the gift of sustenance, of life. They make room for the next generation. We are born, we are shadows, we cast shadows of our own, and then we are gone. All anyone can hope for is to be remembered two shadows deep.

She checked her wrist often, but Hank had confiscated her watch. He probably wouldn’t even know how to wind it. The thing would eventually fall into disrepair and return to being a trinket, a useless thing worn upside down for its pretty band.

“One of my people was taken, and it was the oldest of us, the wisest of us, who intervened on her behalf. It was the weakest and most scared who braved his neck. And whoever of you he turned to for help, and who gave it, I owe you my life.” Knox blinked away the blur and continued. “You gave her more than a chance to walk over that hill, to die in peace and out of sight. You gave me the courage to open my eyes. To see this veil of lies we live behind—”

“Then you have one bad day, and you worry for yourself, you know? It only takes one.”

It was amazing to Knox that they all knew, instinctively, how to build implements of pain. It was something even shadows knew how to do at a young age, knowledge somehow dredged up from the brutal depths of their imagination, this ability to deal harm to one another.

It wasn’t worth it, he decided. This was how the math always added up: not worth it. Nothing seemed worth it anymore.

“What we control,” Juliette said, “is our actions once fate puts us there.”

Her ordeal in its depths already seemed oddly distant, like something she had seen in a dream but hadn’t really gone through, and yet she wanted it to have mattered for something. She wanted Solo’s wounds to have mattered for something.

For me, Wool has never been a story about the end of humanity. It’s been a story about humanity prevailing against all odds. And the heroes of this story are those who go against the grain of pessimism, fear, doubt, and despair.