Wool (Silo #1)

by Hugh Howey

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

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

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.

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.

Killing a man should be harder than waving a length of pipe in their direction. It should take long enough for one’s conscience to get in the way.

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

“We can’t control where we are right now,” he mumbled, “just what we do going forward.”