My thanks to Hugh Howey for letting us write stories that take place in his world. Special thanks to Jason Gurley, who wrote the awesome GREATFALL series, for the incredible book cover, and to the League of Official Woolwrights (LOOW) for your help and encouragement in bringing this story to print.

Hugh Howey has been so gracious in encouraging other writers to participate in his fantastic Wooliverse by writing fan fiction within that universe. It’s been exciting to read so many quality stories coming from fans of the WOOL books. For the most part, I’ve been just a happy bystander and fan throughout the Wool phenomenon. As a lark, for a writing competition put on by an e-magazine in England, I did write a little comedy/satire piece that included Hugh as a character, but that story (#NaNoWri War Z) was not literally fanfic, since it did not take place in the Wool universe. Hugh happily gave me permission to use his story and likeness in that quirky little bit of zombie comedy, and I am so grateful to him for that. Other than that, I’ve just been a reader and a fan.

And then I had an idea.

The Wool world is so ripe for stories and tales that might be completely different than the primary tale that Hugh was telling in his books. Being a self-published writer who has seen some limited success, I wondered what someone like me would be doing if I were trapped in a silo. Would I be writing and publishing my work? I also happen to be a Russophile who loves Russian literature and history. I’ve long been interested in the phenomenon of SAMIZDAT in the former USSR, which was the underground publishing system used by dissidents to publish unapproved books during the Soviet era. My favorite author and hero is Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a brilliant writer and dissident who took on Stalin and the whole Soviet apparatus for the right to publish the things that he wrote. He published his famous book A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch using SAMIZDAT, an underground group of individuals who hand-wrote or hand-typed illegal manuscripts and distributed them throughout the Soviet Union. The word SAMIZDAT literally means “Self Publishing” so I thought that a parallel story taking place in the silo might be of interest to Wool readers. I hope that it is.

REFUSE is a short story about a woman named Leah, a picker whose job it is to sift through the refuse and waste of the silo in order to achieve the goal of recycling everything. On her own time, Leah loves to make homemade paper and lives to write stories. She just happens to exist in a dystopian world that has been destroyed by mankind, and lives in an underground silo full of mysteries and questions. The problem is that both of these things, making paper and writing stories, if they are not approved by the authorities in the silo, are illegal.

I thank Hugh Howey for giving me permission to write this story and to publish it. I hope you all enjoy it.

Leah was a picker, and as a picker she now stood hip deep among the seemingly endless heaps of garbage, carefully opening the reclamation bags one by one, sorting through the contents and tossing the bits and pieces of refuse into the appropriate wooden separation bins for recycling.

Wood. The separation bins were made of wood. Heavy, sturdy, ancient wood, hardened by time, shiny and smooth from use, and aged by the tempering of many hands.

Leah had never seen a real tree, unless you count the little wispy olive trees on the farming floors. She’d visited the farms as a girl in school, like every young person did, and there she’d seen the olive trees lined up in rows like emaciated soldiers standing erect under buzzing grow lights. She knew, however, that those trees could never have produced enough wood to make even one of the sturdy bins she used daily to sort through and recycle the tons of waste produced continuously in the silo. These bins were antiques, relics of another time and place. They were reminders that everything in the silos originally came from somewhere else, and that there had once been another world and another kind of life—one that wasn’t lived underground.

Thinking things like that can make your head spin and it might lead to trouble, but she thought such things quite often anyway.

The silo had six recycling units, spaced at regular intervals all the way from the up-top down to the down-deep. The recycling sections were fed by chutes that never ceased feeding color-coded bags of garbage to the recycling floors. Everything was recycled in the silos. Even the plastic reclamation bags. Dozens of pickers in each recycling section sifted through the garbage with gloved hands and separated out every piece of refuse into the appropriate wooden bin for re-use.

No one monitored the pickers—at least, it could be said that they weren’t monitored very closely—but if a picker got caught stealing paper, they’d be in big trouble. Everyone knew that. Depending on what you were doing with the expropriated paper, you might even get sent to clean. That should tell you something about the value of paper in a closed society. In a very real way, the death penalty was annexed to the concept of paper and its use.

As she thought about these things, Leah recalled the mental image of a great man—to her, maybe he was the greatest man—and she remembered the day he was sent to clean. Even after two years, it seemed to her like it had only happened yesterday.

She’d shadowed under Alexander, her greatest friend and mentor, until he was sent to clean for the twin crimes of procuring or producing black-market paper, and the illegal use of recyclable material. It all happened so quickly. Almost no time passed between Alexander’s arrest and the carrying out of his sentence. She’d been given very little time to say goodbye, and even less time to consider what losing the old man would really mean to her. Now, she’d been without Alexander’s wisdom and guidance for two long years, and his absence was like an open wound in her heart and mind. She looked down as she shifted the bin closer to the stacks of bags. She was strong and lean and not unattractive at all, if the attention she was paid by the men her age was any indication. Her long dark-brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail to keep it out of her face as she bent over to move the bins. Every time she gripped the wooden handles of a recycling bin, or peeled a piece of illegal, black-market paper from its screened frame, she thought of Alexander, and of trees immense and beyond the restraints of the imagination.

Alexander had often talked in hushed but respectful tones about towering trees and endless forests and paper so plentiful that people used it to wipe their chins and even their butts… and seemingly endless reams of paper used to write books so numerous that they couldn’t even be counted or contained in any single library.

Leah wasn’t sure how he could possibly know about such things. Maybe he’d derived those fanciful ideas from the childhood books stacked in cubbies in the silo’s classrooms. Or maybe he’d drawn knowledge from some other source of ancient wisdom known only to the men and women of the mind. In any case, he was an old man who knew how to stoke the fires of imagination in others. He was the one who’d encouraged Leah to read, and to write. Now she wrote every day, so long as she had paper upon which to scribble her words. She wrote earnestly and purposefully, with Alexander’s entreaties always hovering before her, imprinted in her mind and soul:

So she wrote every day, sharpened charcoal gripped firmly in a needy hand.

Having plentiful paper was no easy thing, and making it outside of regulated and well-monitored channels was both a chore and a crime. Considering her reality, Leah knew that spiritually she was born into a long line of criminals.

“You gonna be there today, Leah?”

It was Ivan, cohort in crime and fellow picker. The two friends usually teamed up together as they worked through the stacks of reclamation bags. Ivan was twenty years old, fully five years younger than Leah, but he was smart and kind, and to her he always seemed to be older and wiser than his years. He smiled as he pulled half a dozen square metal containers from a bag with both hands and dropped them into a recycling bin.

“Yeah. I’ll be there,” she answered as she ran the back of a gloved hand across her forehead, pushing some stray wisps of her dark hair out of her face. “I have to help my mother with the apartment today, though. She gets tired a lot now, and Dad’s been in the down-deep for… (what was it?) …weeks now helping re-design and upgrade the heating vents.”

As she talked with Ivan, her mind—as always—churned on in another direction altogether. She thought of the heating vents, and that thought brought forth for her the texture of her artificial environment. Heating.

The ever evident coolness of the recycling section—of the whole silo—pressed in and down on her. Cool radiated from the surrounding dirt and through the thick concrete walls and permeated everyone and everything. The omnipresent cold could only be combated with brute force. Alexander had explained it all to her, and so had her father. The human body exists in its healthy state at 37 degrees Celsius. Now, in this silo, humans were unnaturally populating a concrete silo that, without brute force being applied, wanted to maintain a temperature of around 12.78 degrees Celsius. There were some minimal amounts of heat provided by the existence of so many bodies and machines and activity, but that was not enough to raise the temperature to the point where most people could be comfortable without wearing more than just their coveralls. So heating became a reality of life.

Heating. Brute force alteration of the environment.

“But you’ll be there, right?” Ivan said. He looked around the floor trying to act casually even though what he was really doing was making sure that no one was watching them. When he was certain that no one was looking their way, he bent over and Leah watched as he tore a white cardboard carton into flat strips that he then tucked up into the pants leg of his work coveralls. He pulled his socks up over the strips and then smoothed the pants legs back down into place.

“I’ll be there,” Leah replied. She also scanned the room to see if anyone was paying them any undue attention. Paul and Joseph were working together near Chute #3, and both seemed to be in some kind of restrained argument. Neither looked over to where Leah and Ivan sorted under Chute #1. Paul she liked, though she really didn’t know him. Joseph Kind was another story altogether. She felt sorry for Paul having to work with Joseph, and she was thankful that she always had Ivan when she needed to talk. Joseph was a strange bird, secretive and brooding, always looking at everyone else like he rejected their right to live and breathe. Maybe she was being harsh in her judgment of Joseph—she really didn’t know him either. But the way he watched and scowled made her want to give him a wide berth.

The tumbling sound of a reclamation bag bouncing down twenty stories of stainless steel ducting drew her attention and provided emphasis to the unspoken fact that the work of recycling in an artificial world made by man was never done.

Alexander told her that out there… outside…. the sun warmed the earth naturally, and that there were seasons, and storms, and temperature swings. Weather.

The silo existed underground, he said, where the warmth of the sun and the warm temperatures in the core of the earth barely reached it. This meant that the dirt surrounding the silo stayed cool, and kept the silo at the same temperature. “Men aren’t supposed to live here,” Alexander had told her. “…At least not forever.”

Leah scanned the room again, this time not looking at the people, but instead she looked at the room itself. Typical of the silo. Plastic life. Artificial. It’s all fake. The grow lights in the dirt farms. The motors that cycled water from the down-deep up through the hydroponic gardens. The heating. The wallscreen up on the top floor that showed the bleak and desolate outside. But it was more than just those things. It was the chits and the economy and the endless stairs and the lottery and the jobs—all of these things revolving (like the stairs in the silo) around maintaining that plastic life. Alexander saw it all and he wrote about it too. She wondered whatever happened to the beautiful things that Alexander wrote. Probably recycled and used to print chits.

Leah noticed a large heap of shredded paper stuffed into the bottom of the bag she was sorting. Chit reports from IT, or portage documents, or perhaps these scraps had been the expired records from the Sheriff’s office. Papers documenting the lives and crimes of the dead—no longer needed (the dead and the reports)—shredded and sent down the chutes for recycling. When you died, your body was buried in the dirt of the farms to become food for the rest of the silo, but your records… those were shredded, because in reality, to the cold silo, you never really existed.

For a black-market papermaker, pre-shredded paper is a godsend. Almost unconsciously, she ducked down to make it look like she was struggling with a heavy bag from the kitchen. With practiced precision, she balled up the shredded mass, and, unzipping the front of her coveralls, she stuffed the paper into the area around her midsection, smoothing it carefully before zipping up again. She ran her hands around the area where she’d stuffed the paper until there were no lumps or obvious protrusions.

“You look like you’ve gained a few pounds,” Ivan said, winking.

“Shut up, Ivan!” she snapped, playfully. “Besides,” she whispered, “if I could pull off getting a couple of pounds of paper out of here without someone noticing, I would do it. That would be a huge accomplishment.”

“Ahh,” Ivan waved at her dismissively with his hand, “you’re so skinny, you’re lucky to get a few ounces out of here in a shift.”

“Keep talking like that, buddy, and I’ll take you to meet my mother.”

“Oh no! Not me!” he said, laughing. “I’m waiting for my dream girl… maybe a cute little porter or someone like that. I’d never marry a picker. They have a smell to them that I can’t get used to.”

Leah growled and threw a plastic container at him, but he ducked and the container bounced harmlessly among the sacks stacked behind him. He winked at her again and went back to sorting.

They flirted a lot, but nothing much had ever come of it. She’d known Ivan for most of her life, and she liked him well enough. He was handsome in a mids kind of way, and she probably would respond if he ever showed any real interest, but both of them were too wrapped up in their world of making paper—and writing—to expend too much energy in the pursuit of romance. She was happy with the way things were, and she didn’t want to lose Ivan as a friend. Or maybe I just tell myself that because Ivan has never done anything other than flirt with me.

When the shift was over, the pickers stacked their bins in the packing area. Overnight, packers would come into the section and bundle the salvaged material for delivery by the porters to the different areas of the silo that engaged in manufacturing new things from the salvaged materials. A lot of this refuse—the paper waste—would go to the official paper manufacturing section, where it would be pulped and bleached and made into new paper. Then it would be cataloged and traced and tracked and used for approved purposes only.

You could get paper for your family if you had enough chits, and as long as you weren’t a trouble maker. You could draw and paint—even write—if (and only if) whatever you drew, painted, or wrote was acceptable and was in conformity to the laws of the silo. It had to be pre-approved. As a result, almost no one wrote books, other than the handful of officially sanctioned writers who wrote lukewarm, un-challenging tripe for the widest possible audience. There was no room in the literature of the silo for metaphor, or irony, or for a bracing, cold waltz with the truth.

Ivan reminded her again that he was really hoping she was going to make it tonight. She assured him once again that she intended to be there. Then they just talked, because that is what friends do. Unfeigned and unguarded friendship leads to pure conversation, and she often experienced this kind of fellowship with Ivan.

As they spoke, she absentmindedly pressed her hand up against the almost imperceptible lump in her coveralls where she’d stuffed the shredded paper. From some motivation that she deemed to be almost base and prurient, she felt an extreme amount of excitement and pleasure from the idea (and the act) of stealing raw materials to make homemade paper. She’d often tried to quantify the feeling. She’d analyzed it (or attempted to) and tried to make a judgment from that analysis about what her illegal activities had to say about her character. She’d even hoped to feel guilty about it, because feeling guilty might mean that she still had a place in the social structures of the world around her, and that she hadn’t utterly forsaken the society of the silo in pursuit of her own selfish ambitions. If she could feel guilty, then that would mean that she was still one of them. Nevertheless, in her innermost thoughts, she could find no home for self-recrimination. She knew that in her conscience, she’d already determined that it was the silo’s laws and culture that were criminal, and that her desire to write may be against the letter of the law, but it was not against any higher law that she could possibly imagine.

A subtle smile crept across her face as she embraced the feeling that the cocktail of adrenaline and whatever other self-manufactured chemicals gave her as it thrummed through her veins whenever she stole the raw materials for making paper. She was a junkie and she knew it.

She only enjoyed her feeling of euphoria for a moment though, and the smile quickly melted from her face when she glanced up and saw Joseph Kind staring at her with a look of what she could only interpret as confident malevolence. The high she’d just been on drained from her in microseconds, and at once she was overwhelmed with the feeling that all was lost. Joseph Kind was a picker, but he was definitely one of them. Maybe she was wrong about Joseph. She’d been wrong about people before. But she could not deny the way Joseph’s look made her feel.

The six criminals chewed in silence. They were co-conspirators in the grand drama of revolutionary enterprise, and the silence gave weight to the proceedings. Most of the time, the room was basked in the weird ambiance of breathing and chewing and not much else. Chewing. That’s the way that paper is pulped in the underground. It is chewed, like the cud of the ruminants on the agricultural floors. From the word “ruminant” we get our word “ruminate”:

Alexander taught them how to make paper this way. He said that prisoners throughout antiquity—in the other world, and in this one—had made black-market paper in this fashion. Once, he told them the story about prisoners during a great world war that chewed stolen bits of paper to make new paper for escape maps and notes that could be smuggled out to the underground resistance.

So the six guild friends chewed away like prisoner-revolutionaries manufacturing the means of their own escape. They each chewed and spit in indeterminate intervals. The skill was a learned one. It took time and experience to know just when the fibers were broken up enough and separated sufficiently so that they’d produce good paper. You had to learn not to think about where the paper had been, or how many thousands of times it had been recycled before.

In previous iterations perhaps dog hair or goat hair, or shreds of old garments and fragments of materials now unknown and lost in the mists of time might have been added to the eternal mix.

The source material could be derived from just about any old natural paper product: tissues, computer paper, cardboard boxes, wrapping paper, manila folders, notepaper, chit reports, or even envelopes. The source paper was always shredded first. Usually by hand. This is why pre-shredded paper stolen from the reclamation bags was such a great find. The bulk material, shredded into small bits, was then soaked overnight in buckets of water so that it could be chewed and pulped more easily.

Small metal frames had been fashioned laboriously from the heavy twists of wire used to seal the reclamation bags. The frames held fast the sections of tight wire mesh screening that had been purchased in the underground black-market, probably copped from the farming floors, or maybe from a willing black-market opportunist in Supply.

The pulp, when properly chewed to the right consistency, was then spit out onto the frames, spread to the appropriate thickness, and then dried for a day in the frames. When dried sufficiently, it would then be carefully (Oh, so carefully!) peeled from the frames and hung with clothespins to cure for another week. This process produced a very basic, coarse, and sometimes brittle paper. If the paper was intended for use for their own writing, they only cured the paper for five or six hours, then it would be pressed between two heavy objects, or, preferably in their makeshift paper press. The pressing would remove most of the ridges and valleys so that the charcoal could move more freely across the paper.

Alexander often talked of more advanced and involved papermaking processes. In the past, some of those processes were used by black-market paper guilds in the silo. But, the more intricate the process, the more things could go wrong, and the more likely it was that someone in authority would find out, and the guild would be busted.

Leah chewed in silence. Though there was occasionally some discussion, silence was really one of the hallmarks of papermaking meetings. This form of fellowship did not tax the emotions or put undue strain on friendships. In fact, Leah usually left the meetings with a sore jaw, but a cleansed soul. The friends spoke with their eyes and hearts more than they did with their mouths, and every so often, one of them would get that faraway look like they were writing, right there, right then, in their minds. Leah had written entire chapters, and had memorized them—word for word—while chewing and pulping the paper upon which she would eventually write those very chapters. There was a sublime beauty to the process that she could not convey but that she felt down to her very core.

She slipped her penknife carefully under the paper in the very corner of the frame. Slowly she eased the paper away from the mold and then, holding it up, she examined it in the light. The small, colored hairs and fibers stood out starkly against the eggshell colored sheet. One of the realities of homemade silo paper is that every sheet was unique. The paper itself took time and industry, and each leaf bore the signature of artistry and care. Leah removed a dozen sheets from a homemade press, and replaced them with the new sheet that she’d just removed from the frame, along with a handful of other sheets from the others that waited to be pressed.

The makeshift paper press was a brilliant feat of engineering, and it hid in plain sight disguised as a metal shelf unit. Each individual shelf within the unit was almost invisibly made up of two separate sheets of thin metal. Beneath the flange on each shelf, there was a hidden set of wing nuts that could be turned in order to press the paper.

She twisted each of the wing nuts to tighten up the press, and then pushed the whole unit back into place so that—without some prior knowledge—no one would know that the shelf was actually a device used to manufacture illegal paper.

Leah heard humming, and as she evened up the dozen sheets of new and finished paper in her hands, she turned to see that Ivan was kicked back in his chair, humming to himself and chewing slowly. His eyes were closed and she could tell that he was writing something in his mind—working out a turn of phrase, or maybe a description of something that had yet to come into existence. The other four members of the guild: Randall Paine, the sweeper and his wife Louise (Louise worked as a picker in the recycling unit up on 48); Mark Durant the farmer; and William Burke the porter—all were taking a break, sipping tea and discussing their latest writings.

She smiled as she looked at Ivan, and at that moment he opened his eyes and returned the smile. He always had a smile for her, and he never pressured her to reveal what she was working on. He trusted that she would tell him about it whenever the time was right.

As she walked back towards the table, Ivan bent over and spit into the frame, working and smoothing the pulp with the flat end of a comb until it was just the way he wanted it. She always admired the care and intense concern that he always took with his work. The moment seemed poetic and beautiful to her, but then it is often true that when life is at its most poetic, the whole of it can turn on a dime. He’d just started to hum again when the door flew open and standing there in the open door, Leah could see Sheriff Tatum and the Mayor of the silo.

The trek down to the Deputy Sheriff’s office in the lower mids on 70 passed almost, but not completely, without conversation. It was only thirteen floors, but thirteen floors can seem like an eternity when you’re being arrested and taken to jail. What made it worse for Leah, was that the other five members of the guild—her closest friends—were on the pilgrimage up and not down. They were being escorted by the Mayor and the deputy from the up-top up to the Sheriff’s office on the uppermost floor. Why they were being separated she did not know—and it wasn’t for a lack of asking.

Sheriff Tatum and the deputy from the mids (she did not know his name) were mostly silent as they escorted Leah down the well-worn steps of the mids. A few times they asked her if she needed to stop for a break, or if she needed water, but other than that they kept to themselves.

“I know why I’m being arrested. That’s pretty clear,” Leah said as the sounds of their steps echoed around them. “I’d just like to know why I’m the only one heading down. Why are my friends being taken to the up-top? Can you tell me anything?Anything at all?” She thought she’d try again, though she’d made no headway with the two lawmen thus far.

“There’ll be plenty time for talk when we get you into your cell,” Sheriff Tatum replied. Same refrain.

So many bits of information, and none of it added up. Why was she being taken to 70? And by the Sheriff himself? Why was the Mayor going up with the others? Leah tried to even out her breathing as the steps multiplied beneath her. Porters buzzed by, usually slowing to take in the scene, staring at the young woman being escorted by two representatives of the law. She knew a few of the porters personally, so she was certain that by now the talk would already be bouncing around from person to person and from floor to floor. Her life was now being analyzed by strangers and by people who barely knew her. She tried to care what these others thought of her, but no matter how hard she tried, she could not. She was not one of them.

Her thighs were already starting to protest, but there weren’t many flights left to go, so she kept her head down and concentrated on the steel treads and the railing and how not to let her fears and imagination run away with her. She thought of the martyrs, and of Alexander’s stories of sacrifice and resistance. She thought of Alexander and how willfully he’d gone out to clean. Then she wondered if she’d ever chewed on the shredded remnants of Alexander’s life files.

The jail cell in the deputy sheriff’s office in the mids was cool and dark, and the feeling of incarceration was more than just tangible. The whole world seemed to press in on her, and she could feel, in a very real way, the impression of history and the ages swirling in the air around her. There was a world out there… outside… and there had been a world long before someone built this silo, and all of that—the old world, and antiquity—maybe it was all buried under the ground too, but it was still out there, and there were stories both here and there that, without voices of their own, begged to be told.

Still, here she was, locked up. It felt like she’d marked and passed the moment in her life when it was all coming to an end. Her mind dwelt for a moment on the memory of Alexander and the short time he’d spent in a cell before he’d been sent out to clean. Then she thought about innumerable other prisoners—not just in the silo—but prisoners of conscience from other epochs and from another, earlier world. Alexander had told her that stories of resistance and refusal had always marked the history of humanity.

Maybe she was just being melodramatic. Perhaps she was just a young, foolish woman with dreams of self-importance. Yeah, maybe. Her reverie was broken by the sounds of a key turning in a lock.

Sheriff Tatum entered the cell trailed by the deputy from the mids. Tatum held a file in his hands, but he didn’t refer to it or even allude to anything that might be in it. The file was a prop. Maybe it was intended to subconsciously indicate to her the real power of paper. Maybe her life was in that file, and the dispensation of that life was at the whim of the one who wielded it.

“So,” the Sheriff started, “before you start beating me up with questions, or demand for me to explain the reasons you’ve been brought to a cell down here instead of in the up-top, let me tell you what you need to know. You are here because we have word that your father is currently in the down-deep, way down on 141 and, as a courtesy only, we’ve decided to hold you here while we complete our investigation.”

“So my father can visit me?” she asked. “Really? Because William was arrested with me, he has family in the down-deep. Why isn’t he being held here?”

“The details of the investigation are not really your business, Leah. You are already guilty of aiding in the manufacture of black-market paper. You admitted as much when we caught you red-handed. You had black-market paper in your hands, and there were molds and pulp and all of the other materials and tools for making paper right there in that room.” Tatum leaned back against the bars and cocked his right leg back up and back, resting his foot against the cold steel. “Your father is… a person of interest… in the case, and we’re digging into a number of other irregularities. So just relax and get a good handle on your position.”

Leah nodded and crossed her arms. “So let’s drop the charade about this being some kind of courtesy. Why don’t you just tell me? Exactly what is my position, Sheriff?”

Tatum rolled his eyes and shook his head. “Okay. If you want to do it that way. You’ve been arrested and charged with the same crimes that got your mentor—the man with whom you shadowed—sent out to clean. Perhaps you ought to be thinking about that, and not obsessing with where you are geographically in the silo?”

“My father had nothing to do with this,” Leah said sharply. “He didn’t know we were making paper.”

“Maybe he didn’t… but maybe he did. Frankly, I’ve got a silo that’s on a slow boil, and the making of paper is the least of my concerns.” Tatum looked sideways at the deputy and took a deep breath before continuing.

“Listen, Leah…,” Tatum fidgeted with the file, and then ran his fingers through his hair. His confidence and bravado seemed to melt away and to her, right now, he seemed to be nervous. In fact, if she was reading the situation right, he looked to be more nervous than she was. He continued talking and his voice had dropped a notch, and in it she detected the first ripples of fear; not on the surface, but below the surface, there was fear in his voice. “…there’s word of some stirrings in the down-deep. Maybe some trouble brewing. We don’t know if your father is taking part, but there are people up top who think that he is.”

There it was. The room shuddered, or it seemed to. Leah felt her legs weaken, and her head grew light. Was he talking about an uprising?

“Frankly, I’m not concerned about the paper thing right now,” Tatum said, “and neither is the Mayor. We’ve bigger fish to fry. We want to know what is going on in the down-deep and who is involved. We don’t know if your little paper making operation has something to do with what’s stirring down there, but it would be easy enough for us to assume that the two issues are somehow linked.”

She was starting to feel faint. She blinked and felt the room twist ever-so-slightly around her.

“Your friends are guilty, Leah, and so are you. We haven’t had a cleaning since Alexander went out two years ago, and there hasn’t been a multiple cleaning in over a decade. I need to tell you that your friends’ futures very well may rest solidly in your hands. We need information, and we’re going to need it fast.”

“Wha—,” she was having trouble forming words. The room was moving faster now and she felt her stomach shift with it. “What can… what can I possibly do?”

“We’re going to let you go, Leah. We’re going to let you go, and you’re going to work for us.” Tatum stared into her eyes and he did not blink. “You’re going to work for us, and if you don’t, your friends are going to be sent out, and they are going to die, and you’ll never see them again.”

The spinning magnified, and darkness rose up in her eyes and obscured her view, and then she was falling.

Blackness.

The hard concrete bunk in the cell was cold and she still had her eyes closed, but now she could hear the voices as they came in and out of her consciousness like waves.

“…SAMIZDAT…”

“…Underground publishing… books… Alexander…”

“…some kind of distribution system… porters, sweepers, supply, maintenance…”

“…copy each book by hand. It’s crazy…”

“…what if she won’t cooperate?”

“…clean. And if she doesn’t, they’ll all likely die anyway…”

“…uprising…”

When she was finally fully conscious, Sheriff Tatum told the deputy to prepare the paperwork for her release. The irony was not lost on her. Paper was to be the medium of her freedom, however temporary.

Another hour passed and she was up and pacing around the cell when Tatum and the deputy came in to release her. The Sheriff seemed slightly more confident, though there were still traces of fear in his eyes if she looked closely enough.

“Leah,” Tatum said, matter-of-factly, “this is all pretty simple. We need information from you, and we’re on a schedule. If you fail to help us, you’ll be condemning your friends to the death penalty. If you help us, you will save your friends, you might save your father too, and you’ll certainly save us all a lot of trouble. Lives are at stake, Leah. If you come through with some information we can use, then the Mayor has promised that all pressure will be brought to bear to try to bring about lesser sentences for your friends. It’s all up to you.”

“You can let me out or lock me up, Sheriff,” Leah said. “I’ll never help you.”

“I think you will.”

“Then you don’t know me.”

“I don’t have to know you, Leah. I know people, and I know how we humans usually want to keep our loved ones from dying. You’re not special in that respect, unless you are so callous that you’d send them to clean just to capture or maintain some feeling of rebellion or revolution. Do you think you’re special? Are you a hero? Are you going to get your friends killed so you can be some kind of martyr? Yeah, I think I know people, Leah. You’ll want to see your friends live, that’s what I think. And maybe you’ll even help them get released back into the silo to live their lives out in peace.”

Peace. She laughed. What is it good for?

She was in her apartment alone. There’d been a single note from her mother saying that she’d gone up-top to visit friends. That was it. Leah didn’t believe it for a minute. It was her mother’s handwriting, but she didn’t believe her mother would have gone without some further explanation. Especially with her daughter locked up in jail. Something fishy going on.

Leah wasn’t particularly close to her mother. They saw the world differently. Her mother was one of them. Her father and her mother barely even got along, and the two weeks her father had been in the down-deep had been the first time she hadn’t heard constant arguing in weeks. So… where’s Mom?

The first couple of days after her release passed like silo syrup. She didn’t go to work, because she wanted the rumors and the gossip about her arrest to die down a bit. She’d called in sick for those days, but she knew that the excuse wouldn’t hold up for long. Everyone knew that she wasn’t sick. She’d been arrested. That meant that she was a criminal. She was an enemy to them, an outcast in the silo. Maybe that was why her mother had taken off.

Leah wasn’t ashamed, though. However much she examined herself, she never developed the feeling that she’d done something wrong. It even surprised her a little bit that she didn’t feel ashamed, and, even though she was too disturbed by the whole situation to return to work, she still had a latent sense of satisfaction that she’d been doing what she thought was right.

Time, however, is often the enemy of courage and discipline. The feeling of strength and the desire to stand steadfast against oppression waned as the hours ticked by. Now, the sense of their being options began to bounce around in her brain. If she did nothing, she knew that every member of the paper guild would be sent out to clean. Ivan would die for her intransigence. He was the best friend she had in the whole silo ever since Alexander died. Maybe… maybe she even loved him. Did she? Why did that thought even come up? And now, if she did nothing, he would soon be dead. Was that fair? What if the whole silo erupted in violence? She’d feel a lot better if she were with her brothers and sisters in chains, she thought. But is that even true? Am I ready to die? When she was in the cell down on 70, she’d felt more than ready to die, but now, she wasn’t so sure.

Doubt. Uncertainty. Fear?

Her biggest area of confusion lay in the connection, or lack thereof, between whatever was going on down in Maintenance, and the papermaking guild. As far as she knew, she and her father were the only ones who provided a connection between the two enterprises. She didn’t know what her father was up to, and she was fairly sure that he was ignorant of her illegal activities. The authorities had two problems in the silo, and apparently they had determined that she was the missing link.

She was deep in thought when it happened. The knock on the door was barely recognizable. Her thoughts fled from her and she caught her breath and waited in trembling silence. After a few moments, she heard it again. She had to do something. Twisting the knob, she felt her heart race in her chest. She cracked the door open slightly and a hand began to push against the door. She thought about resisting but before the thought could produce action, a porter rushed through it and quickly slammed it shut behind himself.

“I have only a few seconds,” he said, as he flipped open his satchel and rifled through the contents. Deep in the bag, buried down in a corner, he found what he was looking for and pulled it out. His hands shook as he opened the small envelope. Inside, there were two notes.

“These are from someone up-top. You’ll know who when you read them. This one first,” he said as he handed her one of the notes.

She flipped it open and read the charcoal words and recognized the firm hand and the slant of the letters and immediately knew its author:

The note was initialed by all of the five guild members who’d been arrested. When she finished reading it, the porter handed her the second note and nodded his head in farewell as he took a step to leave and reached for the door.

“Wait!” Leah said. “Let me give you some chits for the delivery.”

“No. I won’t take them. I didn’t do this for chits.”

“Well… what’s your name?”

“Morgan.”

“Thank you, Morgan.”

The porter smiled at her, and with that, he was gone.

Leah sat down, unsure of the trustworthiness of her legs for a moment. Tears ran down her face and onto the paper she clutched in her hands. After reading the second note from Ivan, she poured herself out, sobbing uncontrollably until she had no more tears to shed. After some time, she braced herself and read the note again.

Before she could even think about the ramifications of the letter, or ask herself if Ivan really meant the part about wanting to marry her, she’d already slung open her door and was sprinting towards Ivan’s place. He lived on the same floor, and his apartment was tucked away down a long, dark hallway that led away from the 57th floor landing. Arriving at his apartment, she found that the doorway was crisscrossed with duct tape, a rude pronouncement by the authorities that the peaceful man who lived here was really a criminal—an enemy to the silo. On the tape someone had written “Sheriff’s Investigation” several times. She reached through the tape and twisted the knob and the door swung open into the room. Apparently Sheriff Tatum’s office was sufficiently convinced that the mere mention of a Sheriff’s investigation was good enough of a threat to keep out interlopers. They were wrong about that. She’d have busted open the door if it came to that.

Leah looked back down the hallway towards the landing and saw that no one was watching, so she bent down and stepped through a gap in the tape. Slinking her way through the crisscrossed barrier, she made her way into the apartment and closed the door behind her.

She’d never been in Ivan’s apartment before. The tiny living area was Spartan. There was a small loveseat with a threadbare quilted blanket thrown over the back of it. There was a small dinette table with a single chair, and there was a metal bookshelf, identical to the one that the guild had used to press and hide paper. There was almost nothing in the room that betrayed the character of the apartment’s inhabitant. Almost nothing. On the bookshelves there were a few “approved” books, maybe ten or twelve of them. The books were held up by a set of bookends, probably made in a ceramics class. On each of the bookends was the imprint of a massive and towering tree, painted in brown and green to stand out against the black background of the ceramic base.

Leah worked quickly. She reached up beneath the overhanging lip of the top shelf and found the two wing nuts that she knew would be there. Her hands shook and she had to steady herself so that she could continue to twist the nuts to free the under-shelf from its mate. When the nuts were free from their bolts, the under-shelf was loose and she lowered it down and sat it on the love seat.

There on the shelf she saw a folded note written on homemade paper, a brass key, and four flattened sheets of paper that were covered—every millimeter of them—in tiny print.

She opened the folded note first:

If you’re reading this, then something has gone wrong. If you’re one of them, then it’s all over for us anyway, and I hope you feel good about destroying something that is beautiful. If you are one of us (hopefully you are one of us!), you’re reading this because I was able to get a note out to someone who hasn’t been arrested… yet. If there are documents here, PLEASE take them, and do all that you can do to get them into SAMIZDAT. If you truly are one us, the key will lead you to the information you need to know.Ivan.

Samizdat. There was that word again. She’d heard Sheriff Tatum say it when she was in her barely conscious state back in her jail cell.

She rubbed the key, turned it in her hands, and examined it closely.There were no marks or words or numbers that might indicate what it went to.

The tiny print on the handmade sheets of paper bent around the Bukovsky quote, and then continued around in a circle on to the top of the page. The words were miniscule—she could barely read them without a magnifying glass—and the author had written the lines in a single swirl, like a pinwheel or a spiral, starting on the very edge of the top of the page and then continuing clockwise until the words reached the middle of the page. In this way, an entire manuscript had been squeezed onto the front and backs of four sheets of paper. She tried to imagine doing this. She wondered how many words the author could write before he’d have to sharpen his charcoal and rest his hand.

Leah wanted to read the manuscript, but she felt an urgency that compelled her to set the pages aside for the moment. She needed to work on the mystery of the key. She looked at it again, rubbed its face, flipped it over in her hands and examined it again. She could not identify a single element of the key that indicated its use. It was different than the apartment keys she was used to, and it had no name or number stamped into it that might give her an indication of where to start looking for an answer.

As she looked closer, she noted that the tooth pattern on the key did remind her of an apartment key—at least it was the nearest thing she could think of to the one she had in her hand. She fished her own key out of her pocket and compared it to the key in her hand. Similar. Not identical, but similar. Maybe it goes to a safe house? Arghh! Where could it be?

She closed her eyes and tried to clear her mind. She took a deep breath and relaxed her shoulders and arms. She began breathing diaphragmatically and attempted to will her heart rate to decrease.

That’s when she realized that she needed to make this more personal. Ivan had given her a note telling her where to find the key. He expected her to know what the key went to, and he showed no doubt that she would figure it out because he didn’t mention it again in the note she’d just read. He expected her to just know! So it was personal. Where could it be?

Alexander.

“Could it be the key to Alexander’s old apartment?” She actually asked this question aloud to herself. Alexander had been dead for two years. Surely they’d assigned the living space to someone else by now. How could she find out? Alexander had lived on 60, three levels down, though he’d worked as a picker in the recycling unit for his whole life. She’d have to go down there to try the key in order to find out.

It took her only a few minutes to make it back to her apartment. She slipped the brass key into her pocket and then pulled on a woolen sweatshirt. She carefully rolled up the four page manuscript and put the roll up her left sleeve. She didn’t want to be carrying any bags or packages because doing that might catch the attention of a porter. She pulled on a cap and left her apartment, locking the door behind her. As she did, she wondered if she’d ever see her home again.

The walk down to 60 passed swiftly because Leah busied her mind by going through the events of the past several days in her head, and at some point she began to feel like she was starting to make sense of it all. She didn’t have it completely worked out yet, but she was… just.. just… on the verge of some breakthrough.

Whenever she would pass someone on the stairs, she’d look down and away, maybe peering over the railing towards the down-deep because she didn’t want anyone to recognize her or stop her to ask her questions. From here, you could see all the way down to 99, which was the unofficial start of the down-deep.

She didn’t know what time it was. Time was always a mystery in the silo unless you were the kind of person who paid attention to such things. Leah wasn’t that kind of person. She figured it was late, but didn’t know how late.

When she reached the landing on 60, she loitered for a moment, checking out the situation, seeing if she’d been followed, looking for inquiring eyes and to see if anyone was paying special attention to her. No one was, so she sprinted down the hallway that led to Alexander’s old apartment.

I don’t even know if someone is living here now! The thought was screaming in her head as she stuck the key in the lock, and she closed her eyes before she made the willful decision to try and turn the key. A gentle twist of the wrist and the key turned smoothly in the cylinder, and she heard the locking mechanism tick as the pins all cleared their obstructions, and the door responded to the pressure she applied to it by swinging open slowly to reveal a room not unlike Ivan’s living room. This room was also sparsely furnished, but there was a large desk pushed against one wall, and a heating vent, which was partway up the same wall, was opened. The louvered grill that had once covered the heating vent was lying on the desk. A rope was hanging from the heater vent—one end of it down inside the ducting and the other was tied to the leg of the desk. No human had escaped down the heating vent. The desk was heavy, but not heavy enough to hold the weight of a person. Something else then.

Leah closed the door and made a quick perusal of the living area. The small kitchen looked as if it were used often, and there were a few dirty cups and spoons in the sink. The tiny bedroom had been turned into another work area, and there was a desk and couple of metal shelves in that room, but nothing else of note for her to investigate. Apparently, someone or some group had commandeered the apartment and was using it as a work space.

She’d just started to examine the rope when it went taut. Stepping back a few steps, she could tell from the tension on the rope that something was now hanging on the other end. There were a few sharp metallic raps coming from the vent, then there was silence, and the rope hung still and stiff. For a few moments she just stared at it, uncertain what she should do.

After a minute or so had passed, she decided she’d check the rope, and when she pulled on it, she noted the resistance and that whatever was tied on the other end wasn’t too heavy, so she pulled the rope up slowly, trying her best not to make too much noise as she did.

When the object at the end of the rope cleared the mouth of the heating vent, she saw that there were several books tied to the rope. Homemade books. Books made with black-market paper. She untied the bundle and carefully placed the books on the desk.

The top book caught her attention. The title was written in large print… Lex Rex, and the author was someone named Samuel Rutherford. She had no idea who Samuel Rutherford was, but whoever had published this book had cared a great deal about the content, because the book was completely copied out in charcoal.

The second book looked like a book of poetry. The third and final book was the one that really shook her.

…her Alexander!

The book was thick and, like the other books, it had been built by hand. Someone had bound the book by first sewing it with heavy yarn. Then the spine had been dipped in a hard material, like glue or a very stiff wax. She flipped through the pages and she did not recognize the hand, but she recognized the spirit behind the words. Her heart jumped and she almost squealed with delight at the very thought that someone, somewhere, cared enough about Alexander’s words to put them into a book.

Leah had almost convinced herself to sit down and read the book right then, but her elation melted away when she saw, from the corner of her eye, the knob of the front door slowly twist, and then the door itself push open. Standing in the doorway was Joseph Kind, the man she was certain had ratted the paper guild out to the authorities.

When he first entered the room, he had a smile of complete confidence on his face. Leah melted as she stepped backwards, half-stumbling until she was sitting on the love seat. She still gripped Alexander’s book in her hands.

“Ahh, Leah,” Joseph said, “you finally made it. I was wondering if you were every going to show up here.” He indicated to the book in her hand. “That’s a great book. You should read it.”

He pushed the door closed behind him, and as he did, Leah felt her stomach turn and the fight-or-flight response began to take hold of her. She blinked her eyes and looked around the room. The door behind Joseph was the only way out.

Joseph nodded his head at her, as if he were reading her mind. “You probably think that I squealed on you to the silo. I didn’t. That was your mother. We’re on the same team. Anyway, welcome to Samizdat!”

Reader,

Thank you so much for allowing me to share this story with you. Thanks again to Hugh Howey for allowing, and encouraging, other writers to publish books set in the Wool universe.

I hope you have enjoyed the kickoff to Leah’s story. If you have, there are a few things you can do to help me out. Please take the time (it only takes a few minutes) to go to Amazon.com (or wherever you bought this story) and leave a short review. It really does help, and I’d appreciate it very much. Also, if you enjoyed the story, and you know others who have read and liked the WOOL series, please let them know that this Silo series exists!

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Thanks again!

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Michael Bunker is an off-grid farmer, author, historian, philosopher, iconoclast, husband, and father of four living children. He lives with his family in a "plain" community in Central Texas where he reads and writes books… and occasionally tilts at windmills.

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W1CK, by Michael Bunker (2013).

ISBN 9781481858342

WICK 2: Charm School, by Michael Bunker (2013)

ISBN 9781482605532

WICK 3: Exodus, by Michael Bunker (2013)

ISBN 9781482797763

Three By Bunker, by Michael Bunker (2013).

ISBN 9781484067987

The Last Pilgrims, by Michael Bunker (2012).

ISBN 9780578088891

Fiction Disclaimer:

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events either are the products of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

© Copyright 2013 by Michael Bunker

All rights reserved

FIRST PRINTING

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form, except for brief quotations in reviews, without the written permission of the author.

Cover Design:

Jason Gurley

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