She devises a plan to secretly funnel higher quality supplies to IT for the next cleaning suit. While she is in Mechanical, however, Juliette realizes that IT’s cleaning suits are designed to fail rather than keep cleaners alive. Bernard banishes Juliette to Mechanical and soon after sentences her to cleaning. She also meets Lukas, who works in IT, and starts a romance with him. Marnes, who was in love with Jahns, kills himself out of grief.Īs sheriff, Juliette begins to investigate what drove Holston and his wife to cleaning, running afoul of Bernard, who is serving as interim mayor. Bernard, who is biased against mechanics and also furious over the power holiday, poisons Jahns canteen, assassinating her. Jahns clashes with Bernard Holland, head of IT, over her appointment of Juliette as sheriff. She reluctantly accepts the role of sheriff in exchange for a power holiday that would give her enough time to make repairs on the silo’s generator. Juliette works in the “down deep” of Mechanical. The mayor and deputy sheriff, Jahns and Marnes, go on a downward journey of several days to recruit a woman named Juliette for the role of sheriff. He soon realizes, however, that his helmet is showing him an altered version of reality and that the world really is toxic. He cleans the cameras out of pity for the people left behind in cramped silo. Holston, driven mad by grief and curiosity over his wife’s discovery, goes out to cleaning and discovers that the world is lush and alive, contrary to what he has been taught.

Three years earlier, his wife did the same after making a startling discovery in the silo’s servers. The novel opens with Holston, the sheriff of the silo, volunteering himself for cleaning. Most cleaners say they will not go through with the cleaning, but eventually all do, a source of mystery in the silo.

Eventually each cleaner succumbs to the toxic gases and dies. Cleaners wear suits designed by the IT department that allow them to stay alive long enough to clean the cameras that show the outside world to the residents inside. Expressing the forbidden desire to go out of the silo is punishable by cleaning. Wool takes place in the world of the silo, a 144-floor underground community of humans, hundreds of years after an unknown event has caused the air above ground to become toxic.

The wool trilogy