“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Clay said. “Outside?" Like… outside where?” He exchanged looks with Root and Zach, as if to say Are these people crazy? Root shrugged.
“We have reason to believe there’s an outside, yes.”
“Believe?” Cole stepped forward and pointed at Shaw. “If you don’t know for 100% certain there’s somewhere to go, who’s to say you’re not just leading us all to our deaths? I don’t know about you, but it’s been pretty safe here so far.
“Cole,” Tess said. “We’ve been outside this town. We’ve explored. We’re confident.”
“Confident in what?”
“The machine.” Shaw said. “You want to destroy it, right?”
The men nodded simultaneously.
“Then what, what do you get for that? What do you think will happen after that?”
Cole hadn’t had the time to think too much about it. He was hellbent on destroying it and freeing shovelers that he didn’t think about what that meant.
So what if shovelers were free? Then they’d be roaming the town looking for something to do.
What was the end goal? “Freeing” people only went so far. He wasn’t sure, and clearly needed to spend more time on it, but it seemed as though Shaw had an answer. At least, Cole hoped he did after reflecting on it for 2 seconds. There was something about the man that made it seem like there were answers stuffed in his tangled-hair covered head, just waiting to leak out. The way he grinned. The way his forehead crinkled. His wavy beard shaking for no reason.
“You haven’t thought about it, have you?” Shaw said, nearly laughing. Cole must have tipped his hand by staring off into the distance.
“Have you?” Cole shot back.
Tess nodded. “Of course, that’s why we’re here.” She leaned against the desk and crossed her arms. “The machine does do something.”
“I don’t believe you,” Root interjected. “We’ve seen the top room. Ain’t nothing being monitored up there.”
“You’re right,” Tess said. “Nothing is being monitored. But it’s not because there’s nothing to monitor. It’s because they don’t know how to monitor it.”
“Monitor what?” Zach asked meagerly from behind the others.
“The wall.”
Cole leaned in. He must have misunderstood. “Wall?” he repeated.
Tess just nodded.
“What wall, lady?” Root expressed the inner thoughts of Cole.
“Outside,” she said. “There’s a wall preventing us from going anywhere.”
Having recently demolished a prison wall to bust Root out of jail, Cole couldn’t help but add his thoughts. “Just… go through it?” It was a statement, but came out as a question.
Tess shook her head. “Imagine the biggest wall you can think of. A never ending surface that runs as far as you can see. We’ve followed it and ran out of supplies long before we could find an ending, or a weakness, or anything that would make us think we could get past it.”
Shaw stepped in. “Until we realized the wall was somehow powered by electricity.”
“How’d you find that out?” Cole asked.
Shaw’s eyes darted to the floor.
“It doesn’t matter,” Tess said. “What matters is we had new information. The wall couldn’t be scaled, our navigated around, or even dug through from underneath.”
“Believe us, we tried,” Shaw added.
“The only logical conclusion was to find out how the wall was powered, and turn it off.”
Shaw grinned again. “And where could such a large amount of energy come from?”
“The machine…” Cole whispered into the air.
Shaw nodded and ran his hand through his scraggly beard. “And once we shut it down, we can get finally out of here.”