UnSouled

Page 36

A bullet catches the corner of the sliding glass veranda door, but leaves little more than a ding. It’s bulletproof glass. Apparently the builders decided that anyone who would be invited to the visitor’s suite of a harvest camp might be the kind of person likely to get shot at. His only way out is the door to the suite, but it’s locked from the outside.
The sound of gunfire diminishes, until it’s gone entirely—and the sight of kids still running outside tells Hayden that the invading force was victorious.
He pounds on his door over and over again, screaming at the top of his lungs, until someone comes.
It’s a kid at the door, and he looks familiar. Hayden quickly recognizes him as a message runner from the Graveyard.
“Hayden?” the kids says. “No way!”
• • •
He is led by three fugitives he knew from the airplane graveyard out into the common area, where the artificial turf swelters in the midday sun. There are bodies strewn everywhere. Some are tranq’d; others clearly dead. Most are kids. A few are guards. To the left, the harvest camp workers are being bound and gagged. To the right, there are vast numbers of kids racing out the camp’s gate, claiming their freedom. But not everyone is leaving.
The rest are being addressed by someone wearing the pastel-gray coverall uniform of an Unwind transport worker.
Hayden stops short when he realizes who it is.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, he was holding out hope that it was Connor come to rescue them. Now he wonders if it’s too late to go back to his guest suite.
“Hey,” the kid who unlocked his door shouts. “Look who we found!”
When Starkey lays eyes on Hayden, there’s a moment of fear in Starkey’s eyes, which is quickly engulfed by steel. He smiles a little too broadly. “What was it you always said at the Graveyard, Hayden? ‘Hello. I’ll be your rescuer today.’”
“He’s one of them!” someone shouts before Hayden can come up with a clever response. “He’s been working for the Juvies! They even let him pick who gets unwound!”
“Oh, is that the latest news? You know you can’t trust a thing the tabloids say. Next I’ll be giving birth to alien triplets.”
Bam is there—she looks at Hayden, somewhat amused. “So the Juvenile Authority made you their bitch.”
“Nice to see you too, Bam.”
Shouts of “Leave him,” and “Tranq him,” and even “Kill him,” spread through the crowd of Cold Springs Unwinds, but the kids who knew him rise to his defense enough to spread at least a few seeds of doubt. The crowd looks to Starkey for a decision, but he doesn’t seem ready to make one. He’s spared, though, because three strong storks approach with the struggling camp director.
The crowd parts, and someone has the bright idea to spit on Menard as he passes, and pretty soon everyone’s doing it. Hayden might have done it if he had thought of it first, but now it’s just conformism.
“So this must be the guy in charge,” Starkey says. “Get on your knees.”
When Menard doesn’t obey, the three kids manhandling him push him down.
“You have been found guilty of crimes against humanity,” Starkey says.
“Guilty?” wails Menard desperately. “I’ve had no trial! Where’s my trial?”
Starkey looks up at the mob. “How many of you think he’s guilty?”
Just about every hand goes up, and as much as Hayden hates Menard, he has a bad feeling about where this is going. Sure enough, Starkey pulls out a pistol. “There’s twelve in a jury, and that’s definitely more than twelve people,” Starkey tells Menard. “Consider yourself convicted.”
Then Starkey does something Hayden was not expecting. He hands the gun to Hayden.
“Execute him.”
Hayden begins to stammer, staring at the gun. “Starkey, uh—this isn’t—”
“If you’re not a traitor, then prove it by putting a bullet in his head.”
“That won’t prove anything.”
Then Menard doubles over and begins to pray. A man who kills kids for a living praying for deliverance. It’s enough to make Hayden aim at Menard’s hypocritical skull. He holds it there for a good ten seconds, but he can’t pull the trigger.
“I won’t,” Hayden says. “Not like this.”
“Fine.” Starkey takes back the gun, then points to a random kid in the crowd, who looks to be no older than fourteen. The kid steps forward, and Starkey puts the gun in the kid’s hand. “Show this coward what it means to be courageous. Carry out the execution.”
The kid is clearly terrified, but all eyes are on him. He’s been put to the test and knows he must not fail. So he grimaces. He squints. He puts the muzzle of the gun to the back of Menard’s head and looks away. Then he pulls the trigger.
The pop is not loud; it’s just a pop. Like a single stray firecracker. Menard crumples, dead before he hits the ground. It’s quick and clean. Just an entrance wound in the back of the head and an exit wound right beneath the chin, with the bullet itself claimed by the artificial turf. There are no exploding brain bits and pieces of skull—Starkey and the crowd seem disappointed that an execution, in the end, is far less dramatic than the buildup.
“All right, move out!” Starkey orders, giving instructions to commandeer any vehicle for which they can find keys.
“What about him?” Bam asks, sneering at Hayden.
Starkey spares Hayden a brief glance and the tiniest hint of a superior grin before saying, “We’ll take him with us. He still might be useful.” Then he turns back to all those gathered and says in a powerful voice, “I hereby announce that this harvest camp is officially closed!”
Starkey gets the cheers and adulation he’s craving, and Hayden, looking at the dead director . . . and the dead guards . . . and the dozens of dead kids littering the grounds . . . wonders whether he should be cheering or screaming.
33 • Connor
Waiting is not in Connor’s arsenal of personal skills. Even before his parents signed his unwind order, he was impatient and had little tolerance for downtime. Back then, quiet time made him think about his life, thinking about his life made him angry, and anger made him do the kinds of impetuous, irresponsible, and occasionally criminal things that always got him in trouble.
Since the day he ran from his home, however, there has been no downtime—at least not until arriving on the Arápache Reservation. Even when sequestered in Sonia’s basement, there was a whole petri dish of viral angst to deal with. His guard had to be up at all times to protect himself, to protect Risa, and to keep an eye on Roland, who could have taken him out at any instant.
He still wonders if Roland, in the right circumstances, really would have killed him.
At Happy Jack, he had cornered Connor, pinned him against a wall, and tried to strangle him with the very hand that now is a part of Connor—but Roland couldn’t go through with it. In the end, Roland could have been all bark and no bite—but no one will ever know.
Connor, on the other hand, has killed people.
He fired deadly weapons in a war against the Juvies at the Graveyard. He knows some of his bullets hit their mark and took people down. So does that make him a killer? Is there any way to be redeemed from that?
This is why Connor despises downtime. All that thinking can drive him mad.
His one consolation is a growing feeling of safety. Normalcy—if anything about this situation can be called normal. The Tashi’ne family have been kind hosts, in spite of their initial coolness to him. From the moment it became public that Connor is alive, they have truly made their home his.
During the day, however, no one is there. Kele is off at school—which is a good thing because Connor has little patience for Kele’s lack of patience. Chal is off working his magic with the Hopi, Elina spends her days at the pediatric wing of the medical lodge, and Pivane, who does come over for dinner each night—is usually off hunting.
Connor, Grace, and Lev—who can’t go out for fear of being spotted—are left to their own devices.
• • •
It’s late afternoon a week into August—their twentieth day there. The light coming through the windows is a rich amber, reflected by the ridge across the ravine. Shadows become long quickly in these cliff-side homes, and when the sun sets, it’s gone. There’s little room for twilight in the ravine.
Grace, who is very good at entertaining herself, had proclaimed, “There’s lots of stuff here,” on their first day. Today she’s ransacked yet another closet, then reorganized it with frightening precision. Lev, still recovering from the car accident, has a mat spread out on the marble floor in the middle of the great room, doing some physical therapy Elina taught him, while Connor sits on the overstuffed sofa nearby. Having found a pocketknife that must have belonged to long-lost Wil, Connor has started carving wood, but for the life of him doesn’t know what to make, so he just ends up whittling larger sticks into smaller ones.
“You should take this time to educate yourself,” Lev told Connor on the first day the three of them were left alone in the Tashi’ne home. “You kicked-AWOL in, what, tenth grade? You never finished high school; how do you expect to get a job when this is all over?”
The thought of this “all being over” makes Connor laugh. He tries to imagine what his life might be like in some alternate universe, where staying whole was a given, rather than a privilege. He supposes his natural skill with electronics could have eventually gotten him work as a repair technician somewhere. So, when this is “all over,” and if some miracle allows him to lead a normal life, what will that life be about? Alternate-universe Connor might be content repairing refrigerators, but the Connor from this universe finds the idea vaguely horrifying.
All this thinking time is getting him angry again—an old pattern coming back—and although he no longer misdirects it into bursts of stupidity, he’s troubled by the emergence of this old mental subroutine because he knows there are other things, other feelings that come with it.
“I hate this,” Connor says, throwing down the useless stick he’s carving.
Lev uncurls himself from an awkward-looking stretch and watches in that opossum way of his to see where this is going.
“I hate it here,” says Connor. “Being in someone’s house, being ‘taken care of.’ It’s turning me into someone I’m not—or at least someone I’m not anymore.”
Lev holds that long look at Connor, to the point that it’s uncomfortable. Connor refuses to be stared down.
“You were never good at being a kid, were you?” Lev says.
“What?”
“You stunk at it. You were a total screwup. You were the kind of kid who would use a poor unsuspecting tithe as a human shield.”
“Yeah,” says Connor, more than a little indignant, “but don’t forget I saved that tithe’s life!”
“An added bonus—but that’s not the reason why you first grabbed me that day, is it?”