UnStrung (5 page)

Lev feels as if an arrow has hit him in the chest, and he can’t breathe. He tries to remember what Wil told him. The hunger and the sweating can cause hallucinations and strange dreams. Or maybe someone suggested to Kele that
mahpees
always leave, and so he dreamed it.

“I’m not leaving,” he says, and he’s reassuring himself just
as much as Kele.

“In the vision you were running,” Kele tells him. “People wanted to hurt you . . . and you wanted to hurt them back.”

Earlier that morning, Wil told Pivane he was going off to gather firewood, but in reality he just needed to get away. Find a place to think. Now he sits on a cliff-side boulder that gives him a fine view of the forest and a clearer perspective on his life. He can see the camp from here, or at least part of it, and although he does intend to come back with firewood, he doesn’t intend to do it for a while.

Wil can no longer deny the resentment building inside of him; it’s been building since long before his grandfather’s funeral.
Wil, play us a song for healing. Wil, play us a song for calming. Wil, play us a song for celebration, for soothing, for patience, for wisdom.
The tribe has used him like a music machine. No more. He doesn’t have an on/off switch. Maybe it’s time he played music for a different reason, one of his choosing.

And so when this vision quest is over, and he has fulfilled his promise to his grandfather, even if Lev stays, Wil will not. He resolves that it is time for him to leave the rez and blaze a fresh future for himself, and for Una, too . . . if she decides she loves him more than she loves the rez.

Lev tries not to shudder at the prospect of Kele’s vision. Lev has dreamed of himself running too. And he’s dreamed of revenge. Not against anyone in particular, but everyone at once. The world at large. It’s a feeling as dark as the storm clouds on the horizon, and it won’t be easy to dispel.

“We’re in the rez, surrounded by walls and laws that protect us,” he tells Kele with more confidence than he feels. “There’s no one to run from here,” he adds, more to himself than to Kele.

Then, barely a moment after the words are out of his mouth, something cracks in the woods again—and this time he hears screaming. High-pitched shrieks of surprise. Maybe even terror.

Lev launches himself toward the clearing, with Kele on his heels. The kids are standing, staring at Pivane, who lies facedown in the dirt.

A tranq bullet whistles by Lev’s ear and embeds in a log inches away from Kele’s foot.

“Get down!” he yells, and pushes Kele to the ground, his arm shielding him. The other kids follow his lead, diving to the ground just as a storm of tranqs flies through the camp. Frantically Lev looks around for Wil, but doesn’t see him anywhere.

It’s all up to Lev.

He’s only a couple of years older, but the rez kids are looking to him for help. He shifts to protect mode, as he once did for CyFi.

While scanning the surrounding trees, frantic thoughts jostle for attention:
They’ve found me. They’re taking me to harvest camp. I’ll be tithed after all.
And although he’s scared, his anger overwhelms the fear. This is supposed to be a sanctuary. ChanceFolk are supposed to be protected. But are
mahpees
?
Maybe someone on the rez turned him in before his petition to the Council could be signed.

Kele shifts impatiently under his arm. “Why don’t we shoot back?”

But Lev has no idea where Pivane’s tranq rifle is—and even if he had it, he has no idea where to shoot.

“Stay here,” he orders Kele and the others. “Don’t move till I tell you.” Then, like a soldier, Lev uses his toes and elbows to crawl low across the clearing. One of the kids has a tranq flag in his leg and is unconscious. Another got hit in the back. The rest are okay. Where the hell is Wil?

His ear pressed to the ground, Lev feels the tramp of feet, and into the clearing stride three men in dirty battle fatigues, mismatched as if they found their clothes in a thrift store. The three are barely men. They seem no older than nineteen or twenty. They are not ChanceFolk—they’re outsiders.

One of the kids—the youngest girl in the group—gets up to run.

“Pakwa, no!” Lev yells.

Too late. The lead pirate, with a quick flick of his wrist, fires his pistol, tranqing her in the back of the neck, and she goes down, unconscious.

“Well, well, well,” the leader says. He’s tough, missing an ear, and he handles his gun like he was born with it.
Van Gogh,
thinks Lev.
Cut his ear off for the woman he loved.
But Lev imagines that this guy’s ear was cut off by someone else. Probably in a fight. The second guy is squinty-eyed, like either he’s got bad eyesight or he’s so used to glaring at people that his eyes stayed that way. The third guy has big teeth and a straggly beard, that taken together, make him look like a goat. “What a lovely nest of SlotMongers we’ve found,” says Van Gogh.

Lev, his mouth dry, gets up to face the attackers, putting himself between them and the kids on the ground.

“This kid’s sienna!” says the goat, stating the obvious.

Van Gogh is amused. “One wonders what a nice sienna boy is doing running with SlotMongers.” The guy sounds like he was raised in high-class boarding schools, but he looks as ragged and hungry as the others.

“Exchange program,” Lev says. “I hope you know that violence against People of Chance on their own rez is punishable by death.” Lev doesn’t know if this is true, but if it’s not, it should be. “Leave now and we’ll forget this ever happened.”

“Shut it!” says Squints, taking aim at Lev with his tranq pistol.

“These ’Mongers are all underage,” says the goat.

“Which means their parts are worth even more on the black market.” Van Gogh reaches down and tousles Kele’s hair. “Isn’t that right, lambchop?”

Kele pulls away and smacks his hand. Squints raises his gun to tranq him, but Van Gogh doesn’t let him.

“We’ve wasted enough ammo. Save it until we need it.”

Lev tries to swallow his fear. If there was any doubt as to what these lowlifes were, it’s gone. They are hunters of human flesh. Parts pirates.

“Take me,” Lev says, hardly believing he’s saying it. “I’m the one you want. I’m a tithe, which means I’m worth more on the black market than other AWOLs.”

Van Gogh grins. “But not nearly as much as the right little SlotMonger.”

Suddenly there’s the
pfft
of a tranq shot, and Squints’s eyes go uncharacteristically wide before he falls to the ground, with the flag of a tranq in his back. A tranq fired by a custom-made zebrawood rifle.

At the first sound of a rifle crack, Wil’s attention snapped to the clearing. He saw Pivane fall to the ground, and Wil was instantly on his feet, running back to camp. His heart hammering, he circled the camp quietly, slipping into Pivane’s tent to grab his rifle. Then, having found an unseen position from which to fire, he shot the tallest one, who dropped like a bag of bones.

Now, still wielding his uncle’s rifle, Wil emerges into the clearing, his aim trained on the leader, but the leader is quick. He pulls out an old-fashioned revolver—the kind that takes only real bullets—and shoves it against Lev’s temple.

“Drop it or I kill him.”

They freeze in a standoff.

“Thirty-eight caliber, my friend,” the gunman says. “You can tranq me, but your friend will be dead before I hit the ground. Drop the rifle now!”

Wil lowers it but doesn’t drop it. He’s not that stupid. The leader considers the action, then takes the pistol away from Lev’s head, shoving him to the ground.

“What do you want?” Wil asks.

The leader signals his remaining conspirator—the goat-ugly one with the scraggly beard. He pulls something from his pocket and gives it to Wil. “We found this posted in Denver last week.”

It’s a flier on bright red paper that reads:
SEEKING PEOPLE OF CHANCE PARTS. TRIPLE RECOMPENSE FOR SPECIAL GIFTS.

Light suddenly dawns. Parts pirates? These intruders are parts pirates?

“People of Chance are protected,” Wil says. “We can’t be unwound.”

“Hardly the point, Hiawatha,” the leader says, smoothing
his oily hair over an ear that doesn’t exist. “This requisition isn’t strictly legal, which makes it very profitable.”

“So let’s cut to the chase,” says the other parts pirate. “Any of these here kids got special skills?”

A moment of silence, then Lansa says, “Nova can do high math. Algebra and stuff.”

“Oh, yeah, Lansa?” says Nova. “Why don’t you tell them how good you are with a bow and arrow?”

“Both of you shut up!” yells Lev. “Don’t turn on each other. That’s what these dirtbags want!”

The goat-faced one glares at Lev, then kicks Lev in the side.

Wil advances on him, but One-Ear raises his pistol at Wil. “Let’s all take a deep breath, shall we?”

Lev lies in the dirt, the grimace fading from his face. He makes eye contact with Wil to let him know that he’s okay. Hurt, but okay. Wil has never felt so powerless. He thinks of his grandfather. What would he have done?

“Such lovely choices,” the leader says, looking at the batch of kids. “Perhaps we’ll take the lot.”

“Do that,” says Wil, “and our entire tribe will hunt you for the rest of your miserable lives, and I promise you those lives won’t be long. . . . But that won’t happen if one of us goes of our own free will.”

“That’s not yer choice to make!” says Goat-Face. “We choose!”

“Then choose wisely!” Wil says. Near his uncle he sees his guitar where he left it at breakfast, propped against a log. Everything seems to go quiet, though dimly he’s aware of the two pirates talking to each other. Plotting. Choosing.

Wil knows how he can protect the children. He knows how he can save Pivane and Lev.

He lays his uncle’s rifle on the ground and walks to his
guitar.

“Hey,” Goat-Face yells at him, and scoops up Pivane’s rifle. “Where do you think yer going!” Wil picks up his guitar and sits on the log. He knows it’s the only weapon he needs.

He thinks of Una, and the last thing she said to him. She had carved him a pick of rare canyon sinker wood—trees lying submerged for months in the Colorado River—and she gave it to him when he left for this vision quest. Now he pulls it from between the strings and turns it over in his fingers, thinking of her words:

“I will not miss you, Guitar Boy,” she said, clearly meaning that she would, but refusing to say it out loud.

He kisses the pick and puts it in his pocket. He will not waste it on the likes of these monsters. He will play with his bare fingers. He will play a song of their greed. Of their malice. Of their corruption. He will entice them until they are so consumed by their own lust for money that they will see him as their shining meal ticket and forget the others.

“Tell me what this is worth,” Wil says, and begins to play.

The music soars through the camp. He starts with a complicated baroque piece, then switches to a fiery ChanceFolk traditional and finishes with the Spanish music he loves best, but all angry. Accusing. Music that is both glorious and stirring, yet at the same time a secret indictment of the men he is playing for. Each piece makes his fingers tingle and electrifies even the trees surrounding them.

As always, his audience waits in a charged silence long after the last note is played. Even the leader’s gun is pointed at the ground, as if he’s forgotten he’s holding it. Then something happens. Something different.

Someone claps.

He looks at Lev, still sitting in the dirt, gun oil smudged on his neck, mud on his cheek. Lev’s eyes are fixed only on Wil.
He claps with all his might, bringing his hands together powerfully, shattering the silence with his singular applause. Then Kele joins in, then Nova, then all the kids who are still conscious. It becomes rhythmic, as the applause falls into unison.

“Stop clapping!” the goat-faced pirate screams. His face pale, he points a shaking tranq rifle at Lev. “Stop it! You’re freaking me out.”

The other one laughs. “You’ll have to excuse my associate. You see, his brother died in a clapper attack.”

Looks like they blew up the wrong one,
Wil wants to say, but he realizes that the quickening pace and rising volume of their clapping says it much better than words.

Finally the chorus of applause falls off, with Lev’s loud clapping the last to cease, leaving his hands red from the passion of it.

The lead parts pirate holds eye contact with Wil and nods, sealing Wil’s fate. “You’ve got yourself a deal.” Then he orders his comrade to tie the others up.

“What about Bobby?” Goat-Face asks, pointing to their tranq’d accomplice.

The leader spares a single look at the unconscious pirate, aims his revolver, and puts a bullet in his head. “Problem solved.”

Then the two of them duct-tape the kids’ hands and feet and tie all six together, weaving a rope through their trussed limbs. Kele almost spits at them till he catches Wil’s warning look.

Goat-Face ties Lev alone to the tree near where Pivane lies, leaving Lev struggling against the tight ropes.

“Let me say my good-byes,” Wil asks the leader.

The man sits on the log where Wil played his guitar, waving his tranq pistol as a warning. Apparently Wil is now too valuable to shoot with real bullets. “Make it quick.”

As Goat-Face finishes securing Lev to the tree, Wil approaches Lev. Goat-Face takes a step back, watching Wil warily as if he expects to be attacked.

“Wil, what are you doing?” Lev whispers. “These guys are for real. You don’t come back from a chop shop.”

“My choice, Lev. It’s your job now to take care of these kids. Calm them. Reassure them. Pivane will wake up in a few hours. You’ll all be fine.”

Lev swallows and nods, accepting the responsibility.

Wil summons a wry smile for Lev before the parts pirates take him and his guitar away. “Thanks for the applause, little brother.”

In the village three hours later, Lev leans against Pivane’s dusty truck, only half listening as Pivane tells the sheriff what happened. He watches the kids rushed to their cars and taken home. Only Kele looks back and waves good-bye to Lev.