Unwind (38 page)

The word that the Akron AWOL blew up the Chop Shop zigs like lightning through every Unwind in Happy Jack, and in seconds, disobedience erupts into a full-scale revolt. Every terrible is now a terror. The guards fire, but there are simply too many kids, and not enough tranq bullets. For every kid that goes down, there's another kid that doesn't. The guards are quickly overwhelmed, and once they are, the mob starts storming the front gate.

*   *   *

Connor has no understanding of this event. All he knows is that he was led into the building, then something happened. And now he's not in the building anymore. His face is wrong. It hurts. It hurts bad. He can't move his arm. The ground feels strange beneath his feet. His lungs hurt. He coughs and they
hurt more.

He's stumbling down steps now. There are kids here. Lots of kids. Unwinds. That's right, he's an Unwind. They're all Unwinds. But the meaning of that is slipping from him fast. The kids are running. They're fighting. Then Connor's legs give out, and suddenly he's on the ground. Looking up at the sun.

He wants to sleep. He knows this isn't a good place, but he wants to anyway. He feels wet. He feels sticky. Is his nose running?

Then there's an angel hovering above him, all in white.

“Don't move,” the angel says. Connor recognizes the voice.

“Hi, Lev. How are things . . . ?”

“Shh.”

“My arm hurts,” Connor says lazily. “Did you bite me again?”

Then Lev does something funny. He takes off his shirt. Then he tears his shirt in half. He presses half the torn shirt to Connor's face. That makes his face hurt more. He groans. Then Lev takes the other half of his shirt and ties it around Connor's arm. He ties it tight. That hurts too.

“Hey . . . what . . .”

“Don't try to talk. Just relax.”

There are others around him now. He doesn't know who. A kid holding a tranq pistol looks at Lev, and Lev nods. Then the kid kneels down next to Connor.

“This is going to hurt a little,” says the kid with the tranq gun. “But I think you need it.”

He aims uncertainly at various parts of Connor's body, then settles on Connor's hip. Connor hears the gunshot, feels a sharp pain in his hip, and as his vision begins to darken he sees Lev hurrying shirtless toward a building that's pouring out
black smoke.

“Weird,” says Connor. Then his mind goes to a quiet place where none of this matters.

“A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us . . . Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

—A
LBERT
E
INSTEIN

“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.”

—A
LBERT
E
INSTEIN

Connor regains consciousness with nothing but hazy confusion where his thoughts ought to be. His face aches, and he can see out of only one eye. He feels pressure over his other eye.

He's in a white room. There's a window through which he can see daylight. This is unquestionably a hospital room, and that pressure over his eye must be a bandage. He tries to lift his right arm but there's an ache in his shoulder, so he decides it's not worth the effort just yet.

Only now does he begin to piece together the events that landed him here. He was about to be unwound. There was an explosion. There was a revolt. Then Lev was standing over him. That's all he can remember.

A nurse comes into the room. “So you're finally awake! How are you feeling?”

“Good,” he says, his voice little more than a croak. He clears his throat. “How long?”

“You've been in a medically induced coma for a little over two weeks,” says the nurse.

Two weeks? With a life that has been lived day to day for so long, two weeks sounds like an eternity. And Risa . . . what about Risa? “There was a girl,” he says. “She was on the roof of the Chop—of the harvest clinic. Does anyone know what happened to her?”

The nurse's expression doesn't give anything away. “That can all be sorted out later.”

“But—”

“No buts. Right now you need time to heal—and I have to
say, you're doing better than anyone expected, Mr. Mullard.”

His first thought is that he hasn't heard her right. He shifts uncomfortably. “Excuse me?”

She fluffs his pillows. “Just relax now, Mr. Mullard. Let us handle everything.”

His second thought is that he's been unwound after all. He's been unwound, and somehow, someone got his entire brain. He's inside someone else now. But as he thinks about it, he knows that can't be it. His voice still sounds like his voice. When he rubs his tongue against his teeth, those teeth are still the ones he remembers.

“My name is Connor,” he tells her. “Connor Lassiter.”

The nurse studies him with an expression that's kind, but calculated—almost disturbingly so. “Well,” she says, “as it so happens, an ID with the picture charred off was found in the wreckage. It belonged to a nineteen-year-old guard by the name of Elvis Mullard. With all the confusion after the blast there really was no telling who was who, and many of us agreed that it would be a shame to let that ID go to waste, don't you agree?” She reaches over and adjusts the angle of Connor's bed until he's sitting up more comfortably. “Now tell me,” she asks, “What was your name again?”

Connor gets it. He closes his eye, takes a deep breath, and opens it again. “Do I have a middle name?”

The nurse checks the chart. “Robert.”

“Then my name is E. Robert Mullard.”

The nurse smiles and holds out her hand to shake his. “A pleasure to meet you, Robert.”

As a reflex, Connor reaches out his right hand toward hers, and gets that dull ache in his shoulder again.

“Sorry,” says the nurse. “My fault.” She shakes his left hand instead. “Your shoulder will feel a bit sore until the graft is completely healed.”

“What did you just say?”

The nurse sighs. “Me and my big mouth. The doctors always want to be the ones to tell you, but the cat's out of the bag now, isn't it? Well, the bad news is that we weren't able to save your arm, or your right eye. The good news is that, as E. Robert Mullard, you qualified for emergency transplants. I've seen the eye—don't worry, it's a decent match. As for the arm, well, the new one is a little more muscular than your left one, but some good physical therapy can even that out in no time.”

Connor lets it sink in, playing it over in his mind.
Eye. Arm. Physical therapy.

“I know it's a lot to get used to,” says the nurse.

For the first time Connor looks at his new hand. There are bandages padding his shoulder, and his arm is in a sling. He flexes the fingers. They flex. He twists his wrist. It twists. The fingernails need clipping, and the knuckles are thicker than his own. He runs his thumb across the pads of his fingertips. The sense of touch is just as it ever was. Then he rotates his wrist a bit farther, and stops. He feels a wave of panic surge through him, one that resolves into a knot deep in his gut.

The nurse grins as she looks at the arm. “Parts often come with their own personalities,” she says. “Nothing to worry about. You must be hungry. I'll get you some lunch.”

“Yeah,” says Connor. “Lunch. That's good.”

She leaves him alone with the arm. His arm. An arm that bears the unmistakable tattoo of a tiger shark.

Risa's life as she knew it ended the day the clappers blew up the Chop Shop—and everyone eventually did learn that it was clappers, not Connor. The evidence was indisputable.
Especially after the confession of the clapper who survived.

Unlike Connor, Risa never lost consciousness. Even though she was pinned beneath a steel I beam, she stayed wide awake. As she lay there in the wreckage, some of the pain she felt when the I beam came down on her was gone. She didn't know whether that was a good sign, or bad. Dalton was in lots of pain though. He was terrified. Risa calmed him down. She talked to him, telling him it was all right—that everything would be fine. She kept telling him that right up until the moment he died. The guitar player had been luckier. He was able to wrestle himself out from under the debris, but he couldn't free Risa, so he left, promising her he'd send back help. He must have kept his promise, because help finally did come. It took three people to lift the beam, but only one to carry her out.

Now she rests in a hospital room, trussed up in a contraption that looks more like a torture device than a bed. She is riddled with steel pins like a human voodoo doll. The pins are held in precise place by rigid scaffolding. She can see her toes, but she can't feel them. From now on, seeing them will have to be enough.

“You have a visitor.”

A nurse stands at the door, and when she steps aside, Connor is standing in the doorway. He's bruised and bandaged, but very much alive. Her eyes instantly fill with tears, but she knows she can't let herself sob. It still hurts too much to sob. “I knew they were lying,” she says. “They said you died in the explosion—that you were trapped in the building—but I saw you outside. I knew they were lying.”

“I probably would have died,” Connor said, “but Lev stopped the bleeding. He saved me.”

“He saved me, too,” Risa tells him. “He carried me out of the building.”

Connor smiles. “Not bad for a lousy little tithe.”

By the look on his face, Risa can tell he doesn't know that Lev was one of the clappers—the one who didn't go off. She decides not to tell him. It's still all over the news; he'll know soon enough.

Connor tells her of his coma, and about his new identity. Risa tells him how few of Happy Jack's AWOLs have been caught—how the kids stormed the gates and escaped. She glances at his sling as they speak. The fingers sticking out of that arm sling are definitely not Connor's. She knows what must have happened, and she can tell he's self-conscious about it.

“So, what do they say?” Connor asks. “About your injuries, I mean. You're going to be okay, right?”

Risa considers how she might tell him, then just decides to be quick about it. “They tell me I'm paralyzed from the waist down.”

Connor waits for more, but that's all she has to give him. “Well . . . that's not so bad, right? They can fix that—they're always fixing that.”

“Yes,” says Risa. “They fix it by replacing a severed spine with the spine of an Unwind. That's why I refused the operation.”

He looks at her in disbelief, and she in turn points at his arm. “You would have done the same thing if they'd given you a choice. Well, I had a choice, and I made it.”

“I'm so sorry, Risa.”

“Don't be!” The one thing she doesn't want from Connor is pity. “They can't unwind me now—there are laws against unwinding the disabled—but if I got the operation, they'd unwind me the moment I was healed. This way I get to stay whole.” She smiles at him triumphantly. “So you're not the only one who beat the system!”

He smiles at her and rolls his bandaged shoulder. The sling shifts, exposing more of his new arm—enough to reveal the tattoo. He tries to hide it, but it's too late. She sees it. She
knows
it. And when she meets Connor's eye, he looks away in shame.

“Connor . . . ?”

“I promise,” he says. “I promise I will never touch you with this hand.”

Risa knows this is a crucial moment for both of them. That arm—the same one that held her back against a bathroom wall. How could she look at it now with anything but disgust? Those fingers that threatened unspeakable things. How can they make her feel anything but revulsion? But when she looks at Connor, all that fades away. There's only him.

“Let me see it,” she says.

Connor hesitates, so she reaches out and gently slips it from the sling. “Does it hurt?”

“A little.”

She brushes her fingers across the back of his hand. “Can you feel that?”

Connor nods.

Then she gently lifts the hand to her face, pressing the palm to her cheek. She holds it there for a moment, then lets go, letting Connor take over. He moves his hand across her cheek, wiping away a tear with his finger. He softly strokes her neck, and she closes her eyes. She feels as he moves his fingertips across her lips before he takes his hand away. Risa opens her eyes and takes the hand in hers, clasping it tightly.