Unwind (39 page)

“I
know
this is your hand now,” she tells him. “Roland would never have touched me like that.” Connor smiles, and Risa takes a moment to look down at the shark on his wrist. It holds no fear for her now, because the shark has been tamed by the soul of a boy. No—the soul of a man.

Not far away, in a high-security federal detention center, Levi Jedediah Calder is held in a cell designed for his very specific needs. The cell is padded. There is a steel blast door three inches thick. The room is kept at a constant forty-five degrees Fahrenheit to keep Lev's body temperature from rising too high. Lev is not cold, though—in fact he's hot. He's hot because he's wrapped in layer after layer of fire-resistant insulation. He looks like a mummy, suspended in midair—but unlike a mummy, his hands aren't crossed over his chest, they're held out to each side and lashed to a crossbeam so he cannot bring his hands together. The way Lev sees it, they didn't know whether to crucify him or mummify him, so they did both. This way, he can't clap, he can't fall, he can't inadvertently detonate himself—and if for some reason he does, the cell is designed to withstand the blast.

They've given him four transfusions. They won't tell him how many more he'll need until the explosive is out of his system. They won't tell him anything. The federal agents who come visit him are only interested in what he can tell them. They've given him a lawyer who talks about insanity like it's a good thing. Lev keeps telling him that he isn't insane, although he's not even sure himself anymore.

The door to his cell opens. He expects another interrogation, but his visitor is someone new. It takes a moment for Lev to recognize him—mainly because he's not wearing his modest pastor's vestments. He wears jeans and a striped buttondown shirt.

“Good morning, Lev.”

“Pastor Dan?”

The door slams closed behind him, but it doesn't echo.
The soft walls absorb the sound. Pastor Dan rubs his arms against the cold. They should have told him to bring a jacket.

“Are they treating you okay?” he asks.

“Yeah,” says Lev. “The good thing about being explosive is that no one can beat you.”

Pastor Dan gives an obligatory chuckle, then awkwardness takes over. He forces himself to meet Lev's eyes. “I understand they'll only keep you wrapped up like this for a few weeks, until you're out of the woods.”

Lev wonders which particular woods he means. Certainly his life will now be one dark forest within another, within another. Lev doesn't even know why the pastor is here, or what he hopes to prove. Should Lev be happy to see him, or should he be mad? This is the man who always told him that tithing was a holy thing from the time he was a small boy—and then told him to run from it. Is Pastor Dan here to reprimand him? To congratulate him? Did Lev's parents send him because he's so untouchable now, they won't come themselves? Or maybe Lev's about to be executed and he's here to give last rites.

“Why don't you just get it over with?” Lev says.

“Get what over with?”

“Whatever you're here to do. Do it, and go.”

There are no chairs in the room, so Pastor Dan leans back against the padded wall. “How much have they told you about what's going on out there?”

“All I know is what goes on in here. Which isn't much.”

Pastor Dan sighs, rubs his eyes, and takes his time to consider where to begin. “First of all, do you know a boy by the name of Cyrus Finch?”

The mention of his name makes Lev begin to panic. Lev knew his background would be checked and rechecked. That's what happens to clappers—their whole life becomes pages pasted on a wall to be examined, and the people in their lives
become suspects. Of course, that usually happens after the clapper has applauded his way into the next world.

“CyFi had nothing to do with this!” says Lev. “Nothing at all. They can't pull him into this!”

“Calm down. He's fine. It just so happens that he's come forward and is making a big stink—and since he knew you, people are listening.”

“A stink about me?”

“About unwinding,” says Pastor Dan, for the first time moving closer to Lev. “What happened at Happy Jack Harvest Camp—it got a whole lot of people talking, people who had just been burying their heads in the sand. There have been protests in Washington against unwinding—Cyrus even testified before Congress.”

Lev tries to imagine CyFi in front of a congressional committee, trash-talking them in prewar sitcom Umber. The thought of it makes Lev smile. It's the first time he's smiled in a long time.

“There's talk that they might even lower the legal age of adulthood from eighteen to seventeen. That'll save a full fifth of all the kids marked for unwinding.”

“That's good,” says Lev.

Pastor Dan reaches into his pocket and pulls out a folded piece of paper. “I wasn't going to show you this, but I think you need to see it. I think you need to understand where things have gone.”

It's the cover of a magazine.

Lev's on it.

Not just on it, Lev
is
the cover. It's his seventh-grade baseball picture—mitt in hand, smiling at the camera. The headline reads,
WHY, LEV, WHY?
In all the time he's had here alone to think and rethink his actions, it never occurred to him that the outside world had been doing the same thing. He doesn't
want this attention, but now he's apparently on a first-name basis with the world.

“You've been on the cover of just about every magazine.”

He didn't need to know that. He hopes that Pastor Dan doesn't have a whole collection of them in his pocket. “So what,” Lev says, trying to act as if it doesn't matter. “Clappers always make the news.”

“Their
actions
make the news—the destruction they've caused—but nobody ever cares who a clapper is. To the public all clappers are the same. But you're different from those others, Lev. You're a clapper who didn't clap.”

“I wanted to.”

“If you wanted to, you would have. But instead you ran into the wreckage and pulled out four people.”

“Three.”

“Three—but you probably would have gone in for more if you could have. The other tithes, they all stayed back. They protected their own precious parts. But you basically led that rescue effort, because there were ‘terribles' who followed you in to bring out survivors.”

Lev remembers that. Even as the mob was crashing down the gate, there were dozens of Unwinds going back into the wreckage with him. And Pastor Dan is right—Lev would have kept going back in, but then it occurred to him that one false move would have set him off and brought the rest of the Chop Shop down around them. So he went back out to the red carpet and sat with Risa and Connor until ambulances took them away. Then he stood in the midst of the chaos and confessed to being a clapper. He confessed over and over again to anyone willing to listen, until finally a police officer kindly offered to arrest him. The officer was afraid to even handcuff Lev for fear of detonating him, but that was all right—he had no intention of resisting arrest.

“What you did, Lev—it confused people. No one knows whether you're a monster or a hero.”

Lev thinks about that. “Is there a third choice?”

Pastor Dan doesn't answer him. Maybe he doesn't know the answer. “I have to believe that things happen for a reason. Your kidnapping, your becoming a clapper, your refusing to clap”—he glances at the magazine cover in his hand—“it's all led to this. For years, Unwinds were just faceless kids that no one wanted—but now you've put a face on unwinding.”

“Can they put my face on someone else?”

Pastor Dan chuckles again, and this time it's not as forced as before. He looks at Lev like he's just a kid, and not something inhuman. It makes him feel, if only for a moment, like a normal thirteen-year-old. It's a strange feeling, because even in his old life he never really was a normal kid. Tithes never are.

“So, what happens now?” Lev asks.

“The way I understand it, they'll clear the worst of the explosive out of your bloodstream in a few weeks. You'll still be volatile, but not as bad as before. You can clap all you want and you won't explode—but I wouldn't play any contact sports for a while.”

“And then they'll unwind me?”

Pastor Dan shakes his head. “They won't unwind a clapper—that stuff never entirely gets out of your system. I've been talking to your lawyer. He has a feeling they're going to offer you a deal—after all, you did help them catch that group who gave you the transfusion to begin with. Those people who used you, they'll get what they deserve. But the courts are likely to see you as a victim.”

“I knew what I was doing,” Lev tells him.

“Then tell me why you did it.”

Lev opens his mouth to speak but he can't put it into
words. Anger. Betrayal. Fury at a universe pretending to be fair and just. But was that really a reason? Was that justification?

“You may be responsible for your actions,” Pastor Dan says, “but it's not your fault you weren't emotionally prepared for life out there in the real world. That was
my
fault—and the fault of everyone who raised you to be a tithe. We're as guilty as the people who pumped that poison into your blood.” He looks away in shame, curbing his own growing anger, but Lev can tell it's not anger aimed at him. He takes a deep breath and continues. “The way the winds are blowing, you'll probably serve a few years of juvenile detention, then a few more years of house arrest.”

Lev knows he should be relieved by this, but the feeling is slow in coming. He considers the idea of house arrest. “Whose house?” he asks.

He can tell Pastor Dan reads everything between the lines of that question. “You have to understand, Lev, your parents are the kind of people who can't bend without breaking.”

“Whose house?”

Pastor Dan sighs. “When your parents signed the unwind order, you became a ward of the state. After what happened at the harvest camp, the state offered to return custody to your parents, but they refused it. I'm sorry.”

Lev is not surprised. He's horrified, but not surprised. Thoughts of his parents bring up the old feelings that drove him crazy enough to become a clapper. But now he finds that sense of despair is no longer bottomless. “So is my last name ‘Ward' now?”

“Not necessarily. Your brother Marcus is petitioning for guardianship. If he gets it, you'll be in his care whenever they let you go. So you'll still be a Calder . . . that is, if you want to be.”

Lev nods his approval, thinking back to his tithing party
and how Marcus was the only one to stand up for him. Lev hadn't understood it at the time. “My parents disowned Marcus, too.” At least he knows he'll be in good company.

Pastor Dan straightens out his shirt and shivers a bit from the cold. He doesn't really look like himself today. This is the first time Lev has seen him without his pastor's clothes. “Why are you dressed like that, anyway?”

He takes a moment before he answers. “I resigned my position. I left the church.”

The thought of Pastor Dan being anything but Pastor Dan throws Lev for a loop. “You . . . you lost your faith?”

“No,” he says, “just my convictions. I still very much believe in God—just not a god who condones human tithing.”

Lev begins to feel himself choking up with an unexpected flood of feeling, all the emotions that had been building up throughout their talk—throughout the weeks—arriving all at once, like a sonic boom. “I never knew that was a choice.”

All his life there was only one thing Lev was allowed to believe. It had surrounded him, cocooned him, constricted him with the same stifling softness as the layers of insulation around him now. For the first time in his life, Lev feels those bonds around his soul begin to loosen.

“You think maybe I can believe in that God, too?”

There's a sprawling ranch in west Texas.

The money to build it came from oil that had long since dried up, but the money remained and multiplied. Now there's a whole compound, an oasis as green as a golf course in the middle of the flat, wild plains. This is where Harlan Dunfee grew to the age of sixteen, finding trouble along the way. He
was arrested for disorderly behavior twice in Odessa, but his father, a big-shot admiral, got him off both times. The third time, his parents came up with a different solution.

Today is Harlan Dunfee's twenty-sixth birthday. He's having a party. Of sorts.

There are hundreds of guests at Harlan's party. One of them is a boy by the name of Zachary, though his friends know him as Emby. He's been living here at the ranch for some time now, waiting for this day. He has Harlan's right lung. Today, he gives it back to Harlan.

*   *   *

At the same time, six hundred miles to the west a wide-bodied jet lands in an airplane graveyard. The jet is full of crates, and each crate contains four Unwinds. As the crates are opened, a teenage boy peers out of one, not sure what to expect. He's faced by a flashlight, and when the flashlight lowers he can see that it's not an adult who opened the crate but another kid. He wears khaki clothes and he smiles at them, showing braces on a set of teeth that don't seem to need them. “Hi, my name's Hayden, and I'll be your rescuer today,” he announces. “Is everyone safe and sound in there?”

“We're fine,” says the young Unwind. “Where are we?”

“Purgatory,” says Hayden. “Also known as Arizona.”

The young Unwind steps out of the crate, terrified of what might be in store for him. He stands in the processional of kids being herded along, and, against Hayden's warning, bangs his head on the door of the cargo hold as he steps out. The harsh light of day and the blistering heat assault him as he walks down a ramp to the ground. He can tell this isn't an airport, and yet there are planes everywhere.