UnWholly (Unwind Dystology #2)(24)

“Are you going to hurt them?” Noah asks.

“Do you want me to?”

“Yes. Yes, I do.”

Connor shakes his head. “Sorry, that’s not what we do. Someday you’ll be grateful we didn’t.”

Noah looks down. “No, I won’t.”

Trace, no longer having to hold Noah quite so tightly, escorts him back to his bedroom so Noah can shove a few things into his backpack; what little he can salvage from fifteen years of life.

While the rest of Connor’s team checks out the home, making sure there is no one else present to call the police or otherwise foul up the mission, Connor hands a pad and pen to the father.

“What’s this for?”

“You’re going to write down the reasons you decided to have your son unwound.”

“What’s the point?”

“We know you have reasons for doing it,” Connor says. “I’m sure they’re stupid; I’m sure they’re selfish and seriously screwed up, but they’re still reasons. If nothing else, it’ll help us to know what kind of pain in the ass Noah is, so maybe we can deal with him better than you did.”

“You keep saying we,” the mother asks. “Who’s we?”

“We’re the ones saving your son’s freaking life. That’s all you need to know.”

The father looks down pitifully at the little notepad.

“Write,” Connor says. Neither he nor the mother look up as Trace escorts Noah out of the house into the waiting car.

“I hate you!” he yells back at them. “I never meant it when I said it before, but now I do.”

Connor can tell it cuts deeply into these parents, but not as deeply as the scalpels of a Chop Shop.

“Someday, if he makes it to seventeen, he may give you a shot at forgiveness. If he does, don’t throw that chance away.”

They say nothing to that. The father just looks down at the pad, scribbling and scribbling. When he’s done, he hands it back to Connor. Rather than a manifesto, the man has written down his excuses in efficient bullet points. Connor reads them out loud, as if each one was an accusation against them.

“ ‘Disrespect and disobedience.’ ”

Those are always the first reasons. If every parent unwound a kid due to disrespect, the human race would go extinct in a single generation.

“ ‘Destructive behavior to self and property.’ ”

Connor knows a bit about self-destructive behavior and did his share of vandalizing in times of frustration. But most kids get over that, don’t they? It never ceases to amaze him how everything—even unwinding—is geared toward the quick fix. Connor looks at the third bullet point and has to laugh.

“ ‘Lack of personal hygiene’?”

The woman throws her husband an angry gaze for writing that.

“Ooh, I like this one!” Connor says. “ ‘Diminished prospects for future.’ Sounds like a stock report!”

At every rescue mission, Connor reads aloud the reasons, and each time he wonders if it’s the same list his parents would have written. This time, the last reason chokes Connor up a bit.

“ ‘Our own failure as parents.’ ”

And then he gets mad at himself. These parents haven’t earned his sympathy. If it’s their failure, then why should their son have to pay for it?

“Tomorrow, when the Juvey-rounders come for him, you’ll tell them that he ran away, and you don’t know where he went. You won’t talk about us, or what happened here today, because if you do, we’ll know. We monitor all the police frequencies.”

“And if we don’t comply?” the father asks, showing the same kind of disobedience he condemned his son for.

“In case you have any thought of reporting this, we’ve uploaded a nice identity cocktail for the two of you onto the net.”

That makes them both look even more ill than they already do.

“What kind of cocktail?”

Hayden’s the one who answers, proud because it was his idea.

“We send out a single code over the net, and bingo, your names become linked to a dozen known clapper cells. Your digital footprint will be so tangled in terrorism, you’ll spend years trying to get Homeland Security off your collective asses.”

The couple nod a solemn acceptance.

“Fine,” the man says. “You have our word.”

The threat of identity cocktails is always very effective—and besides, whether these kids go with Connor or they’re unwound, the parents get what they want. Their unmanageable kid becomes somebody else’s problem. Reporting Connor and his team would just make Noah their problem again.

“You have to understand, we were desperate,” says the mother with a high quotient of self-righteousness. “Everyone told us that unwinding was the best thing to do. Everyone.”

Connor tears up the list of excuses and drops it on the floor, locking eyes with her.

“So, in other words you decided to unwind your son because of peer pressure?”

Finally the two of them crumble, feeling the appropriate weight of shame. The father, who had started out so defiant, suddenly bursts into tears. It’s the mother who holds it together enough to offer Connor one last excuse.

“We tried to be good parents . . . but there’s a point at which you give up trying.”