UnWholly (Unwind Dystology #2)(27)

Hard to imagine that so much notoriety came from merely surviving the blast at Happy Jack Harvest Camp. Merely because Connor was lucky enough to be the first Unwind ever to walk out of a Chop Shop in one piece. Of course, as far as the rest of the world knows, Connor died there and Risa is missing—either dead herself, or in hiding deep within some AWOL-friendly nation, if there even is such a thing anymore. She wonders how her legend would hold up if people knew she was right here in the Arizona desert, sunburned and dirty.

A breeze blows beneath Hush Puppy’s belly, getting even more dirt in Risa’s eyes. She blinks it away.

“Are you ready?” Connor asks her.

“Always.”

Then Connor kneels before Risa’s wheelchair and begins to massage her legs, trying to coax circulation to those parts of her that can no longer feel. It’s part of their daily ritual together, this physical contact between them. It’s coolly clinical, yet strangely intimate at the same time. Today, however, Connor is detached. Distant.

“Something’s bothering you even more than usual,” Risa says. A statement of fact, not a question. “Go on, spill it.”

Connor sighs, looks up at her, and asks the big question.

“Why are we here, Risa?”

She considers the question. “Do you mean why are we here philosophically, as a species, or why are we here, doing this in full view of anyone who cares to watch?”

“Let them watch,” he says. “I don’t care.” And clearly he doesn’t, because privacy is the first casualty when you live in the Graveyard. Even the small private jet Connor claimed as his quarters has no curtains on its windows. No, Risa knows that this has nothing do with their daily ritual, or the grand question of humanity. It has to do with survival.

“What I mean is, why are we still here in the Graveyard? Why haven’t the Juvies tranq’d and yanked us all?”

“You’ve said it yourself—they don’t see us as a threat.”

“But they should,” Connor points out. “They’re not stupid . . . which means that there’s some other reason why they haven’t taken this place down.”

Risa reaches over, rubbing Connor’s tense shoulder. “You think too much.”

Connor smiles at that. “When you met me, you accused me of not thinking enough.”

“Well, your brain is making up for lost time.”

“After what we’ve been through—after what we’ve seen—can you blame me?”

“I like you better as a man of action.”

“Action has to be well thought out. You taught me that.”

Risa sighs. “Yes, I suppose I did. And I created a monster.”

She realizes that both of them have been profoundly changed in the wake of the Happy Jack Harvest Camp revolt. Risa likes to think that their spirits have been galvanized like iron in a furnace, but sometimes it feels like they’ve only been damaged by those harsh flames. Still, she’s glad she had survived to see the far-reaching effects of that day. Like Cap-17.

Even before Happy Jack, there had been a bill in Congress calling for the lowering of the legal limit of unwinding by a whole year, to one’s seventeenth birthday instead of eighteenth. The “Cap-17” bill had never been expected to pass—in fact, most people didn’t even know about it until Happy Jack made the news—and until poor Lev Calder’s face became plastered on the cover of every major magazine: the innocent boy clothed all in white. A bright-eyed, clean-cut kid smiling out from a school picture. How the perfect child became a clapper was a question that made parents everywhere stop and take notice . . . because if it could happen to Lev, who’s to say that their own child might not turn their blood explosive someday and detonate themselves in a burst of rage? And the fact that Lev chose not to detonate himself troubled people even more, because they couldn’t just file him away as a bad seed. They had to accept that he had a soul—a conscience—which meant that maybe society had a hand in making him a clapper. And then suddenly—as if to assuage everyone’s feelings of cultural guilt—the Cap-17 bill became law. No one could be unwound after their seventeenth birthday.

“You’re thinking about Lev again, aren’t you?” Connor asks.

“How do you know?”

“Because whenever you do, time stops, and your eyes go to the dark side of the moon.”

She reaches down to touch his hands, which have stopped massaging, and he gets back to coaxing her troubled circulation.

“It’s because of him that the Cap-17 law passed, you know,” Risa says. “I wonder how he feels about that.”

“I’ll bet it gives him nightmares.”

“Or,” suggests Risa, “maybe he sees the bright side of it.”

“Do you?” Connor asks.

Risa sighs. “Sometimes.”

Cap-17 should have been a good thing, but in time, it became clear that it was not. Sure it was a victorious morning that next day, when the news showed thousands of seventeen-year-olds being released from harvest camps. It was a triumph of human compassion, and a great victory for those against unwinding, but that same feeling of victory allowed people to turn a blind eye again to the whole problem. Unwinding was still there, but people could now look the other way, believing their consciences were clean.