UnWholly (Unwind Dystology #2)(60)

His mother sees him first. She reaches over to get his father’s attention. They look at each other for a moment, sharing whatever pseudo-telepathy married couples have. Then his mother stands, crosses to Lev, and never once looking at him, hugs him awkwardly, then leaves the room.

His father doesn’t look at him either. Not at first anyway. He just looks to Marcus, watching his chest rise and fall in a slow, steady, machine-regulated rhythm.

“How is he?” Lev asks.

“He’s in an induced coma. They said they’ll keep him like this for three days, so the nanos can speed the healing.”

Lev has heard that the pain of nano-healing is unbearable. It’s best that Marcus sleeps through it. Lev is certain that his parents gave Marcus all tithed organs. The most expensive. He knows this, but he won’t ask.

Finally his father looks at him. “Are you satisfied now? Are you happy with the results of your actions?”

Lev has imagined this conversation between him and his father a hundred times. In each of those mental confrontations, Lev has always been the one making accusations, not the other way around. How dare he? How dare he? Lev wants to lash out, but he refuses to take the bait. He says nothing.

“Do you have any idea what you’ve put this family through?” his father says. “The shame? The ridicule?”

Lev can’t maintain his silence. “Then maybe you shouldn’t surround yourself with people as judgmental as you.”

His father looks to Marcus again. “Your brother will come home with us,” he decrees. And since any guts that Marcus now has have been paid for by their father’s money, he won’t have much of a choice.

“And me?”

Again, his father won’t look at him. “My son was tithed a year ago,” he says. “That’s the son I choose to remember. As for you, you can do as you please. It’s not my concern.” And he says no more.

“When Marcus wakes up, tell him I forgive him,” Lev says.

“Forgive him for what?”

“He’ll know.”

And Lev leaves without saying good-bye.

Farther down the hallway, he spots his mother again, and other members of his family, in the fourth-floor waiting room. A brother, two sisters, and their husbands. In the end, they came for Marcus. None of them are there for him. He hesitates, wondering if he should go in there. Will they behave like his father, bitter, rigid, and cold—or like his mother, offering a pained hug, yet refusing to look at him?

Then, in that moment of indecision, he sees one of his sisters bend down and pick up a baby. It’s a new nephew Lev never even knew he had.

And the baby is dressed all in white.

Lev races back to his room, but even before he gets there, he feels the eruption begin. It starts deep in his gut, sobs rising with such unexpected fury, his abdomen locks in a cramp. He must struggle the last few feet to his room doubled over, barely able to catch his breath as the tears burst from his eyes.

Somewhere deep, deep down in the most irrational corner of Lev’s mind—perhaps the place where childhood dreams go—he held out a secret hope that he might actually be taken back. That he might one day be welcomed home. Marcus had told him to forget about it—that it would never happen, but nothing could wipe out that stubborn hope that hid within him. Until today.

He climbs into his hospital bed and forces his face into his pillow as the sobs crescendo into wails. A full year’s worth of suppressed heartache pours forth from his soul like Niagara, and he doesn’t care if he drowns in the killing whiteness of its churning waters.

? ? ?

Lev wakes without ever remembering having slept. He knows he must have, because there’s morning light streaming into the room.

“Good morning, Lev.”

He turns his head toward the voice a little too sharply, and the room spins around him. An aftereffect of the explosion. His ears are still ringing, but at least the flutter in his left ear has settled down.

Sitting in a chair near the foot of his bed is a woman a little too well-dressed to be part of the hospital staff.

“Are you FBI? Homeland Security? Are you here to ask me more questions? Because I don’t have any more answers.”

The woman chuckles slightly. “I’m not with any government agency. I represent the Cavenaugh Trust. Have you heard of it?”

Lev shakes his head. “Should I have?”

She hands him a colorful brochure, and as he looks at it, he gets a shiver.

“It looks like a harvest camp brochure.”

“Hardly,” she says, clearly insulted. The right response, as far as Lev is concerned. “To put it simply,” she tells him, “the Cavenaugh trust is a whole lot of money, set aside by what was once a very wealthy family to help wayward youth. And we can think of few youth as wayward as you.”

She gives him a twisted little smile, thinking herself funny. She’s not.

“Be that as it may,” she says, “we understand you have no place to go once you’re released, and rather than leave you at the mercy of Child Protective Services, who certainly cannot protect you from any future clapper attacks, we are prepared to offer you a place to live—with the full approval of the Juvenile Authority, of course—in exchange for your services.”

Lev pulls his knees up beneath his covers and shrinks away from her. He doesn’t trust well-dressed people who make offers with strings attached. “What kind of services?”