UnWholly (Unwind Dystology #2)(86)

“Starkey!” one of the others yells after him. “What the hell are you doing?”

“You’ll see.”

In the garage he finds a gas can. It’s only half-full, but half is enough. He runs through the house pouring gasoline everywhere, and on the mantel above the fireplace he finds a book of matches.

Moments later he’s racing across the lawn away from the house, toward his friends in the waiting Jeeps, while an ominous glow rises within the house behind him. By the time he climbs into a Jeep, flames are rising in the windows, and the moment the Jeeps screech away into the night, those windows begin to explode, and smoke pours forth from the rising inferno. The entire house has become a blazing beacon to let the world know that Mason Starkey was here, and people are going to pay.





43 ? Avalanche

This document I sign of my own free will.

That was the last line of the consent form that Risa Ward signed, just as Roberta had predicted she would. Signing that form has given her a new spine and the use of her legs, but that’s not all it did. It set into motion a cascading series of events that Risa could not have predicted, and yet was expertly orchestrated by Roberta, her associates, and their money.

. . . I sign of my own free will.

Risa has never gone skiing—such frivolous activities were not offered to state wards—yet lately she’s been dreaming that she’s skiing down a triple black diamond slope, chased by the leading edge of an avalanche. There’s no stopping until she either reaches the bottom, or sails off a cliff to her doom.

. . . my own free will.

Before the news interviews, before the public service announcements, before she knows any of what she’ll be asked to do, Risa’s damaged spine is replaced, and she awakes from a five-day medically induced coma into her brave new life.





44 ? Risa

“Tell me if you can feel this,” a nurse says, scraping Risa’s toe with a strip of plastic. Risa gasps in spite of herself. Yes, she feels it—and it’s not just a phantom sensation. She can feel the sheets brushing against her legs. She can feel her toes again. She tries to move them, but just moving her toes makes every part of her body ache.

“Don’t try to move, dear,” the nurse tells her. “Let the healing agents do their job. We’re using second-generation healing agents. You’ll be up and walking in two weeks.”

It speeds her heart to hear those words. She wishes the connection between her heart and her mind could be more direct—that the part of her that wants this could be firmly ruled by the part of her that doesn’t—because although her mind wants to despise what they’ve done for her, the part of her that knows no reason is filled with joy at the prospect of holding her own balance and moving under the power of her own legs.

“You’ll require a lot of physical therapy, of course. Not as much as you might think, though.” The nurse checks the devices that are attached to her legs. They are electrical stimulators, which cause her muscles to contract, awakening them from their atrophied state, building them back to prime body tone. Each day she feels like she’s run miles, although she hasn’t left the bed.

She’s no longer in a cell. It’s not really a hospital, either. She can tell it’s some sort of private home. She can hear the roar of ocean surf outside her window.

She wonders if the staff knows who she is and what happened to her. She chooses not to bring it up, because it’s too painful. Better just to take it day by day and wait until Roberta comes for her again, to tell her what more she has to do to fulfill the terms of her so-called contract.

It’s not Roberta who visits her, though, it’s Cam. He’s the last person she wants to see, if she indeed can call him a person. His hair has filled in a bit since the time she first saw him, and the scars on his face from the various grafts are slimmer. You can barely see the seam where the different skin tones touch.

“I wanted to see how you were feeling,” he says.

“Sick to my stomach,” she tells him, “but that only started when you walked in.”

He goes to the window and opens the blinds a bit more, letting in bars of afternoon light. A particularly loud wave crashes on the shore outside the window. “ ‘The ocean is a mighty harmonist,’ ” he says, quoting someone she’s probably never even heard of. “When you can walk,” Cam tells her, “you should look at your view. It sure is pretty this time of day.”

She doesn’t answer him. She just waits for him to leave, but he doesn’t.

“I need to know why you hate me,” he asks. “I’ve done nothing to you. You don’t even know me, but you hate me. Why?”

“I don’t hate you,” Risa admits. “There’s no ‘you’ to hate.”

He comes up beside her bed. “I’m here, aren’t I?” He puts his hand on hers, and she pulls away.

“I don’t care who or what you are, nobody touches me.”

He thinks for a moment, then says, in all seriousness, “Would you like to touch me then? You can feel all the seams. You can see what makes me me.”

She doesn’t even dignify that with a response. “Do you think the kids who were unwound to be a part of you wanted it?”

“If they were tithes, they did,” Cam says, “and some of them were. As for the other ones, they had no choice . . . any more than I had a choice in being made.”