"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 a.s.ses."
The couple nod a solemn acceptance.
"Fine," the man says. "You have our word."
The threat of ident.i.ty c.o.c.ktails 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."
"No, there"s not," Connor tells her. Then he turns to go, leaving them with the worst punishment of all: having to live with themselves.
Connor and his team drive off in an intentionally nondescript minivan with a false license plate. Noah Falkowski is understandably grim as he looks out the window, watching his neighborhood go by for the last time. He doesn"t seem to know who they are. He doesn"t seem to care. Connor"s glad Noah doesn"t recognize him. While the Akron AWOL has a legendary reputation in some circles, his face was in the news much less than Lev"s. Plus, with everyone thinking he"s dead, it"s easier to go incognito.
"Relax," Connor tells him, "you"re among friends."
"I got no friends," says Noah. And for now, Connor lets him feel sorry for himself.
The Graveyard is true to its name this late at night. Airplane tail fins stand as monumental and as quiet as tombstones. Kids are on watch patrol with tranq-loaded rifles, but other than that, there"s no sign that the place is home to more than seven hundred AWOL Unwinds.
"So why are we here?" Noah asks as the rescue party pulls down the main aisle-the busiest "street" of the Graveyard, flanked by a series of large aircraft that make up the core of their living s.p.a.ce, each one named by Unwinds who have long since left. Names like Crash Mamma, for one of the main girls" dorms; the ComBom, a veteran World War II bomber that"s become their computer and communications center; and of course IHOP, the International House of Purgatory, where new arrivals like Noah stay until they"re given a job and integrated into the Graveyard.
"The Graveyard"s where you"ll live until you turn seventeen," Connor tells Noah.
"Like h.e.l.l I will," the kid says. Typical. Connor just ignores him.
"Hayden, get him a bedroll and escort him to IHOP. We"ll see what kind of work he"s suited for in the morning."
"So what am I, a stinking AWOL now?" asks Noah.
"AWOLs is what they call us," says Hayden. "We call ourselves Whollies. As to whether or not you stink, I think we all can agree that you need to visit our bathing facilities at your earliest possible convenience."
The kid grunts like a mildly irritated bull, and Connor grins. It was Hayden who actually came up with the term "Whollies," because "Unwind" and "AWOL" were negative labels put on them by the world. "You should be a spin doctor," Connor told Hayden, to which he facetiously replied, "Spinning makes me nauseous; I"d puke on my patients."
Hayden, Connor, and Risa were the only three Whollies remaining who had been harbored in Sonia"s safe house way back when. That experience bonded them as if they were lifelong friends.
Noah toddles off with Hayden to the International House of Purgatory, and Connor takes a few moments to enjoy some rare peace and quiet. He looks to AcMac, the jet where Risa sleeps. The lights are out, just like the others, but he suspects she has already peered out at the sound of their approach, to make sure that Connor has arrived home safe and sound.
"I"m not sure if these missions of yours are n.o.ble or stupid," Risa once told him.
"Why can"t they be both?" he responded. The fact is, saving individual kids is somehow far more satisfying for him than the daily ins and outs of running the Graveyard. These side trips keep him sane.
When he was left in charge, it was only supposed to be temporary. The Anti-Divisional Resistance was supposed to find a suitable replacement for the Admiral-someone who could present an image that the public could believe would be running an airplane salvage operation. But then they realized that they didn"t need that. They had people in the Graveyard"s front office-a trailer near the entrance-and those employees ran the business end of things. As long as Connor kept the kids working, fed, and quiet, the ADR found no reason to hire someone else.
"Surveying your domain?"
Connor turns to see Trace coming up to him.
"It"s not mine, I only work here," Connor tells him. "The new kid settled in?"
"Yeah-a real complainer. He says the blanket"s too rough."
"He"ll get over it. We all do."
Trace Neuhauser is an air force boeuf who gave it up to join the resistance when his sister was unwound. He"s AWOL from his unit for six months now, but still a boeuf in every sense of the word. He"s all steroid bulk, with a tunnel-vision education in the martial sciences.
Connor never liked boeufs. Maybe because they know their purpose in the world, and generally serve it well. Seeing them always made Connor feel useless. That a boeuf has become such a close friend proves that people change. Trace is twenty-three but seems to have no problem taking orders from a seventeen-year-old.
"Chain of command knows no age restrictions," he once told Connor. "You could be six, but if you were my superior, I"d still do as I was told."
Maybe that"s why Connor likes him; because if a guy like that can respect Connor"s lead, maybe he"s not such a lousy leader after all.
The next day begins as every day begins in the Graveyard. With things to be done. "The Firefighters" Treadmill," the Admiral called it: an endless trot to stomp out nuisances. "Leadership is about keeping toilets flushing," the Admiral once said. "Unless you"re on the battlefront. Then it"s about staying alive. Neither are pleasant."
On the main aisle, kids are already lounging beneath the recreation jet, watching TV, or playing video games. Still more have begun their shifts, dismantling or rebuilding aircraft parts, as per the orders coming in from the front office. Sometimes it"s easier for Connor to think that it"s all going on in spite of him, rather than because of him.
As soon as Connor is spotted on the main aisle, the barrage begins.
"Hey, Connor," says a kid running up to him, "not to complain, but, like, can we get some better food here? I mean, I know beggars can"t be choosers and all, but if I gotta eat beef-flavored stew with no actual beef in it one more time, I think I"m gonna hurl."
"Yeah, you and everyone else," Connor tells him.
"Mr. Akron," says a girl, fourteen or so-he can"t get over the fact that so many of the kids, particularly the younger ones, are not only ridiculously respectful, but think that Akron is somehow part of his name-"I don"t know if you know this, but the fans in Crash Mama ain"t working no more, and it"s way too hot at night."
"I"ll send someone to fix them," Connor tells her. Then a third kid comes up complaining that there"s too much trash, and can"t he do something about it.
"I swear, half the time I feel like a janitor," he tells Trace. "I need a dozen more hands just to keep this place afloat."
"You do have a dozen hands," Trace reminds him. "But you"ve got to be willing to use them."
"Yeah, yeah," says Connor, having heard it before. He shouldn"t be mad at Trace for pointing these things out-after all, that"s why he keeps Trace so close: to advise him on how to be in charge. Connor has already accepted the odd reality that he"s some sort of leader, but, as the Admiral pointed out, it"s a pretty thankless job.
After the Admiral left him in charge, Connor had set up a power structure: an inner circle, an outer circle, and everyone else. Those in his inner circle are supposed to make sure things like food supplies and sanitation are being taken care of, because Connor has much more pressing things to deal with. Things like keeping them all in one piece.
"I"ll call a meeting after I meet with the rep from the resistance," Connor tells Trace. "And I"ll make sure tasks are being delegated."
"Maybe," says Trace, "you need to take a look at who you"re delegating to."
Connor never knew he could handle this kind of responsibility, but now that he knows, he wishes he could go back to just being responsible for himself. There are so many things he feels he still needs to do. Thanks to Lev, and his misguided clapper cell, Connor avoided being unwound, but he still doesn"t feel entirely whole.
6 * Risa
There is only one permanently disabled resident of the Graveyard. Since the disabled are a protected cla.s.s, they"re never at risk for being unwound, so they never turn up at the Graveyard with all the other kids who ran from their unwind order. It"s a testimony to the swiss-cheese nature of public compa.s.sion. Lucky for those to whom grace is extended, but unlucky for those who wind up in the holes.
Risa is disabled by choice. That is to say, she refused surgery that would repair her severed spine, because it involved giving her the spine of an unwound kid. It used to be that spinal damage was irreversible, and if that was the card you were dealt, you spent the rest of your days with it. She wonders if it"s harder to live like that, or to live knowing you can be fixed but choose not to.
Now she lives in an old McDonnel Douglas MD-11, for which they built a wooden switchback ramp to the main hatch. The plane has been aptly named Accessible Mac, or AcMac for short. There are about ten kids with sprained ankles or other temporary conditions who currently share AcMac with Risa, each in sections divided by curtains, providing the illusion of personal s.p.a.ce. Risa has the old first-cla.s.s cabin of the jet, which is forward of the hatch. It gives her a larger living area, but she can"t stand the fact that it singles her out. The whole lousy jet singles her out-and although her shattered spine is a well-earned war wound, it doesn"t change the fact that she is constantly condemned to receive special treatment.
The only other plane with a ramp is the infirmary jet, where she works. It leaves Risa with a very limited choice of interior s.p.a.ces, so she spends her free time outside when she can stand the heat.
Every day at five o"clock, Risa waits for Connor beneath a stealth bomber they"ve nicknamed Hush Puppy. Every day, Connor is late.
The bomber"s expansive black wings create a huge wedge of shade, and its radar-resistant skin wicks heat right out of the air. It"s one of the coolest spots in the Graveyard, in more ways than one.
She finally sees him approaching: a figure in blue camo that sets him apart from anyone else in the Graveyard. "I thought you weren"t coming," Risa says as he reaches the shade of Hush Puppy.
"I was supervising an engine dismantling."
"Yeah," says Risa with a grin. "That"s what they all say."
Connor brings his tension with him to these daily encounters with her. He says being with her is the only time he gets to feel normal, but he never truly relaxes. In fact, since she first met him, she"s never known him to relax. It doesn"t help to know that their legends are out there, living lives of their own. Stories of Connor and Risa have already grown deep roots in modern folklore, for few things are more compelling than an outlaw romance. They are Bonnie and Clyde for a new era; the subjects of b.u.mper stickers and T-shirts.
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 ma.s.sage 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 pa.s.s-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 a.s.suage 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 ma.s.saging, and he gets back to coaxing her troubled circulation.
"It"s because of him that the Cap-17 law pa.s.sed, 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 compa.s.sion, 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.
And then came the media blitz, a flood of advertis.e.m.e.nts designed to "remind" people how much "better" things were since the Unwind Accord. "Unwinding: the natural solution," the ads said, or "Troubled teen? Love them enough to let them go," and, of course, Risa"s favorite, "Experience a world outside of yourself: Embrace the divided state."
The sad truth about humanity, Risa was quick to realize, is that people believe what they"re told. Maybe not the first time, but by the hundredth time, the craziest of ideas just becomes a given.