UnBound (20 page)

“My guitar,” he manages through chattering teeth, ignoring the fact that he can no longer feel his toes.

“It's safe,” Roberta says quickly. “I have it.”

“Send it home.”

She hesitates, and then nods.

Wil's unwinding proceeds at an alarming rate. All too soon a wave of darkness crashes over him. He can no longer hear Roberta. He can no longer see her.

Then, in the void, he senses someone lean close to him. Someone familiar.

“Grandfather?” he hazards to say. He cannot hear himself speak.

“Yes, Chowilawu.”

“Are we are going to the Lower World?”

“We will see, Chowilawu,” his grandfather says. “We will see.”

There is never anything official.

No communication confirming Wil's unwinding, because kids taken by parts pirates simply disappear.

In the end, however, the rez does receive evidence of Wil's demise. His guitar is delivered home with no note and no return address.

Una cradles the guitar in her arms and remembers: Wil building mountains for her in a sandbox when they were five. The quiet delight in his eyes when she asked him to marry her when they were six. His grief as Tocho died, while she and Lev sat watching. The touch of Wil's hand on her arm when he said good-bye.

In every memory is his music, and she hears it again every day, playing in the wind through the trees to tease and torment her. Or maybe to comfort her and remind her that nothing and no one is ever truly lost.

Una tries to hold on to that as she lays Wil's guitar on the workshop table. There is no body; there is only the guitar. So she gently, lovingly, unstrings it and prepares it for the funeral pyre in the morning.

And she tells no one of the strange hope she cradles in her heart, that somehow she will hear Wil's music again, loud and pure, calling forth her soul.

The deep, resonant clang of a Buddhist
ghanta
snaps Colton to attention, the heavy sound of the bell echoing through the marketplace. Before this he was just drifting, lonely, like a jellyfish at sea, through the vendors and crowds. Every so often a soldier passes him, but more often than not, he sees only tourists and locals. It doesn't matter that three days ago there had been a coup here in Thailand. It doesn't matter that Myanmar, formerly Burma, formerly Myanmar, formerly Burma, is (big surprise) Burma again, and the current regime has been threatening to drop bombs on Bangkok for harboring enemies of the state. It is, as Colton has already surmised, business as usual.

Like the Burmese, Colton isn't quite sure who he is anymore. He's halfway between one thing and another. Neither here nor there, fish nor fowl. Who he was and who he will be are connected only by the fine, nearly invisible thread of who he is now. He can't yet decide whether to be terrified or energized by the spectrum of personal possibilities before him.

The sweet smell of lychees brings Colton to a vendor who smiles wide and sells him four for what would have been pocket change back home. Colton puts his hands together before his face as if in prayer—a common thank-you in this part of the world—and the vendor returns the gesture.

There is a reason Colton is in Thailand and why he's decided he isn't leaving. Thailand has outlawed unwinding. In fact, they were one of the first countries to speak out against it and sign the Florence Agreement—a plea that was ignored completely by the United States, as if it were written by her enemies. Colton knows the name of every country that retracted their statements and turned to unwinding—which was most of them—but Thailand held firm. Now Thailand is somewhat of a haven for AWOLs from China and Russia. But just next door is Burma. The heart of darkness.

Colton heard stories about the Burmese Dah Zey, or “Flesh Market.” Everyone had. How they would keep you alive during a week-long unwinding process, taking part after part while you suffered in a cell, slowly losing more and more of yourself to buyers across Asia. The Dah Zey became the stuff of horror stories around AWOL campfires, but the scariest part was that no one knew truth from fiction. Colton does know that they are so powerful they now run Burma from the shadows, pulling the strings while they pull their parts. But that's not why he's here, and he has to keep reminding himself of that. As much as he'd like to stop the Dah Zey, he has no means to do so.
It's not David versus Goliath,
he tells himself
. It's David versus a hostile universe that was constructed in the wake of the Heartland War
.

Colton shifts his backpack and tries to make it sit right. It won't, though it only holds his clothes—nothing sharp or bulky. He packed light when he ran away.

As far as he's concerned, his parents are monsters as bad as the Dah Zey. How they could have signed his little brother's unwind order is a question he asks himself over and over each day as he sits at cafés and restaurants, in tuk-tuks and temples. He looks for an answer. He never finds it.

His brother never saw it coming, and Colton never really found out how it went down. Colton came home from school one day, and Ryan was gone. His parents told him he'd been sent to his aunt's—to get him away from the bad influences at school—although other parents would say that
Ryan
was the bad influence. Colton kept calling his aunt, wanting to talk to his brother, but she never answered or returned his call. That's when Colton began to worry.

He denied the possibility. Yes, Ryan was more defiant than Colton had ever been—but is that enough reason for a divisional solution? He finally got through to his aunt. At first she tried to sound normal, making excuses as to why Ryan couldn't come to the phone. Then she finally broke down and told him the truth.

A week later Colton pawned everything he could find of value in the house, got himself a false passport, and left for good. He never said good-bye or left any sort of explanation.
Let them wonder,
he thought.
Let them wonder why their straight-A, college-bound son disappeared. Let them cry the tears they should have cried for Ryan.

He told no one he was leaving—not even his friends. He was there one day, and the next he was on the other side of the planet. He suspected his brother had a similar problem, only more divided.

That was a month ago. Now he wanders the streets of Bangkok, in that dizzying place between possible futures.

He peels one of the lychees and takes a bite, its sweet flavor unlike anything he could get in the West. Looking around, he takes notice of how many obvious AWOLs he sees in this part of town. Many of them are adults now. He wonders how many would still be unwound by their parents today, if they had it to do over again. One of these former AWOL kids shouts at him for blocking the road and throws a half-eaten hamburger at his head. As it bounces off him, he figures that at least one of these kids still would be unwound.

At the sound of a girl's laughter, he turns to a small restaurant where stray cats wind through patrons' feet. A blond girl with a wide smile laughs at the cat rubbing up against her leg. She's maybe sixteen and covered in tattoos from head to toe. Angels, demons, tigers, and clowns fill out a veritable circus of ink. A nose ring pierces her septum. She'd look like a bull ready to charge if she weren't still smiling. He sits at an adjacent table, and then makes his move.

“So how long you been on the run?” he asks.

“What makes you think I'm running?” she responds in a thick Cockney accent.

Britain,
Colton thinks. Just another country that reneged and made unwinding a legal and acceptable practice. In fact, they were the first ones to come up with the term “feral teens.”

He smirks. “It's written all over you.” Then he adds, “Like a dare.”

She puts out a cigarette that he just notices; so much about her draws attention, the cigarette was the least of it. She says, “You're right. Been AWOL for two months now. How about you?”

“A month or so,” he tells her. It's a half-truth. He chooses not to tell her that he isn't an AWOL—that he left of his own free will. There's a sort of triumph in taking on the role that he wishes his brother could have had.

She looks him over, reading him far too well, and narrows her already suspicious eyes. “You're lying.” Then she gets up to leave.

This girl is a strange one,
he thinks.
There's something off about her, more so than most AWOLs.
He finds it intriguing. Alluring
.
As she tries to slip away, he instinctively stands in her way, trying to think of something witty to say that might keep her there. Nothing comes out, but they make eye contact. She stops and stares into his eyes.

“Hazel eyes, yeah?”

“Yeah,” he says.

“Nice.”

“Listen—us AWOLs gotta stick together,” he says. “I'm sure you know how dangerous it can be out on these streets. You could get arrested for vagrancy. Or worse—sold to the Dah Zey.”

She smiles, showing yellow-stained teeth that Colton finds oddly alluring, and says, “You don't know a thing about danger, Hazel.”

•  •  •

Her name is Karissa. She doesn't give her last name, even though he asks for it. She tells him that she left it in England with her bloody parents. He gets that. At first he tells her that he left because he found his own unwind order. Like the Akron AWOL. But eventually he tells her the whole story about his brother and the real reason why he left home. In turn she tells him her story, emptying her broken life out onto him like he's a shrink. It's a lot to take in.

He finds out she has a place. They talk till nearly midnight, and by then, she's ready to take him back to it. They stroll through the streets and get into a tuk-tuk, a small, three-wheeled taxi. When he looks to his left, she's gotten out on the other side. She winks at him and hurries off as the tuk-tuk takes him away without her.

“American?” asks the tuk-tuk driver in an uninterested tone.

“Yeah,” he says, equally uninterested and shocked he's just been ditched by the girl.

“I'll take you home now,” he says. Colton gives the driver the address, but he doesn't seem to be listening. “Yeah, yeah, take you home . . .”

•  •  •

Exhausted, Colton dozes, waking up every time they hit a rough patch of road—which is every few seconds. After a particularly bad bump, Colton opens his eyes to see he's in a part of town he's never seen before. It's impoverished, so unpleasant that not even brothels will open up shop here.

“Yo, man—this is not where I live,” says Colton, irritated.

“Shortcut, shortcut,” says the tuk-tuk driver. “Get there soon.”

Colton looks around.
This idiot must have gotten lost,
he thinks.

The tuk-tuk stops in front of a large, gray building that dwarfs the rest, like a mausoleum in a sea of tombstones.

“What the hell—”

Then the tuk-tuk driver gets up and leaves. He just runs off into the darkness, abandoning Colton there.

Colton knows this is bad, but his body is slow to move. He tries to get up, but his legs feel like rubber. Has he been drugged? He labors out of the tuk-tuk. The world spins around him. The few people in the street at this time of night give him fearful looks. Or perhaps they are looks of pity. Either way, they don't gaze at him for long before shuffling off—as if looking will curse them somehow.

Colton tries to stumble away, but before he can get anywhere, he runs into a soldier who seems to appear out of thin air.

“Whoa, whoa. Where you going?” says the soldier in Thai—Colton can understand that much.

“The hell outta here,” Colton answers in English. “Move!”

“No, no. You come with us,” the soldier says, now in heavily accented English.

Colton tries to push past, but a second soldier comes out of the darkness, slamming a rifle butt to the back of his head. His vision spins worse than before. The hit doesn't knock him out, but it does make him stumble into the arms of the first soldier, who laughs.

Colton rubs his head and feels blood.
Gotta get outta here,
he thinks.
Gotta get out of here fast.
But now there are more of them, and he's surrounded.
These aren't soldiers,
he realizes.
They're police officers
. Two officers grab him and drag him into the dead gray building.

•  •  •

“Colton Ellis,” the Thai man behind the desk says in perfect English. On his head is a beret. He smells of cologne and wears the smile of a used-car salesman. Behind him a grenade launcher casually leans against a file cabinet, upon which are a coffee machine and an old-school microwave.

“Look . . . ,” says Colton. “What's this all about? What do you want? Money?”

Even as Colton says the words, he knows that can't be why this is happening, but he has nothing else with which to bargain.

The man seems to know this and ignores him, waiting an uncomfortably long time before speaking again. Just before Colton starts pleading, the man says, “When I was a boy, I stepped on a land mine. A land mine put there by Americans during the Vietnam War long before I was born. I lost my leg. I thought I'd lost it for good, but then came the Dah Zey.”

The man takes a sip of his coffee, seeming to savor the taste as much as he savors Colton's wide-eyed reaction. Colton looks around for something he can use to hit the man and escape. There's nothing within reach. The grenade launcher is close enough only to mock him.

“My parents were poor, but the Dah Zey offered free parts to anyone who had lost a limb due to American explosives. Thousands of people who thought they would have to beg in the streets for the rest of their lives suddenly had new leases on life. But there was a catch: The Dah Zey needed us as enforcers, agents, and merchants. I like to think of myself as all three.”