Authors: Neal Shusterman
“Good answer. As long as you can say that, you’ll have job security.”
The kid considers it, then looks at the medallion in his three-fingered hand. He tosses it back to Rheinschild. “You shouldn’t walk around with this. You should frame it or something.”
Then he leaves with nothing more than he had when he broke in, except for a business card.
Rheinschild is sure he’ll never see the kid again. He finds himself pleasantly surprised when the boy shows up at his research office on Monday morning, wearing the same filthy clothes, but freshly showered beneath them.
12 • Risa
She cannot believe the position she’s put herself in.
All this time surviving against overwhelming odds and now, thanks to her own stupidity, she’s going to die.
She blames her own arrogance for her downfall. She was so certain she was too clever, too observant, to be snagged by a parts pirate—as if somehow she existed on a higher plane.
A crumbling barn on a marginally functional farm in Cheyenne, Wyoming. She had found it in the midst of a storm and had gone in to take shelter from the rain. In one stall there was a shelf stocked with food.
Stupid, stupid, stupid! What was food doing in a deserted barn? If she had been thinking, she would have run and risked the lightning, but she was tired and hungry. Her guard was down. She reached for a bag of chips, hit a trip wire, and a spring-loaded steel cable wrapped around her wrist. She was caught like a rabbit. She tried to tug free, but the slipknot cable was designed to ratchet tighter and tighter the more she pulled.
The parts pirate had been careless enough to leave various farm tools within her reach, but none of them were of the type to cut a steel cable. After an hour of struggling, Risa realized there was nothing to do but wait—and envy wild animals who had the good sense to gnaw off their own limbs to escape from traps.
That was last night. Now as morning comes, Risa, having not slept at all, must face a fresh hell. The parts pirate comes an hour after sunrise. He’s a middle-aged man with a bad scalp job. His mop of boyish blond hair doesn’t make him
look boyish, just creepy. He practically dances a jig when he sees that his trap has done the job.
“Been there for months and nothing,” he tells Risa. “I was ready to give up—but good things come to those who wait.”
Risa seethes and thinks of Connor. She wishes she could have been more like him last night. Connor would never be so foolish as to allow himself to be captured by an imbecile.
Clearly this guy’s an amateur, but as long as he’s got the goods, the black-market harvesters won’t turn him away. He doesn’t recognize her. That’s good. The black market pays more for the infamous—and she doesn’t want this man to get paid what she’s worth. Of course that assumes he gets that far. Risa has had all night to come up with a plan of action.
“Selling you might just get the banks off my back,” he tells her jovially. “Or at least get me a decent car.”
“You have to cut me loose first before you can sell me.”
“Indeed I do!”
He looks at her a little too long, his grin a little too wide, and it occurs to Risa that selling her to a black-market harvester is only at the end of his list of planned activities. But whatever his plans, he’s the type who has to have everything just right. He goes around the stall and begins cleaning up the mess Risa made in her frustrated attempts to escape.
“You sure were busy last night,” he says. “Hope you got it out of your system.”
Now Risa begins to taunt him. She knows what sorts of things will push this man’s buttons—but she begins with some easy, glancing blows. She begins with slights against his intelligence.
“I hate to kill the dream,” she says, “but the black market won’t deal with morons. I mean, you have to know how to read if you’re going to sign a contract.”
“Very funny.”
“Seriously, maybe you should have gotten some brains to go along with that hair.”
It only makes him chuckle. “Bad-mouth me all you want, girlie. It’s not gonna change a thing.”
Risa thought there was no way she could possibly hate this man more . . . but calling her “girlie” opens up a whole new level of loathing. She begins her next round of attacks—this time against his family. His gene pool. His mother.
“So did they slaughter the cow that gave birth to you, or did it die of natural causes?”
He continues his stall tidying, but his focus is gone. Risa can tell he’s getting rankled. “You shut up. I don’t gotta take crap like that from a dirty Unwind bitch!”
Good. Let him curse at her. Because the angrier he gets, the more it plays in Risa’s favor. Now she delivers her final salvo. A series of cruel assertions about the man’s anatomy. Assertions of severe inadequacy. At least some of them must be true, because he loses it, getting red in the face.
“When I’m done with you,” he growls, “you ain’t gonna be worth what you are now—that’s for sure!”
He lunges for her, his big hands out in front of him—and as he throws himself forward, Risa raises the pitchfork that she’s concealed in the hay. She doesn’t have to do any more than that: just hold the thing up. His weight and momentum do all the work.
The amateur parts pirate thoroughly impales himself and pulls back, taking the pitchfork with him.
“Whad’ya do to me! Whad’ya do!”
The pitchfork flails back and forth like an appendage in his chest as he curses and screams. Risa knows it’s hit some vital organ because of all the blood and the speed at which he goes down. In less than ten seconds, he collapses against the far wall of the stall and dies with his eyes open and staring not
quite at her, but off to her left, as if maybe in his last moments he saw an angel over her shoulder, or Satan, or whatever a man like him sees when he dies.
Risa considers herself a compassionate human being, but she feels no remorse for this man. She does, however, begin to feel a deepening sense of regret. Because her hand is still caught in the cable. And the only human being who knows she’s here is now lying across the stall, dead.
And Risa cannot believe the situation she’s put herself in. Again.
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The parts pirate, who had no intention of dying, had left the barn door open. A coyote comes to visit that night. When Risa first sees it, she yells at it, throws hay, and heaves a garden hoe. The hoe hits it on the nose hard enough to make it yelp and leave in a hurry. Risa knows nothing of wild animals, their natures, or habits. She does know that coyotes are carnivorous but she’s not sure if they hunt alone or in packs. If it returns with its mangy brethren, she’s done for.
It comes back an hour later, alone. It takes little interest in her, other than to note whether or not she’s still in a throwing mood. The point is moot, since there’s nothing left in her reach to throw. She yells at it, but it ignores her, focusing all of its attention on the parts pirate, who isn’t putting up any resistance.
The coyote dines on the man, who is already beginning to grow rancid in the summer heat. Risa knows the stench will only get worse until, in a day’s time, maybe two, the stench of her own flesh will join his. Perhaps the coyote is smart enough to know that she will eventually die as well and is prioritizing. As far as the coyote is concerned, her continued life is better than refrigeration. It can make several meals of the parts pirate, knowing that, when all is said and done, fresh meat will be waiting.
Watching the coyote eat eventually desensitizes her to the horror of it. She finds herself objective, almost as if watching from a safe distance. She idly wonders which is crueler, man or nature. She determines it must be man. Nature has no remorse, but neither does it have malice. Plants take in the light of the sun and give off oxygen with the same life-affirming need that a tiger tears into a toddler. Or a scavenger devours a lowlife.
The coyote leaves. Dawn breaks. Dehydration begins to take its toll on Risa, and she hopes the thirst will kill her before the coyote finds her alive but too weak to fend off its advances. She slips in and out of consciousness, and her life begins to scroll before her eyes.
The flashing of one’s life, Risa finds, is by no means complete; nor does it take into account the value of memories. It is as random as the stuff of dreams, just a little more connected to what once was.
The Cafeteria Fight
She’s seven years old and fighting another girl who insists that Risa stole her clothes. It’s a ridiculous assertion, because everyone in the state home wears the same basic utilitarian uniforms. Risa’s too young at the time to know that it’s not about clothes but about dominance. Social position. The girl is larger than her, meaner than her—but when the girl pins her to the ground, Risa gouges the girl’s eyes, flips her, and spits in her face—which is what the girl was trying to do when she pinned Risa. The girl cries foul when the teachers pull them apart, claiming Risa started it and that she fights dirty. But no adult really cares who started it as long as it ends, and as far as they’re concerned, all fights among state home orphans are dirty. The interpretation among the kids, however, is much different. What matters to them is that Risa won. Few people pick fights with her after that. But the other girl gets no peace from her peers.
A Practice Room
She’s twelve and playing piano in a small acoustic-tiled room of Ohio State Home 23. The piano is out of tune, but she’s used to that. Risa plays the Baroque piece flawlessly. In the audience, disembodied faces observe, stony and impassionate, in spite of the passion with which she plays. This time she does fine. It’s only when it matters four years later that she chokes.
The Harvest Camp Bus
The administration has decided that the best way to deal with budget cuts is to unwind one-tenth of the home’s teen population. They call it forced downsizing. The glitches and clunkers in Risa’s pivotal piano recital leave her firmly placed within that 10 percent. Sitting next to her on the bus is a mealy
boy by the name of Samson Ward. An odd name for a scrawny kid, but since all state home orphans are, by law, given the last name of Ward, first names tend to be, if not entirely unique, at least fairly uncommon and often ironic because they’re not chosen by loving parents, but by bureaucrats. The kind who might think giving a sickly premature baby the name “Samson” is droll.
“I’d rather be partly great than entirely useless,” Samson says. This memory has the perspective of hindsight. Samson, she discovered much later, had a secret crush on her, which expressed itself in the person of Camus Comprix. Cam had received the part of Samson’s brain that did algebra and apparently also had fantasies about unattainable girls. Samson was a math genius—but not enough of one to keep him out of the unlucky 10 percent.
Looking at Stars
Risa and Cam lying on the grass on a bluff on a Hawaiian island that had once been a leper colony. Cam announces the names of the stars and constellations, his accent suddenly tweaking New England as he engages the piece of the person in his head who knows everything about stars. Cam loves her. At first she despised him. Then she endured him. Then she came to appreciate the individual he was becoming—the spirit that was exerting itself above and beyond the sum of his parts. She knows she will never feel for him what he feels for her, though. How could she when she is still so in love with Connor?
Connor.
Months before that stargazing night in Molokai. He’s massaging her legs as she sits in a wheelchair in the shade of a stealth bomber in the Arizona desert. She cannot feel her legs. She doesn’t know that in a few short months her spine will be replaced and she’ll walk again. All she knows in the moment is
that Connor can’t truly be with her the way she wants him to be. His mind is too full of responsibilities. Too full of the hordes of kids he’s hiding and protecting in the airplane graveyard.
The Graveyard
.
Now true to its name. Violently emptied of its occupants as thoroughly as a World War II ghetto. All those kids were either killed or sent off to harvest camps to their eventual unwinding—or “summary division,” as the paperwork officially calls it. And where is Connor? She knows he must have gotten away, because if he had been caught or killed, the Juvenile Authority would have had a field day with it in the media. It would be a death blow to the Anti-Divisional Resistance—which has become as effective as a flyswatter against a dragon.
And it is dusk once more in the barn. The coyote comes back again, this time with a mate to share in the feast. Risa yells so as to not appear weak and to remind them that she still has some strength left, although it’s waning quickly. They don’t bother with her. Instead they tear cruelly at the dead man, and as they do, Risa realizes something. From where she’s caught—even when she stretched herself as far as she could—she was still two feet away from the dead man.
But the coyotes have pulled him away from the wall.
With all the energy that she has left, she stretches herself across the ground toward him. Reaching with her left hand, she manages to snag the cuff of his pant leg with her forefinger.
She begins to tug him closer, and as he begins to move, the coyotes realize that tomorrow’s meal has become a threat to today’s. They bare their teeth and growl at her. She doesn’t stop. She pulls on him again. This time one of the animals bites her arm, clamping down. She screams and uses her old trick of gouging its eye. The animal is hurt enough to loosen its grip, and Risa breaks free long enough to pull the dead man closer. She can reach the edge of his pocket—but the other
coyote leaps for her. She has only a second. She reaches into the dead man’s pocket hoping, for once, that luck is in her favor, and she finds what she’s looking for just as the second coyote grabs on to her upper arm. But the pain is only secondary to her now. Because she has his phone.