UnSouled (37 page)

And in the stunned silence that follows, Sonia comes down the stairs. “Janson, what’s wrong?”

But he finds he can’t tell her. He can’t even repeat the words aloud. She comes to his side, and the boy at the door, wringing a woolen hat in his hands, continues. “His dad, see—he’s got a drug problem—that’s the reason Austin was on the streets to begin with. From what I hear, someone offered him a lot of money to sign those papers.”

Sonia gasps, covering her mouth as she realizes what has happened. Janson’s face goes red with fury. “We’ll stop it! We’ll pay whatever we have to pay, bribe whomever we need to bribe—”

“It’s too late,” says the kid, looking to the welcome mat at his feet. “Austin was unwound this morning.”

None of them can speak. The three stand in an impotent tableau of grief until the kid says, “I’m sorry,” and hurries away.

Janson closes the door and then holds his wife close. They don’t talk about it. They can’t. He suspects they’ll never speak of it to each other again. Janson knows this was intended as a warning—but a warning to do what? Stay quiet? Embrace unwinding? Cease to exist? And if he tries to rattle his saber at Proactive Citizenry, what good will it do? They haven’t actually broken the law. They never do! Instead they mold the law to encompass whatever it is they wish to accomplish.

He lets go of Sonia and goes to the stairs, refusing to look at her. “I’m going to bed,” he tells her.

“Janson, it’s barely noon.”

“Why should that make a difference?”

In the bedroom, he draws the shades, and as he buries himself in the covers, in the dark, he thinks back to the time Austin broke into their home and hit Janson in the head. Now Janson wishes that the blow would have killed him. Because then Austin might still be whole.

47 • Connor

Starkey. He should have known it was Starkey. The numbers of the dead reported from the crash in the Salton Sea didn’t match with the numbers he knew escaped. He was foolish enough to think that either Starkey had been among the dead, or would lie low, content with his petty principality of storks. As Connor prepares to leave Una’s apartment and continue the journey to Ohio, he can’t help but be drawn in by the news reports coming in on every station about the attack on MoonCrater Harvest Camp.

“You mean you know this guy?” Lev asks.

“He’s the one who stole the escape plane,” Connor explains. “You saw it take off from the Graveyard, didn’t you? He took all the storks and left the rest of us for the Juvies.”

“Nice guy.”

“Yeah. I was an idiot for not seeing his psycho factor before it was too late.”

The premeditated lynchings at MoonCrater is Starkey’s line in the sand, and it’s quickly deepening into a trench. Five staff members hung and a sixth one left alive to tell the tale. The media scrutiny is turning Mason Starkey into a swollen image much larger than his five-foot-six stature, and Connor realizes, as much as he hates to admit it, that they are in the same club now. They are both cult figures in hiding, hated by some, adored by others. Vilified and lionized. He wouldn’t be
surprised if someone starts making T-shirts featuring both of them side by side, as if their renegade status makes them in any way comrades in arms.

Starkey claims to speak for storks, but people don’t differentiate when it comes to AWOLs. As far as the public is concerned, he’s the maniacal voice of all Unwinds—and that’s a big problem. As Starkey’s trench in the sand fills with blood, the fear of AWOLs will grow, tearing apart everything Connor has fought for.

He used to impress upon the Whollies at the Graveyard the importance of keeping their wits about them and using their heads. “They think we’re hopelessly violent and better off unwound,” he would tell them. “We have to prove to the world that they’re wrong.”

All it might take to destroy everything that Connor has worked for is Starkey kicking out five chairs.

Connor turns off the TV, his eyes aching from all the coverage. “Starkey won’t stop there,” he tells Lev. “It’s only going to get worse.”

“Which means there are three sides in this war now,” Lev points out, and Connor realizes that he’s right.

“So, if the first side is driven by hate and the second by fear, what drives us?”

“Hope?” suggests Lev.

Connor shakes his head in frustration. “We’re gonna need a lot more than that. Which is why we have to get to Akron and find out what Sonia knows.”

Then from behind him he hears, “Sonia who?”

It’s Cam, stepping out of the bathroom. He’s been locked in the basement for safekeeping, but Una must have sent him up on one of his regular bathroom runs. Connor feels fury rise in him, not so much at Cam, but at himself—for having given away two crucial pieces of information. Their destination and a name.

“None of your goddamn business!” Connor snaps.

Cam raises his eyebrows, causing the pattern of multiracial seams in his forehead to compress. “Hot button,” Cam says. “This Sonia must be important for you to react like that.”

Their plan has been to leave Cam in Una’s basement until Lev and Connor are too far away for him to pick up the trail. That way, although he knows where they’ve been, he won’t know where they’re going and can’t bring the information back to his creators—because in spite of his claims to have turned on them, there’s been no proof to back up the claim.

However, Cam now has a name as well as the city they’re headed to. If he does go back to Proactive Citizenry, it won’t take long for them to realize that this particular Sonia is the long-lost wife of their disavowed founder.

Connor realizes that everything has now changed, and their lives have become infinitely more complicated.

48 • Lev

More things have changed than Connor even realizes—but Lev is not about to hit him with his own big announcement just yet.

He watches as Connor grabs Cam’s arm a little too hard, but then Lev realizes that he’s using Roland’s hand to do it, so that’s understandable. He pulls him toward the stairs with troubling purpose.

“What are you going to do?” Lev asks.

Connor gives him a bitterly sardonic smile. “Have a meaningful discussion.” Then Connor pulls Cam down the stairs, leaving Lev alone with Grace, who had eavesdropped on everything from the safety of Una’s room. Grace, Lev knows, is another variable to be dealt with. Throughout all of this, she’s
kept her distance from Lev, and they’ve said very little to each other.

“So is Cam coming to Ohio?” she asks.

“Why on earth would Connor take him to Ohio?”

Grace shrugs. “Friends close, enemies closer kind of thing,” she says. “Seems to me there’s three choices. Leave him, take him, or kill him. Since he knows too much, that brings it down to the last two, and Connor don’t seem the killing type. Even though he runned you down with a car.”

“It was an accident,” Lev reminds her.

“Yeah—anyways, best strategy is to bring him along. You watch. Connor’s going to come back and tell you that you’ve gained a travel buddy.” She hesitates for a moment, glances at him, then glances away. “When are you gonna tell him that you’re not coming?”

Lev looks to her, a little shocked, a little angry. He had told no one of his decision yet. No one. How did she know?

“Don’t look at me so funny. It’s obvious to anyone with half a brain. You keep talking about
Connor
going to Ohio and
his
mission to find Sonia. You’ve already cut yourself out of that picture in your head. Which is why I gotta go with him. So there’s two of us to keep Cam in line.”

“You’re relieved that I’m not coming, aren’t you?”

Grace looks away from him. “I never said that.” Then she adds, “It’s because I know you don’t like me!”

Lev grins. “No, actually, you’re the one who doesn’t like me.”

“That’s because I keep thinking you’re gonna blow up! I know you say you can’t, but what if you can? People step on mines that aren’t supposed to work no more and blow themselves up, so what if you’re like one of those mines?”

Lev responds by swinging his hands together. Grace flinches, but nothing comes from Lev’s clap but a clap—and not even a loud one.

“Now you’re just making fun of me.”

“Actually,” says Lev, “there are a lot of people I’ve come across that think ‘once a clapper, always a clapper.’ But I didn’t blow us all sky-high when I got hit by the car, did I? If I was gonna blow, that would have done it.”

Grace shakes her head. “You’re still not safe. Maybe you won’t blow up, but you’re not safe in other ways. I can just tell.”

Lev isn’t exactly sure what she means, but he senses that she’s right. He’s not a clapper anymore, but neither is he the model of stability. He’s not sure what he’s capable of—good or bad. And it scares him.

“I’m glad you’re going with Connor,” Lev tells her. “And he’ll take good care of you.”

“I’ll take care of him, you mean,” Grace says, a bit offended. “He needs me, because you can’t win a thing like this without the brains. I know they call me low-cortical and all, but even so, I got this one corner of my brain that’s like Grand Central Station. Stuff that other people can’t figure out comes easy to me. Argent always hated that and called me stupid, but only because it made him feel stupid.”

Lev smiles. “Connor told me all about how you got him out during the raid at your house. You were the one who thought to send the Juvies looking elsewhere for us, and you also figured out the shooter wasn’t trying to kill us.”

“Right!” Grace says proudly. “And I even know who the shooter was—but like my mama always said, tellin’ all you know just gets your head empty. Anyways, I thought on it and saw no need to tell.”

Lev feels himself really warming to Grace for the first time. “I figured it out too. And I agree with you. No one needs to know.”
But
, thinks Lev,
maybe there are things
Grace
needs to know
. He thinks about the situation with Starkey and realizes that if Grace is the strategist she appears to be, perhaps the
challenge should be put to her. “I have a train for you to run through Grand Central Station,” he says.

“Send it on through.”

“The question is: How do you win a three-sided war?”

Grace frowns as she considers it. “That’s a tough one. I’ll think on it and give you an answer.” Then she crosses her arms. “ ’Course I can’t give you an answer if you don’t come with us, can I?”

Lev offers her an apologetic smile. “Then don’t give the answer to me. Give it to Connor.”

49 • Connor

Holding tightly to Cam’s arm, Connor escorts him down the stairs. Una is in the back room of her shop, building a new guitar, escaping into her work.

“You sent him up there without warning any of us!”

Una looks up from her work with only mild interest, as if, in her mind, they’ve already left. “I sent him to the bathroom. It’s not like he was going to escape.”

Connor doesn’t bother to explain his anger. It’s a waste of his breath. He continues down to the basement with Cam, who doesn’t resist.

“So,” says Cam, with irritating nonchalance. “Someone named Sonia in Akron.”

Connor lets him loose. “We could have the Arápache lock you up as an enemy of the tribe, and you’ll rot in a tribal jail for the rest of your miserable life.”

“Maybe,” says Cam, “but not without a trial—and everything I tell them will become a matter of public record.”

Connor turns away from him, clenching his fists, growling in utter frustration—then turns back and finds Roland’s hand
swinging, connecting with Cam’s jaw. Cam is knocked down, falling over a rickety wooden chair, and Connor prepares to hit him again. But then he looks at the arm. He holds eye contact with the shark. This might be satisfying, but it’s not helping the situation. If he lets Roland’s muscle memory rule that arm, then Connor loses more than just his temper. In a sense he loses a part of his soul.

“Stop,” he tells the shark. Reluctantly, the muscles of Roland’s fist relax. Cam is the prisoner here, not Connor. He has to remind himself that no matter how compromised he feels, he still has the upper hand in the situation. He reaches down, rights the chair, and backs away. “Take a seat,” he tells Cam, folding his anger back in on itself.

Cam gets up off the dusty ground and pulls himself into the chair, rubbing his jaw. “That grafted arm of yours has its own set of talents, doesn’t it? And is that someone else’s eye, too? That puts you two steps closer to being just like me.”

Connor knows Cam is trying to goad him into losing control again, but Connor won’t let it happen. He brings the focus back to the matter at hand.

“You have nothing but a name and a city,” Connor says, with relative calm. “It’s more than I want you to know, but even if you bring it back to the people who made you, it won’t make a difference. And Sonia’s just a code name, anyway.”

“A code name, huh?”

“Of course.” Connor shrugs it off like it’s nothing. “You don’t think I’d be stupid enough to say a real name when anyone could hear.”

Cam gives him a Cheshire smile. “Like a rug,” he says. “I believe there’s a brain bit in my right frontal lobe that’s a BS detector, and it’s pinging in the red.”

“Believe what you want,” Connor says with no choice but to stick to his story. “Una will keep you locked in this basement
as long as she feels like it, and when she lets you go—
if
she lets you go—you can tell Proactive Citizenry whatever you want; they still won’t find us.”

“Why are you so convinced I’ll crawl back to them? I already told you, I hate them just as much as you do.”

“Do you expect me to believe you’d bite the hand that made you?” says Connor. “Yes, maybe you’d do it for Risa, but not for me. The way I see it, you’ll go to them, and they’ll take you back with open arms. The prodigal son returns.”

And then Cam asks a question that will linger in Connor’s mind for a long, long time. “Would you ever go back to the people who wanted to unwind you?”

The question throws Connor for a loop. “Wh—what has that got to do with anything?”