UnWholly (12 page)

“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.

There is only one permanently disabled resident of the Graveyard. Since the disabled are a protected class, 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 compassion. 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 space. Risa has the old first-class 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 spaces, 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 bumper 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 massage 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 pass—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 assuage 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 massaging, and he gets back to coaxing her troubled circulation.

“It’s because of him that the Cap-17 law passed, 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 compassion, 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 advertisements 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.

Which brings her back to Connor’s question. With a major shortage of Unwinds in the system after Cap-17, and a public accustomed to getting all the parts they want whenever they want them, why hasn’t the Graveyard been raided? Why are they still here?

“We’re here,” Risa tells him, “because we are. And we should just be thankful for that while it lasts.” Then she gently touches his shoulder, signaling it’s time to end the massage. “I’d better get back to the infirmary jet. I’m sure there are plenty of scrapes, black eyes, and fevers to take care of. Thank you, Connor.” As many times as he does this for her, she’s always embarrassed that she needs it.

He rolls down the loose-fitting legs of her khaki pants and puts her feet back on the wheelchair’s footrests. “Never thank a guy for putting his hands all over you.”

“Not all over,” Risa says coyly.

Connor throws her a sly little grin, letting it carry the weight of anything he might have said to that.

“I think I’d like our times together even more,” she tells him, “if you were actually here.”

Connor reaches up to touch her face—but he stops himself, switches hands, and touches her with the left instead of the right. The one he was born with. “I’m sorry, it’s just—”

“—your brain making up for lost time. I know. But I do look forward to a day we can be together and not be filled with all these dark thoughts. Then we’ll know we’ve won.”

Then she pushes off toward the infirmary jet, maneuvering over the rugged ground on her own, as always, refusing to be pushed by anyone, ever.

A representative from the Anti-Divisional Resistance shows up the next afternoon—three days late for his scheduled meeting with Connor. He’s disheveled, paunchy, and drenched in sweat.

“And it’s not even summer,” Connor says—hoping to make the point that the sweltering Arizona summer is just a few months away. The ADR had better get their act together, or there are going to be a lot of angry AWOLs. That is, the ones who survive the heat.

They meet in the retired Air Force One, which used to be the Admiral’s personal quarters but now serves only as a conference room. The man introduces himself as Joe Rincon, “But call me Joe. No formalities in the ADR.” He sits at the conference table and pulls out a pad and pen to take notes. He’s already glancing at his watch, as if there’s somewhere else he would rather be.