UnWholly (25 page)

Lev can’t maintain his silence. “Then maybe you shouldn’t surround yourself with people as judgmental as you.”

His father looks to Marcus again. “Your brother will come home with us,” he decrees. And since any guts that Marcus now has have been paid for by their father’s money, he won’t have much of a choice.

“And me?”

Again, his father won’t look at him. “My son was tithed a year ago,” he says. “That’s the son I choose to remember. As for you, you can do as you please. It’s not my concern.” And he says no more.

“When Marcus wakes up, tell him I forgive him,” Lev says.

“Forgive him for what?”

“He’ll know.”

And Lev leaves without saying good-bye.

Farther down the hallway, he spots his mother again, and other members of his family, in the fourth-floor waiting room. A brother, two sisters, and their husbands. In the end, they came for Marcus. None of them are there for him. He hesitates, wondering if he should go in there. Will they behave like his father, bitter, rigid, and cold—or like his mother, offering a pained hug, yet refusing to look at him?

Then, in that moment of indecision, he sees one of his sisters bend down and pick up a baby. It’s a new nephew Lev never even knew he had.

And the baby is dressed all in white.

Lev races back to his room, but even before he gets there, he feels the eruption begin. It starts deep in his gut, sobs rising with such unexpected fury, his abdomen locks in a cramp. He must struggle the last few feet to his room doubled over, barely able to catch his breath as the tears burst from his eyes.

Somewhere deep, deep down in the most irrational corner of Lev’s mind—perhaps the place where childhood dreams go—he held out a secret hope that he might actually be taken back. That he might one day be welcomed home. Marcus had told him to forget about it—that it would never happen, but nothing could wipe out that stubborn hope that hid within him. Until today.

He climbs into his hospital bed and forces his face into his
pillow as the sobs crescendo into wails. A full year’s worth of suppressed heartache pours forth from his soul like Niagara, and he doesn’t care if he drowns in the killing whiteness of its churning waters.

•   •   •

Lev wakes without ever remembering having slept. He knows he must have, because there’s morning light streaming into the room.

“Good morning, Lev.”

He turns his head toward the voice a little too sharply, and the room spins around him. An aftereffect of the explosion. His ears are still ringing, but at least the flutter in his left ear has settled down.

Sitting in a chair near the foot of his bed is a woman a little too well-dressed to be part of the hospital staff.

“Are you FBI? Homeland Security? Are you here to ask me more questions? Because I don’t have any more answers.”

The woman chuckles slightly. “I’m not with any government agency. I represent the Cavenaugh Trust. Have you heard of it?”

Lev shakes his head. “Should I have?”

She hands him a colorful brochure, and as he looks at it, he gets a shiver.

“It looks like a harvest camp brochure.”

“Hardly,” she says, clearly insulted. The right response, as far as Lev is concerned. “To put it simply,” she tells him, “the Cavenaugh trust is a whole lot of money, set aside by what was once a very wealthy family to help wayward youth. And we can think of few youth as wayward as you.”

She gives him a twisted little smile, thinking herself funny. She’s not.

“Be that as it may,” she says, “we understand you have no place to go once you’re released, and rather than leave you at the mercy of Child Protective Services, who certainly cannot protect you from any future clapper attacks, we are prepared to
offer you a place to live—with the full approval of the Juvenile Authority, of course—in exchange for your services.”

Lev pulls his knees up beneath his covers and shrinks away from her. He doesn’t trust well-dressed people who make offers with strings attached. “What kind of services?”

She smiles at him warmly. “Just your presence, Mr. Calder. Your presence and your winning personality.”

And although he can’t think of anything that his personality has won, he says, “Sure, why not?” Because he realizes he has absolutely nothing left to lose. He thinks back to the days after he left CyFi, and before he arrived at the Graveyard. Dark days, to be sure, but punctuated by a bit of light when he found himself on a reservation, taken in by People of Chance. The Chance folk had taught him that when you have nothing to lose, there’s no such thing as a bad roll of the dice. And then something occurs to him. Something that has been in the back of his mind for a while, but today has risen to the forefront.

“One thing, though,” Lev says.

“Yes?”

“I want to have my last name legally changed. Can you do that?”

She raises her eyebrows. “Of course, if that’s what you want. May I ask what you would like to change it to?”

“It doesn’t matter,” he tells her. “Just as long as it’s not Calder.”

There’s a home on a street in northern Detroit. It is now the official legal residence of one Levi Jedediah Garrity. It’s a small home, but adequate, and comes through the generosity of the Cavenaugh trust, dedicated to helping wayward youth. There
is a full-time valet to take care of Lev’s needs, and a new tutor to take care of his lessons. The trust has even planted a permanent rent-a-cop out front to deter any unwanted guests and suspicious solicitors. No clappers are getting anywhere near the front door here.

It would be a perfect situation for Lev, except for the fact that he doesn’t actually live there. True, there’s that subcutaneous tracking chip embedded in his neck that swears he does, but the chip was easily compromised. Now the chip can ping out a signal from wherever they want Lev to appear to be.

No one knows he’s being brought to the Cavenaugh mansion, almost forty miles away.

The Cavenaugh mansion is a behemoth of a building resting on seventy-five secluded acres in Lake Orion, Michigan. It was designed to look like Versailles and was built with motor money in the days before the American automotive industry had done its own version of clapping and applauded itself into nonexistence.

Most people don’t know the mansion is still there. They’re mostly right, because it’s barely there at all. Exposure to the elements all these years has left it one storm short of surrender.

The mansion served as the Midwest headquarters for the Choice Brigade during the Heartland War, until it was captured and became headquarters for the Life Army. Apparently both the Lifers and Choicers saw great value in having their own personal Versailles.

The place was under attack constantly until the day the Unwind Accord ended all battles, putting forth the worst possible compromise and yet the only one both sides could agree to: sanctity of life from conception to thirteen, with the option of unwinding teenagers whose lives were deemed to have been a mistake.

For many years after the war, the Cavenaugh mansion lay
crumbling, too expensive to repair yet too large to tear down, until Charles Cavenaugh Jr., to assuage his guilt at still having old money in new times, donated the mansion to a trust fund, which was owned by another trust fund, which was laundered through yet another trust fund, which was owned by the Anti-Divisional Resistance.

Charles Cavenaugh Jr. meets Lev personally at the entrance of the crumbling mansion. He’s dressed like he’s too rich to worry about how he’s dressed. Even with the Cavenaugh family fortune long gone, Lev figures there must be enough residual wealth to keep at least his generation living elite. The only thing that betrays his allegiance to the resistance is his thinning hair. Nowadays the rich don’t have thinning hair. If they do, they just replace it with someone else’s.

“Lev, it’s an honor to meet you!” He grasps Lev’s hand with both of his, shaking it firmly and maintaining a steady eye contact that Lev finds awkward.

“Thanks. Same here.” Lev isn’t sure what else to say.

“I was so sorry to hear about the loss of your friend and your brother’s injuries. I can’t help but think if we had approached you earlier, the tragedy never would have happened.”

Lev looks up at the mansion. Barely a window is intact. Birds fly through the jagged, broken panes.

“Don’t let it fool you,” Cavenaugh says. “She still has some life in her—and the way she appears is actually an asset. It’s camouflage for anyone who tries to look too closely.”

Lev can’t imagine anyone looking too closely. The place is on seventy-five fenced-in acres, in the middle of a weedy field that was once a lawn, which is surrounded on all sides by
dense woods. The only way to even see the mansion would be from above.

Cavenaugh pushes open a rotted door and leads Lev into what was once a grand foyer. Now the foyer has no roof. Two sets of stairs climb to the second floor, but most of the wood on the stairs has caved in, and weeds grow through cracks in the floor, pushing up the marble tiles, making it randomly uneven.

“This way.” Cavenaugh leads him deeper into the ruined building, down a dim hallway in equally awful condition. The smell of mildew makes the air feel gelatinous. Lev is about to conclude that Cavenaugh is a madman and run in the other direction when the man unlocks a heavy door in front of them, swinging it open to reveal a grand dining hall.

“We’ve restored the north wing. For now it’s all we need. Of course, we’ve had to board all the windows—lights at night in an abandoned ruin would be way too conspicuous.”

The place is nowhere near in the condition it must have once been in. There’s still peeling paint, and water stains on the roof, but it’s far more livable than the rest of the sprawling estate. The dining hall has two mismatched chandeliers that were probably salvaged from other areas of the mansion. Three long tables and benches suggest that a lot of people are served their meals here.

At the far end of the room is a huge fireplace, and above it a full-length portrait, larger than life. At first Lev takes it to be a painting of one of the Cavenaughs as a boy, until he looks more closely.

“Wait—is that . . . me?”

Cavenaugh smiles. “A good likeness, isn’t it?”

As he crosses toward it, Lev can see how good a likeness it really is. Or at least a fine rendering of how he looked a year ago. In the portrait, he’s wearing a yellow shirt that seems to glow like gold. In fact, the portrait is painted so that his
skin gives off a sort of divine radiance. The expression on his painted face speaks of wisdom and peace—the kind of peace Lev has yet to find in life—and at the base of the portrait are tithing whites metaphorically trampled beneath his feet.

His first reaction is to laugh. “What’s this all about?”

“It’s about the cause you fought for, Lev. I’m pleased to say we’ve picked up where you left off.”

On the mantel just below the portrait are everything from flowers to handwritten notes, to bits of jewelry and other trinkets.

“These things spontaneously began to appear after we put up the portrait,” Cavenaugh explains. “We didn’t expect it, but maybe we should have.”

Lev still struggles to process this. Again, all he can do is giggle. “You’re joking, right?”

Then off to his right, at a doorway to an adjacent hallway, a woman calls out to them. “Mr. Cavenaugh, the natives are getting restless. Can I let them in?”

Lev can see kids craning to see around the rather heavyset woman.

“Give us a moment, please,” Cavenaugh tells her, then smiles at Lev. “As you can imagine, they’re very excited to meet you.”

“Who?”

“The tithes, of course. We held a contest, and seven were chosen to personally greet you.”

Cavenaugh talks like these are all things Lev should already know. It’s all too much for him to wrap his mind around. “Tithes?”

“Ex-tithes, actually. Rescued before their arrival at their respective harvest camps.”

Then something clicks, and it dawns on Lev how this is possible. “Parts pirates—the ones who target tithes!”

“Oh, there are certainly parts pirates,” Cavenaugh says, “but to the best of my knowledge, none of them have taken
any tithes. It’s a good cover story, though. Keeps the Juvenile Authority barking up the wrong tree.”

The idea that tithes are being rescued rather than sold on the black market is something that has never occurred to Lev.

“Are you ready to meet our little squad of ambassadors?”

“Sure, why not.”

Cavenaugh signals the woman to let them in, and they enter in an orderly procession that doesn’t hide the high-voltage excitement in their step. They’re all dressed in bright colors—intentionally so. Not a bit of white in the whole bunch. Lev just stands there dazed as they greet him one by one. A couple of them just stare and nod their heads, too starstruck to say anything. Another shakes his hand so forcefully Lev’s shoulder has to absorb the shock. One boy is so nervous, he stumbles and nearly falls at Lev’s feet, then goes beet red as he steps away.

“Your hair is different,” one girl says, then panics like she’s gravely insulted him. “But it’s good! I like it! I like it long!”

“I know everything about you,” another kid announces. “Seriously, ask me anything.”

And although Lev is a bit creeped out by the thought, he says, “Okay, what’s my favorite ice cream?”

“Cherry Garcia!” the kid says without the slightest hesitation. The answer is, of course, correct. Lev’s not quite sure how to feel about it.

“So . . . you were all tithes?”

“Yes,” says a girl in bright green, “until we were rescued. We know how wrong tithing is now.”

“Yeah,” says another. “We learned to see the way you see!”

Lev finds himself giddy and caught up in their adoration. Not since his days as a tithe has he felt “golden.” After Happy Jack, everyone saw him either as a victim to be pitied or a monster to be punished. But these kids revere him as a hero. He can’t
deny that after all he’s been through, it feels good. Really good.

A girl in screaming violet can’t contain herself and throws her arms around him. “I love you, Lev Calder!” she cries.