UnWholly (40 page)

“What is it?” Miracolina asks.

“I think I sprained my ankle kicking out the bars,” Lev tells her. She lets him put his weight on her, and she helps him walk.

As they open the front door, it becomes clear where they’re being held. It’s a cottage in the woods, so isolated they could have screamed at the top of their lungs for days and no one would have heard them.

There’s a dirt path leading out to what Lev hopes is a major road. He tries putting weight on his ankle and grimaces again—so she continues to let him put his arm over her shoulder, and he gratefully accepts her assistance.

Then, when they’re a good distance away from the shack, he says, “I’m really going to need your help now. You have to help me warn my friend.”

She steps away from him, and he almost topples, but manages to keep his balance.

“I’ll do no such thing. Your friend is not my problem.”

“Please, look at me. I can barely walk—I can’t make it there on my own.”

“I’ll get you to a hospital.”

Lev shakes his head. “When I went to Cavenaugh, I broke the terms of my parole. If I get caught, I’ll get locked away for good.”

“Don’t blame me for that!”

“I just saved your life,” Lev reminds her. “Don’t repay me by destroying mine.”

She looks at him almost as hatefully as the day they first met. “That parts pirate will get to the caverns before we do. What’s the point?” Then she studies him for a moment as if reading Lev’s mind, and says, “Your friend’s not in the caverns, is he?”

“No.”

She sighs. “Of course not.”

Miracolina is not a girl given to impulsive behavior. All things must be planned and have sufficient time to settle before being carried out. Even her escape from the Cavenaugh mansion was not a wild bolt, but the result of careful preparation. Therefore, she is completely unprepared for the madness that overtakes her as she stands in that dirt path with Lev.

“I will contact my parents before I help you get anywhere,” she tells him, realizing that by saying this, she’s entered into negotiation. She’s actually considering going with him. Perhaps it’s post-traumatic stress disorder.

“You can’t call your parents. If you do, they’ll know your tithing bus wasn’t attacked by parts pirates. It will compromise the entire Cavenaugh operation.”

“If you care so much about it,” she asks him, “then why did you run?”

He takes a moment before answering, shifting his weight and grimacing again. “Their work is good,” he says. “It just isn’t mine.”

This baffles her. His motives—his hazy integrity. It was easy to dismiss Lev as “part of the problem” when she did not know him, but now it’s not so easy. He’s a paradox. This is a boy who almost blew himself to bits in an attempt to kill others, and yet he offered himself to the parts pirate in order to save Miracolina’s life. How could someone go from having no respect for one’s own existence to being willing to give himself as a sacrifice for someone he barely knows? It flies in the face of the truths that have defined Miracolina’s life. The bad are bad, the good are good, and being caught in between is just an illusion. There is no gray.

“I will contact my parents and let them know that I am alive,” she demands, holding firm. “Just knowing I’m alive will make them happy.”

“A call can be traced.”

“We’ll be moving, won’t we? If my parents report it to the Juvenile Authority, they’ll only know where we’ve been, not where we’re going.” And then she asks, “Where
are
we going?”

“I guess you can get in touch with your parents,” Lev says, giving in, “but don’t ask where we’re going. The less you know, the better.”

And although that sends a red warning flag flying to the top of her mast, she says, “Fine.” Then she puts her hands on her hips. “And you can stop pretending your ankle hurts. That will just slow us down.”

Lev puts his full weight on the ankle and offers her up an impish little grin. It’s in this moment that Miracolina realizes she lost this negotiation before it began. Because even before he asked her to come along with him, a part of herself—secret even to her—had already decided that she would.

The journey to the Graveyard is different for Lev than his first time. That first trek had no definite destination beyond a slow downward spiral, and was made while his wounded spirit was so raw, he had been ripe for recruitment by the Clappers. He had been lost with no real way to cope with his anger.

First there was CyFi, and the kid in CyFi’s head who didn’t even know he had already been unwound. Then Lev was left alone to fend for himself, prey for bottom-feeders as stealthy as mosquitoes. They would offer help, or shelter, or food—but they all had some bloodsucking agenda. A brief stint in a
Chance folk rez bolstered his strength, but even that ended with a nasty run-in with a parts pirate. Lev’s time surviving under the radar had made him street-smart and resourceful. He had been toughened by a brutal baptism of life experience. In those bleak days, the idea of blowing himself up and taking as much of the world with him as he could didn’t sound like such a bad idea.

But he is not in that dark place now, and he knows that no matter what happens to him, he’ll never be in that place again.

To honor Miracolina’s wishes, Lev slips a cell phone out of the coat pocket of a businessman so she can call home. The call is brief, and as promised, she gives no more information than the fact that she’s alive, cutting off her mother’s rapid-fire inquiry by quickly hanging up.

“There, are you happy?” she snaps at Lev. “Short and sweet.” She insists he return the phone to the same businessman’s pocket, but he’s long gone, so he drops it in the pocket of a similar man.

With no money of their own, everything they need must be stolen. Lev uses milder versions of the survival tricks he learned his first time on the streets. Smash and grab without the smash. Breaking and entering without any actual breaking. Oddly, Miracolina has no problem with them stealing.

“I am making a list of all the things we take, and where we take them from,” she tells him. “All will be paid for in full before I am unwound.”

However, the fact that she is allowing for the bending of her personal moral code gives Lev hope that it may bend enough to break her of her tithing fixation.

He knows that time is of the essence. Nelson is the kind of human bloodhound who won’t give up—and he’ll be even more relentless once he realizes Lev has lied to him. They have to warn Connor.

Neither Lev nor Miracolina can drive, or look old enough to get away with it if they could—and kids their age traveling on conventional transportation stick out like sore thumbs. So they ride in the shadows of the world. The containers of eighteen-wheelers, when they can get inside; the beds of pickups when there are tarps under which to hide. More than once they’re chased away, but never seriously pursued. Luckily, most people have more important things to do than run after a couple of kids.

“I hate what we’re doing, and how we’re doing it!” Miracolina yells, after running from a particularly aggressive trucker who chased them with a tire iron for all of ten yards. “I feel dirty! I feel subhuman.”

“Good,” Lev tells her. “Now you know how a real AWOL feels.”

He has to admit that being back on the fringe is exhilarating. That first time it was all about betrayal, alienation, and survival. He hated it, and still has nightmares about it—but now giving in to instincts, impulses, and the rush of adrenaline feels far more like home than being a caged bird in the Cavenaugh mansion. Some of that survival excitement seems to be rubbing off on Miracolina—for every time they get away with something, she loosens up. She even smiles.

The longest leg of their journey is in the baggage compartment of a Greyhound bus—having climbed in behind luggage when no one was looking. The bus, out of Tulsa, is bound for Albuquerque, just one state away from their destination.

“Are you ever going to tell me where this journey ends?”

“We’re going to Tucson,” he finally tells her, but nothing more specific than that.

The bus leaves at five in the evening and will travel through the night. They create a reasonably comfortable place for themselves among the luggage. Then, about two hours into the trip, Lev realizes he’s in trouble. Even in the pitch dark of the
cramped compartment, Miracolina can tell something’s wrong, because she asks, “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” Lev says. Then he confesses. “I gotta pee.”

“Well,” says Miracolina in a superior voice that must have taken years to cultivate, “
I
thought ahead and went at the bus station.”

Within ten minutes Lev realizes this is not going to end well.

“Are you going to wet your pants?” Miracolina asks.

“No!” says Lev. “I’d rather blow up.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“Very funny.”

But as the bus hits a patch of rough road, it becomes painfully clear that holding it in is not an option. He will not foul the compartment . . . then he realizes that absorbency is only a luggage zipper away. He moves away from Miracolina and begins to unzip a suitcase.

“You’re going to pee in someone’s suitcase?”

“Do you have any other ideas?”

And suddenly Miracolina begins to snicker, then giggle, then cackle uncontrollably. “He’s going to pee in someone’s suitcase!”

“Quiet! Do you want the people in the bus to hear you?”

But Miracolina is beyond help. She’s entered into a full-fledged laughter fit—the kind that leaves your stomach hurting. “They’re gonna open their suitcase,” she blurts between bursts of glee, “
and their clothes’ll be full of pee!

For Lev this is no laughing matter. He opens the suitcase and feels around to make sure it’s just clothes and nothing electronic, because that would be really bad—and Miracolina can’t catch her breath.
“And I thought it was bad when shampoo spilled in mine!”

“Shampoo!” says Lev. “You’re a genius.”

Lev rifles blindly through one suitcase, then a second,
until he comes up with a nice-size shampoo bottle. Then he frantically dumps the shampoo out in the corner of the luggage compartment and, without a second to lose, refills it with sweet relief. When he’s done, he caps the bottle tightly. He considers putting it back in the suitcase, but decides it’s best to just leave it rolling around at the far corner of the luggage compartment.

Lev releases a shivering sigh, then returns to his space next to Miracolina.

“Did you wash your hands?” she asks.

“Wash them?” Lev tells her. “They’re covered with shampoo!”

Now they’re both laughing, and when they breathe in, the cloying smell of cherry blossom shampoo fills the air around them, which just makes them laugh harder, until they’re all laughed out.

And in the silence that falls afterward, something changes. The tension that has been strung taut between them since the moment they met now goes slack. Soon the motion of the bus begins lulling them to sleep. Lev feels Miracolina lean into his shoulder. He doesn’t move for fear of waking her. He just enjoys the feeling of her there—certain that she would never do such a thing if she were awake.

And then she says, with no hint of sleep in her voice, “I forgive you.”

Lev feels it begin deep inside him, just as it did on the day he realized his parents would never take him back. It’s an emotional swell that can’t be contained, and there’s no bottle in the world big enough to hold it. And although he fights to keep his sobs silent, his chest begins to heave with them, and he knows he won’t be able to stop any more than Miracolina was able to stop laughing. Although she must know he’s racked with tears, she says nothing, just keeps her
head on his shoulder as his tears fall into her hair.

All this time, Lev never realized what he needed. He did not need to be adored or pitied. He needed to be forgiven. Not by God, who is all-forgiving. Not by people like Marcus and Pastor Dan, who would always stand by his side. He needed to be forgiven by an unforgiving world. By someone who once despised him. Someone like Miracolina.

Only once his silent sobs have stopped does she speak to him. “You’re so weird,” she says. He wonders if she has any idea of the gift she has just given him. He’s pretty sure she does.

Lev knows his world is different now. Maybe it’s exhaustion, or stress, but in that rattling, bouncing, greasy, shampooey compartment, his life suddenly feels like it couldn’t be any better.

Both he and Miracolina close their eyes and fall asleep, blissfully unaware of the brown van with a dented roof and shattered side window that has been following the bus since it left Tulsa.

“Chatter,” Hayden tells Connor. “All kinds of chatter.”

Hayden paces the tight space in Connor’s jet, hitting his head on the ceiling more than once. Connor has rarely seen Hayden this agitated. Until now, he always managed to keep the world at smirking distance.

“Is it just on the Tucson police bands, or the juvey bands too?”

“Everywhere,” Hayden tells him. “Radio, e-mails, every communication we can intercept. The analysis programs have us shooting to red alert.”

“They’re just programs,” Connor reminds him. “It doesn’t necessarily mean—”

“There’s chatter specifically about us. Code words mostly, but they’re easy to crack.”

Connor begins to wonder if his own paranoia has infected Hayden as well. “Just calm down and give me specifics.”

“Okay,” says Hayden, pacing and trying to slow his breathing. “There have been three house fires over the past two weeks. Three homes in different Tucson neighborhoods got burned to the ground, and they’re blaming us for it.”

Connor’s grafted hand balls into a fist. That iron fist the Admiral had spoken of, perhaps. Didn’t Trace say that there were people itching for a reason to take the Graveyard out? If they couldn’t find a reason, it would be pretty easy to manufacture one.

“Where’s Trace?” Connor asks. “If something’s really going on, he would know.”

Hayden just looks at him, confused. “Trace? Why would Trace know?”