UnWholly (41 page)

“Never mind why, he just would. I have to talk to him.”

Hayden shakes his head. “He’s gone.”

“What do you mean ‘gone’?”

“No one’s seen him since yesterday. I figured you sent him on some mission.”

“Damn it!” Connor punches the wall, cracking the fiberglass interior of the corporate jet. So Trace finally decided which side he’s on—and without him, they have no escape plan. No one but Trace can fly the Dreamliner.

“There’s more,” Hayden says, hesitating long enough for Connor to know that there’s yet another round of bad news. “All three homes had Unwinds—and they burned the day before the Juvey-rounders were due to take them to Harvest camp. I checked, and the kids were on our list. And all three of them were storks.”

•   •   •

“What the hell were you thinking?”

Connor doesn’t hide his fury as he storms into GymBo, where Starkey works out like he doesn’t have a care in the world.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Like hell you don’t!”

Around them other kids leave their equipment and slowly approach, taking menacing positions. Only now does Connor realize that Starkey has completely surrounded himself with members of the Stork Club. There’s not a single bio-raised kid there.

“How many of you were with him?” Connor demands. “How many of you are as crazy as he is?”

“Let me show you something, Connor.” Starkey saunters over to a kid sitting on a side bench, who looks both angry and scared at the same time. “I’d like you to meet Garrett Parks, the newest member of the Stork Club. We liberated him last night.”

Connor looks the kid over. He has a black eye, a swollen lip. He was pretty roughed up during his “liberation.”

“They burned down your house—you know that, don’t you?” Connor asks him.

The kid can’t look Connor in the eye. “Yeah, I know.”

“He also knows,” adds Starkey, “that his so-called parents were about to have him unwound. We saved him, and sent a message.”

“Yeah, you sent a message, all right. To the Juvies. You told them that it’s time to take every last one of us out. You didn’t save him, you’ve condemned him. You’ve condemned all of us! Do you really think they’ll stand for us burning down homes?”

Starkey crosses his arms. “Let them try to take us down. We’ve got weapons. We’ll fight them off.”

“How long do you think we can last? An hour? Two? No
matter how many weapons we have, they have more, and they’ll just keep coming and coming until we’re all dead or captured.”

Finally Starkey begins to show a hint of uncertainty.

“You’re just a coward,” shouts Bam, glowering at him just as she did the day Connor fired her.

“Yeah, yeah, a coward,” the others echo.

The chorus of support gives Starkey all the justification he needs to bury any doubts beneath his own blind confidence. “I’ve been here long enough to know that you’re nothing but a babysitter. We need more than that. We need someone who’s not afraid to take this battle to the streets. I gave you every chance to leave on your own, but you wouldn’t go. You leave me no choice but to take you down.”

“Not gonna happen.”

Connor is clearly outnumbered. Starkey’s inner circle of storks advance on him—but Starkey’s not the only one with tricks up his sleeve. Suddenly Hayden and half a dozen others, who’ve been waiting outside, begin piling through the door, firing tranq pistols at every stork in their path until half of Starkey’s inner circle is unconscious on the floor of the jet, and the others drop their weapons.

Connor looks straight into Starkey’s eyes. “Cuff him.”

“With pleasure,” says Hayden, pulling Starkey’s hands behind his back and cuffing them together.

Connor has been foolish enough to trust him, and to believe that Starkey’s ambition was healthy, not blind.

“The difference between me and you, Connor,” Starkey says, still defiant, “is that—”

“—is that you’re in handcuffs and I’m not. Get him out of here.”

Hearing the gunfire of tranq pistols, dozens of kids have gathered in front of GymBo, as they haul Starkey out and down the stairs.

“Put his little mutiny team in the detention jet with two armed guards,” Connor says.

“Starkey, too?” Hayden asks.

Connor knows he can’t put Starkey in the same holding pen as his coconspirators. It would just lead to more plotting.

“No. Lock him in
my
jet,” Connor orders, and one of the kids holding Starkey throws him to the ground, but Connor pulls the kid back.

“No! We are not the Juvies. Treat him with dignity. Whether he deserves it or not.”

They obey, although no one helps Starkey up. With his hands cuffed behind his back, he has to wiggle and contort himself to get to his feet.

“This isn’t over!” Starkey yells.

“Yeah, that’s what they always say when it is.”

Starkey is taken away, and Connor begins damage control. He tunes in to the rumbles of conversation on the perimeter. Some kids are just wondering what the hell happened, but there are other voices. Disapproving voices. The Stork Club. He wonders how much support Starkey has. It might be a mile wide, but Connor hopes it’s only an inch deep.

“Listen to me, all of you,” Connor says, knowing he has to sell himself as their leader more than ever. “Whether you’re a stork, or a ward, or bio-raised, we have to stand united now. What we do now will decide whether we live or die. The Juvies are about to make a move. We have to work together, unless you want to end up in pieces.”

His speech meets with affirmations and a sense of solidarity until someone in the back asks, “What about Starkey?”

Then everyone waits to see what Connor will say.

“Starkey is one of us,” Connor tells them. “And I won’t let a single one of us be unwound.”

•   •   •

With no one to fly the Dreamliner, there is no escape plan, so Connor calls together Hayden, Ashley, and half a dozen others—some from the Holy of Whollies, and other kids he knows he can trust. They meet in the ComBom—a makeshift war room for an unlikely general—and Connor pulls plan B out of thin air.

“We set up two fronts—here, and here.” He points to a hand-drawn map of the Graveyard. “The Juvies will come in through the north gate. Once they’re in, we drive them right down the main aisle, then ambush from both sides, with about fifty of us.”

“Live ammo?” Hayden asks.

“We hit them with everything we have. Live ammo, tranqs, everything.”

“They’ll have more than us,” Ashley points out. “No matter what we do, they’ll outlast us.”

“Yes, but it’s all about buying time,” Connor tells her. “When our ammo runs low, we retreat to here—behind the fuel tanker, east of the fighter jets.”

“Won’t they corner us?” another kid asks.

“When they start to close in, we blow the tanker and run east.”

“We’ll never make it!” says Ashley.

“Here’s the thing, though. The second the fifty take on the Juvies, more than six hundred fifty will be scattering to the south.” And on the map, Connor draws a dispersal pattern of kids spreading out like a fan toward the remote southern fence. “That fence is full of holes.”

Hayden nods, getting it, and points to the main aisle. “So if the fifty do their job here and then draw the Juvies to the east, keeping them engaged and distracted, by the time they realize everyone else is on the run, they’ll never be able to catch them.”

“They might be able to round up some, but the others will make it. They’ll all be on their own again, but at least they’ll be alive, and whole.”

And then comes the big question. “What about the fifty?”

Finally Connor has to answer. “We’ll be the sacrifices so the others can survive.”

He can actually hear the click in Hayden’s Adam’s apple as he swallows. “So much for a future in broadcasting,” Hayden says.

“Any of you who aren’t up for it, I won’t hold it against you if you leave,” Connor says, but everyone knows that’s like the minister asking if anyone objects to the wedding.

“All right, good,” he says when no one raises a hand. “Each of you put together a team of your most trusted friends who are willing to stand against the Juvies, then let the others know to start running when the alarm sounds, and not to stop running until they’re either caught or turn seventeen.”

“Why wait until the alarm sounds?” someone asks. “Why not abandon the Graveyard now?”

“Because,” Connor points out, “they’re watching our every move now. If they see us starting to bail, they’ll have squad cars lining that perimeter fence before we even get there, and they can pick us off like rabbits—but if all their forces are tied up in a single forward offensive, that’s when we’ll have a back door.”

They all approve of Connor’s logic. He seems to be the only one who knows he’s flying by the seat of his pants.

“How much time do we have?” Ashley asks.

Connor lets Hayden field that one.

“Days if we’re lucky,” Hayden tells her. “Hours if we’re not.”

While Connor has his summit meeting, Trace breaks all speed limits racing back to the Graveyard. He had been called for an emergency meeting with his “employers,” to confirm that
Graveyard AWOLs were responsible for the house fires in Tucson. There was enough evidence to lay the attacks on the Graveyard’s doorstep—it made no sense to deny it. What the suits from Proactive Citizenry wanted to know was why Trace hadn’t told them about these attacks ahead of time. After all, that was his entire purpose there—to let them know everything before it happened. They refused to believe that he had been just as blindsided by it as they were.

“Do you have any idea the position this puts us in?” they asked him. “The Juvenile Authority wants to clean the place out, and with these attacks on civilian neighborhoods, we won’t be able to stop them.”

“I thought you controlled them.”

The suits bristled in unison. “Our relationship with the Juvenile Authority is more complex than your simplistic boeuf understanding.” Then they told him they were ending his assignment, effective immediately.

But to Trace, this wasn’t an assignment anymore. And the time of playing both sides had come to an end.

So, preparing himself for battle, he sped off to the Graveyard like a surfer riding ahead of a tsunami.

Now, at dusk, he screeches to a halt before the locked gate and honks nonstop until the two teen guards on duty come out to see what the commotion is. When they see it’s Trace, they unlock the gate.

“Jesus, Trace, do you want to wake all of Tucson?”

The other kid on duty chuckles. “Ain’t nothing gonna wake Tucson.”

Poor bastards,
thinks Trace.
They have no idea what’s coming.
He looks at the rifles they wield limply, like fashion accessories. “You got tranq bullets in those?” he asks.

“Yup,” says the first kid.

“Replace them with these.” Trace reaches over onto his
passenger seat of his Jeep and hands them two boxes of the deadliest military ammunition made. Shells that could take the head off an elephant.

The kids look at the shells like they’ve been handed a newborn they’re afraid they’ll drop.

“Load them quick—and the next time you see someone headed for the gate, shoot first, and don’t stop until you’re out of bullets, do you hear me?”

“Y-yes, sir,” says the first kid. The other kid just nods mutely. “Why, sir?”

“Because the Juvies are right behind me.”

It’s the fading edge of dusk when Lev and Miracolina arrive on the road that skirts the northern edge of the Graveyard. They’re on foot now. An old rusted road sign points ahead toward what was once Davis Air Force Base. The faint shape of aircraft can be seen rising in the desert more than a mile beyond the fence.

“An air force base? Your friend is holing up in an air force base?”

“It’s not a base anymore,” Lev tells her, “and hasn’t been since the war. It’s an aircraft salvage yard.”

“So the Akron AWOL is hiding in one of those planes?”

“Not just him, and not just one plane.”

The fence seems to go on forever. Every few minutes a car zooms past on its way to or away from Tucson. Lev knows that drivers must see them and wonder what two kids are doing way out here, but he doesn’t care. He’s too close to waste time hiding from headlights now.

“I know the gate’s up here somewhere. It’s guarded, but they’ll recognize me and let us in.”

“You sure about that? Not everyone in the world is like your worshipful tithes.”

At last the gate comes into view, and Lev picks up the pace.

“Slow down!” Miracolina yells.

“Catch up!” Lev yells right back.

As he nears the gate, he sees one of the kids on guard duty hurrying to greet him. There’s something in the kid’s hands, but it’s gotten too dark to see just what it is until it’s too late, and a single rifle shot explodes through the dying dusk.

From the moment the cuffs are on Starkey’s wrists, he begins his escape act. He has no secret key, no penknife in his shoe to pick the lock, but a true master knows how to improvise.

He keeps his wits about him as they bring him to Connor’s jet, suppressing his fury at the humiliation of being collared in front of the entire Graveyard. The arrogance of Connor! Allowing him to “preserve his dignity” was anything but dignified. Starkey would rather have fought as they dragged him through the dirt.
That
would be dignified—but to treat him with such limp pity? It was the ultimate insult.

The two kids assigned to guard him are bigger than him and are armed. Once inside the jet, they relock the handcuffs around a steel support strut so he stays in one place. Satisfied, the two kids leave, one of them dangling the key in front of him to taunt him, before shoving it in his pocket. They close the door, and Starkey finds himself an official prisoner of war.

He watches the two guards from the window of the jet, sizing them up. They’re chatty with each other—probably friends. Of course, neither of them are storks; Connor made sure of that. Storks are now the enemy. Well, if Starkey has
his way, Connor will see what a formidable enemy they are.