UnWholly (49 page)

Their car is a nondescript beige Honda that Connor hot-wired back in Phoenix, after ditching the Ford he hot-wired in Tucson, after ditching Nelson’s van. Anyone trying to track them would be hard-pressed to keep up with their transportation switcheroos.

The Rain Valley Diner boasts “the Best Burgers in the Southwest.” Connor hasn’t had food this good since before his parents signed his unwind order and his life turned upside down. As far as he’s concerned, the Rain Valley Diner has the best burgers in the world.

With one hand he eats his burger, and with the other, he does some information gathering on Nelson’s laptop, which the parts pirate was kind enough to leave for them in his van.

“Find out anything new?” Lev asks.

“It looks like Risa disappeared after the broadcast last night, and Proactive Citizenry wants her head. Not unwound, just her head. Like on a stake.”

“Ew.”

“And Hayden’s being charged with everything they can charge him with.”

“At least they can’t unwind him.”

“But they can unwind everyone else who got caught.”

The thought of the captured Whollies brings Connor waves of anger, chased by sadness that threatens to wash him down into the lightless places within himself. “I should have been able to save them. . . .”

“Hey, you did everything you could—and besides, they’re not unwound yet,” Lev reminds him. “Maybe what we do now can still make a difference for them.”

Connor closes the laptop. “Maybe . . . but what are we going to do now?”

They sit in a long, uncomfortable silence, doing nothing but eating, because that’s easier than answering the question. No plans, no destination, no idea what direction to go from here other than “away.” Connor’s first instinct is to find Risa, but he knows that, like himself, she’ll be completely off radar. He wouldn’t even know where to start looking.

“I could take you to the Cavenaugh mansion,” Lev suggests. “You’d be safe there.”

“Safe would be nice for once, but that’s not happening. Besides, didn’t you bail from there?”

“Yeah, well, if I come back with the one and only Akron AWOL, I think they’ll forgive me.”

“Keep your voice down!” Connor looks around—they’ve chosen a corner booth that’s relatively secluded, but it’s not that big of a diner, and voices carry.

“Maybe we oughta check out that ‘You-Tub’ place, get a Jacuzzi, and turn into a couple of spa potatoes. We deserve some downtime.”

He knows Lev is kidding, but there’s something about what he said that triggers a thought. It’s a small thought at first, but it grows quickly. An inkling becomes a hunch, becomes an idea, becomes a revelation, and Connor flips open the laptop again, clicking and typing furiously.

“What is it?” Lev asks.

“Janson Rheinschild!”

“But you already told me he was wiped out of digital existence, so what’s the point in looking?”

Connor continues to ply the search engines, getting the keyboard slick with french fry grease. “You gave me an idea.”

“Me?”

“The hot tub website. The typo.”

“Are you gonna make fun of my keyboarding skills again?”

“No. You gotta have skills to make fun of them,” Connor tells him. “Anyway, Hayden figured there’s a code-eating worm on the net that chewed up every reference to Janson Rheinschild, but it’s only looking for his name spelled correctly. . . . So I’m inputting every possible misspelling of his name.”

Lev smiles. “Leave it to you to turn someone else’s screwup into gold.”

Connor orders a second burger and spends twenty minutes misspelling the name. By the last bite of the burger, he’s ready to give up hope . . . then suddenly there’s a glint of that gold Lev was talking about, and it turns out to be the mother lode.

“Lev—take a look at this!”

Lev comes around to his side of the booth, and they look at a news article dated more than thirty years ago. The article is from a small local paper somewhere in Montana where Rheinschild once lived. Apparently they kept tabs on one of their favorite sons, but consistently misspelled his name as “Reignchild.”

Connor and Lev read the article in stunned disbelief. Rheinschild, a research scientist and inventor, was important enough to make quite a name for himself, until that name got erased like a shunned pharaoh from an Egyptian obelisk.

“My God!” Connor says, “This guy pioneered neural bonding and regeneration—the very technology that made unwinding possible! Without Rheinschild, transplants and grafting would be back in the Stone Age!”

“So he was the monster who started this!”

“No, this was right at the beginning of the war—before anyone even thought of unwinding.”

Connor plays a video embedded in the article, and they watch an interview with Rheinschild, a middle-aged man with glasses and thinning hair—two clear signs that it was before unwinding.

“We can’t even begin to know the uses of this technology,”
Rheinschild says with an excitement much more youthful than he looks.
“Imagine a world where loved ones who die young don’t really die—because every part of them can be donated to ease someone else’s suffering. It’s one thing to be an organ donor, and another to know that every single part of you will save someone else’s life. That’s a world I want to live in.”

Connor shivers, for the first time noticing the air-conditioned chill of the diner. The world Rheinschild described is a world Connor would want to live in too . . . but that’s not the world they ended up with.

“Of course there are going to be ethical questions,”
Rheinschild goes on to say,
“which is why I’ve started an organization to study the ethical issues inherent in this sort of medical advancement. Proactive Citizenry, as I’m calling it, will be a watchdog to make sure there are no abuses of this technology. A conscience to make sure nothing goes wrong.”

Connor stops the video, trying to process it all. “Holy crap! So he founded Proactive Citizenry to protect the world from what he created!”

“And it became the very monster he was afraid of.”

Connor thinks back to something he learned in school. Oppenheimer—the man who created the first nuclear bomb—turned against it in the end and became the bomb’s greatest opponent. What if Rheinschild was the same, speaking out against unwinding, then was silenced—or worse—was
silenced before he even had the chance to speak out. Not even the Admiral remembered the man, which means Rheinschild was either already gone or was prevented from speaking out against the Unwind Accord.

Lev reaches over and starts the video again—just a few more seconds of Rheinschild joyfully, naively waxing on about the glorious future he envisioned.
“This is just the beginning. If we’re able to regenerate nerve tissue, we can regenerate anything—it’s just a matter of time.”

The interview freezes on his smiling face, and Connor can’t help but feel tremendous sorrow for this man; the secret father of unwinding, who paved a road to a place beyond hell with his good intentions.

“That’s pretty wild,” says Lev, “but how can knowing all this stop unwinding? Isn’t that what you said, that finding out about this guy can change life as we know it, or something like that? Even if everyone knew about him, it wouldn’t change a thing.”

Connor shakes his head in frustration. “There’s got to be something we’re missing.”

He scrolls down to the end of the article, where there’s a picture of Rheinschild and his wife in a laboratory—apparently they worked as a team. When Connor reads the caption beneath the photo, his stomach seizes so suddenly, he thinks he might lose both of his Best in the Southwest burgers.

“It couldn’t be. . . .”

“What is it?”

Connor can’t speak for a moment. He looks at the caption again. “His wife. Her name is Sonia!”

Lev doesn’t get it—and why should he? He was never in that first safe house with Connor and Risa. Sonia was the name of the old woman who ran it. Over the years she must have rescued hundreds, maybe thousands, of AWOL Unwinds.
Connor enlarges the picture on the screen, and the more he looks at Mrs. Rheinschild, the more certain he is.

It’s the same Sonia!

What was it she said to him?
We move in and out of darkness and light all of our lives. Right now, I’m pleased to be in the light.
Connor had no idea the burden of darkness she must have been carrying all these years.

“I know that woman,” he tells Lev. “And now I know where we have to go. We’re going back to Ohio.”

Lev grows pale at the suggestion. “Ohio?” The thought of home brings a scorpion’s nest of emotions neither one of them are ready for, but Sonia’s antique shop is in Akron. If there’s more to this picture, she’s the only one who can give it to them.

Bells above the diner’s front door jingle, and a stone-faced deputy saunters in, his eyes immediately scanning the room. While Connor and Lev were absorbed by the news article, two patrol cars had pulled up out front, and officers are all over the stolen Honda.

“You look like a deer in headlights,” Connor whispers to Lev. “Stop it.”

“I can’t help it.” Lev lowers his head so his hair hangs over his face, but that looks just as conspicuous as antelope eyes.

Sure enough, the deputy zeroes in on them and makes a beeline across the diner—but to Connor’s surprise, their waitress gets to the table first and says, “Tommy, you just about inhaled those burgers! You keep eating like that and you’ll burst out of your jeans.”

Connor is a little slack-jawed as the deputy arrives, but Lev pulls out of road-kill mode and says, “Yeah, Tommy, you’re such a pig. You’ll get fat, just like your dad.”

“It’s in the genes,” says the waitress, not missing a beat. “Better be careful!”

The deputy turns to the waitress. “You know these boys, Karla?”

“Yeah, this is my nephew, Tommy, and his friend Evan.”

“Ethan,” says Lev. “You always get my name wrong.”

“Well at least I knew it started with an
E
.”

Connor nods politely to the deputy and looks at the waitress. “Your burgers are just too good, Aunt Karla. So if I get fat, it’s your fault.”

Satisfied, the deputy turns to Karla, concluding that Connor and Lev are somebody else’s problem. “Know anything about that car out there?” he asks her.

Karla looks out the window and says, “A couple of kids pulled up, maybe an hour ago. Boy and a girl. I noticed them because they looked to be in a hurry.”

“They come in?”

“No, they just ran off.”

“I’m not surprised—the car was stolen down in Phoenix.”

“Joyriders?”

“Maybe. Could be AWOLs. A bunch of them escaped from that old air force base in Tucson.” He jots her statement down in his notepad. “You remember anything else, you be sure to let us know.”

Once the deputy is gone, Karla winks at Connor and Lev.

“Well, Tommy and Ethan, your meal’s on the house today.”

“Thank you,” Connor says. “For everything.”

She winks at him. “Least I can do for my favorite nephew.” Then she reaches into her pocket and, to his amazement, puts a set of car keys in front of Connor, rabbit’s foot key chain and all. “Why don’t you do me a favor and drive my car ‘home’ for me today. It’s out back.”

Lev looks at Connor, astonished, which isn’t much different from his deer-in-headlights look. For a moment Connor thinks she might recognize who they are, but he realizes this
is not about recognition. It’s about the random kindness of a stranger.

“I can’t take these keys,” Connor whispers.

Karla lowers her voice to match his. “Yes, you can. And anyway, you’d be doing me a favor taking that clunker off my hands. Even better—why don’t you total it when you’re through? ’Cause I could use the insurance money.”

Connor takes the keys from the table. He doesn’t even know how to say thank you for something like this. It’s been a very long time since anyone has gone so far out of their way to help him.

“You need to know that not everyone’s your enemy,” Karla says. “Things are changing out there.
People
are changing. It might not be all that obvious, but it’s there, and I see it every day. Why, just last week a trucker came in and was bragging all about how last year he picked up that Akron AWOL kid at a rest stop and gave him a ride. Poor guy got arrested for it too, but still he was bragging, because he knew it was the right thing to do.”

Connor suppresses a smile. He knows the exact trucker she’s talking about. Josias Aldridge, with the grafted card-trick arm. Connor has to clench his jaw to keep himself from telling her all about it.

“There’s ordinary people out there doing extraordinary things.” Then she winks at them again. “And now you’ve given me the chance to be one of those extraordinary/ordinary people, so I should be the one thanking
you
.”

Connor rubs the rabbit’s foot between his fingers, hoping that his own luck has finally changed. “It’s too suspicious if you don’t report it as stolen.”

“I will,” Karla says. “Eventually.” Then she stands up and starts stacking their empty plates. “I’m telling you, change is on the way,” she says. “It’s like a plump old peach, ripe and ready
to drop.” Then she offers them both a warm smile before going back to waiting tables. “You take care now.”

Connor and Lev take a few moments to collect their thoughts. Then they head out and around back to find a classic red Charger with some fender damage. Not exactly a show car, but no clunker, either. They get in, Connor starts it, and it purrs like a waking lion. The car smells of rose air freshener, and there are middle-aged-woman accessories everywhere, but that’s okay. Connor doesn’t mind being reminded of ordinary/extraordinary Karla.

As they pull out onto the road, Lev looks over at Connor. “Ohio?” Lev says. “Does it really have to be Ohio?”

Connor grins at him. “Yes, it does. And when we get there, the first thing I’m gonna do is make you get a haircut.”

Then they pull onto Route 66, heading east into a world that’s ripe for saving.