UnDivided (Unwind Dystology 4)

“So who is it?”

“You’ll find out soon enough. Set up a meeting between you, me, and your earless friend.”

This nervy thing has done her homework! “He’s not earless,” Fretwell says. “He’s still got one left.”

“Call him.”

Fretwell pulls out his phone but hesitates, calculating himself important enough in this equation to have a little bit of bargaining power now.

“I won’t call him till you tell me who you got.”

She lets out a short exasperated huff. Then she says, “The clapper who didn’t clap.”

And suddenly Fretwell’s fingers can’t dial fast enough.

11 • Lev

It’s a standard freight container. Eight feet wide, eight-and-a-half feet high, and forty feet deep. During the day it’s a perpetual twilight inside, with pinpricks of light penetrating rust holes in the corners. It smells like sour milk with overtones of chemical waste. Lev thought there might be rats, but rats only frequent places where there’s something to scavenge. He’s far too alive to be a morsel for the resident rodentia of the freight yard.

Lev’s wrists are bound by sturdy cable ties to the far wall of the long container. Una had to buy hasps and attach them to the wall with epoxy because the wall had no inherent way to shackle him and make it look convincing. He had asked Una to give him a small cut with her pocketknife right at the base of his left thumb. Not deep enough to do any real damage, but enough to bloody up his wrist and the cable tie. He knows that small touches like that will lend authenticity and make their ruse seem real. They’ve also strategically placed various bits of junk they found in the freight yard around the container, to provide camouflage for Una’s rifle, which is propped up in deep shadow against a rusted filing cabinet.

The hasps are a bit too low to make him look torturously bound when he’s standing, but when he kneels, his hands are higher than his head in a position that looks painful, because it is. Little blond Jesus crucified in a big steel box. Letting his head fall completely slack completes the illusion.

“You look positively helpless,” Una said when she stood back to look at him, “but still a little clean, even with the blood on your wrist.”

So he squirmed and writhed, getting rust and grime all over his clothes, and kicked off a shoe to make it seem as if he’d lost it while struggling.

“I’ll keep it up until I break a good sweat,” he told her, which was not hard to do considering that the container was oppressively hot.

Una went to meet their marks, and Lev was left alone with the stench and his thoughts.

That was over an hour ago.

He’s been alone in here for way too long.

It’s after dark now. The half-light spilling through the rust holes has given way to darkness as thick as tar. He has a moment of panic when he imagines the impossible—that the two parts pirates have killed Una. He wouldn’t put it past them. That would truly leave Lev imprisoned here with no means of escape. If that happened, then this container would be his tomb. That’s when the rats would come.

But no. He can’t let himself think that way. Una will be back. All will go according to plan.

Unless it doesn’t.

He shakes his head in the dark, banishing his anxious thoughts. With his arms secured so uncomfortably, he knows time feels like it’s dragging much more slowly than it actually is. He remembers another time he was bound like this, and for much longer. Nelson had held him and Miracolina captive in an isolated cabin. He was bound to a bed frame with cable ties similar to the ones on his wrists now, only that time it was for real. Nelson had played Russian roulette with them; five bullets in his clip were tranqs, and the sixth was deadly. No way of knowing when the killer bullet would come up. He didn’t fire at Lev, though—he shot Miracolina each time Lev gave Nelson an answer he didn’t like, and each time she was tranq’d into unconsciousness once more.

In the silence of the steel container, Lev’s mind now takes him to alternate realities. What if Nelson had killed Miracolina? What would Lev have done then? Would he have had the wherewithal to escape, or would the burden of her death weigh so heavily upon him that it would have crippled him?

And where would Connor be now, if Lev never got free from Nelson? Dead or in prison, probably. Or in a har

vest camp, waiting until one of the proposed laws passes that allows the unwinding of criminals.

But Miracolina survived and helped him get to the airplane graveyard. He rescued Connor from the Juvies and from Nelson. He did good. He wishes he could tell Miracolina all the good he’s done—but he has no idea where she is, or if she even escaped.

He still cares for Miracolina, and thinks about her often—but so much has transpired in the weeks since he last saw her, it feels like another lifetime. She had been a tithe, which means she might be unwound by now if she held to the ideals she had when they first met. Lev can only hope that his influence had eroded her dangerously self-sacrificing resolve, but there’s no way to know. Maybe someday he will track her down and find out what happened to her, but personal curiosity is a luxury he can’t afford right now. For the time being, Miracolina Roselli must remain on his list of “maybe somedays.”

He hears a bolt thrown, and the creaking of heavy hinges. The doors at the front of the container open just enough to admit a streak of pale moonlight, and three figures enter. Lev slumps, feigning unconsciousness. Through his closed eyes, he registers the glow of a flashlight against his face.

“That’s not him, look at his hair!”

“Hair grows, you imbecile.”