UnWholly (Unwind Dystology 2)

For a few minutes, he seems lost in his own thoughts. Then he turns to Miracolina again.

“They say tithes get treated really well at harvest camp. You think it’s true? They say it’s lots of fun, and we’re with tons of other kids just like us.” He clears his throat. “They say we even get to choose the day when we . . . when we . . . well, you know . . .”

Miracolina smiles at him warmly. Usually tithes like Timothy go to harvest camp in a limo—but she knows why Timothy didn’t, without having to ask. He didn’t want to make the journey alone. Well, if fate has brought them together on this momentous day, she will be the friend he needs.

“I’m sure harvest camp will be just the experience you want it to be,” she tells him, “and when you choose your date, you’ll choose it because you’re ready. That’s why they let us choose. So it’s our decision, no one else’s.”

Timothy looks into her with those piercing perfect eyes. “You’re not scared at all, are you?”

She chooses to answer his question with another question. “Have you ever been on an airplane?” she asks him.

“Huh?” Timothy is thrown by the change of subject. “Yeah, a bunch of times.”

“Were you scared the first time you flew?”

“Yeah, sure, I guess.”

“But you went anyway. Why?”

Timothy shrugs. “I wanted to get where I was going, and my parents were with me and said it would be okay.”

“Well,” says Miracolina, “there you go.”

Timothy looks at her, blinking with a kind of innocence Miracolina doesn’t think she ever had. “So then, you’re not scared?”

She sighs. “Yes, I’m scared,” she admits. “Very scared. But when you trust that it will all be okay, you can enjoy the fear. You can use it to help you instead of letting it hurt you.”

“Oh, I get it,” says Timothy. “It’s like a scary movie, you know? You can have fun with it because you know it’s not real no matter how scared it makes you.” Then he thinks about it a bit more. “But getting unwound is real. It’s not like we’re going to walk out of the theater and go home. It’s not like I’m going to get off a plane and be in Disneyland.”

“Tell you what,” Miracolina says, before Timothy can drag himself back into his pit of spider-filled despair. “Let’s watch one of those scary movies and get it all out of our systems before we get to harvest camp.”

Timothy nods obediently. “Yeah, sure, okay.”

But as she scrolls through all the preprogrammed movies, none of them are scary. They’re all family films and comedies.

“It’s okay,” says Timothy. “To tell you the truth, I don’t like scary movies anyway.”

In a few minutes, they’re on the interstate making good time. Timothy contents himself with video games to keep his mind from going to dark places, and Miracolina puts in her earphones, listening to her own eclectic mix of music, rather than the van’s vapid pop tunes. There are 2,129 songs in her iChip, and she’s determined to listen to as many as she can before the day she enters the divided state.

About two hours and thirty songs later, the van exits the interstate and turns down a scenic road winding through dense woods. “Just half an hour now,” Chauffeur-Claus tells them. “We made good time!”

Then, as they come around a bend, he slams on the brakes, and the van screeches to a halt.

Miracolina takes off her earphones. “What’s going on? What’s wrong?”

“Stay here,” orders Chauffeur-Claus, no longer jolly, and he jumps out of the van.

Timothy already has his nose pressed against the window, looking out. “This can’t be good.”

“No,” agrees Miracolina. “It can’t.”

Just off the road in a ditch is another Wood Hollow Harvest Camp van, but this one is overturned, wheels to the sky. There’s no telling how long it has been there.

“He must have blown a tire or something, and skidded off the road,” says Timothy. But none of the tires look blown.

“We should call for help,” says Miracolina—but no one brings a phone to harvest camp, so neither she nor Timothy has one.

Just then there’s a commotion outside. Half a dozen people dressed in black with faces hidden by ski masks come leaping out of the woods from all directions. The chauffeur is hit with a tranq bullet to the neck and goes down like an overstuffed rag doll.