“My terms,” Cam corrected.
“Yes, of course. Your terms.”
Now, as Cam watches Risa through the one-way glass, he wonders what could possibly make her live by his terms too. Roberta has told him that he can have anything he desires, but what if the thing he desires most is Risa choosing to be with him of her own free will?
“Cam, please—come now, or we’ll be late.”
Cam stands, but before he leaves, he spares one last glance through the mirror at Risa, who has struggled onto her bed. Now she lies stretched out on her back, looking morosely at the ceiling. Then she closes her eyes.
The eternally sleeping princess, thinks Cam. But I shall free you from those poisoned brambles that surround your heart. And then you will have no choice but to love me.
30 - Nelson
The Juvey-cop turned parts pirate makes a side trip to check one of his most successful traps. It is, however, in an unfortunate location. Unfortunate because it’s in a field that floods during storms. Nothing’s more irritating than a drowned AWOL. Except maybe disposing of one. He would rather continue searching for safe houses, with hopes of finding Connor Lassiter in one of them, but with major storms projected throughout the Midwest, checking this particular trap is worth the effort.
The trap is a piece of drainage pipe—a concrete cylinder five feet high and twenty feet long, lying in a fallow field that no one has farmed for years. Half a dozen such pipes rest in the field, surrounded by weeds—all abandoned when some public works project got canceled. It’s a nice hiding spot for runaway Unwinds—and in fact, one of the tunnel segments has a store of canned food right in the middle. The inside surface of that same cylinder, however, is painted with super-adhesive resin that sticks to clothes and flesh with such tenacity that anyone caught in the pipe might as well be nailed to the concrete. It tickles Nelson that he can catch Unwinds the way other people catch roaches.
Sure enough, there’s a kid stuck in the pipe. “Help me!” the boy shouts, kind of like the Fly caught in the spiderweb. “Help me, please!” The kid is scrawny and acne-ridden, with crooked teeth yellowed from chewing tobacco or just bad genetics. Either way, he’s not a prime specimen and won’t fetch much on the black market. His hair is plastered with glue, although Nelson suspects it doesn’t look much better clean.
“My God! What happened to you?” Nelson says, feigning concern.
“It’s like glue or somethin’! I can’t get out!”
“Okay,” Nelson says, “I think I can get you out of there. I have some adhesive remover in the van.” Actually he already has it with him. He pretends to jog away and jog back, then soaks a foul-smelling rag with the fluid, climbs into the tunnel, and begins dabbing the kid’s clothes and skin. Bit by bit the boy comes free from the adhesive.
“Thanks, mister,” says the kid. “Thanks a lot!” Nelson climbs out and waits at the mouth of the tunnel as the gooey, glue-covered kid slides himself out, just as nasty as a baby being born. Then, as he comes into the light of day, something finally occurs to this dim bulb. “Hey, wait a second . . . why would someone have that there adhesive remover stuff unless—”
Nelson doesn’t give him the chance to finish his thought. He grabs the boy, wrenches his arms behind his back, and tugs a plastic cable tie around his wrists. Then Nelson pushes him to the ground and pricks him with the DNA reader.
“William Yotts,” Nelson announces, and the kid groans. “AWOL for four days. Not too good at hiding, are ya?”
“You ain’t takin’ me in,” Yotts screams. “You ain’t takin’ me in!”
“You’re right, I’m not,” Nelson tells him. “You’re not going ‘in,’ you’re going ‘up.’ As in ‘up’ on the black market auction block. Ka-ching!”
The kid seems to go both pale and red in the face at the same time, making him all blotchy. Nelson surprises him with a hypodermic. Not tranqs, though. “Antibiotics,” he tells the boy. “Clean out whatever diseases crawled into your system while you were in that pipe. Even the ones that were there before. Most of them, anyway.”
“Please, mister, you don’t gotta do this. Please . . .”
Nelson kneels down and takes a good look at him.
“I’ll tell you what,” he says. “I like your eyes, so I’ll make you a deal.”
He cuts the cable tie, and offers the same deal he always offers. A countdown. A chance to run. These AWOLs never realize that the game is rigged. It never occurs to them that Nelson can count as fast as he chooses, and they don’t know that he’s a very, very good shot.
This boy, like all the others, thinks he’ll be the one to escape. He takes off, tripping in the field and picking himself up while Nelson counts. He nears the road as Nelson gets to “eight” and raises his gun. “Nine.” He has a clear target—the clothing logo on the kid’s back. “Ten!” Then Nelson lowers the gun and doesn’t fire. Instead he watches as the kid races across the road, nearly getting hit by a car—but the car swerves around him. The kid then disappears into the woods.
Nelson applauds his own restraint. It would have been so easy to take the kid down. But he has other plans for this AWOL. The injection he gave the kid wasn’t an antibiotic at all, but a delivery system for a microscopic tracking chip. The kind they used to monitor the populations of endangered species. This is the fourth AWOL Nelson has tagged and released into the wild since his new mission began. With any luck they’ll get picked up by the resistance and give him a clear path to the AWOL sanctuary where Connor Lassiter is holed up. But in the meantime, there are plenty of local leads to follow up on. Nelson smiles. It’s good to have a goal. Something joyful to look forward to.
31 - Miracolina
Miracolina endures her captivity and deprogramming at the hands of the Anti-Divisional Resistance for weeks but never surrenders her core. She never gives in to the things they try to teach her. Oh, she’s learned to function within their little world of ex-tithes, doing what’s expected, if only so they’ll leave her alone. More tithes are brought in, others are placed with families and given new identities. There’s no such plan for Miracolina. Even semi-cooperative, she’s still too much of a risk. They have no idea, however, what she’s really planning.
Miracolina considers herself up for any challenge. While she is a tithe, she has not lived the same sheltered life as most other tithes, and although she’s not a girl from the hard streets, she considers herself street-smart and world savvy. Escaping from the velvet-gloved fist of the resistance will be a challenge, but not an insurmountable one.
Early on Lev personally warned her of the futility of an escape attempt. “There are sharpshooters with tranq rifles everywhere,” he said, making it sound hopeless. Yet every bit of information helps her, because Lev let it slip that although there’s a fence, it isn’t electrified. Good to know.
She explores every corner of the huge mansion to which she has access, paying special attention to the many unused, dilapidated rooms and corridors too far gone to be restored. Most of the windows are boarded over, and all the doors to the outside are locked. But the more forgotten an area is, the less reliable those locks will be—and a padlock hasp is only as good as the wood it’s screwed into. Such as the lock on the garden door, which has an unpleasant termite infestation. Once she finds the door, she files the information away for future reference.