UnWholly (Unwind Dystology 2)

“It’s not that we don’t have feelings, we just know how to harness them and direct them toward specific goals.”

Which Connor might be able to do if he had a goal, but life at the Graveyard feels more and more directionless. A treadmill that hurls kids off when they turn seventeen.

Someone—Connor suspects it’s Hayden—alerts the Admiral that he’s not taking Risa’s capture well, so the Admiral pays a surprise visit.

He arrives at the Graveyard in a black limo waxed to such a smooth sheen it doesn’t collect the dust it kicks up. Connor barely recognizes him when he steps out. The Admiral’s thin. Not just thin but gaunt. His skin, once bronzed from his years in the Graveyard sun, has gotten pale, and he’s dressed not in his medal-covered uniform, but in slacks and a plaid shirt, like he’s out for a round of golf. He still stands tall, though, and has the unmistakable bearing of a commanding officer.

Connor expects the Admiral will tear him a new one, giving him a reprimand more severe than he himself gave Starkey—but as always, the Admiral’s strategy cannot be predicted.

“You’ve put on some muscle since I last saw you,” the Admiral tells him. “I hope to God you’re not shooting up those damn military steroids they have the boeufs on; they shrink your testicles down to peanuts.”

“No sir.”

“Good. Because your genes might actually be worth passing on.”

He invites Connor to join him in his plush, air-conditioned limo, and they sit idling on the runway like the thing could sprout wings and take off at any given moment.

They make small talk just a bit. The Admiral tells him of the Great Harlan Reunion: a huge party with all the people who had received his son’s parts.

“I’ll swear till the day I die that Harlan was there, alive in that garden, and no one can prove he wasn’t.”

He tells Connor how, when all the “parts” went their separate ways, Emby, his asthmatic friend, had nowhere to go, so the Admiral kept him on and is now raising him like a grandson.

“Not the shiniest Easter egg on the lawn,” the Admiral says, “but he’s very sincere.”

He also tells Connor that due to his damaged heart, the Admiral was given six months to live.

“Of course, that was almost a year ago. Doctors are mostly imbeciles.”

Connor suspects that the Admiral will be alive and kicking for years to come.

Finally he gets down to the real reason for his visit. “I hear that this thing with Risa is getting to you,” the Admiral says, then holds his silence, knowing Connor will eventually feel compelled to break it, which he does.

“What do you want me to do? Just go on like it never happened? Like she never existed?”

The Admiral holds a steady demeanor, in spite of Connor’s frustration. “I hadn’t pegged you as the kind of young man who wastes his time feeling sorry for himself.”

“I’m not feeling sorry! I’m angry!”

“Anger is only our friend when we know its caliber and how to aim it.”

That makes Connor give out a sudden guffaw that’s loud enough for the driver to glance back. “Good one! Someone oughta quote you.”

“Someone did. It’s on page ninety-three of the Military Academy Freshman Ordinance Manual, fifth edition.” The Admiral turns to look out of the tinted windows at the activity of the Graveyard. “The problem with all you AWOLs is that you use your anger like a grenade, half the time blowing off your own hands.” Then he looks at Connor’s arm. “No offense.”

“None taken.”

But now that the Admiral’s attention has been drawn to the arm, he looks at it more closely. “Do I know that tattoo?” Then he snaps his fingers. “Roland. Wasn’t that his name? A real pain in the ass.”

“That’s the one.”

The admiral ponders the shark a moment more. “I don’t suppose it was your choice to get his arm.”

“It wasn’t my choice to get any unwound arm,” Connor tells him. “If I had a choice, I would have refused it, the same way you refused an unwound heart. The same way Risa refused a new spine.” Connor feels goose bumps rise on the arm from the near-arctic chill of the air conditioner. “But now I’ve got it, and it’s not like I’m gonna hack it off.”

“And well you should keep it!” the Admiral says. “Roland may have been a miscreant, but he was a human miscreant, and deserved better. I’m sure he’d be satisfied to know that his arm is ruling the Graveyard with an iron fist.”

Connor has to laugh. Leave it to the Admiral to make sense of the senseless. Then the man gets quiet. Serious. “Listen here,” he says. “This business about Risa—for everyone’s sake, you’ve got to let it go.”