UnWholly (Unwind Dystology 2)

“Did you wash your hands?” she asks.

“Wash them?” Lev tells her. “They’re covered with shampoo!”

Now they’re both laughing, and when they breathe in, the cloying smell of cherry blossom shampoo fills the air around them, which just makes them laugh harder, until they’re all laughed out.

And in the silence that falls afterward, something changes. The tension that has been strung taut between them since the moment they met now goes slack. Soon the motion of the bus begins lulling them to sleep. Lev feels Miracolina lean into his shoulder. He doesn’t move for fear of waking her. He just enjoys the feeling of her there—certain that she would never do such a thing if she were awake.

And then she says, with no hint of sleep in her voice, “I forgive you.”

Lev feels it begin deep inside him, just as it did on the day he realized his parents would never take him back. It’s an emotional swell that can’t be contained, and there’s no bottle in the world big enough to hold it. And although he fights to keep his sobs silent, his chest begins to heave with them, and he knows he won’t be able to stop any more than Miracolina was able to stop laughing. Although she must know he’s racked with tears, she says nothing, just keeps her head on his shoulder as his tears fall into her hair.

All this time, Lev never realized what he needed. He did not need to be adored or pitied. He needed to be forgiven. Not by God, who is all-forgiving. Not by people like Marcus and Pastor Dan, who would always stand by his side. He needed to be forgiven by an unforgiving world. By someone who once despised him. Someone like Miracolina.

Only once his silent sobs have stopped does she speak to him. “You’re so weird,” she says. He wonders if she has any idea of the gift she has just given him. He’s pretty sure she does.

Lev knows his world is different now. Maybe it’s exhaustion, or stress, but in that rattling, bouncing, greasy, shampooey compartment, his life suddenly feels like it couldn’t be any better.

Both he and Miracolina close their eyes and fall asleep, blissfully unaware of the brown van with a dented roof and shattered side window that has been following the bus since it left Tulsa.

57 - Connor

“Chatter,” Hayden tells Connor. “All kinds of chatter.”

Hayden paces the tight space in Connor’s jet, hitting his head on the ceiling more than once. Connor has rarely seen Hayden this agitated. Until now, he always managed to keep the world at smirking distance.

“Is it just on the Tucson police bands, or the juvey bands too?”

“Everywhere,” Hayden tells him. “Radio, e-mails, every communication we can intercept. The analysis programs have us shooting to red alert.”

“They’re just programs,” Connor reminds him. “It doesn’t necessarily mean—”

“There’s chatter specifically about us. Code words mostly, but they’re easy to crack.”

Connor begins to wonder if his own paranoia has infected Hayden as well. “Just calm down and give me specifics.”

“Okay,” says Hayden, pacing and trying to slow his breathing. “There have been three house fires over the past two weeks. Three homes in different Tucson neighborhoods got burned to the ground, and they’re blaming us for it.”

Connor’s grafted hand balls into a fist. That iron fist the Admiral had spoken of, perhaps. Didn’t Trace say that there were people itching for a reason to take the Graveyard out? If they couldn’t find a reason, it would be pretty easy to manufacture one.

“Where’s Trace?” Connor asks. “If something’s really going on, he would know.”

Hayden just looks at him, confused. “Trace? Why would Trace know?”

“Never mind why, he just would. I have to talk to him.”

Hayden shakes his head. “He’s gone.”

“What do you mean ‘gone’?”

“No one’s seen him since yesterday. I figured you sent him on some mission.”

“Damn it!” Connor punches the wall, cracking the fiberglass interior of the corporate jet. So Trace finally decided which side he’s on—and without him, they have no escape plan. No one but Trace can fly the Dreamliner.

“There’s more,” Hayden says, hesitating long enough for Connor to know that there’s yet another round of bad news. “All three homes had Unwinds—and they burned the day before the Juvey-rounders were due to take them to Harvest camp. I checked, and the kids were on our list. And all three of them were storks.”

- - -

“What the hell were you thinking?”