UnWholly (Unwind Dystology 2)

75 - Cam

Roberta returns from her unsuccessful search for Risa. Cam meets her in the greenroom, where two security guards now wait, eager to escort Roberta out. She’s on the phone, already in the throes of damage control.

“Antarctica,” Cam says. “I should have said something out there, but I froze.”

“What’s done is done,” she says, then growls at a dropped call. “Let’s get out of here.”

“I’ll meet you at the car,” Cam tells her. “My stuff’s still in the dressing room.”

The guards solemnly escort Roberta out of the building, and Cam goes back to the dressing room. He puts on his sports coat and carefully rolls up his tie, putting it in his pocket. Then, when he’s sure Roberta has left the building, he says, “It’s okay, she’s gone.”

The closet door opens, and Risa steps out. “Thank you, Cam.”

Cam shrugs. “She deserved it.” He turns to look at her. She’s breathing rapidly, as if she’s been running, but he knows she’s only been running in her head. “Will they all be unwound? Your AWOL friends?”

“Not right away,” she tells him. “But yes, they will be.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault.” Although she doesn’t look at him when she says it, like maybe she thinks it somehow is. Like his very existence makes him guilty.

“I can’t help what I am,” he tells her.

“I know . . . but today you showed me you can help what you do.” And then she leans forward and kisses him on the cheek. He feels it like an electric shock in all the seams of his face. She turns to go, but he can’t let her. Not yet. Not without saying—

“I love you, Risa.”

She glances back at him and offers nothing more than an apologetic smile. “Good-bye, Cam.”

And she’s gone.

It’s only after she leaves that the anger begins to rise in him. Not just a spike, but an eruption, and there’s nowhere for it to go. He takes the chair and hurls it against the vanity mirror, smashing it. He hurls everything that’s breakable against the walls and doesn’t stop until the security guards burst in on him. It takes three guards to restrain him, but still he’s stronger. He has the best of the best in him—every muscle group, every synaptic reflex. He tears free from the guards, bolts down the emergency exit stairs, and meets Roberta in the limo.

“What took you so long?”

“Solitude,” he says. “I needed some time alone.”

“It’s all right, Cam,” she tells him as they drive away. “We’ll get past this.”

“Yes, I know we will.”

But he keeps his true thoughts to himself. Cam will never accept Risa’s good-bye. He will not let her disappear from his life. He will do whatever it takes to have her, to hold her, to keep her. He has all of Roberta’s resources at his fingertips to get what he wants, and he’s going to use them.

Roberta smiles at him reassuringly between phone calls, and he smiles back. For now Cam will play the game. He’ll be the good rewound boy Roberta wants him to be, but from this moment on, he has a new agenda. He will make Risa’s dream come true and take down Proactive Citizenry piece by bloody piece.

And then she will have no choice but to love him.

Part Seven

Landings

Our country is challenged at home and abroad . . . it is our will that is being tried and not our strength.

—PRESIDENT JOHNSON on Vietnam and the school campus war protests, 1968

I have every faith that this devastating national conflict shall be resolved, and that the accord between both sides shall also serve as an ultimate solution to the feral teenage problem. But until that glorious day, I am instituting an eight p.m. curfew for anyone under the age of eighteen.

—PRESIDENT MOSS on the Heartland War, two weeks prior to his assassination by militant New Jersey separatists