She winks at him. “Least I can do for my favorite nephew.” Then she reaches into her pocket and, to his amazement, puts a set of car keys in front of Connor, rabbit’s foot key chain and all. “Why don’t you do me a favor and drive my car ‘home’ for me today. It’s out back.”
Lev looks at Connor, astonished, which isn’t much different from his deer-in-headlights look. For a moment Connor thinks she might recognize who they are, but he realizes this is not about recognition. It’s about the random kindness of a stranger.
“I can’t take these keys,” Connor whispers.
Karla lowers her voice to match his. “Yes, you can. And anyway, you’d be doing me a favor taking that clunker off my hands. Even better—why don’t you total it when you’re through? ’Cause I could use the insurance money.”
Connor takes the keys from the table. He doesn’t even know how to say thank you for something like this. It’s been a very long time since anyone has gone so far out of their way to help him.
“You need to know that not everyone’s your enemy,” Karla says. “Things are changing out there. People are changing. It might not be all that obvious, but it’s there, and I see it every day. Why, just last week a trucker came in and was bragging all about how last year he picked up that Akron AWOL kid at a rest stop and gave him a ride. Poor guy got arrested for it too, but still he was bragging, because he knew it was the right thing to do.”
Connor suppresses a smile. He knows the exact trucker she’s talking about. Josias Aldridge, with the grafted card-trick arm. Connor has to clench his jaw to keep himself from telling her all about it.
“There’s ordinary people out there doing extraordinary things.” Then she winks at them again. “And now you’ve given me the chance to be one of those extraordinary/ordinary people, so I should be the one thanking you.”
Connor rubs the rabbit’s foot between his fingers, hoping that his own luck has finally changed. “It’s too suspicious if you don’t report it as stolen.”
“I will,” Karla says. “Eventually.” Then she stands up and starts stacking their empty plates. “I’m telling you, change is on the way,” she says. “It’s like a plump old peach, ripe and ready to drop.” Then she offers them both a warm smile before going back to waiting tables. “You take care now.”
Connor and Lev take a few moments to collect their thoughts. Then they head out and around back to find a classic red Charger with some fender damage. Not exactly a show car, but no clunker, either. They get in, Connor starts it, and it purrs like a waking lion. The car smells of rose air freshener, and there are middle-aged-woman accessories everywhere, but that’s okay. Connor doesn’t mind being reminded of ordinary/extraordinary Karla.
o;What is it?” Lev asks.
“Janson Rheinschild!”
“But you already told me he was wiped out of digital existence, so what’s the point in looking?”
Connor continues to ply the search engines, getting the keyboard slick with french fry grease. “You gave me an idea.”
“Me?”
“The hot tub website. The typo.”
“Are you gonna make fun of my keyboarding skills again?”
“No. You gotta have skills to make fun of them,” Connor tells him. “Anyway, Hayden figured there’s a code-eating worm on the net that chewed up every reference to Janson Rheinschild, but it’s only looking for his name spelled correctly. . . . So I’m inputting every possible misspelling of his name.”
Lev smiles. “Leave it to you to turn someone else’s screwup into gold.”
Connor orders a second burger and spends twenty minutes misspelling the name. By the last bite of the burger, he’s ready to give up hope . . . then suddenly there’s a glint of that gold Lev was talking about, and it turns out to be the mother lode.
“Lev—take a look at this!”
Lev comes around to his side of the booth, and they look at a news article dated more than thirty years ago. The article is from a small local paper somewhere in Montana where Rheinschild once lived. Apparently they kept tabs on one of their favorite sons, but consistently misspelled his name as “Reignchild.”
Connor and Lev read the article in stunned disbelief. Rheinschild, a research scientist and inventor, was important enough to make quite a name for himself, until that name got erased like a shunned pharaoh from an Egyptian obelisk.
“My God!” Connor says, “This guy pioneered neural bonding and regeneration—the very technology that made unwinding possible! Without Rheinschild, transplants and grafting would be back in the Stone Age!”
“So he was the monster who started this!”
“No, this was right at the beginning of the war—before anyone even thought of unwinding.”
Connor plays a video embedded in the article, and they watch an interview with Rheinschild, a middle-aged man with glasses and thinning hair—two clear signs that it was before unwinding.
“We can’t even begin to know the uses of this technology,” Rheinschild says with an excitement much more youthful than he looks. “Imagine a world where loved ones who die young don’t really die—because every part of them can be donated to ease someone else’s suffering. It’s one thing to be an organ donor, and another to know that every single part of you will save someone else’s life. That’s a world I want to live in.”
Connor shivers, for the first time noticing the air-conditioned chill of the diner. The world Rheinschild described is a world Connor would want to live in too . . . but that’s not the world they ended up with.