UnSouled (Unwind Dystology 3)

“What if I bashed your head in a little deeper than I already did?”

Rheinschild reaches into his pocket, pulls out his wallet, intentionally revealing that there are a few bills in there, but instead of the bills he tosses the boy his business card.

“Come to that address at ten on Monday. I’ll put you to work and pay you a livable wage. If you want to buy food and clothes with it, that’s fine with me. If you want to squander it, that’s fine with me too. Just as long as you show up every day, five days a week. And you take a shower before you do.”

The kid sneers at him. “And you’ll have the Juvey-cops waiting there for me. Do you think I’m stupid?”

“There’s not enough empirical evidence to make that judgment.”

The kid shifts his weight from one foot to another. “So what kind of work is it?”

“Biological. Medical. I’m working on something that could end unwinding, but I need a research assistant. Someone who isn’t secretly on Proactive Citizenry’s payroll.”

“Proactive Who?”

“Good answer. As long as you can say that, you’ll have job security.”

The kid considers it, then looks at the medallion in his three-fingered hand. He tosses it back to Rheinschild. “You shouldn’t walk around with this. You should frame it or something.”

Then he leaves with nothing more than he had when he broke in, except for a business card.

Rheinschild is sure he’ll never see the kid again. He finds himself pleasantly surprised when the boy shows up at his research office on Monday morning, wearing the same filthy clothes, but freshly showered beneath them.

12 • Risa

She cannot believe the position she’s put herself in.

All this time surviving against overwhelming odds and now, thanks to her own stupidity, she’s going to die.

She blames her own arrogance for her downfall. She was so certain she was too clever, too observant, to be snagged by a parts pirate—as if somehow she existed on a higher plane.

A crumbling barn on a marginally functional farm in Cheyenne, Wyoming. She had found it in the midst of a storm and had gone in to take shelter from the rain. In one stall there was a shelf stocked with food.

Stupid, stupid, stupid! What was food doing in a deserted barn? If she had been thinking, she would have run and risked the lightning, but she was tired and hungry. Her guard was down. She reached for a bag of chips, hit a trip wire, and a spring-loaded steel cable wrapped around her wrist. She was caught like a rabbit. She tried to tug free, but the slipknot cable was designed to ratchet tighter and tighter the more she pulled.

The parts pirate had been careless enough to leave various farm tools within her reach, but none of them were of the type to cut a steel cable. After an hour of struggling, Risa realized there was nothing to do but wait—and envy wild animals who had the good sense to gnaw off their own limbs to escape from traps.

That was last night. Now as morning comes, Risa, having not slept at all, must face a fresh hell. The parts pirate comes an hour after sunrise. He’s a middle-aged man with a bad scalp job. His mop of boyish blond hair doesn’t make him look boyish, just creepy. He practically dances a jig when he sees that his trap has done the job.

“Been there for months and nothing,” he tells Risa. “I was ready to give up—but good things come to those who wait.”

Risa seethes and thinks of Connor. She wishes she could have been more like him last night. Connor would never be so foolish as to allow himself to be captured by an imbecile.

Clearly this guy’s an amateur, but as long as he’s got the goods, the black-market harvesters won’t turn him away. He doesn’t recognize her. That’s good. The black market pays more for the infamous—and she doesn’t want this man to get paid what she’s worth. Of course that assumes he gets that far. Risa has had all night to come up with a plan of action.

“Selling you might just get the banks off my back,” he tells her jovially. “Or at least get me a decent car.”

“You have to cut me loose first before you can sell me.”

“Indeed I do!”

He looks at her a little too long, his grin a little too wide, and it occurs to Risa that selling her to a black-market harvester is only at the end of his list of planned activities. But whatever his plans, he’s the type who has to have everything just right. He goes around the stall and begins cleaning up the mess Risa made in her frustrated attempts to escape.

“You sure were busy last night,” he says. “Hope you got it out of your system.”

Now Risa begins to taunt him. She knows what sorts of things will push this man’s buttons—but she begins with some easy, glancing blows. She begins with slights against his intelligence.

“I hate to kill the dream,” she says, “but the black market won’t deal with morons. I mean, you have to know how to read if you’re going to sign a contract.”