UnSouled (Unwind Dystology 3)

It’s after dark at the campsite now. Starkey sits in a lawn chair, his head leaning back. One kid holds a bucket of water; another kid is ready with towels. Bam, wearing rubber gloves, smears a sharp-smelling solution into Starkey’s hair, massaging it into his scalp, all beneath the collective spotlight of four other kids holding flashlights.

“Can you believe it? The guy actually tried to blackmail us,” Starkey tells Bam, closing his eyes.

“I wish I could have seen his face when you turned it around on him.”

“It was classic—and it proves that our backup plan works.”

“Jeevan deserves a medal,” says one of the flashlights.

“But Whitney took the picture,” says the kid with the water bucket.

“But Jeevan thought of it.”

“Hey,” says Starkey. “I didn’t ask either of you.”

Actually, it was Starkey who decided to put Jeevan in charge of intelligence. He’s a smart kid with computer know-how who’s good at thinking ahead. It’s true that it was Jeevan’s idea to gather information on the people they deal with—but what to do with that information is entirely up to Starkey. In this case blackmail for blackmail was the right move, and the man caved, just as Starkey had known he would. Even the hint of harm to his precious children was too much for the man. Incredible. It never ceases to amaze Starkey how far society will go to protect the children it loves and to discard the ones it doesn’t.

“So where do we go now?” asks the kid with the towel. Starkey opens one eye, because the other one is already starting to sting. “It’s not for you to worry about. You’ll know when we get there.”

As leader of the Stork Club, Starkey had learned the art of information control. Unlike Connor—who held nothing back when he ran the Graveyard—Starkey metes out information in bite-sized rations and only when absolutely necessary.

Since their plane crashed in the Salton Sea almost three weeks ago, things have not been easy for the Stork Club. Not at first anyway. Those first days, they hid out in the bare mountains above the Salton Sea, finding shallow caves and crevices to huddle in, so they couldn’t be seen by reconnaissance aircraft. Starkey knew a ground search would be mounted, which meant they had to get far away, but they could travel only at night and on foot.

He had not thought of how to provide food or shelter or first aid for the kids who were injured in the crash, and they resorted to ransacking roadside convenience stores, which kept giving away their position to the authorities.

It was a trial by fire for Starkey, but he came through the flames, and thanks to him they remained alive and uncaptured. He kept those kids safe in his fist, in spite of his shattered hand. His hand is now the kind of war wound that legends are made of and has brought him even greater respect, because if he was tough enough to break his own hand in order to save them, he’s tough enough to do anything.

In Palm Springs, they came across a hotel that had shut down but had not yet been demolished, and their fortune began to change. The place was isolated enough that they could hole up there and take the time to come up with a survival plan more effective than stripping 7-Elevens to the bone.

Starkey began to send kids out in small teams, choosing kids who didn’t have an innately suspicious look about them. They stole clothes from unattended laundry rooms and groceries right from supermarket loading docks.

They stayed there for almost a week, until some local kids spotted them. “I’m a stork, too,” one of the kids said. “We won’t tell on you; we swear.”

But Starkey has never trusted kids who come from loving families. He has a particular dislike of storks whose adoptive parents love them like their own flesh and blood. Starkey knows the basic statistics of unwinding. He knows that 99 percent of all storked kids are in warm loving homes, where unwinding would never be an issue. But when you’re in that remaining 1 percent, and you’re surrounded by other throwaway kids, those loving homes seem too distant to matter.

Then Jeevan came up with a stroke of genius. He tapped into the bank account of the Stork Clubs’ parents—because quite a few of the kids either knew, or could figure out, their adoptive parents’ passwords. The operation went down all at once, with a few computer clicks—and by the time anyone knew what was going on, the Stork Club had amassed more than seventeen thousand dollars in an offshore account. Accessing it was as simple as linking a counterfeit ATM card.

“Somebody somewhere is investigating this,” Jeevan told Starkey. “In the end it won’t lead them to us, though. It will lead them to Raymond Harwood.”

“Who’s Raymond Harwood?” Starkey had asked.

“A kid who used to pick on me in middle school.”

That had made Starkey laugh. “Jeevan, have I ever told you that you’re a criminal genius?”

He hadn’t seemed too comfortable with the thought. “Well, I’ve been told I’m a genius . . . .”

Starkey often wonders why Jeevan’s parents would choose to unwind a kid so bright—but it’s an unspoken rule that you just don’t ask.

The money gave the storks a little bit of freedom, because money buys legitimacy. All they needed was a simple subterfuge—an illusion that no one would question—and if there’s one thing that Starkey knows as an amateur magician, it’s the art of illusion. Misdirection. Every magician knows that an audience will always follow the hand that moves and will always believe what is presented to the eye until there’s a reason not to.

Camp Red Heron was Starkey’s own brainstorm. All it took to make the illusion real was an order of 130 camp T-shirts, staff shirts, and a few matching hats as icing on the cake. As Camp Red Heron, they were able to travel on trains and even charter buses, because the illusion ran on the power of assumption. People saw a camp on a field trip, and it became part of their reality without a second thought. Ironically, the more boisterous, the more visible they were, the more powerfully the illusion held. Even if people were watching a news report about the band of fugitive Unwinds, Camp Red Heron could march right past them, loud and obnoxious, and no one—not even law enforcement—would bat an eye. Who knew that hiding in plain sight could be so gratifying?

The first order of business was getting out of Southern California to a place where the authorities would not be searching for them. Having had enough desert for a lifetime, Starkey deemed that they take the Amtrak north to greener, lusher pastures. At their first campsite, near Monterey, they had no trouble whatsoever. Then they continued north, reserving their space at Redwood Bluff. All had gone well until today—but even so, today’s crisis was easily managed.

Bam finishes rinsing the bleaching solution out of Starkey’s hair, and the towel boy hurries to dry it.

“So, if the campground manager squeals, will you really hurt one of his kids?” Bam asks.