UnSouled (Unwind Dystology 3)

“I won’t,” Hayden says. “Not like this.”

“Fine.” Starkey takes back the gun, then points to a random kid in the crowd, who looks to be no older than fourteen. The kid steps forward, and Starkey puts the gun in the kid’s hand. “Show this coward what it means to be courageous. Carry out the execution.”

The kid is clearly terrified, but all eyes are on him. He’s been put to the test and knows he must not fail. So he grimaces. He squints. He puts the muzzle of the gun to the back of Menard’s head and looks away. Then he pulls the trigger.

The pop is not loud; it’s just a pop. Like a single stray firecracker. Menard crumples, dead before he hits the ground. It’s quick and clean. Just an entrance wound in the back of the head and an exit wound right beneath the chin, with the bullet itself claimed by the artificial turf. There are no exploding brain bits and pieces of skull—Starkey and the crowd seem disappointed that an execution, in the end, is far less dramatic than the buildup.

“All right, move out!” Starkey orders, giving instructions to commandeer any vehicle for which they can find keys.

“What about him?” Bam asks, sneering at Hayden.

Starkey spares Hayden a brief glance and the tiniest hint of a superior grin before saying, “We’ll take him with us. He still might be useful.” Then he turns back to all those gathered and says in a powerful voice, “I hereby announce that this harvest camp is officially closed!”

Starkey gets the cheers and adulation he’s craving, and Hayden, looking at the dead director . . . and the dead guards . . . and the dozens of dead kids littering the grounds . . . wonders whether he should be cheering or screaming.

33 • Connor

Waiting is not in Connor’s arsenal of personal skills. Even before his parents signed his unwind order, he was impatient and had little tolerance for downtime. Back then, quiet time made him think about his life, thinking about his life made him angry, and anger made him do the kinds of impetuous, irresponsible, and occasionally criminal things that always got him in trouble.

Since the day he ran from his home, however, there has been no downtime—at least not until arriving on the Arápache Reservation. Even when sequestered in Sonia’s basement, there was a whole petri dish of viral angst to deal with. His guard had to be up at all times to protect himself, to protect Risa, and to keep an eye on Roland, who could have taken him out at any instant.

He still wonders if Roland, in the right circumstances, really would have killed him.

At Happy Jack, he had cornered Connor, pinned him against a wall, and tried to strangle him with the very hand that now is a part of Connor—but Roland couldn’t go through with it. In the end, Roland could have been all bark and no bite—but no one will ever know.

Connor, on the other hand, has killed people.

He fired deadly weapons in a war against the Juvies at the Graveyard. He knows some of his bullets hit their mark and took people down. So does that make him a killer? Is there any way to be redeemed from that?

This is why Connor despises downtime. All that thinking can drive him mad.

His one consolation is a growing feeling of safety. Normalcy—if anything about this situation can be called normal. The Tashi’ne family have been kind hosts, in spite of their initial coolness to him. From the moment it became public that Connor is alive, they have truly made their home his.

During the day, however, no one is there. Kele is off at school—which is a good thing because Connor has little patience for Kele’s lack of patience. Chal is off working his magic with the Hopi, Elina spends her days at the pediatric wing of the medical lodge, and Pivane, who does come over for dinner each night—is usually off hunting.

Connor, Grace, and Lev—who can’t go out for fear of being spotted—are left to their own devices.

• • •

It’s late afternoon a week into August—their twentieth day there. The light coming through the windows is a rich amber, reflected by the ridge across the ravine. Shadows become long quickly in these cliff-side homes, and when the sun sets, it’s gone. There’s little room for twilight in the ravine.

Grace, who is very good at entertaining herself, had proclaimed, “There’s lots of stuff here,” on their first day. Today she’s ransacked yet another closet, then reorganized it with frightening precision. Lev, still recovering from the car accident, has a mat spread out on the marble floor in the middle of the great room, doing some physical therapy Elina taught him, while Connor sits on the overstuffed sofa nearby. Having found a pocketknife that must have belonged to long-lost Wil, Connor has started carving wood, but for the life of him doesn’t know what to make, so he just ends up whittling larger sticks into smaller ones.

“You should take this time to educate yourself,” Lev told Connor on the first day the three of them were left alone in the Tashi’ne home. “You kicked-AWOL in, what, tenth grade? You never finished high school; how do you expect to get a job when this is all over?”

The thought of this “all being over” makes Connor laugh. He tries to imagine what his life might be like in some alternate universe, where staying whole was a given, rather than a privilege. He supposes his natural skill with electronics could have eventually gotten him work as a repair technician somewhere. So, when this is “all over,” and if some miracle allows him to lead a normal life, what will that life be about? Alternate-universe Connor might be content repairing refrigerators, but the Connor from this universe finds the idea vaguely horrifying.

All this thinking time is getting him angry again—an old pattern coming back—and although he no longer misdirects it into bursts of stupidity, he’s troubled by the emergence of this old mental subroutine because he knows there are other things, other feelings that come with it.

“I hate this,” Connor says, throwing down the useless stick he’s carving.

Lev uncurls himself from an awkward-looking stretch and watches in that opossum way of his to see where this is going.

“I hate it here,” says Connor. “Being in someone’s house, being ‘taken care of.’ It’s turning me into someone I’m not—or at least someone I’m not anymore.”

Lev holds that long look at Connor, to the point that it’s uncomfortable. Connor refuses to be stared down.

“You were never good at being a kid, were you?” Lev says.