UnSouled (Unwind Dystology 3)

“So what is it?”

“I’m keeping a journal of my time here. That way, when it’s our turn to hang for the things we’re doing, there’ll be a record of what really happened. I’m calling it ‘Starkey’s Inferno,’ although I’m not quite sure which level of hell this is.”

“They don’t hang people anymore,” Bam points out. Then she thinks of Starkey’s lynchings. “Or at least they don’t hang people officially.”

“True. I suppose they’ll just shell us. Or at least they will if those shelling laws pass.” He closes the notebook and looks up at her for the first time. “The Egyptians were the first to think of shelling. Did you know that? They mummified their leaders to preserve their bodies for the afterlife—but before they sent them on their unmerry way, they sucked their brains out of their heads.” He pauses to consider it. “Geniuses, those Egyptians. They knew the last thing a pharaoh needs is a brain of his own, or he might do some real damage.”

Finally he stands to face her. “So what are you doing here, Bam? What do you want?”

“We need you to show Jeevan how to break through firewalls. You don’t have to do any of the breaking; you just need to show him.”

“Jeevan knows how to defeat firewalls—he did it all the time at the Graveyard. If he’s not doing it, it’s because he doesn’t want to but he’s afraid to tell the Stork Lord.”

“The Stork Lord—is that what the media’s calling him now?

“No. It’s my own term of endearment,” Hayden admits. “But if they did start calling him that, I’m sure Starkey would love it. I’ll bet he’d build himself an altar so that the common folk may worship in song and sacrifice. Which reminds me—I’ve been toying with the idea of an appropriate Stork Lord salute. It’s like a heil Hitler thing, but with just the middle finger. Like so.” He demonstrates, and it makes Bam laugh.

“Hayden, you really are an asshole.”

“Coming from you, I take that as a compliment.” He gives her a hint of his condescending smirk. She’s actually glad to see it.

He hesitates for a moment, takes a glance over at his guard, who is dozing on the rice again; then he steps closer to her and says quietly, “You’d be a better leader than Starkey, Bam.”

There’s silence between them. Bam finds she can’t even respond to that.

“You can’t tell me you haven’t thought of it,” Hayden says.

He’s right; she has thought about it. And she also dismissed the idea before it could take root. “Starkey has a mission,” she tells him. “He has a goal. What do I have?”

Hayden shrugs. “Common sense? A survival instinct? Good bone structure?”

Bam quickly decides this is not a conversation she’s going to have. “Put down the notebook and start doing your job. There wasn’t enough food yesterday—make sure there is tonight.”

He gives her a middle-finger heil, and she leaves, chucking a potato at the sleeping guard to wake him up.

• • •

It’s that afternoon when Bam’s world, already dangerously off-kilter, turns upside down entirely. It’s because of the Prissies. That’s always been her special word for the kind of girls she hates most. Dainty little things who have lived a carefree life of privilege, whose troubles are limited to choice of nail color and boyfriend woes and whose names sound normal but are weirdly spelled. Even among the Stork Brigade there are girls who qualify as Prissies, ever aloof and pretentious even as their clothes tatter into rags. Somehow, in spite of all the hardships they’ve endured, they manage to be pretty and petty and as shallow as an oil slick.

There are three in particular who have formed their own little click over the past few weeks. Two are sienna, one umber, and all three are annoyingly beautiful. They didn’t participate in either harvest camp liberation—in fact, they never seem to do much of anything but talk among themselves and whisper derision of others. More than once Bam has heard them snarking behind her back about her height, her arguably mannish figure, and her general demeanor. She avoids them on principle, but today Bam’s feeling belligerent. She wants to pick a fight, or at least to make others feel miserable—and who better to make miserable than girls who have a dainty figure instead of good bone structure?

She finds them in the area of the mine designated as “girls only.” It’s where they go to avoid unwanted advances from the hormonal male population when they’ve tired of flirting. Bam hasn’t noticed them flirting lately. She doesn’t think anything of it at first.

“Starkey needs munitions moved deeper into the mine,” she tells them. “I’ve elected you three to do it. Try not to blow yourselves up.”

“Why are you telling us?” Kate-Lynn asks. “Get some of the boys to do it.”

“Nope. It’s your turn today.”

“But I’m not supposed to be lifting heavy things,” whines Emmalee.

“Right,” says Makayla. “None of us are.”

“According to who?”

They look at one another like none of them wants to say. Finally Emmalee becomes the spokeswoman of the clique. “Well . . . according to Starkey.”

That Starkey would give special privileges to the Prissies irritates Bam even further. Well, she’s his workhorse around this place—she can take away any privileges she chooses.