Kids who managed to avoid the darts are doing their best to revive the others. When they see Starkey, they stand in awe. It must be what the kids at Happy Jack felt when they saw Connor Lassiter walking out of the Chop Shop alive.
“He escaped!” they yell, relaying the good news down into the deeper tunnels of the mine. “Starkey escaped!”
Jeevan comes up to him. “What happened?” he asks. “How did you get away? Why didn’t they take us?”
“No one’s taking us anywhere,” Starkey tells him. “We’ve got a lot of work to do—but it can wait until morning.” He orders the unconscious to be covered with blankets and moves through the mine, calming fears and telling everyone to get a good night’s rest. “We have exciting days ahead.”
“Where did they take you?” a wide-eyed stork asks.
“Into the sky,” Starkey tells him. “And we have friends in very high places.”
56 • Hayden
Supplies come like manna from the heavens. The food is far superior to anything they’ve been subsisting on. Vacuum-packed roasts that need no refrigeration. Vegetables in such quantities they don’t need to ration. Hayden finds his inventory job becomes a full-time endeavor. But it’s the other things that these new “partners” bring that is deeply disturbing to Hayden. There are weapons coming in that are like nothing Hayden’s ever seen. Things like bazookas and what looks like handheld missile launchers that are heavier than the kids who are supposed to wield them. Starkey has said nothing about who these new benefactors are, and Hayden wonders who would be insane enough to arm angry teenagers with weapons that were clearly meant for armies. More terrifying, though, is how Starkey might use them.
Starkey doesn’t bother with Hayden anymore. As far as Starkey is concerned, Hayden’s a nonentity, too small to be concerned with but too dangerous to let go.
“Why haven’t you escaped yet?” Bam asks Hayden. “There were so many times you could have slipped away from that one inept guard.”
“And leave all you fine people?” Hayden says. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”
The fact is, as much as he wants to bolt from this nightmare and save himself, he can’t do it knowing that he’s leaving all these kids to burn in the furnace of Starkey’s ego. Yes, many of them worship the ground Starkey walks on, but only because they desperately need a hero. Hayden has no desire to be a hero. He just wants to survive and spread some of that survival around.
As Hayden feared, Starkey picks the Stork Brigade’s next target quickly. Jeevan has broken down and used his skills to get through the firewalls. Now they have all the information they need for an attack. This time it won’t be a subtle, secret attack, or even a mad dash at the gate. The storks will be going in with an iron fist. Hayden considers himself smart, crafty even, but he can’t figure out a way to stop Starkey short of putting a bullet in his head, which Hayden just can’t do.
Bam had asked Hayden to bend her ear and tell her what he thinks, as well as what he knows—and so as Starkey prepares his storks for the next attack, Hayden takes Bam to the computer room and shows her some of the things he’s been finding out there in the world.
He begins to pull up one political advertisement after another. “There have been more and more of these online and on TV. They’re blitzing the airwaves.” He shows her impassioned calls to rescind the Cap-17 law and allow older teens to be unwound again.
There are advertisements about measures, propositions, and initiatives on the ballots calling for the mandatory unwinding of teenaged “undesirables,” the further downsizing of state orphanages through unwinding, state bonds to build more harvest camps, and more.
Bam dismisses it. “So what? There are always a ton of those ads out there. There’s nothing new about that.”
“Yes, but look at this.” He shows her a graph depicting the frequency the ads have been appearing. “Look how the ads started to flood the airwaves right after the Cold Springs liberation—and then they almost doubled after MoonCrater.” Hayden takes a moment to look around to make sure they’re unobserved but speaks in a whisper anyway. “Everything the Stork Brigade does might be freeing kids from harvest camps, but people out there are getting scared, Bam—and all of these laws that didn’t have a hope in hell of passing a few months ago are now gaining more and more support. Starkey wants a war, right? But as soon as people see it as war, they’ll have to choose sides, and the more fear there is, the more people lean toward the side of the Juvenile Authority. Which means that if it turns into a war . . . we lose.”
Hayden can already imagine the results. Martial law would be declared against juveniles, just as it had during the teen uprising. Kids will be dragged from their homes and unwound for the slightest infractions, and the public will allow it to happen, out of fear.
“For every harvest camp we bring down, two more will pop up in its place.” He leans close to her, trying to drive the point home. “Starkey’s not stopping unwinding, Bam. All he’s doing is making sure it never, ever ends!”
He can see by the pale look on Bam’s face that she’s finally getting it. He continues. “These people funding Starkey’s war may want to mess with the system, but that kind of messing will only make the system stronger and give the Juvenile Authority more power.”
Then Bam says something that Hayden hasn’t even considered. “What if that’s what they want? What if the people funding Starkey want the Juvies to have more power?”
And Hayden shivers, because he realizes Bam may have just found a vein in this old mine that leads right to the mother lode.
57 • Lev
All is peaceful. All is calm. The oasis of the Arápache Rez hides the reality of what’s going on beyond its gates and walls. Calls to rescind Cap-17 and raise the legal age of unwinding back to eighteen and possibly beyond. Removing the brains of convicted criminals and unwinding the rest of their bodies. Allowing people to voluntarily submit themselves to unwinding for cash. It’s all looming on the horizon, and any or all of it might come to pass, and worse, if it’s not stopped. Like Connor, he knows he must do something.
“Throw a stone in a river, and it just sinks to the bottom,” Elina tells him, “Put a boulder in its path and the river just flows around. What happens will happen, no matter what you do.”
Elina has many fine qualities, but her passive, fatalistic view of the world is not one of them. Unfortunately, too many people on the rez share it.
“Enough boulders builds a dam,” Lev counters.
Elina opens her mouth to deliver another metaphoric salvo—perhaps about how dams burst, causing floods worse than a river—but she thinks better of it and instead says, “Have some breakfast; you’ll be less cranky.”
Lev complies, munching down on yam cakes that, according to Elina, used to be served with agave syrup, but since the agave extinction, they’ve had to make due with maple. Lev can’t deny that part of his choice to stay here was to be sheltered from the world, among people whom he genuinely cares for, and genuinely care for him, but there was a larger purpose for it.