“I imagine you must know Akron pretty well.”
“Not at all,” Connor tells him. “I’ve been here only once.”
That makes Cam laugh. “And yet they call you the Akron AWOL.”
“Yeah, funny how that works.” Connor is actually from a suburb of Columbus, hours away, but Akron is where he turned the tranq on Nelson. Akron is where he became notorious. He didn’t even know where he was at the time. He only knew it had been Akron once they gave him the irritating “Akron AWOL” label.
“Center-North!” Connor blurts.
“Center-north what?” Grace asks.
“That’s the name of the school. Center-North High. I knew I’d remember it eventually.”
“We’re going to a school?”
“That’s ground zero. We’re looking for an antique shop near the school. I’ll know it when I see it.”
“You sure about that?” asks Cam. “Memory’s a funny thing.”
“Only yours,” says Connor. He punches the name of the school into the GPS and a gentle voice directs them with confident, if somewhat soulless, purpose. In fifteen minutes, they’re on the east side of town. They turn a corner and things look troublingly familiar to Connor.
The school looks exactly the same. Three stories of institutional redbrick that somehow looks as intimidating to him as the Texas School Book Depository had when Connor’s family traveled to Dallas and took a tour of the infamous building where Oswald shot Kennedy. Connor takes a deep, shuddering breath.
It’s midmorning on a Tuesday, so school is in session. It’s just about the same time of day that the fire alarm went off and all hell broke loose. Connor rolls them slowly past. Across the street are homes, but up ahead is a main commercial street.
“Anything specific we should be looking for?” asks Cam. “Any defining characteristics of this antique shop?”
“Yeah,” Connor says, “old stuff,” which makes Grace laugh.
He wonders what Sonia will do when she sees him. Then a horrible thought crosses Connor’s mind: What if she’s dead? Or what if she was caught and arrested for harboring Unwinds? He doesn’t voice his concerns, because if he doesn’t speak them aloud, maybe they won’t be true.
Connor slams the brakes, nearly running a red light. A pedestrian crosses the street glaring at them.
“Not much of a driver, are ya?” says Grace, then turns to Cam. “Did you know he almost killed Lev?”
“My driving’s fine,” Connor insists, “but this place is eating my brain.” He looks around, waiting for the light to change. “I don’t recognize any of this, but I know the shop can’t be more than a block or two away.”
“So drive around the school in a spiral that gets bigger,” suggests Grace. And then she adds, “Although since the streets ain’t round, it’s kinda a square spiral.”
“That’s called an Ulam spiral, by the way,” Cam says. “A way of graphing prime numbers. Not that you would know that.”
Connor gives him a disgusted look in the rearview mirror. “Is everyone in your internal community an ass?” Connor asks. It shuts Cam up.
They widen their search pattern until Connor hits the brakes suddenly again, but not because of a red light.
“There it is. It’s still there.”
The unprepossessing storefront of the corner shop has an understated sign that reads GOODYEAR HEIGHTS ANTIQUES. Being that it’s two blocks off the main thoroughfare, it doesn’t seem to be getting much business. Connor parks across the street, and they sit there in silence for about ten seconds. Then he unbuckles his seat belt.
“Well,” he says, “let’s go antiquing.”
59 • Sonia
She’s not surprised that the Lassiter boy has come here, but she is surprised by the company he’s keeping. That blasted Rewind is the last travel companion she’d expect to see him with. She doesn’t show her surprise though—and she doesn’t show how happy she is to see Connor either. As far as Sonia is concerned, authentic emotions are a liability. They always come back to bite you. Her poker face has served her well over the years, and on many occasions it has saved her life.
e begin applauding. It starts slow, but it builds until the crowd is cheering by the time Una reaches the stage. Now any doubts he had are gone. His bid to win over the Arápache people has begun—and if he succeeds, he knows he’ll be able to pull them into the battle against unwinding. He’ll finally have his dam!
“Are you sure you know what you’re doing, little brother?” Una asks him over the cheering crowd.