Unwind (Unwind Dystology 1)

"For God's sake, stop staring," she says to them. "You look like a pack of rats."

Sonia shuffles around the dusty cellar, pointing things out to Risa and Connor. "There arc canned goods on these shelves, and a can opener around somewhere. Eat whatever you want, but don't leave anything over or you really will see rats. Bathroom's back there. Keep it clean. I'll go out in a bit and get some formula and a baby bottle." She glances at Connor. "Oh, and there's a first-aid kit around here somewhere for the bite on your arm, whatever that's all about."

Connor suppresses a grin. Sonia doesn't miss a thing.

"How much longer?" asks the oldest of the three cellar-rats, a muscular guy who looks at Connor with intense distrust, as if Connor might challenge his role as alpha male or something.

"What do you care?" says Sonia. "You got a pressing appointment?"

The kid doesn't respond; he just glares at Sonia and crosses his arms, displaying a shark tattooed on his forearm. Ooh, thinks Connor with a smirk. Intimidating. Now I'm really scared.

Sonia sighs. "Four more days until I'm rid of you for good."

"What happens in four days?" Risa asks.

"The ice cream man comes." And with that, Sonia climbs up the stairs faster than Connor thought she'd be able to. The trapdoor bangs closed.

"Dear, sweet Dragon Lady won't tell us what happens next," says the second boy, a lanky blond kid with a faint smirk that seems permanently fixed on his face. He has braces on teeth that don't appear to need them. Although his eyes tell of sleepless nights, his hair is perfect. Connor can tell that this kid, despite the rags he's wearing, comes from money.

"We get sent to harvest camp and they cut us apart, that's what happens next," says the girl. She's Asian, and looks almost as tough as the kid with the tattoo, with hair dyed a deep shade of pink and a spiked leather choker on her neck.

Shark Boy looks at her sharply. "Will you shut up with your end-of-the-world crap?" Connor notices that the kid has four parallel scratch marks on one side of his face, consistent with fingernails. The girl has a black eye.

"It's not the end of the world," she grumbles. "Just the end of us."

"You're beautiful when you're nihilistic," says the smirker.

"Shut up."

"You're only saving that because you don't know what nihilistic means."

Risa gives Connor a look, and he knows what she's thinking. We have to suffer through four days with this crew? Still, she's the first to hold out her hand to them and introduce herself. Reluctantly, Connor does the same.

Turns out, each of these kids, just like every Unwind, has a story that ranks a ten on the Kleenex scale.

The smirker is Hayden. As Connor predicted, he comes from a ridiculously wealthy family. When his parents got a divorce, there was a brutal custody battle over him. Two years and six court dates later, it still wasn't resolved. In the end the only thing his mother and father could agree on was that each would rather see Hayden unwound than allow the other parent to have custody.

"If you could harness the energy of my parents' spite," Hayden tells them, "you could power a small city for several years."

The girl is Mai. Her parents kept trying for a boy, until they finally got one—but not before having four girls first. Mai was the fourth. "It's nothing new," Mai tells them. "Back in China, in the days when they only allowed one kid per family, people were killing off their baby girls left and right."

;I have some lovely infant items in the back room," she tells them loud enough for the customer to hear. "Why don't you go back there, and wait for me?" Then she whispers, "And for God's sake, feed that baby!"

The back room is through a doorway covered by what looks like an old shower curtain. If the front room was cluttered, this place is a disaster area. Things like broken picture frames and rusty birdcages are piled all around—all the items that weren't good enough to be displayed out front. The junk of the junk.

"And you're telling me this old woman is going to help us?" says Connor. "It looks like she can't even help herself!"

"Hannah said she would. I believe her."

"How could you be raised in a state home and still trust people?"

Risa gives him a dirty look and says, "Hold this." She puts the baby in Connor's arms. It's the first time she's given it to him. It feels much lighter than he expected. Something so loud and demanding ought to be heavier. The baby's cries have weakened now—it's just about exhausted itself.

There's nothing keeping them tied to this baby anymore. They could stork it again first thing in the morning. . . . And yet the thought makes Connor uncomfortable. They don't owe this baby anything. It's theirs by stupidity, not biology. He doesn't want it, but he can't stand the thought of someone getting the baby who wants it even less than he does. His frustration begins to ferment into anger. It's the same kind of anger that always got him into trouble back home. It would cloud his judgment, making him lash out, getting into fights, cursing out teachers, or riding his skateboard wildly through busy intersections. "Why do you have to get wound so tight?" his father once asked, exasperated, and Connor had snapped back, "Maybe someone oughta unwind me." At the time, he thought he was just being funny.

Risa opens a refrigerator, which is as cluttered as the rest of the back room. She pulls out a container of milk, then finds a bowl, into which she pours the milk.

"It's not a cat," Connor says. "It won't lick milk out of a bowl."