UnWholly (Unwind Dystology 2)

Risa looks to Roberta so she doesn’t have to look at Cam. “I said get it out of here.”

“I’m not an it,” Cam insists.

Risa shakes her head. “Yes, you are.” She still won’t look directly at him. “Now get it out of here, or I swear I will rip every stolen part out of its body with my bare hands.”

She tries not to catch his gaze, but she can’t stop herself. The thing has begun to cry tears from someone else’s stolen tear ducts, and it just makes her angry.

before they begin, Lev speaks loudly enough to get everyone’s attention, stealing the floor from Cavenaugh before he has the chance to take it. “Why is the portrait of me back in the dining hall?” he asks. “It was already vandalized once—why put it back?” The question quiets everyone down and brings the room to order.

“I ordered it restored and returned,” says Cavenaugh. “The comfort and focus it provides the ex-tithes is invaluable.”

“I agree!” says one of the teachers. “I think it draws their focus toward the positive.” Then she punctuates her remark with a brownnosing nod toward Cavenaugh. “I, for one, like it and approve.”

“Well, I don’t like it, and I don’t approve,” Lev tells them, for the first time voicing his feelings out loud. “I shouldn’t be some sort of god-thing. I shouldn’t be put on a pedestal. I’m not and never have been this image you’re trying to make me.”

There’s silence around the room as everyone waits to see how Cavenaugh will react. He takes his time and finally says, “We all have our jobs here. Yours is very clear and very simple: to be an example for the other ex-tithes to follow. Have you noticed kids have been letting their hair grow? At first I thought your hair would be off-putting, but now they are modeling themselves on you. It’s what they need at this juncture.”

“I’m not a role model!” Lev yells. He stands up, not even realizing he’s come to his feet. “I was a clapper. A terrorist! I made awful decisions!”

But Cavenaugh remains calm. “It’s your good decisions we care about. Now sit down and let us get on with this meeting.”

Lev looks around the table but sees no support. If anything, he sees them all tallying this outburst as one of his bad decisions, best forgotten. He boils with the same kind of anger that once turned him into a clapper, but he bites it back, sits down, and remains silent for the rest of the meeting.

It’s only as the meeting breaks up that Cavenaugh takes his hand. Not to shake it, but to flip it over and scrutinize his fingers—or more specifically, to look under his fingernails.

“Best clean those a little better, Lev,” he says. “Spray paint comes out with turpentine, I think.”

28 - Risa

Risa does not have an Easter social. She can’t even be sure which day is Easter—she’s lost track of the days. In fact, she can’t even be sure where she is. At first she’s held by the Juvenile Authority in Tucson, then transferred in a windowless armored vehicle to another detention facility about two hours away—in Phoenix, she presumes. Here is where they send in interrogators to ask her questions.

“How many kids are in the Graveyard?”

“A bunch.”

“Who sends your supplies?”

“George Washington. Or is it Abraham Lincoln? I forget.”

“How often do you receive new arrivals?”

“About as often as you beat your wife.”

The interrogators are infuriated by her lack of cooperation, but she has no intention of telling them anything useful. Besides, she knows they’re asking her questions they already know the answers to. The questions are merely tests to see whether she’ll tell the truth or lie. She doesn’t do either. Instead she makes a mockery of each interrogation.

“Your cooperation might make things easier on you,” they tell her.

“I don’t want things easy,” she responds. “I’ve had a hard life. I’d rather stick with what’s familiar.”

They let her go hungry but don’t let her starve. They tell her they have Elvis Robert Mullard in custody and they’re cutting him a deal for information—but she knows they’re lying, because if they had him, they’d know it’s not Mullard at all, but Connor.

This is how it goes for two weeks. Then one day in walks a Juvey-cop. He aims a gun at her and unceremoniously tranqs her—not in the leg, where it would hurt the least, but right in the chest, where it stings until she loses consciousness.

She awakes in a different cell. A little newer and larger, perhaps, but still a cell. She has no idea where she has been transported this time, or why. This new cell is not at all designed for a paraplegic, and her captors have offered no help since she arrived. Not that she’d accept it if they did, but it’s as if they want her to struggle over the lip of the bathroom threshold, or onto her bed, which is abnormally high—just enough to make getting into it an ordeal.

She suffers a week of food brought in by a silent guard in a rent-a-cop uniform. She knows she’s no longer in the hands of the Juvenile Authority, but who her new captors are is a mystery. These new jailers ask no questions, and that concerns her the same way that Connor is always concerned by the fact that the Graveyard has never been taken out. Are they so unimportant in the grand scheme of things that the Juvenile Authority won’t even torture her to get the information they want? Have they been deluding themselves into thinking they’re making a difference?

All this time she’s forced out thoughts of Connor, because it simply hurt too much to think about him. How horrified he must have been when she turned herself in. Horrified and stunned. Well, fine, let him be; he’ll get over it. She did it for him just as much as she did it for the injured boy, because as painful as it is to admit, Risa knows she had become just a distraction to Connor. If he’s truly going to lead those kids in the Graveyard like the Admiral did, he can’t be giving Risa leg massages and worrying whether her emotional needs are being met. Maybe he does love her, but it’s obvious there’s no room in his life at this moment to pay it any more than lip service.