It’s a question Cam has never even considered before. As far as he knows, he is the center of Roberta’s universe. “You don’t like her, do you?”

“Who, me? No, I love her dearly. Evil scheming bitches are my favorite kind of people.”

Cam feels a sudden protectiveness and an unexpected spike of anger. “Red light!” he blurts. “She’s the closest thing I have to a mother.”

“You’d be better off storked.”

“Easy for you to say. A ward like you doesn’t even know what a mother is.”

Risa gasps, then brings her hand back and slaps him hard across the face. The momentum of the slap pushes her off balance, and she falls backward—but the nurse is there to catch her. He gives Cam an accusing glance, then returns his attention to Risa. “Enough for now,” the way-too-muscular male nurse says. “Back into bed.”

He helps Risa back to bed while Cam stands impotently at the window, not sure who to be mad at—himself, her, or the nurse for taking her away from him.

“Did the slap sting evenly, Cam,” she asks with a nasty bite in her voice, “or do the kids in your face all feel it differently?”

“Teflon!” he says, refusing to let her comment stick.

“Muzzle!” He cannot let himself lash out again. He cannot! He takes a deep breath, picturing the tumultuous sea calming to a glassy lake.

“I know I invited that slap,” he tells her calmly, “but watch what you say about Roberta. I do not speak unkindly of the people you love—have the same courtesy for me.”

- - -

Cam gives Risa some space. He knows this change in her life must be as traumatic as it is wonderful for her. He still doesn’t quite understand what made Risa change her mind about allowing the operation, but he knows Roberta can be persuasive. He likes to pretend that some of it had to do with him—that deep down, beneath her initial repulsion, was a curiosity, perhaps even an admiration for the mosaic that had been created from all his disparate parts. Not the one they put together for him, but how he took what he was given and made it all work.

They eat one meal a day together. “It is imperative,” Roberta tells him, “if the two of you are ever going to bond, that you dine together. Meals are when the psyche is most vulnerable to attachment.”

He wishes Roberta didn’t make it all sound so clinical. Growing accustomed to each other’s company shouldn’t be about Risa’s “vulnerability to attachment.”

Risa does not yet know that she is here to be his companion.

“Do not rush this,” Roberta has told Cam. “She must be groomed for the role, and we have other things planned for her first. We’re turning her folk-legend status to our advantage, creating a powerful media presence before we link the two of you together publicly. That will take time. In the meantime, be your wonderful, charming self. She is yours to win.”

“And if I don’t?”

“I have every confidence in you, Cam.”

Risa is in his thoughts through each activity of the day. She becomes a thread weaving through all the seams of his mind, binding them together more tightly. And she’s thinking of him, too. He knows because of the way she watches him secretly. He plays basketball one afternoon with an off-duty guard. He has his shirt off, revealing not only his seams, but his musculature, in tip-top shape. A boxer’s six-pack abs, a swimmer’s powerful pecs—flawless muscle groups reined in by a finely tuned motor cortex to produce the perfect layup. Risa watches him play from a window in the main living room. He knows, but he doesn’t let on—he just delivers spectacular game, allowing his body to speak for itself. Only when he’s done playing does he glance up at her, to let her know that her stolen glimpses of him aren’t stolen at all—they’re given freely. She backs away from the window into shadows, but they both know she was watching. Not because she had to but because she wanted to, and Cam knows that makes all the difference in the world.

o;I don’t care who or what you are, nobody touches me.”

He thinks for a moment, then says, in all seriousness, “Would you like to touch me then? You can feel all the seams. You can see what makes me me.”

She doesn’t even dignify that with a response. “Do you think the kids who were unwound to be a part of you wanted it?”

“If they were tithes, they did,” Cam says, “and some of them were. As for the other ones, they had no choice . . . any more than I had a choice in being made.”

And for a moment, within the fury she feels toward the people who created him, Risa realizes that Cam, as much as all the kids who were unwound to make him, is a victim too.

“Why are you here?” she asks him.

“I have lots of answers to that one,” Cam says proudly. “ ‘The sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.’ Carl Jung.”

Risa sighs, exasperated. “No—why are you here, in this place, talking to me? I’m sure Proactive Citizenry has more important things for their beta test to do than talk to me.”

“Where the heart is,” he says. “Uh—I mean—I’m here because this is my home. But I’m also here because I want to be.”

He smiles at her, and she hates the fact that his smile is sincere. She has to keep reminding herself that it’s not his smile at all. He’s just wearing the flesh of others, and if it was all peeled away, there’d be nothing in the center. He is little more than a cruel trick.

Tags: Neal Shusterman Unwind Dystology
Source: readsnovelonline.net