UnWholly (Unwind Dystology 2)

His body burns through the last of its oxygen; then, resigned to his fate, Trace releases his final breath. It bubbles away from him in the darkness, and his body gets to the business of drowning. It’s as awful as he ever imagined it might be, but he knows it won’t last long. Five seconds. Ten. Then the injustice of it all doesn’t seem to matter anymore. As the last of his consciousness filters away, Trace holds on to the hope that his choice to fight on the side of the AWOLs instead of the Juvenile Authority will be enough to pay his passage to a truly better place.

79 - Starkey

The water tastes like rubber and rot and is neither warm nor cold, but tepid, like tea left to steep an hour too long. The last of the plane disappears beneath the surface, leaving nothing but white water bubbling up through the brine and the fuel slick, which has almost burned itself out. Starkey looks around to see kids in the water, kids on rafts, and kids who’ve drifted too far away to see at all, calling out for help.

There’s a deserted shore just a few hundred yards way. Trace, rest his soul, knew enough to bring them down near the unpopulated side of the huge lake. Even so, people will have seen the crash and will come to investigate. They have to get away from the scene as quickly as possible—the attention of the locals is the last thing they need.

“This way!” Starkey tells them, and starts swimming, pulling himself forward with his good hand. The kids in rafts paddle, the kids in the water swim, and in a few minutes they’re pulling themselves out of the fetid water onto a spongy shore of pulverized fish bones.

Starkey sets Bam to do a head count, and she comes back with 128. They lost forty-one in the crash. Around him the survivors try to tally exactly who is missing, which just makes Starkey angry. Sitting here will do nothing but get them captured. He knows he’s cunning enough to make it on his own; somehow he’s got to extend his survival smarts to all of them.

“Everybody up! We can’t waste our time licking our wounds and mourning the dead. We’ve got to get out of here.”

“Where do you suggest we go?” asks Bam.

“Right now, anywhere but here.”

Starkey knows he needs to give these kids direction and purpose. Now that they’re free from the holding pen of the Graveyard, their priorities need to change. Connor might have been happy to just keep kids alive, but Starkey has to make this about more than just survival. Under his leadership, his storks can be a force to be reckoned with.

He goes to the nearest kids nursing their exhaustion and lifts them to their feet by their collars. “Let’s move! We’ll rest when we’re safe.”

“When will we ever be safe?” someone asks. Starkey doesn’t answer, because he knows they’ll probably never be. But that’s all right. They’ve been complacent for too long. Being on the edge will keep them sharp and focused.

As the storks all gather their strength for an uncertain journey on foot, Starkey searches through them until he finds Jeevan, relieved that he’s one of the survivors.

“Jeeves, we’ll need the same type of setup you had in the ComBom, but mobile. I need you to be our eyes and ears and gather all the intelligence you can from the Juvenile Authority.”

Jeevan just shakes his head in panicked disbelief. “That was all high-end military software. We don’t have it anymore. We don’t even have a computer!”

“We’ll commandeer as many computers as you need,” Starkey tells him. “And you’ll make it work.”

Jeevan nods nervously. “Yes, sir.”

Even before they leave the shore, Starkey’s grand plan begins to take shape. He will step up the campaign of vengeance he began in Tucson—only this time it won’t just be a handful of avenging storks, it will be all of them: a guerrilla army 128 strong, heaping punishment on anyone who would unwind a stork. Their numbers will grow with every stork they rescue. He doesn’t doubt that in time they could take down entire harvest camps. And then the Akron AWOL will be nothing but a sorry footnote beneath his own legacy.

Drawing strength from his powerful vision, Starkey leads them into the mountains east of the Salton Sea. His first trick will be to make them all disappear, but that’s only the beginning. From this moment on, there will be no end to the magic.

80 - Miracolina

Miracolina’s head is spinning as she awakes. That’s how she knows she’s been tranq’d. This is the fourth time she’s been tranq’d—she knows the drill by now. Memories of the events leading up to it come back, but slowly and not in order. She suppresses the nausea and sets to the task of determining her current circumstances and defragging her mind.

She’s moving. She’s in a vehicle. She was traveling with Lev. Is she in the back of a pickup? No. Is she in the baggage compartment of a bus? No.

It’s night. She’s in the backseat of a car. Is Lev with her? No.

They weren’t in a vehicle at the end, were they? They were walking. By a fence. Toward an old air force base. Is there more? There must be, but try as she might, she can’t remember anything after walking toward the gate.

Although she knows it will makes her feel as if her brain wants to escape through her ears, she sits up. There’s a thick glass barrier between her and the front seat. A police car? Yes—two Juvey-cops are in the front seat. This should be good news for her. It means that she’s finally surfaced out of the underworld that Lev has dragged her through. It doesn’t feel good at all, though, and it’s more than just the tranqs. That she’s in a squad car doesn’t bode well for Lev, and she can no longer deny that she cares about what happens to him in spite of herself.

The Juvey-cop at the wheel glances in his rearview mirror, catching her gaze. “Well, look who’s awake,” he says pleasantly.

“Can you tell me what happened?” The sound of her own voice makes her head pound.

“Police action at the aircraft salvage yard,” he says. “But you already know that, don’t you?”

“No. I was tranq’d outside the gate.” And then she adds, “I was out for a walk,” which is a stupid thing to say, considering how isolated that road is.

“We know who you are, Miracolina,” the cop riding shotgun says. The news makes her have to lie back down on the sticky leather of the backseat, but she leans the wrong way and ends up slumped against the door.