“He told you?” she asks. She can’t imagine Lev voluntarily giving her name to the Juvies.
“No one told us,” he says, and holds up a small electronic device. “DNA tester. Standard issue for Juvey-cops since Happy Jack.”
“I’d like to know what ‘he’ she’s talking about,” says the cop driving.
Well, if they don’t know, she’s not going to tell them. If Lev hasn’t been caught, then he wasn’t with her when she was. But would he just leave her? Lev is such a mixed bag of contradicting ethics, she can’t be sure. But no—that’s a lie—the kind of lie she used to tell herself just to demonize him. Deep down she knows he wouldn’t leave her voluntarily. If he did, he had no choice. Still, there’s no telling whether he’s free or has been captured.
“What I want to know,” asks the cop riding shotgun, “is how you wound up outside the gate and not inside like the rest of them.”
Miracolina decides to tell them an edited version of the truth, since they’re not going to believe it anyway. “I escaped from a parts pirate with a friend,” she tells them. “We were looking for a place of safety.”
The two cops look to each other. “So you had no idea that the airplane graveyard was an AWOL stronghold.”
“We were just told to go there—that we would be safe from the parts pirates.”
“Who told you?”
“Some guy,” she says, which sounds like something any kid would say, and effectively throws a wet rag over the question.
“How did you get tranq’d?”
When she doesn’t answer, the driver looks at his partner and says, “Prolly a trigger-happy rookie.” His partner just shrugs.
“Well, you’re here, and you’re safe. Was your friend a tithe too?”
Miracolina has to suppress a smile. “Yes,” she says, “he was.” She’s pleased she can lie to them in complete honesty, because after all it is the best policy.
“Well, no tithes turned themselves in,” Shotgun says. “Perhaps he got hauled off with the rest.”
“The rest?”
“Like we said, police action. Rounded up a huge nest of AWOLs. A few hundred at least.”
Again, something that once would have been good news for Miracolina—justice prevailing, order restored—now brings her nothing but melancholy.
“Any bigwigs brought in?” she asks, knowing that if Lev or his friend, the Akron AWOL, were caught, it would be big news—they’d all know.
“No such thing as a bigwig AWOL, sweetie. They’re all nonentities. Otherwise they wouldn’t be where they are.”
Again she sighs in relief, and the cops assume her sigh is exhaustion from the tranquilizers. “Lie back down, honey. You’ve got nothing to worry about. The parts pirates can’t get you now.” But she stays upright, not wanting to slip into a post-tranq stupor. There’s something off about the way they’re treating her. After all, she is an Unwind with a questionable story—and even though she’s a tithe, she’s never known Juvies to be so nice to kids about to be unwound. As they said, they see Unwinds as nonentities. You don’t call nonentities “honey” and “sweetie.”
As they pull into the local Juvey headquarters, she begins to wonder what the process is now. “I was supposed to go to Wood Hollow Harvest Camp,” she tells them. “Will I still go there, or to a camp in Arizona?”
“Neither,” the driver says.
“Excuse me?”
He parks the car and turns to her. “From what I understand, your parents never actually signed the unwind order.”
That leaves Miracolina speechless.
They never signed it. Now she remembers them telling her that as she stood at the door—but she told them it was her choice to go, and she got into the van anyway.
“Even if you had made it to Wood Hollow, you would have just been sent home once they double-checked the paperwork. Can’t unwind without an order.”
She laughs at the irony of it. All this time fighting to finally be tithed, and not only won’t it happen, but it was never going to happen. She wants to be angry—but how can she fault her parents for loving her too much to let her go? She wonders how things would have been different if she had known. Would she still have taken the journey west with Lev after escaping from the parts pirate? Would she have stayed with him long enough to forgive him, granting him that absolution he so desperately needed?
To her amazement, the answer is no.