“Like what?” asks Lizbeth. “Sign a second unwind order? You only need one.”
At seven fifteen, the sun clears the mountains, heralding another scorcher, and the ComBom begins to roast. They manage to scrounge up a few water bottles, but not enough for fifteen kids who are already beginning to sweat out more than there is to take in. By eight o’clock, the temperature hits one hundred, and Hayden knows this can’t last. So he comes back to his favorite question, but this time it isn’t rhetorical.
“I want you all to listen to me and think about your answer to this,” he tells them. He waits until he’s sure he has all their attention, then says:
“Would you rather die . . . or would you rather be unwound?”
They all look to one another. Some put their heads in their hands. Some sob dry tears because they’re too dehydrated to cry. Hayden silently counts to twenty, asks the question again, then waits for the answers.
Esme, their best password-cracking hacker, is the first to break through the firewall of silence. “Die,” she says. “No question.”
And Nasim says, “Die.”
And Lizbeth says, “Die.”
And the answers start to come faster.
“Die.”
“Die.”
“Die.”
Everyone answers, and not a single one of them chooses unwinding.
“Even if there is such a thing as ‘living in a divided state,’ ” Esme says, “if we get unwound, the Juvies win. We can’t let them win.”
And so, as the temperature soars past 110 degrees, Hayden leans back against the bulkhead and does something he hasn’t done since he was little. He says the Lord’s Prayer. Funny how some things you never forget.
“Our father, who art in heaven . . .”
Tad and several others are quick to join in. “Hallowed be thy name . . .”
Nasim begins to recite an Islamic prayer, and Lizbeth covers her eyes, chanting the Shema in Hebrew. Death, as they say, doesn’t just make all the world kin, it makes all religions one.
“Do you think they’ll just let us die?” Tad asks. “Won’t they try to save us?”
Hayden doesn’t want to answer him, because he knows the answer is no. From the Juvies’ point of view, if they die, all they lose are kids no one wanted anyway. All they lose are parts.
“With the news vans out there,” suggests Lizbeth, “maybe our deaths will stand for something. People will remember that we chose death over unwinding.”
“Maybe,” Hayden says. “That’s a good thought, Lizbeth. Hold on to it.”
It’s 115 degrees. 8:40 a.m. Hayden’s finding it harder and harder to breathe, and he realizes the heat might not get them at all. It might be the lack of oxygen. He wonders which is lower on the list of bad ways to die.
“I don’t feel so good,” says a girl across from him. Hayden knew her name five minutes ago, but he can’t think clearly enough to remember it. He knows it’s only minutes now.
Beside him, Tad, his eyes half-open, begins babbling. Something about a vacation. Sandy beaches, swimming pools. “Daddy lost the passports and ooh, Mommy’s gonna be mad.” Hayden puts his arm around him and holds him like a little brother. “No passports . . . ,” Tad says. “No passports . . . can’t get back home.”
“Don’t even try, Tad,” Hayden says. “Wherever you are, stay there; it sounds like the place to be.”
Soon Hayden feels his eyesight starting to black out, and he goes places too. A house he lived in as a kid before his parents started fighting. Riding his bike up a jump ramp he can’t handle and breaking his arm in the fall. What were you thinking, son? A fight his parents had over custody in the heat of their divorce. You’ll have him, all right! You’ll have him over my dead body, and Hayden just laughing and laughing, because it’s his only defense against the prospect of his family collapsing around him. And then overhearing their decision to unwind him rather than allowing the other to have custody. Not so much a decision, but an impasse.
Fine!
Fine!
If that’s the way you want it!