UnSouled (Unwind Dystology 3)

She sits down on the bed, not even bothering to inspect the unconscious kid. “He must have been the star of the reservation parading you around there,” Roberta says, mostly just to get a rise out of Cam. “If you stayed there, you might have evaded us for a good long time. Why didn’t you?”

Cam shrugs and finally gives her his famous grin. “Phileas Fogg,” he says. “I wanted to see the world.”

“Well, you didn’t quite make eighty days, but I hope it was sufficient.” She turns to the team leader. “Time to wrap this up.”

“Do we take the others?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Roberta chides. “We’ve gotten what we came for. I have no desire to complicate things with kidnapping.”

“But taking me—that’s not kidnapping?” Cam asks.

“No,” Roberta says, happy to take the bait. “According to the law, it would be considered the retrieval of stolen property. In fact, I could press charges against everyone in this house, but I won’t. I’ve no need to be vindictive.”

They haul him out to the car, but gently so, by Roberta’s orders. Upstairs the child continues to cry, but the sound is greatly muffled when they pull the fractured front door closed. The mother, whoever she is, and the rest of this unseemly crew will eventually regain consciousness to take care of the irascible toddler. If not by morning, then a few hours later.

They drive off with Cam seated in the back of the sedan next to Roberta, handcuffs still on, although he’s not struggling against them. Now that Cam has freed his grin, he won’t stop. She has to admit it’s a bit unnerving.

“I assume the senator and the general were fuming when I left.”

“On the contrary,” Roberta tells him happily. “They never knew that you left. I told them that you and I were going back to Hawaii for a few weeks before you reported to them. That you wished to spend some time at the clinic for a motivational makeover. And, of course, that’s where we’re now going. So that you can have some mild cortical retuning.”

“Cortical retuning . . . ,” he echoes.

“Only to be expected,” Roberta tells him. “You’ve been prone to quite a lot of wrongful thinking ever since you were first rewound. But I’m happy to tell you that I have an effective way of taking what’s wrong within that wonderful mind of yours . . . and making it right.”

Roberta can’t help but take pleasure in her victory as she watches the grin finally leave his face.

66 • Connor

Connor opens his eyes to the same room and the same bed he had been traq’d in. He knows this can’t be right. They came for them, didn’t they? No, he thinks. Grace knew better. They came for Cam.

“Welcome back from Tranqistan.”

He turns his head to see Sonia sitting in a chair beside him. He tries to push himself up, but feels dizzy, so he lets his elbows slide out from under him, and his head hits the pillow, his brain clanging inside him like the clapper of a bell.

“Easy now. I’d think with all the times you’ve been tranq’d, you know to take it slow.”

He’s about to ask where Risa is, but then she appears at the door. “Is he awake?”

“Barely.” Sonia grabs her cane and rises with a grunt, vacating the seat for Risa. “It’s almost noon. Time to open up shop, or the crowds may bust the door down.” But before she leaves the room, she pats Connor comfortingly on the leg. “We’ll talk later. I’ll tell you everything you want to know about my husband. Or at least what this fool brain of mine still remembers.”

Connor smiles at that. “I’m sure you remember things back to the Stone Age.”

“Don’t be a wiseass.”

Then she waddles out, and Risa takes the seat. She also takes Connor’s hand. He squeezes back, and unlike the day before, he does it wholeheartedly.

“I’m glad we let you sleep it off without waking you. You needed it.”

“You don’t get rest during tranq sleep. You just go away.” He clears his throat, to remove a persistent frog. “So what happened?”

Risa explains how she and Grace were never even found under the bed and how Cam was collared, then taken away. Connor is amazed with their luck—but maybe he shouldn’t be. If the mission of that task force was to simply capture Cam, they couldn’t care less about his travel companions. Get in, get out. Their mission was accomplished, and they had no idea the forest they had missed for the tree.

“Cam could have turned us all in, but he didn’t,” Risa says. “He sacrificed himself for us.”

“He was going down anyway,” Connor points out. “It wasn’t exactly a sacrifice.”

“Give him some credit—by turning us in he would have bought himself some serious bargaining power.” She thinks for a moment, her grip on Connor’s hand loosening slightly. “He’s not the monster you think he is.”