UnStrung

An Unwind Story

by

Neal Shusterman & Michelle Knowlden

1 • Lev

“Do it for him,” a woman says, her voice quiet but steeped in authority.

Mired in a numbing gray fog, Lev feels her cool fingers on his neck, taking his pulse. His throat hurts, his tongue feels like chewed leather, his left wrist aches, and he can’t open his eyes.

“Not yet, Ma.”

Like his eyes, Lev’s lips won’t open. Who is it who just spoke? Maybe one of his brothers. Marcus, perhaps? No, the voice is wrong. And no one in his family is so informal as to call their mother “Ma.”

“All right,” he hears the woman say. “You decide when he’s ready. And don’t forget your guitar.”

The sound of footsteps recedes, and Lev slips back into darkness.

•

When he wakes again, his eyes open, but only a sliver. He’s alone in a large bedroom with blinding-white walls. A red, woven blanket covers him. Beneath him he can feel a smooth and expensive cotton sheet, like the ones he once knew. He’s on a bed that’s low to the ground, and beyond its foot he sees the fur of a mountain lion on the slate floor. He shudders at the sight of it. An oak bureau faces him. It has no mirror, and for the moment he’s glad.

Forcing his eyes wider, he sees unshuttered windows on the far wall, the light beyond them weakening to dusk. Or is it strengthening to dawn? There is a nightstand next to him. A stethoscope is coiled there, and for a brief, devastating moment he thinks that he’s been discovered and taken to a harvest camp. Despair presses him against the cotton sheet, and he sinks into the fog that fills his head, confusing dreams with delirium and making a mockery of time. He drifts through the fog until he hears—

“When he wakes, get his name.” It’s a different voice. Deeper. “The council can’t give him sanctuary without a name.”

Cool fingers touch his wrist again. “I’ll keep that in mind.” He senses the woman leaning over him. He can hear her breathing. She smells of sage and smoky cottonwood. It’s comforting. “Now leave us be.”

He feels a prick in his upper arm, like a tranq dart, but not. The world goes hazy—but not like the fog. This is a different kind of sleep.

Suddenly he’s standing in a yard, near a briefcase covered in mud that lies halfway down a hole. Outside the picket fence, police are sidling toward him. No, it’s not him they’re interested in—it’s the skinny umber kid with him. CyFi’s hands overflow with gold chains and glittering stones of every color. He’s pleading with the sienna-colored man and woman, who clutch each other, staring at the kid in terror.

“Please don’t unwind me.” CyFi’s words are hoarse and choked with sobs. “Please don’t unwind me. . . .”

A cool hand touches Lev’s cheek, and the memory is sucked in like a mental gasp. He left CyFi days ago. He’s somewhere else now.

“You’re safe, child,” the woman’s reassuring voice says. “Open your eyes.”

When he does, he sees her pleasant face smiling at him. Square jaw, black hair tied back, and bronze skin, she’s a—“SlotMonger!” he blurts, and feels his skin flush red. “I’m sorry . . . I didn’t mean . . . It just came out . . .”

She chuckles. “Old words die hard,” she tells him, with infinite understanding. “We were called Indians long after it was obvious we weren’t from India. And ‘Native American’ was always a bit too condescending for my taste.”

“ChanceFolk,” Lev says, hoping his SlotMonger slur will quickly be forgotten.

“Yes,” the woman says. “People of Chance. Of course the casinos are long gone, but I suppose the name had enough resonance to stick.”

He sees the stethoscope around her neck—the one he at first incorrectly thought belonged to a harvest-camp surgeon.

“You’re a doctor?”

“A Woman of Medicine, yes—and as such I can tell you that your cuts and bruises are healing, and the swelling of your wrist is much reduced. Leave the brace on till I give you leave to shed it. You need to gain a few pounds, but once you taste my husband’s cooking, that shouldn’t be a problem.”

Lev watches warily as she sits on the edge of his bed and studies him.

“But your spirit, child, is a vastly different matter.”

He withdraws, and her lips purse ruefully.

“Medicine women know that healing takes time, some more time than others. Tell me one thing, and I’ll leave you to rest.”

He stiffens, reflexively on his guard. “What?”

“What is your name?”

“Lev Calder,” he says, and regrets it immediately. It’s been almost three weeks since he was dragged by Connor from his limo, but the Powers That Be are still looking for him. It was one thing to be traveling with CyFi, but to give a doctor his name—what if she turns him over to the Juvenile Authority? He thinks of his parents, and the destiny he left behind. How could he have wanted to be unwound? How could his parents have made him want it? It fills him with an unrelenting fury at everyone and everything. He’s not a tithe anymore. He’s an AWOL now. He’d better start thinking like one.

“Well, Lev, we’re petitioning the Tribal Council to allow you to stay. You don’t have to tell me all you’ve been through—I’m sure it was horrible.” And then her eyes brighten. “But we People of Chance do believe in people of second chance.”

2 • Wil

He stands in the doorway watching the boy sleep. His guitar hangs down his back, warm from the sun, strings still humming.

He doesn’t mind being here, though he was sorry to have to leave the forest. His time accompanying the sounds of shivering leaves, whirling dust devils, and powerful Chinook winds was special to him. There was calming joy in transposing nature to music. Adapting the chords of yellow-shouldered blackbirds, prairie dogs, and wild pigs. Bringing their voices into each movement he played.

Wil brought Dad’s leftover blackberry crumble to the forest with him. Una brought some elk jerky and a thermos of cinnamon-spiced chocolate. She sat with him beneath a spreading oak while he played, although she left before he finished, as it was her turn to clean the workshop.

His guitar always sounds a little melancholy when Una leaves.

The AWOL boy that his mother has taken into their home has been awake for a day now, but he hasn’t come down for anything, even meals. Dad offered to carry him, but Ma said he needed more time.

“Can’t fret over AWOLs,” his father told her. “They never stay long, and they’re too desperate to be grateful.” But Ma just ignores him. She’s taken the boy under her protection, and that is that.

Wil wonders how the boy can sleep when the sun blasts from the windows over his head and the roar of tribal construction in town echoes down the ravine. The boy’s chest rises and falls, and then his legs churn beneath the sheets as if he’s running. Wil is not surprised: AWOLs know much about running. Sometimes he thinks that’s all they know.

Wil is confident the boy will be calmed. Wild animals, rattlesnakes, and feral teenagers go quiet in Wil’s presence. Even when his guitar hangs silent on his back, his presence calms them—perhaps in anticipation of what he’ll deliver. Although Wil’s just a teenager himself, he’s got old-soul style, a storyteller vibe that he got from his grandfather—

But he doesn’t want to think about his grandfather now.

While he considers what music may reach this AWOL, the boy wakes. His wide pupils constrict, revealing pale blue eyes that focus on Wil standing in the doorway.

Wil takes a few steps into the room and sits cross-legged on the mountain-lion skin, swinging his guitar into his lap in a single, practiced movement.

“My name’s Chowilawu,” he tells the boy. “But everyone calls me Wil.”

The boy stares at him guardedly. “I heard you talking yesterday. The medicine woman is your mom?”

He nods. The kid looks about thirteen—three years younger than Wil—but something about his eyes makes him seem like he’s going on one hundred. More old-soul style, but of the world-weary kind. Life has done a number on this AWOL.

“Okay if I play my guitar here?” Wil asks, his voice as gentle as he can make it.

The boy squints suspiciously. “Why?”

Wil shrugs. “It’s easier for me than talking.”

The boy hesitates, chewing on his lip. “Sure, okay.”

It starts that way with them. Being an AWOL breaks kids’ spirits—makes them distrustful of the world. But since they can’t see the trickery in listening to a guitar, or how Wil’s music breaks through barriers that betrayal built, they surrender, listening to his fingers caress the strings, his music finally gives voice to their souls’ sorrow.

His ma took a music-therapy seminar at Johns Hopkins, but she only knows its theories. Wil has seen how music heals since the day he picked up a guitar on his third birthday. Not all the AWOLs and not all ChanceFolk with sick spirits heal, though. Some are too far gone. Too early to tell into which camp this boy will fall.

Wil plays for two straight hours, until he smells lunch and feels the cramp in his back. The AWOL sits on the bed, having been awake and listening the whole time. His arms are wrapped around his legs; his chin rests on his knees; his eyes stare at the blanket. The chords of Wil’s music fade to silence.

“Time to eat.” Wil gets to his feet, his guitar swinging over his shoulder to hang down his back. “Probably soup and cornbread. You coming down?”

The boy reminds him of a rabbit, frozen, trapped between staying or fleeing. Wil waits, letting the quiet hum in widening ripples till the boy unwraps his arms from his legs and gets off the bed, standing straighter than Wil expected he would.

“My name’s Lev. I was a tithe.”

Wil accepts this with a nod and no judgment. Maybe this kid will be okay after all.

3 • Lev

Lev watches Wil wash the dishes after lunch, still thinking about what possessed him to tell Wil that he’s a runaway tithe. Giving out too much information can only make things worse for him. Then a dish towel hits him in the face and drops to the counter.

“Hey.” Lev glares at Wil, wondering if it was thrown in anger. Wil may be big as a bear, but he has a teddy-bear grin.

“You can dry the dishes. Meet me at the end of the hall when you finish.”

Lev never did dishes at home: That was the servants’ job. He’s been sick, too. Who makes sick people dry dishes? Still, he does the job. He owes Wil for the one-man concert. He’d never heard guitar playing like that before—and Lev’s folks were big on the arts, making sure their kids had violin lessons, listening to the Cincinnati Pops most Thursday nights.

But Wil’s music was different. It was . . . real. For two hours, and strictly from memory, Wil played a little Bach, Schubert, and Elton, but he mostly played Spanish guitar.

Lev thought such wild, complex music would be too hard to listen to in his weakened state, but it was just the opposite. The music lulled him until it seemed to sing through his synapses: notes rising, sweetening, spinning in perfect synchronicity with his thoughts.

He hangs the towel after he finishes drying the dishes, and thinks about going back to his room, but he’s curious about Wil. He finds him at the end of the hall, closing his bedroom door and putting on a light jacket. He looks somehow incomplete without his guitar. Evidently, Wil feels the same. His hand fingers the doorknob; then with a sigh he opens the door again and retrieves his guitar, and a jacket for Lev, too.

“Are we going somewhere?” Lev asks.

“Here and there.” Which seems a logical answer for a guy like Wil, but the answer makes Lev think about being unwound. The dispersal of every piece of him. Here and there. Lev climbed the rez wall desperate for some sort of sanctuary, but what if he put too much faith in rumors?

“Is it true that reservations are safe for AWOLs?” he asks. “Is it true that People of Chance don’t unwind?”

Wil nods. “We never signed the Unwind Accord. So not only don’t we unwind, we also can’t use unwound parts.”

Lev mulls that over, baffled at how a society could work without harvesting organs. “So . . . where do you get parts?”

“Nature provides,” Wil says. “Sometimes.” An enigmatic look crosses Wil’s face like a shadow behind his eyes. “C’mon, I’ll show you around the rez.”

Moments later they stand on an open balcony, staring down almost four stories to a dry creek below. Across the ravine are other houses, also hewn right out of the red stone wall. They appear to be of ancient design, yet somehow modern and carved with diamond precision. New-world technology serving ancestral respect.

“Not scared of heights, are you?” Wil doesn’t wait for an answer, but makes sure his guitar strap has his instrument secure on his back, then hops on a rope ladder. He climbs down, sometimes sliding for yards at a time.

Lev swallows nervously, but not as nervously as he might have three weeks ago. Lately he’s been doing plenty of dangerous things. He waits till Wil reaches the bottom; then he grits his teeth and follows him. With his left wrist still in a brace, it’s hard, and his stomach rolls every time he looks down, but Lev grins when he reaches bottom, realizing why Wil made him do this. The first thing an AWOL loses is his dignity. By allowing Lev to climb the rope alone, Wil gave his dignity back to him.

When Lev turns to Wil, he’s surprised to see that they’re not alone.

“Lev, this is my uncle Pivane.”

Lev cautiously shakes the large man’s hand, keeping an eye on the shiny tranq rifle cradled in his left arm. His deerskins are worn, and the long graying hair escaping from its rawhide knot makes him look scruffy—but there is no mistaking the designer quality of his boots or the Swiss watch on his wrist. And that rifle with its fine zebrawood stock was probably custom-made.

“How did today’s hunt go?” Wil asks. It should be a casual question, but Lev catches how intently Wil looks at his uncle.

“Tranq’d a lioness, but had to let her go: She was nursing.” Pivane rubs his eyes. “We’re heading to Cash Out Gulch in the morning. Rumors of a male down there. You coming with us for once?”

Wil doesn’t answer, and Lev wonders at the sly look Pivane gives his nephew. Lev assumed all ChanceFolk hunted, but maybe that’s just a myth. Just like everything else in his life has been.

Pivane spares a glance at Lev. “You look better than when I found you. That arm okay?”

“Yeah. Better. Thanks for saving me.” Lev can’t remember being rescued. He can’t remember much after dropping off the wall except the sharp pain in his wrist, then lying in the leaves and pine needles, certain that this was what dying felt like.

Pivane’s gaze sharpens on Wil’s guitar. “Are you going down to the medical warren today? Are you going to visit your grandfather?”

“Maybe not” is all Wil says.

The man’s voice roughens, becoming almost an accusation. “Medicine folk and musicians don’t get to choose who their hands heal. Or whose way they smooth for dying.” Then he points a finger at Wil. “You do it for him, Chowilawu.” A moment of uneasy eye contact between them; then Pivane takes a step back and shifts his rifle. “Tell your grandfather we’ll bag a heart for him tomorrow.” Then he nods a solemn good-bye to Lev and leaves, using not the ropes but an elevator that Lev did not see, and Wil did not see fit to show him.

•

They walk into the village. Lev, so used to bland sienna suburbia, feels out of place among the red cliff homes, the whitewashed adobes, and the sidewalks of rich mahogany planks. Although the place appears at first to be primitive, Lev knows upper crust when he sees it, from the luxury cars parked on the side streets to the gold plaques embedded in the adobe walls. Men and women wear business suits that are clearly Chance-Folk in style, yet finer than the best designer fashions.

“What do your people do here?”

Wil throws him an amused look. “My people as in ‘Slot-Mongers’ in general, or are you asking about my family in particular?”

Lev reddens, wondering if the medicine woman told Wil how he’d accidently called the ChanceFolk by the rude slang name. “Both, I guess.”

“Didn’t do your homework before scaling our wall?”

“I needed a place to hide and had no time to be choosy. A kid at a train station told me that since your people are protected, I would be protected too. And that you know the legal mumbo jumbo to make it stick.”

Wil relents and offers Lev a brief history of the tribe. “When my grandfather was a kid, the rez made a bundle—not just from gaming, but from some lawsuits over land usage, a water treatment plant, a wind farm that went haywire, and casinos we didn’t want but got stuck with when another tribe rolled on us.” He shrugs uncomfortably. “Luck of the draw. We’ve got it better than some tribes.”

Lev looks down the street, where the curbs gleam with gold. “Way better, by the look of it.”

“Yah,” says Wil, looking both embarrassed and proud at the same time. “Some tribes did wise investing with their casino cash; others squandered it. Then, when the virtual casinos got ritzier than the real ones and it all came crashing down, tribes like ours did very well. We’re a Hi-Rez. You’re lucky you didn’t jump the wall of a Low-Rez. They’re much more likely to sell AWOLs to parts pirates.”

Lev has, of course, heard of the wealth chasm between the rich tribes and the poor ones, but as it was never a part of his world, he never gave it much thought. Maybe people this rich don’t need to profit off AWOLs. Still, he tries not to let his spark of hope ignite. He has quickly learned that hope is a luxury the hunted can ill afford.

“Anyway,” says Wil, “my tribe knows the law and how to use it. In fact my dad’s a lawyer, and has done pretty well for our family. My mom runs the pediatrics lodge in the medical warren and is well respected. We get rich tribal kids from all over North America coming here for healing.”

Lev wonders at the irony in Wil’s voice but feels awkward about asking him more questions. His mother always told him it was rude to talk about money, especially if you didn’t know the person well. But on the other hand, after listening to Wil play the guitar for him, he feels he knows him better than much of his own family.

Wil stops before a small storefront at the end of the street. A carved oak sign says LUTHIER. He tries the handle, but it’s locked. “Huh. I wanted to introduce you to my fiancée, but I guess she’s taking a break.”

“Fiancée?”

“Yah,” says Wil. “It’s like that around here.”

Lev looks up at the sign above the door, feeling increasingly ignorant. “So . . . what’s a luthier?”

“Guitar maker. Una is an apprentice to the rez’s best.”

“You mean there’s more than one?”

“It’s kind of a tribal specialty.” Wil looks around, clearly disappointed, and Lev realizes this was less about showing him around than about showing him off to his fiancée. “Ready to go back yet?”

But Lev is tired of hibernating at Wil’s house. Besides, if that petition is approved, this could be his new home. The thought gives him a strange chill: excitement laced with fear of a future so new and unknown. There have never been unknown quantities in his life. Until a few weeks ago, everything was carefully laid out for him, so he never needed to consider the concept of possibilities. But now there are possibilities enough to make him dizzy.

“Show me more. How about your schools? What kind of school would I go to?”

Wil shakes his head, laughing. “You really don’t know anything about us, do you?”

Lev doesn’t dignify that with a response—he just waits for an explanation.

“Very young kids learn what they need to know from extended family and the neighborhood elders,” Wil explains. “Then, as their talents and passions are recognized, they’re apprenticed to a master in the field, whatever that field is.”

“Seems kind of narrow to learn only one thing.”

“We learn many things, from many people,” Wil says, “as opposed to your world, where you’re taught all the same things, by the same people.”

Lev nods, point taken. “Advantages and disadvantages to both, I guess.”

Lev thinks Wil will just defend his tribe’s ways, but instead he says, “Agreed.” Then he adds, “I don’t always like the way things are done here, but the way we learn works for us. It even prepares kids for university every bit as well as your system. We learn because we want to, not because we have to, so we learn faster. We learn deeper.”

Then Lev hears a young voice behind him.

“Chowilawu?”

Lev turns around to see three kids, maybe about ten years old, staring admiringly at Wil. The kid who spoke is skinny as an arrow, and just as tightly wound. He has a pleading look on his face.

“Something wrong, Kele?” Wil asks.

“No . . . it’s just . . . Elder Muna asks if you’ll play for us.”

Wil sighs but grins, as if he feels put upon and flattered at the same time. “Elder Muna knows I’m not permitted to play lightly. There must be a need.”

“It’s Nova,” Kele says, indicating a girl beside him, her eyes downcast. “Ever since her father divorced his spirit-guide, her parents have been fighting.”

“It’s bad,” Nova blurts out. “My ma says she married an eagle, not a possum—but he was the only accountant in his office who wasn’t a possum. So now they fight.”

Lev wants to laugh, but realizes that this is no laughing matter.

“So shouldn’t I play for your parents, not you?” Wil asks her.

“They won’t ask,” Nova says. “But maybe some of what you give me will rub off on them.”

Wil looks to Lev, offers him a shrug, and agrees to perform. “Not too long,” he tells them. “Our new mahpee can’t have too much excitement on his first waking day.”

Lev looks at him, puzzled.

“Mahpee is short for ‘sky faller.’ It’s what we call AWOLs who climb the wall and drop into the rez as if they’ve fallen from the sky.”

Elder Muna, a white-haired woman, meets them at the door a few streets away, clasping Wil’s hands with both of hers, asking him about his parents. Lev looks around the round room with its many windows. The maps on the walls and the computer stations make the place resemble a classroom, but only slightly. A dozen children mill about in what appears to be total mayhem: Two argue over a helix on one monitor, one child traces a path on a map of Africa, four act out a play that could be Macbeth if Lev remembers his Shakespeare correctly, and except for the three who have shanghaied Wil, the rest are playing some complicated game on the floor with a pile of pebbles.

Elder Muna claps once, and the children instantly look her way, see Wil, and swarm him. He shoos them away, and they stampede to the center of the room, jostling for the best place on the floor. Wil settles on a stool, and all the kids start shouting their favorites at him. But Elder Muna silences them with a raised hand.

“The gift is for Nova today. She will choose.”

“The Crow and Sparrow song,” Nova says, trying to hide her delight with a solemn expression.

The song is markedly different from the music Wil played for Lev. This tune is bright and joyous, evoking perhaps a different kind of healing. Lev closes his eyes and imagines himself a bird flitting through summer leaves in an orchard that seems to go on forever. The music captures, if only for a few moments, a sense of an innocence recently lost.

When the song is done, Lev raises his hands to clap, but Elder Muna, anticipating this, gently takes his hand before he can, and shakes her head no.

The group of kids sits in silence for a good thirty seconds, filled with the aftermath of the song. Then the elder releases them, and they all go back to their games and learning.

She thanks Wil and wishes Lev luck with his new journey, and they leave.

“You really are amazing,” Lev tells him once they’re out on the street. “I bet you could make millions outside the rez with your music.”

“It would be nice,” Wil says wistfully, almost sadly. “But we both know that’s not going to happen.”

Lev wonders at his sadness, because it seems to him if you never have to worry about unwinding, you can do anything. “Why no applause?” he asks. “Are people here that afraid of clappers?”

Wil laughs at that. “Believe it or not, we don’t have clappers on the rez. I’d like to believe that’s because people here don’t get angry enough to become suicide bombers and make their blood explosive . . . but maybe it’s just that we vent our anger at the world in different ways.” Then he sighs and says, with more than a little bitterness, “No, we don’t applaud because it’s not our way. Applause is for the musician, and the musician is ‘just an instrument.’ Accepting applause is considered vanity.” Then he looks at his guitar, stroking the strings with his fingertips, peering into its hollow, like maybe something will speak out from inside. “Every night I dream of cheering crowds and wake up guilty for it.”

“Don’t be,” Lev tells him. “Where I come from, everyone wants to be cheered for something. It’s normal.”

“Ready to go back?”

Lev isn’t sure whether he means Wil’s home or back to the world outside of the rez. Well, Lev isn’t ready to do either. He points down a winding path. “What’s down there?”

Wil huffs, his mood clearly darkened by Lev’s talk of adoration. “Why do you need to see everything? Maybe there are some places it’s best not to go!”

Lev stares at the ground, feeling more hurt by the rebuke than he wants to admit.

When he looks up, Wil is staring with pain at the cliffs on the other side of the village, then down the winding path. “The medical warren is down there,” he tells Lev. “It’s where my mother works.”

And then Lev recalls something. “And where your grandfather is?”

Wil nods, saying nothing for a moment . . . and then he takes off his guitar and leaves it hidden behind a boulder. “Come on. I’ll take you there.”

Lost in thought, Wil walks down the cobblestone road. His face looks grim, and Lev leaves him alone, wrapped in memories of his own. Clappers remind him of the last time he saw Connor and Risa, and guilt prickles him. They had rescued him, and in his own uneasy ambivalence between his past and his future, he had betrayed them. Connor and Risa had pretended to be clappers, solemnly applauding in grand, rhythmic sweeps—and it caused a panic. They had escaped. He hopes. The truth is, he has no idea what befell them. They could be unwound by now. In a “divided state.” The more he thinks about it, the more he despises that euphemism.

The road curves outside the village toward the wide fissure in the cliff and dips into a gulch filled with gleaming one-story buildings separated by greenbelts.

“This first building is the pediatrics lodge,” Wil explains tersely as they pass. Wil doesn’t stop, but Lev peers through the windows and into the patios, hoping to see the medicine woman. He sees other healers and groups of children, but not Wil’s ma.

Lev shoots a look at Wil and sees his eyes glued on someone ahead: a short girl with warm almond eyes, a cascade of feathers woven into her vest, and a faint smile that reminds Lev of Risa. She is standing in front of another medical lodge, stalling at the door, when she catches sight of Wil.

Even before they speak, Lev realizes that this must be Wil’s fiancée. There’s a connection between them perhaps even more powerful than Wil’s connection with his guitar. As Wil approaches her, Lev thinks they might kiss, but instead Wil reaches for the beaded ribbon restraining her hair and unties it, sending her shiny black locks cascading down her shoulders.

“Much better,” he says, with the slightest of smiles.

“Not for the workshop,” she points out. “It’ll wrap around a saw blade, and my head will get cut off.”

“Now that’s what I call unwinding!” Wil says with a smirk. She gives him a glare that’s more like a visual rim shot, and he laughs.

“Una, this is Lev. Lev, Una.”

“Hi.”

“Nice to meet you, Lev.” She snatches at Wil’s hand, but as he’s a foot taller than her, he easily holds the ribbon out of reach. “Give it to me, Guitar Boy.” Then, as if she’s had years of practice, she leaps and yanks it from his hand. “Ha!” Winking at Lev, she says, “Take notes, little brother. If you hang with this one, you’ll need that move.”

Lev isn’t sure why she’s calling him little brother, but he feels pleased.

Una studies Wil. “Is your uncle back?”

Something intense passes between them. Lev notices that this long, narrow lodge has CARDIOLOGY carved in large wood letters above the door.

“Yah,” Wil says. “Didn’t find anything. So are you here to see my grandfather?”

“Someone has to,” she says. “He’s been here for weeks, and how many times have you visited?”

“Stop it, Una. It’s bad enough I get it from my family.”

“You get it because you deserve it.”

“Well, I’m visiting now, aren’t I?”

“Then where’s your guitar?”

Something crumples in Wil’s face, and Lev looks sideways, not wanting to see the tears building in his eyes. “Una, I can’t do it. He wants me to soothe him into death. I just can’t do it!”

“It doesn’t mean he’ll actually die.”

Wil’s voice gets louder. “He’s waiting for me when he should be waiting for a heart.”

And although Lev knows none of the particulars, he touches Wil on the arm to get his attention and says, “Maybe he’s waiting for both . . . but he’ll accept one if he can’t have the other.”

Wil looks at him like he’s seeing him for the first time, and Una smiles. “Well said, little brother,” says Una. “I suspect if you were one of us, your spirit-guide would be an owl.”

Lev feels himself go just the tiniest bit red. “More like a deer in the headlights.”

Lev follows them inside and to the far end of the building, where a spacious round room is subdivided into four open enclaves. It feels less like a hospital and more like a spa. There are large windows framed in rough-hewn wood. Blooming flowers decorate the walls, and in the very center is a fountain gently drizzling water over a copper sculpture made to look like a stylized dream catcher. There is state-of-the-art medical equipment in each enclave, but discreetly placed, as not to disturb the calming nature of the place.

Of the four beds, only two are occupied. In the one closest to the door rests a young woman who breathes irregularly, her lips tinged blue. In the farthest bed is a gaunt old man, who looks tall even lying down. Lev stalls in the hallway with Wil and Una until Wil takes a deep breath and leads the way in, mustering a smile.

His grandfather is awake. Seeing them, he chuckles delightedly, but the laugh turns into a ragged cough.

“Grandfather, this is Ma’s patient Lev. Lev, this is my grandfather, Tocho.”

“Please sit,” Tocho says. “Keep standing around me and I’ll feel like I’m already dead.”

Lev sits with the others but scoots his plush chair slightly back, disturbed at how pasty the old man looks, his face drawn and his breathing ragged. Lev sees the family resemblance, and it unnerves him that this frail man probably looked like Wil sixty years ago. This man is dying for lack of a heart. It reminds Lev of the heart he might have provided someone. Did a person die because Lev kept his heart for himself? There’s still a part of him that wants to feel guilty for that, and it makes him angry.

Wil picks up his grandfather’s hand. “Uncle Pivane says he’ll bag a mountain lion tomorrow.”

“Always tomorrow with that one,” Tocho says. “And I suppose you’ll play for me tomorrow too?”

Wil reluctantly nods. Lev notices how he won’t meet the old man’s gaze. “I don’t have my guitar today. But yes, tomorrow for sure.”

Then Tocho wags a finger at Wil. “And no more talk of changing my guide to a pig.” He smiles hugely. “Not happ’nin’.”

Lev looks to Wil. “Pig?”

“Nova’s dad isn’t the only one who divorced his spirit-guide. My dad writes petitions to the Tribal Council all the time asking to switch people’s animal spirit-guides to something more . . . helpful. It’s no big deal.”

Tocho’s expression is mutinous. “Big deal to me. Lion chose me.” He turns weakly to Lev. “My grandson thinks I should change my spirit-guide to a pig, just so I can have a new heart quick and easy. What do you think?”

Wil throws Lev a forbidding look, but Una nods at Lev, giving him silent permission to voice an opinion. But how can he have an opinion? “This is all new to me,” Lev says. “I don’t think I would want an animal part . . . but sir, I think whatever lets you keep your dignity is the right thing to do.”

Wil’s frown is so severe, Lev backpedals.

“But on the other hand, a pig heart would be okay if it works. If I eat pork chops, I can’t object to you using its heart, can I?”

The old man starts to laugh-cough again.

“Uh . . . maybe I should wait outside.” Lev starts to get up, ready to make his escape, but Una stops him.

“You’ll do no such thing. It’s refreshing to hear an outsider’s view. Isn’t it, Wil?”

Wil considers it. “We can learn things from the outside, just as they can learn things from us. And if an old tradition ends your life before its time, then what good is it?” Then he turns to Lev, making him the mediator once more. “Not many mountain lions on the rez anymore, Lev. But there are plenty of pigs, mustangs, and sheep. It makes no sense to insist on a part from his animal spirit-guide. Choosing a different animal is simple logic. Shouldn’t a flush of logic beat a straight of tradition?”

Lev has no idea how to answer—and then he realizes he can fake his way out of this. “Neither,” he says. “In games of chance nobody wins but the house.”

A beat of silence, and Una throws her head back and laughs. “Definitely an owl,” she says.

Tocho locks his eyes on Wil. “I will hear you play tomorrow,” he says. “You will smooth the path of dying for me. You shame me by refusing. You shame yourself.”

“I will play for your healing only, Grandfather,” Wil says. “After you have a new heart.”

The old man stares stonily at his grandson, his earlier good humor gone. He turns toward the window, shutting them out. The visit is over.

•

“While your people focused on the business and science of unwinding, the tribal nations’ scientists worked on perfecting animal-to-human transplant technology,” Wil tells Lev on the way back to Wil’s cliff-side home. Una left Wil with a halfhearted kiss on the cheek and returned to the luthier workshop. Wil waited until she was gone before he retrieved his guitar. “We overcame organ rejection and other problems caused by interspecies transplant. The only thing we can’t use is animal brain tissue. Animals don’t think the way we do, and it just doesn’t take.”

“How come you didn’t share with our scientists?” Lev asks.

Wil looks at him as if it’s a stupid question. Maybe it is.

“We did. They weren’t interested,” Wil tells him. “In fact, your people condemned it as unethical, immoral, and just plain sick.”

Lev has to admit that a part of him—the part that was indoctrinated into a world where tithing and unwinding were accepted—agrees. Funny how morality, which always seems so black and white, can be influenced so completely by what you were raised to believe.

“Anyway,” Wil continues, “our legal powerhouse crafted an intricate set of laws, based on traditional belief systems, for using this technology. When ChanceFolk come of age, they take a vision quest and discover their spirit-guide, which can be anything from a bird to an insect to a larger animal. Of course, after the Council transplant laws came down, it was amazing how many kids, coached by their parents, came up with pig guides.”

Lev doesn’t quite get it until Wil explains that, aside from primates, pigs are biologically closest to humans. “Mountain lion is a worse case,” Wil says. “Endangered, vastly different biology than humans, and on top of it carnivores weren’t created to last as long as plant eaters so the hearts give out quickly.”

“So what’s your spirit-guide?” Lev asks.

Wil laughs. “I’m even more screwed if ever I need an organ. It was a crow that spoke to me.” And then he becomes silent for a moment. Pensive. The way he gets when he plays. “They call my music a gift but treat it like an obligation. I am shameful if I don’t use it the way they see fit.” He spits, leaving a dark spot on a boulder as they pass. “I would never accept a human part, little brother . . . but there are many things your world has to offer that I would take.”

“Like a cheering crowd?”

Wil considers it. “Like . . . being appreciated.”

4 • Wil

Wil knows he’s opened up too much to Lev. An AWOL is supposed to open up to them, to find solace in their acceptance, not the other way around. He vows to shutter his heart a little more securely.

The next day, Wil’s spooning out breakfast porridge for Lev and himself when his father calls. Ma takes the call in the study, expecting bad news, but then comes out to put it on speaker because it turns out to be the kind of news everyone should hear.

“We bagged a mountain lion a half hour out in today’s hunt,” Wil hears his father say. “Pivane is already harvesting his heart.”

Intense relief reverberates through the house. Even Lev, who met Grandfather only once, seems overjoyed.

“Wil, go now and tell your grandfather,” Ma says. “And be quick about it. For once, good news will travel faster than bad.”

Wil grabs his guitar and asks Lev to come along. He even takes Lev in the elevator rather than making him struggle down the ropes.

•

“You’re a stubborn man, Grandfather, but you finally got your lion heart!” he says, swinging his guitar around, ready to play some healing tunes even before the transplant.

“Stubbornness is a family trait,” the old man says flatly. Wil notices that his grandfather is looking at Lev, not because he’s giving Lev his attention but because he’s avoiding eye contact with Wil. It makes Wil uneasy.

“What’s wrong, Grandfather? I thought you’d be happy.”

“I would be, if the heart were mine.”

“Excuse me?”

Grandfather twitches a finger at the crowd around the other patient’s bed. Wil barely noticed them when he came in, so intent was he on giving Grandfather the news—but apparently the news had already reached him. The woman in the other bed is in her late twenties or early thirties. The family around her seems very happy in spite of her dire condition.

“The heart is to be hers,” Grandfather says. “I’ve already decided.”

Wil stands up so quickly that the chair crashes backward. “What are you saying?”

“I’m a poor risk, Chowilawu. Too old for it to make sense when there’s someone younger with a better chance of survival. Her spirit-guide is the lion too.”

“It was found by your family,” Wil fiercely announces, loud enough for the woman to hear. Good. He wants them to know. “It was found by your family, which means it is meant to be yours and no one else’s.”

His grandfather’s gaze drifts again to Lev, and that makes Wil angry. “Don’t look at him. He’s not one of us.”

“An outsider is objective. His will be the clearest opinion.”

Lev takes a step backward, clearly not wanting to be a part of this any more than Wil wants him to be.

“It’s your heart” is all Lev says.

Wil is about to relax, relieved to have Lev on his side, until Grandfather says, “You see? The boy agrees with me.”

“What?” both Wil and Lev say in unison.

“It’s my heart,” Grandfather explains. “Which means I have full legal right to decide what happens to it. And I chose to gift it to the young woman over there. I will hear no further discussion.”

Fury and grief nearly overwhelm Wil. He storms out of the cardiology lodge—but there is no escaping this. Word of Grandfather’s decision reaches the rest of the family quickly. Within the hour, while Wil still stews and storms outside, ignoring Lev’s attempts to calm him, his family begins to arrive: his parents, then Uncle Pivane and his family. He sees Grandfather’s closest friends arrive. He sees Una. They’ve all been called to give the old man their good-byes. They’ve come for the final vigil.

“Do it for him,” Ma says gently as she enters the cardiology lodge. “Please, Wil, do it.”

He waits outside until everyone has gone in, even Lev. Then he takes the long walk down the hallway toward the round room at the end. The blue-lipped woman is wheeled past him, followed by her family. She is already prepped for surgery.

Inside the room his family sits on chairs and on the floor. Lev has held a chair for Wil. His grandfather’s weary eyes are fixed on him as he takes his spot. He begins to play. At first he plays healing songs, but the tempo is too fast. He’s playing them too desperately. No one stops him. Then, in time, the songs evolve into traveling threnodies: tunes meant to ease one’s passage from this world to the next.

Over the next few hours Wil melts so completely into the music that his family ignores his presence. He hardly listens as they all say their good-byes, or as his grandfather speaks about the spirit’s journey from its failing temple to other realms. He ignores Lev, who appears more out of place than ever with the family. Una crouches next to Lev near the window, listening to Wil play, but he won’t look at her. Wil catches a glimpse of his dad’s face, etched with sorrow. His father still wears his hunting gear, as does Uncle Pivane, although his uncle is stained with the animal’s blood. There is the smell of a bonfire coming from outside the lodge, the giving of thanks, the exuberant singing of the young woman’s family.

As the day wears on toward twilight, Tocho almost seems to dissolve before them, giving in to the call from beyond. Then, very near the end, he reaches out to stop Wil from playing, motioning him closer.

He has one last request for Wil, and he whispers it with long spaces between the words. Wil agrees, because he hasn’t the strength to argue about tomorrow, because his grandfather has only today.

The promise made, Wil loses himself in the music again, faintly aware of his ma in her hospital whites solemnly taking his grandfather’s vitals and shaking her head. Wil plays as his grandfather’s breathing slows. Wil plays as his uncle Pivane quietly weeps. Wil plays, the music of his guitar covering everything, until it carries his grandfather’s soul to a place Wil cannot see. And when Wil finally lifts his fingers from his instrument, there is nothing but overwhelming silence.

5 • Lev

In the very center of the rez, miles from its many villages, sprawl the ChanceFolk burial grounds. Many families have adopted the Western use of caskets, more traditional ones bury their dead wrapped in a blanket, and some still invoke the most ancient ritual of all. Although levels of tradition in Wil’s family are very mixed, his grandfather was as old-school as they come. His funeral is of the ancient kind.

Tocho is placed on a high platform made of cottonwood and heaped with boughs of juniper. Reed baskets, decorated with lion teeth, are filled with food for the afterlife and hung from poles. A fire is lit, and smoke leaps into the wind. Lev watches carefully, storing the memory.

“Our ancestors believed that the breath of the dead moves to the Lower World,” Una explains to him.

Lev is shocked. “Lower World?”

“Not hell,” Una says, understanding what he’s thinking. “It’s the place where spirits dwell. Down or up—neither of those directions has much meaning in the afterlife.”

Lev can’t help but notice Wil standing apart from everyone else, as if he’s suddenly the outsider. “Why isn’t Wil taking part in the ceremony?” Lev asks Una.

“Wil followed our traditions because he loved his grandfather. Now he must decide for himself whether to follow the traditions or not. And so must you.”

Lev first thinks she’s joking. “Me?”

“When your residence petition is approved, you will be an adopted son of the tribe. In addition to protecting you from your unwind order, the adoption will make this your official home. Like everyone else here, you’ll eventually choose on which side of the rez wall your spirit belongs.”

Lev tries his best to wrap his mind around this. He hasn’t thought that far ahead: finding a safe place he can truly call home.

“Wil’s grandfather gave you a gift, Lev,” Una tells him.

Lev can’t begin to imagine what it might be. Anticipation stirs in him.

“He gave the same gift to Wil, but Wil doesn’t know it yet. You see, on his deathbed Tocho asked Wil to take you on a vision quest.”

Suddenly the wind changes, and their eyes tear from the smoke.

•

There is a communal quest in ten days’ time, and Lev is added to the group of boys and girls, to honor Tocho’s dying wish. Wil joins them as well, also to honor his grandfather’s final request.

The vision quest starts with a sweat lodge. It’s total chaos trying to keep almost a dozen ten- and eleven-year-olds occupied while sitting around hot rocks being steamed nearly to death. They drink gallons of salted cactus tea and leave the sweltering heat of the lodge only to pee, which isn’t often, since they sweat out almost everything they drink.

Lev, who always felt the youngest of any group he was in, is now the oldest. As if he didn’t already feel out of place.

After the sweat lodge, they hike into the mountains. No food on a quest either: just thick, noxious drinks that taste like weeds.

“The sweating and fasting prepare the body for the vision quest,” Wil tells him. Pivane is in charge of the quest, with Wil as a reluctant sidekick. “Of course, my uncle and I get real food,” he adds, almost taunting. Lev knows Wil is here only because he promised his grandfather.

On the first night, one kid has a vision that he tells the others at breakfast the next day. A pig spirit led him to a courthouse and told him he’d be a judge.

“He’s lying,” announces Kele, the skinny, hyper kid who often seems to speak for the others. “How much you wanna bet his parents told him to say that?”

Wil begins to call the boy out on it, but Pivane raises his hand and lets it go.

“If the boy has a true vision,” Lev overhears Pivane tell Wil, “he will choose it over the lie.”

On the next day, there is an archery competition. Luckily for Lev, he took a liking to archery a few years back and placed silver in a citywide competition. Unfortunately, that doesn’t help him here. He takes last place.

On the third day, Lev falls and tweaks his wrist again. He has forgotten what clean feels like, and he’s covered with mosquito bites. He’s miserable and uncomfortable, and his head is pounding.

So why then does he find this to be the happiest week of his life?

Every night they build a fire, and Wil plays his guitar. It is the highlight of the day. So are the stories that Pivane tells: traditional folktales. Some are funny and some are strange. Lev likes to watch the kids around him lean close to the storyteller, their eyes wide with wonder.

On the fourth day, everyone is antsy. Lev isn’t sure if it’s the effects of not eating or a storm brewing in the mountains to the north. The kids are simmering at breakfast in the muggy stillness. When Ahote spills his weed drink on Lansa, the two boys fight with such fury it takes the combined might of Lev, Wil, and Pivane to separate them.

It doesn’t help that Lev feels like he’s being watched. He stares into the forest every time a bird erupts from a tree or a twig cracks. He knows it’s probably nothing, but all the uneasiness from his time as an AWOL still has him paranoid. His twitchiness spreads to the younger kids, till Pivane finally sends him off for a break.

At first it’s a relief to be alone in the small pup tent, but soon the deerskin walls press down on him and the smell of dirty socks drives him outside. He can hear the others washing the breakfast mugs in the clearing. Chin low, he sits cross-legged, ChanceFolk style, in the small thicket of tents, wishing the storm would finally break and get it over with.

“Lev?”

Looking up, he sees Kele fidgeting in front of him. Kele sits down, but he won’t look directly at Lev at first. When he finally does, Kele says, “I had my vision last night.”

Lev doesn’t know what to say. He wonders why Kele came to him rather than Pivane or Wil.

“So you saw your spirit-guide?” Kele seems stuck on what to say next, so Lev prompts him. “It wasn’t a pig, was it?”

“No . . .” Kele draws the word out. “It was a sparrow, like my name.”

Lev is struck by this. Seems right that the spirit-guide would mean something special to a kid, unless of course it’s to be a source of organ replacements.

“So what happened?”

“Something bad.” The boy whispers so quietly that Lev has to lean forward to hear him.

“What was bad?” All the fears that have been haunting him this morning return.

“I don’t know.” Kele looks at him, nervously crushing leaves to powder. “But I saw you leaving. You won’t, will you?”

Lev feels as if an arrow has hit him in the chest, and he can’t breathe. He tries to remember what Wil told him. The hunger and the sweating can cause hallucinations and strange dreams. Or maybe someone suggested to Kele that mahpees always leave, and so he dreamed it.

“I’m not leaving,” he says, and he’s reassuring himself just as much as Kele.

“In the vision you were running,” Kele tells him. “People wanted to hurt you . . . and you wanted to hurt them back.”

6 • Wil

Earlier that morning, Wil told Pivane he was going off to gather firewood, but in reality he just needed to get away. Find a place to think. Now he sits on a cliff-side boulder that gives him a fine view of the forest and a clearer perspective on his life. He can see the camp from here, or at least part of it, and although he does intend to come back with firewood, he doesn’t intend to do it for a while.

Wil can no longer deny the resentment building inside of him; it’s been building since long before his grandfather’s funeral. Wil, play us a song for healing. Wil, play us a song for calming. Wil, play us a song for celebration, for soothing, for patience, for wisdom. The tribe has used him like a music machine. No more. He doesn’t have an on/off switch. Maybe it’s time he played music for a different reason, one of his choosing.

And so when this vision quest is over, and he has fulfilled his promise to his grandfather, even if Lev stays, Wil will not. He resolves that it is time for him to leave the rez and blaze a fresh future for himself, and for Una, too . . . if she decides she loves him more than she loves the rez.

7 • Lev

Lev tries not to shudder at the prospect of Kele’s vision. Lev has dreamed of himself running too. And he’s dreamed of revenge. Not against anyone in particular, but everyone at once. The world at large. It’s a feeling as dark as the storm clouds on the horizon, and it won’t be easy to dispel.

“We’re in the rez, surrounded by walls and laws that protect us,” he tells Kele with more confidence than he feels. “There’s no one to run from here,” he adds, more to himself than to Kele.

Then, barely a moment after the words are out of his mouth, something cracks in the woods again—and this time he hears screaming. High-pitched shrieks of surprise. Maybe even terror.

Lev launches himself toward the clearing, with Kele on his heels. The kids are standing, staring at Pivane, who lies facedown in the dirt.

A tranq bullet whistles by Lev’s ear and embeds in a log inches away from Kele’s foot.

“Get down!” he yells, and pushes Kele to the ground, his arm shielding him. The other kids follow his lead, diving to the ground just as a storm of tranqs flies through the camp. Frantically Lev looks around for Wil, but doesn’t see him anywhere.

It’s all up to Lev.

He’s only a couple of years older, but the rez kids are looking to him for help. He shifts to protect mode, as he once did for CyFi.

While scanning the surrounding trees, frantic thoughts jostle for attention: They’ve found me. They’re taking me to harvest camp. I’ll be tithed after all. And although he’s scared, his anger overwhelms the fear. This is supposed to be a sanctuary. ChanceFolk are supposed to be protected. But are mahpees? Maybe someone on the rez turned him in before his petition to the Council could be signed.

Kele shifts impatiently under his arm. “Why don’t we shoot back?”

But Lev has no idea where Pivane’s tranq rifle is—and even if he had it, he has no idea where to shoot.

“Stay here,” he orders Kele and the others. “Don’t move till I tell you.” Then, like a soldier, Lev uses his toes and elbows to crawl low across the clearing. One of the kids has a tranq flag in his leg and is unconscious. Another got hit in the back. The rest are okay. Where the hell is Wil?

His ear pressed to the ground, Lev feels the tramp of feet, and into the clearing stride three men in dirty battle fatigues, mismatched as if they found their clothes in a thrift store. The three are barely men. They seem no older than nineteen or twenty. They are not ChanceFolk—they’re outsiders.

One of the kids—the youngest girl in the group—gets up to run.

“Pakwa, no!” Lev yells.

Too late. The lead pirate, with a quick flick of his wrist, fires his pistol, tranqing her in the back of the neck, and she goes down, unconscious.

“Well, well, well,” the leader says. He’s tough, missing an ear, and he handles his gun like he was born with it. Van Gogh, thinks Lev. Cut his ear off for the woman he loved. But Lev imagines that this guy’s ear was cut off by someone else. Probably in a fight. The second guy is squinty-eyed, like either he’s got bad eyesight or he’s so used to glaring at people that his eyes stayed that way. The third guy has big teeth and a straggly beard, that taken together, make him look like a goat. “What a lovely nest of SlotMongers we’ve found,” says Van Gogh.

Lev, his mouth dry, gets up to face the attackers, putting himself between them and the kids on the ground.

“This kid’s sienna!” says the goat, stating the obvious.

Van Gogh is amused. “One wonders what a nice sienna boy is doing running with SlotMongers.” The guy sounds like he was raised in high-class boarding schools, but he looks as ragged and hungry as the others.

“Exchange program,” Lev says. “I hope you know that violence against People of Chance on their own rez is punishable by death.” Lev doesn’t know if this is true, but if it’s not, it should be. “Leave now and we’ll forget this ever happened.”

“Shut it!” says Squints, taking aim at Lev with his tranq pistol.

“These ’Mongers are all underage,” says the goat.

“Which means their parts are worth even more on the black market.” Van Gogh reaches down and tousles Kele’s hair. “Isn’t that right, lambchop?”

Kele pulls away and smacks his hand. Squints raises his gun to tranq him, but Van Gogh doesn’t let him.

“We’ve wasted enough ammo. Save it until we need it.”

Lev tries to swallow his fear. If there was any doubt as to what these lowlifes were, it’s gone. They are hunters of human flesh. Parts pirates.

“Take me,” Lev says, hardly believing he’s saying it. “I’m the one you want. I’m a tithe, which means I’m worth more on the black market than other AWOLs.”

Van Gogh grins. “But not nearly as much as the right little SlotMonger.”

Suddenly there’s the pfft of a tranq shot, and Squints’s eyes go uncharacteristically wide before he falls to the ground, with the flag of a tranq in his back. A tranq fired by a custom-made zebrawood rifle.

8 • Wil

At the first sound of a rifle crack, Wil’s attention snapped to the clearing. He saw Pivane fall to the ground, and Wil was instantly on his feet, running back to camp. His heart hammering, he circled the camp quietly, slipping into Pivane’s tent to grab his rifle. Then, having found an unseen position from which to fire, he shot the tallest one, who dropped like a bag of bones.

Now, still wielding his uncle’s rifle, Wil emerges into the clearing, his aim trained on the leader, but the leader is quick. He pulls out an old-fashioned revolver—the kind that takes only real bullets—and shoves it against Lev’s temple.

“Drop it or I kill him.”

They freeze in a standoff.

“Thirty-eight caliber, my friend,” the gunman says. “You can tranq me, but your friend will be dead before I hit the ground. Drop the rifle now!”

Wil lowers it but doesn’t drop it. He’s not that stupid. The leader considers the action, then takes the pistol away from Lev’s head, shoving him to the ground.

“What do you want?” Wil asks.

The leader signals his remaining conspirator—the goat-ugly one with the scraggly beard. He pulls something from his pocket and gives it to Wil. “We found this posted in Denver last week.”

It’s a flier on bright red paper that reads: SEEKING PEOPLE OF CHANCE PARTS. TRIPLE RECOMPENSE FOR SPECIAL GIFTS.

Light suddenly dawns. Parts pirates? These intruders are parts pirates?

“People of Chance are protected,” Wil says. “We can’t be unwound.”

“Hardly the point, Hiawatha,” the leader says, smoothing his oily hair over an ear that doesn’t exist. “This requisition isn’t strictly legal, which makes it very profitable.”

“So let’s cut to the chase,” says the other parts pirate. “Any of these here kids got special skills?”

A moment of silence, then Lansa says, “Nova can do high math. Algebra and stuff.”

“Oh, yeah, Lansa?” says Nova. “Why don’t you tell them how good you are with a bow and arrow?”

“Both of you shut up!” yells Lev. “Don’t turn on each other. That’s what these dirtbags want!”

The goat-faced one glares at Lev, then kicks Lev in the side.

Wil advances on him, but One-Ear raises his pistol at Wil. “Let’s all take a deep breath, shall we?”

Lev lies in the dirt, the grimace fading from his face. He makes eye contact with Wil to let him know that he’s okay. Hurt, but okay. Wil has never felt so powerless. He thinks of his grandfather. What would he have done?

“Such lovely choices,” the leader says, looking at the batch of kids. “Perhaps we’ll take the lot.”

“Do that,” says Wil, “and our entire tribe will hunt you for the rest of your miserable lives, and I promise you those lives won’t be long. . . . But that won’t happen if one of us goes of our own free will.”

“That’s not yer choice to make!” says Goat-Face. “We choose!”

“Then choose wisely!” Wil says. Near his uncle he sees his guitar where he left it at breakfast, propped against a log. Everything seems to go quiet, though dimly he’s aware of the two pirates talking to each other. Plotting. Choosing.

Wil knows how he can protect the children. He knows how he can save Pivane and Lev.

He lays his uncle’s rifle on the ground and walks to his guitar.

“Hey,” Goat-Face yells at him, and scoops up Pivane’s rifle. “Where do you think yer going!” Wil picks up his guitar and sits on the log. He knows it’s the only weapon he needs.

He thinks of Una, and the last thing she said to him. She had carved him a pick of rare canyon sinker wood—trees lying submerged for months in the Colorado River—and she gave it to him when he left for this vision quest. Now he pulls it from between the strings and turns it over in his fingers, thinking of her words:

“I will not miss you, Guitar Boy,” she said, clearly meaning that she would, but refusing to say it out loud.

He kisses the pick and puts it in his pocket. He will not waste it on the likes of these monsters. He will play with his bare fingers. He will play a song of their greed. Of their malice. Of their corruption. He will entice them until they are so consumed by their own lust for money that they will see him as their shining meal ticket and forget the others.

“Tell me what this is worth,” Wil says, and begins to play.

The music soars through the camp. He starts with a complicated baroque piece, then switches to a fiery ChanceFolk traditional and finishes with the Spanish music he loves best, but all angry. Accusing. Music that is both glorious and stirring, yet at the same time a secret indictment of the men he is playing for. Each piece makes his fingers tingle and electrifies even the trees surrounding them.

As always, his audience waits in a charged silence long after the last note is played. Even the leader’s gun is pointed at the ground, as if he’s forgotten he’s holding it. Then something happens. Something different.

Someone claps.

He looks at Lev, still sitting in the dirt, gun oil smudged on his neck, mud on his cheek. Lev’s eyes are fixed only on Wil. He claps with all his might, bringing his hands together powerfully, shattering the silence with his singular applause. Then Kele joins in, then Nova, then all the kids who are still conscious. It becomes rhythmic, as the applause falls into unison.

“Stop clapping!” the goat-faced pirate screams. His face pale, he points a shaking tranq rifle at Lev. “Stop it! You’re freaking me out.”

The other one laughs. “You’ll have to excuse my associate. You see, his brother died in a clapper attack.”

Looks like they blew up the wrong one, Wil wants to say, but he realizes that the quickening pace and rising volume of their clapping says it much better than words.

Finally the chorus of applause falls off, with Lev’s loud clapping the last to cease, leaving his hands red from the passion of it.

The lead parts pirate holds eye contact with Wil and nods, sealing Wil’s fate. “You’ve got yourself a deal.” Then he orders his comrade to tie the others up.

“What about Bobby?” Goat-Face asks, pointing to their tranq’d accomplice.

The leader spares a single look at the unconscious pirate, aims his revolver, and puts a bullet in his head. “Problem solved.”

Then the two of them duct-tape the kids’ hands and feet and tie all six together, weaving a rope through their trussed limbs. Kele almost spits at them till he catches Wil’s warning look.

Goat-Face ties Lev alone to the tree near where Pivane lies, leaving Lev struggling against the tight ropes.

“Let me say my good-byes,” Wil asks the leader.

The man sits on the log where Wil played his guitar, waving his tranq pistol as a warning. Apparently Wil is now too valuable to shoot with real bullets. “Make it quick.”

As Goat-Face finishes securing Lev to the tree, Wil approaches Lev. Goat-Face takes a step back, watching Wil warily as if he expects to be attacked.

“Wil, what are you doing?” Lev whispers. “These guys are for real. You don’t come back from a chop shop.”

“My choice, Lev. It’s your job now to take care of these kids. Calm them. Reassure them. Pivane will wake up in a few hours. You’ll all be fine.”

Lev swallows and nods, accepting the responsibility.

Wil summons a wry smile for Lev before the parts pirates take him and his guitar away. “Thanks for the applause, little brother.”

9 • Lev

In the village three hours later, Lev leans against Pivane’s dusty truck, only half listening as Pivane tells the sheriff what happened. He watches the kids rushed to their cars and taken home. Only Kele looks back and waves good-bye to Lev.

The sheriff returns to his car to relay the report and then heads back up the mountain to retrieve Bobby, the dead parts pirate—probably wishing it was one of them who took him out, and not one of his own gang.

Lev can’t help but notice the cold glare that the policemen throw at him before they leave.

•

“Your petition to join the tribe has been denied,” Wil’s ma tells him, the pain in her voice partly for him and partly for her son who will never return. “I’m sorry, Lev.”

Lev accepts the news with a stoic nod. He knew this would be the decision. He knew because of the looks everyone has given him since he returned from the vision quest. Those who know him see him as a walking gravestone with Wil’s name etched on his sienna face. Those who don’t know him see only a harbinger of the world that so cruelly took Chowilawu away. Wil’s music—his spirit —cannot be replaced by any musician on the rez. The wound will be raw for a very long time. And there’s no one they can blame for it. No one but Lev. Even if they allow him to stay, Lev knows the rez can no longer be his sanctuary.

Pivane volunteers to drive him to the reservation’s northern entrance: immense bronze gates bookended by towers of green glass. Lev leans forward to see the bells in the towers and the rearing, life-size bronze mustang suspended above the gate. Wil told him that fine, nearly invisible wires and a clear glass bridge support the mustang. When Chinook winds blow through the valley, children gather, hoping to see the horse escape its fetters and fly away.

“Where will I go?” Lev asks simply.

“That is for you to decide.” Pivane leans across him and retrieves his wallet from the glove compartment. Then he hands Lev a huge wad of cash.

“Too much,” Lev manages, but Pivane shakes his head.

“By accepting this gift, you will honor me . . . and you will honor him,” Pivane says. “The children told me how you offered yourself to the pirates before Wil did. It was not your fault they chose him over you.”

Lev obediently shoves the money into his pocket. He shakes Pivane’s hand as he gets out of the car.

“I hope your spirit-guide takes you to a place of safety. A place you can call home,” Pivane says.

Lev closes the door, and in a plume of dust the truck disappears down the street. Only then does it occur to Lev that he has no spirit-guide. He never completed his vision quest. There is nothing and no one to guide him through this dim, foggy future.

A security guard nods as he exits the pedestrian gate, and Lev heads for a bus stop a hundred feet away. He sees nothing else but a barren plateau, spotted with sage, which stretches to the horizon, not quite as barren as he feels inside.

He counts the money Pivane has given him, and it will carry him far indeed, but not far enough, because there is nowhere far enough away from all the things he’s experienced since the day he was sent off to be tithed.

Wil healed him with music, taught him the way of his people, and saved him from the pirates by sacrificing his own life.

All he was able to give Wil was applause.

The bus schedule shows the next departure is in thirty minutes. He doesn’t bother checking the destination. Lev knows that wherever it leads, his path ahead is dark. He has nothing left to lose. A burning fills his emptiness. Revenge drives him now.

As he looks at his hands, he begins to see a purpose for his applause. It’s a powerful purpose that will make his anger known . . . and tear the world to shreds.

10 • Wil

Like a crow Wil has flown over the rez wall, but not as he imagined. Deep down, he still expects the Tribal Council—or maybe even the Alliance of Tribal Nations—to somehow rescue him. But no one comes.

The pirates drive him not to a chop shop but to a private hospital. In this upscale, designer clinic of glass walls, soft lights, and wall-size murals of cascading color, he sees no patients. He is treated like a rock star by an extensive staff, and is provided any food he’d like, but he’s not hungry. He’s offered any music, the latest movies, games, books, or television, but nothing distracts him. He only watches the door.

On his third day, a neurologist, a surgeon, and a severe-looking blond woman come in and graciously ask him to play his guitar. Despite heartache, Wil plays flawlessly, and they are duly impressed. He still expects that somehow his playing will open their hearts and set him free. He still expects someone from the tribe to come to his door with good news. But no one comes.

On the fourth day, at dawn, he’s put in restraints. A nurse gives him a shot, and he feels woozy. They roll him into an operating room: bright lights, white walls, monitors bleeping, sterile, cold. Nothing like the surgical lodge at home.

He feels numb despair. He is being unwound. And he comes to his end alone.

Then he sees a face in the operating room he recognizes. Although her hair is hidden by surgical scrubs, she doesn’t wear a mask like the others. It’s as if his seeing her face is more important that the sterile environment. He’s not surprised to see her again. He played his guitar for this woman. She never told him her name, although he heard the others call her Roberta.

“Do you remember me, Chowilawu?” she asks, with the hint of a British accent almost Americanized. “We met yesterday.” She pronounces his name flawlessly. It pleases him, yet troubles him at the same time.

“Why are you doing this?” he asks. “Why me?”

“We have been searching for the right Person of Chance for a very long time. You will be part of a spectacular experiment. One that will change the future.”

“Will you tell my parents what happened to me? Please?”

“I’m sorry, Wil. No one can know.”

This shakes him worse than death. His parents, Pivane, Una, the whole tribe grieving his absence, never knowing his fate.

She takes his hand in hers. “I want you to know that your talent will not be lost. These hands and the neuron bundles that hold every bit of your musical memory will be kept together. Intact. Because I, too, treasure that which means the most to you.”

It’s not anything close to what Wil truly wants, but he tries to cling to the knowledge that his gift of music will somehow survive his unwinding.

“My guitar,” he manages through chattering teeth, ignoring the fact that he can no longer feel his toes.

“It’s safe,” Roberta says quickly. “I have it.”

“Send it home.”

She hesitates, and then nods.

Wil’s unwinding proceeds at an alarming rate. All too soon a wave of darkness crashes over him. He can no longer hear Roberta. He can no longer see her.

Then, in the void, he senses someone lean close to him. Someone familiar.

“Grandfather?” he hazards to say. He cannot hear himself speak.

“Yes, Chowilawu.”

“Are we are going to the Lower World?”

“We will see, Chowilawu,” his grandfather says. “We will see.”

But whatever happens now, it doesn’t matter to Wil. Because someone finally came.

11 • Una

Not through smoke signals.

Not through the intricate legal investigations of the Council.

Not through the tribal nations’ security task force, put in place after the parts pirates took him.

In the end, the rez finds out Wil is no more when his guitar is delivered with no note and no return address.

Una cradles the guitar in her arms and remembers: Wil building mountains for her in a sandbox when they were five. The quiet delight in his eyes when she asked him to marry her, when they were six. His grief as Tocho died, while she and Lev sat watching on the hospital floor. The touch of Wil’s hand on her arm when he said good-bye.

In every memory is his music, and she hears it again every day, playing in the wind through the trees to tease and torment her. Or maybe to comfort her and remind her that nothing and no one is ever truly lost.

Una tries to hold on to that as she lays Wil’s guitar on the workshop table. There is no body; there is only the guitar. So she gently, lovingly, unstrings it and prepares it for the funeral pyre in the morning.

And she tells no one of the strange hope she cradles in her heart, that somehow she will hear Wil’s music again, loud and pure, calling forth her soul.

THE END

About authors

NEAL SHUATERMAN is the author of many novels for young adults, including Unwind, which was an ALA Best Book for Young Adults and a Quick Pick for Reluctant Young Readers and has won more than thirty other awards; the highly acclaimed Skinjacker Trilogy (Everlost, Everwild, and Everfound), and Full Tilt, which has received twenty awards and honors. He also writes screenplays for motion pictures and television shows, including Goosebumps and the Disney Channel original movie Pixel Perfect. Currently he is adapting Unwind as a feature film. The father of four children, Neal lives in Southern California. Visit him at StoryMan.com

MICHELLE KNOWLDEN has published fourteen stories with Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, most featuring hypochondriac detective Micky Cardex. The story “No, Thank You, John” was nominated for a Shamus Award. Many of Ms. Knowlden’s stories have been included in anthologies and translated in multiple languages, including “Where Old Kings Gather” for Tor Books’ More Amazing Stories anthology. This is Michelle Knowlden’s second collaboration with Neal Shusterman. The first was the X-Files young adult novel Dark Matter for HarperCollins in 1999, under the name Easton Royce.

“Connor, stop!” he hears his father yell. Then he hears a gun fire.

He feels the impact, but not in his skin. The bullet embeds in his backpack. He doesn’t look behind him. Then, as he reaches the highway median, he hears another gunshot, and a small blue splotch appears on the center divider. They’re firing tranquilizer bullets. They’re not taking him out, they’re trying to take him down—and they’re much more likely to fire tranq bullets at will, than regular bullets.

Connor climbs over the center divider, and finds himself in the path of a Cadillac that’s not stopping for anything. The car swerves to avoid him, and by sheer luck Connor’s momentum takes him just a few inches out of the Caddy’s path. Its side mirror smacks him painfully in the ribs before the car screeches to a halt, sending the acrid stench of burned rubber up his nostrils. Holding his aching side, Connor sees someone looking at him from an open window of the backseat. It’s another kid, dressed all in white. The kid is terrified.

With the police already reaching the center divider, Connor looks into the eyes of this frightened kid, and knows what he has to do. It’s time for another split-second decision. He reaches through the window, pulls up the lock, and opens the door.

1 • Starkey

He’s fighting a nightmare when they come for him.

A great flood is swallowing the world, and in the middle of it all, he’s being mauled by a bear. He’s more annoyed than terrified. As if the flood isn’t enough, his deep, dark mind has to send an angry grizzly to tear into him.

Then he’s dragged feetfirst out of the jaws of death and drowning Armageddon.

“Up! Now! Let’s go!”

He opens his eyes to a brightly lit bedroom that ought to be dark. Two Juvey-cops manhandle him, grabbing his arms, preventing him from fighting back long before he’s awake enough to try.

“No! Stop! What is this?”

Handcuffs. First his right wrist, then his left.

“On your feet!”

They yank him to his feet as if he’s resisting—which he would, if he were more awake.

“Leave me alone! What’s going on?”

But in an instant he’s awake enough to know exactly what’s going on. It’s a kidnapping. But you can’t call it kidnapping when transfer papers have been signed in triplicate.

“Verbally confirm that you are Mason Michael Starkey.”

There are two officers. One is short and muscular, the other tall and muscular. Probably military boeufs before they took jobs as Juvey-rounders. It takes a special heartless breed to be a Juvey-cop, but to specialize as a rounder you probably need to be soulless as well. The fact that he’s being rounded for unwinding shocks and terrifies Starkey, but he refuses to show it, because he knows Juvey-rounders get off on other people’s fear.

The short one, who is clearly the mouthpiece of this duo, gets in his face and repeats, “Verbally confirm that you are Mason Michael Starkey!”

“And why should I do that?”

“Kid,” says the other rounder, “this can go down easy or hard, but either way it’s going down.” The second cop is more soft spoken with a pair of lips that clearly aren’t his. In fact, they look like they came from a girl. “The drill’s not so hard, so just get with the program.”

He talks as if Starkey should have known they were coming, but what Unwind ever really knows? Every Unwind believes in their heart of hearts that it won’t happen to them—that their parents, no matter how strained things get, will be smart enough not to fall for the net ads, TV commercials, and billboards that say things like “Unwinding: the sensible solution.” But who is he kidding? Even without the constant media blitz, Starkey’s been a potential candidate for unwinding since the moment he arrived on the doorstep. Perhaps he should be surprised that his parents waited so long.

Now the mouthpiece gets deep in his personal space. “For the last time, verbally confirm that you are—”

“Yeah, yeah, Mason Michael Starkey. Now get out of my face, your breath stinks.”

With his identity verbally confirmed, Lady-Lips pulls out a form in triplicate: white, yellow, and pink.

“So is this how you do it?” Starkey asks, his voice beginning to quaver. “You arrest me? What’s my crime? Being sixteen? Or maybe it’s just being here at all.”

“Quiet-or-we-tranq-you,” says Mouthpiece, like it’s all one word.

A part of Starkey wants to be tranq’d—just go to sleep and if he’s lucky, never wake up. That way he won’t have to face the utter humiliation of being torn from his life in the middle of the night. But no, he wants to see his parents’ faces. Or, more to the point, he wants them to see his face, and if he’s tranq’d, they get off easy. They won’t have to look him in the eye.

Lady-Lips holds the unwind order in front of him and begins to read the infamous Paragraph Nine, the “Negation Clause.”

“Mason Michael Starkey, by the signing of this order, your parents and/or legal guardians have retroactively terminated your tenure, backdated to six days postconception, leaving you in violation of Existential Code 390. In light of this, you are hereby remanded to the California Juvenile Authority for summary division, also known as unwinding.”

“Blah, blah, blah.”

“Any rights previously granted to you by the county, state, or federal government as a citizen thereof are now officially and permanently revoked.” He folds the unwind order and shoves it into his pocket.

“Congratulations, Mr. Starkey,” says Mouthpiece. “You no longer exist.”

“Then why are you talking to me?”

“We won’t be for much longer.” They tug him toward the door.

“Can I at least put on shoes?”

They let him go but stay on their guard.

Starkey takes his sweet time tying his shoes. Then they pull him out of his room and down the stairs. The Juvey-cops have heavy boots that intimidate the wood of the steps. The three of them sound like a herd of cattle as they go down.

His parents wait in the foyer. It’s three in the morning, but they’re still fully dressed. They’ve been awake all night anticipating this. Starkey sees anguish on their faces, or maybe it’s relief, it’s hard to tell. He hardens his own emotions, hiding them behind a mock smile.

“Hi, Mom! Hi, Dad!” he says brightly. “Guess what just happened to me? I’ll give you twenty guesses to figure it out!”

His father takes a deep breath, preparing to launch into the Great Unwinding Speech that every parent prepares for a wayward child. Even if they never use it, they still prepare it, running the words through their minds while on lunch break, or while sitting in traffic, or while listening to some moronic boss blather on about price points and distribution, and whatever other crap that people in office buildings have meetings about.

What were the statistics? Starkey saw it on the news once. Every year the thought of unwinding passes through the mind of one in ten parents. Of those, one in ten seriously considers it, and of those, one in twenty actually goes through with it—and the statistic doubles with every additional kid a family has. Crunch those juicy numbers, and one out of every two thousand kids between the ages of thirteen and seventeen will be unwound each year. Better odds than the lottery—and that doesn’t even include the kids in state homes.

His father, keeping his distance, begins the speech. “Mason, can’t you see that you left us no choice?”

The Juvey-cops hold him firm at the bottom of the stairs, but they make no move to get him outside. They know they must allow the parental rite of passage; the verbal boot out the door.

“The fights, the drugs, the stolen car—and now being expelled from yet another school. What’s next, Mason?”

“Gee, I don’t know, Dad. There are so many bad choices I can make.”

“Not anymore. We care enough about you to end your bad choices before they end you.”

That just makes him laugh out loud.

And then there’s a voice from the top of the stairs.

“No! You can’t do this!”

His sister, Jenna—his parents’ biological daughter—stands at the top of the stairs in teddy bear pajamas that seem too old for her thirteen years.

“Go back to bed, Jenna,” their mother says.

“You’re unwinding him just because he was storked, and that’s unfair! And right before Christmas, too! What if I had come storked? Would you unwind me also?”

“We are not having this discussion!” yells their father, as their mother begins to cry. “Go back to bed!”

But she doesn’t. She folds her arms and sits at the top of the stairs in defiance, witnessing the whole thing. Good for her.

His mother’s tears are genuine, but he’s unsure whether she’s crying for him or for the rest of the family. “All these things you do, everyone told us they were a cry for help,” she says. “So why didn’t you let us help you?”

He wants to scream. How could he possibly explain it to them if they can’t see? They don’t know what it’s like to go through sixteen years of life knowing you weren’t wanted; a mystery baby of uncertain race storked on the doorstep of a couple so sienna-pale, they could have been vampires. Or to still remember that day when you were three years old and your mom, all doped up on pain medication from your sister’s cesarean delivery, took you to a fire station and begged them to take you away and make you a ward of the state. Or how about knowing every Christmas morning that your gift is not a joy, but an obligation? And that your birthday isn’t even real because they can’t pinpoint when you were born, just the day you were left on a welcome mat that some new mother took too literally?

And what about the taunts from the other kids at school?

In fourth grade Mason’s parents were called into the principal’s office. He had flipped a boy off the top platform of the jungle gym. The kid had suffered a concussion and a broken arm.

“Why, Mason?” his parents had asked, right there in front of the principal. “Why did you do it?”

He told them that the other kids were calling him “Storky” instead of Starkey, and that this was the boy who had started it. He naively thought they’d rise to his defense, but they just dismissed it as if it didn’t matter.

“You could have killed that boy,” his father had reprimanded. “And why? Because of words? Words don’t hurt you.” Which is one of the hugest criminal lies perpetrated by adults against children in this world. Because words hurt more than any physical pain. He would have gladly taken a concussion and a broken arm if he never had to be singled out as a storked child ever again.

In the end, he got sent to a different school and was ordered to have mandatory counseling.

“You think about what you did,” his old principal had told him.

And he did what he was told, like a good little boy. He gave it plenty of thought and decided he should have found a higher platform.

So how do you even begin to explain that? How do you explain a lifetime of injustice in the time it takes the Juvey-cops to herd you out the door? The answer is easy: You don’t even try.

“I’m sorry, Mason,” his father says, tears in his eyes as well. “But it’s better for everyone this way. Including you.”

Starkey knows he’ll never make his parents understand, but if nothing else, he’ll have the last word.

“Hey, Mom, by the way . . . Dad’s late nights at the office aren’t really at the office. They’re with your friend Nancy.”

But before he can begin to relish his parents’ shocked expressions, it occurs to him that this secret knowledge could have been a bargaining chip. If he had told his father he knew, it could have been ironclad protection from unwinding! How could he be so stupid not to have thought of that when it mattered?

So in the end he can’t even enjoy his bitter little victory as the Juvey-cops push him out into a cool December night.

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The Juvey squad car leaves the driveway with Starkey locked in the backseat behind a bulletproof barrier. Mouthpiece drives while Lady-Lips flips through a fat file folder. Starkey can’t imagine his life could have that much data.

“It says here you scored in the top ten percentile in your early childhood exams.”

The mouthpiece shakes his head in disgust. “What a waste.”

“Not really,” says Lady-Lips. “Plenty of folks will get the benefit of your smarts, Mr. Starkey.”

The suggestion gives him an unpleasant chill, but he tries not to show it. “Love the lip graft, dude,” Starkey says. “What’s the deal? Did your wife tell you she’d rather be kissed by a woman?”

Mouthpiece smirks, and Lady-Lips says nothing.

“But enough lip service,” says Starkey. “You boys hungry? Because I could go for a midnight snack right about now. Some In-N-Out? Whaddaya say?”

No answer from the front seat. Not that he expects one, but it’s always fun to mess with law enforcement and see how much it takes to irritate them. Because if they get ticked off, he wins. What’s that story about the Akron AWOL? What did he always say? Oh yeah. “Nice socks.” Simple, elegant, but it always undermined the confidence of any figure of false authority.

The Akron AWOL—now there was an Unwind! Sure, he died in the attack on Happy Jack Harvest Camp almost a year ago, but his legend lives on. Starkey longs for the kind of notoriety that Connor Lassiter has. In fact, Starkey imagines Connor Lassiter’s ghost sitting by his side, appreciating his thoughts and his every action—not just approving, but guiding Starkey’s hands as he wriggles his handcuffs down to his left shoe—just low enough to fish out the knife from the lining. The knife he’s saved for special occasions like this.

“Come to think about it, In-N-Out Burger does sound good right about now,” says Lady-Lips.

“Excellent,” says Starkey. “There’s one up ahead on the left. Order me a Double-Double, Animal Style, and Animal fries, too, because, hey—I’m an animal.”

He is amazed that they actually pull into the all-night drive-through. Starkey feels like the master of subliminal suggestion, even though his suggestion was not all that subliminal. Still, he is in control of the Juvey-cops . . . or at least he thinks he is until they order meals for themselves and nothing for him.

“Hey! What’s the deal?” He pounds his shoulder against the glass that separates their world from his.

“They’ll feed you at harvest camp,” says Lady-Lips.

Only now does it hit home that the bulletproof glass doesn’t just separate him from the cops—it’s a barrier between him and any part of the outside world. He will never taste his favorite foods again. Never visit his favorite places. At least not as Mason Starkey. Suddenly he feels like hurling up everything he’s eaten, backdated to six days postconception.

The night shift cashier at the drive-through window is a girl Starkey knows from his last school. As he sees her, a whole mess of emotions toy with his brain. He could just lurk in the shadows of the backseat, hoping not to be seen, but that would make him feel pathetic. No, he will not be pathetic. If he’s going down, then it will be in flames that everyone must see.

“Hey, Amanda, will you go to the prom with me?” He shouts loud enough to be heard through the thick glass barrier.

Amanda squints in his direction, and when she realizes who it is, she turns up her nose as if she’s smelled something rancid on the grill.

“Not in this life, Starkey.”

“Why not?”

“A, you’re a sophomore, and B, you’re a loser in the back of a police car. And anyway, don’t they have their own prom at the alternative school?”

Could she possibly be any denser? “Uh, as you can see, I’ve graduated.”

“Pipe down,” says Mouthpiece, “or I’ll unwind you right into the burgers.”

Finally Amanda gets it, and suddenly she becomes a little sheepish. “Oh! Oh, I’m sorry, Starkey. I’m really sorry. . . .”

Pity is something Mason Starkey can’t stand. “Sorry for what? You and your friends wouldn’t give me the time of day before, but now you’re sorry for me? Save it.”

“I’m sorry. I mean—I’m sorry that I’m sorry—I mean . . .” She sighs in exasperation and gives up, handing Lady-Lips a bag of food. “Do you need ketchup?”

“No, we’re good.”

“Hey, Amanda!” Starkey shouts as they drive away. “If you really want to do something for me, tell everyone I went down fighting, will you? Tell them I’m just like the Akron AWOL.”

“I will, Starkey,” she says. “I promise.”

But he knows she’ll forget by morning.

Twenty minutes later they’re turning into the back alley of county lockup. No one goes in the front way, least of all the Unwinds. The county jail has a juvenile wing, and in the back of the juvey wing is a special box within a box where they hold Unwinds awaiting transport. Starkey’s been in regular juvey enough to know that once you’re in the Unwind holding cell, that’s it. End of story. Even death row inmates don’t have such tight security.

But he’s not there yet. He’s still here, in the car, waiting to be transferred inside. Right here is where the hull of this little ship of fools is thinnest, and if he’s going to sink their plans, it has to happen between the car and the back door of the county jail. As they prepare for his “perp walk,” he thinks about his chances of breaking free—because as much as his parents may have imagined this night, so has he, and he’s made up a dozen valiant escape plans. The thing is, even his daydreams are fatalistic; in every anxiety-filled fantasy, he always loses, gets tranq’d, and wakes up on an operating table. Sure, they say they don’t unwind you right away, but Starkey doesn’t believe it. No one really knows what goes on in the harvest camps, and those who find out aren’t exactly around to share the experience.

They pull him out of the car and flank him on either side, grasping his upper arms tightly. They are practiced in this walk. Lady-Lips grips Starkey’s fat file in his other hand.

“So,” says Starkey, “does that file show my hobbies?”

“Probably,” says Lady-Lips, not really caring either way.

“Maybe you should have read it a little more closely, because then we’d have something to talk about.” He grins. “You know, I’m pretty good with magic.”

“That so?” says Mouthpiece, with a twisted sneer. “Too bad you can’t make yourself disappear.”

“Who says I can’t?”

Then, in his finest Houdini fashion, he raises his right hand, revealing the cuff no longer on it. Instead, it dangles free from his left hand. Before they can even react, Starkey slides the penknife he used to pick the lock out of his sleeve, grips it in his hand, and slashes it across Lady-Lips’s face.

The man screams, and blood flows from a four-inch wound. Mouthpiece, for once in his miserable life of public disservice, is speechless. He reaches for his weapon, but Starkey is already on the run, zigzagging in the shadowy alley.

“Hey!” yells Mouthpiece. “You’re only making it worse for yourself.”

But what are they going to do? Reprimand him before they unwind him? The Mouthpiece can talk all he wants, but he’s got no bargaining position.

The alley turns to the left and then to the right like a maze, and all the while beside him is the tall, imposing brick wall of the county jail.

Finally he turns another corner and sees a street up ahead. He charges forward, but just as he emerges into that street, he’s grabbed by Mouthpiece. Somehow he made it there before Starkey. He’s surprised, but he shouldn’t be, because doesn’t every Unwind try to run? And couldn’t they build a twisting alley specifically designed to waste your time and give the Juvey-cops an advantage that they never really lost?

“You’re through, Starkey!” He crushes Starkey’s wrist enough to dislodge the knife and brandishes a tranq gun with trigger-happy fury. “Down on the ground, or this goes in your eye!”

But Starkey does not go down. He will not humble himself before this legalized thug.

“Do it!” says Starkey. “Tranq me in the eye and explain to the harvest camp why the goods are damaged.”

Mouthpiece turns him around and pushes him against the brick wall, hard enough to scrape and bruise his face.

“I’ve had enough of you, Starkey. Or maybe I should call you Storky.” Then Mouthpiece laughs, like he’s a genius. Like every moron in the world hasn’t already called him that. “Storky!” he snorts. “That’s a better name for you, isn’t it? How do you like that, Storky?”

Blood boils hotter than water. Starkey can vouch for that, because with adrenaline-pumped fury, he elbows Mouthpiece in the gut and spins around, grabbing the gun.

“Oh no, you don’t.”

Mouthpiece is stronger—but maybe animal-style beats strength.

The gun is between them. It points at Starkey’s cheek, then his chest, then to Mouthpiece’s ear, then under his chin. They both grapple for the trigger and—Blam!

The concussive shock of the blast knocks Starkey back against the wall. Blood! Blood everywhere! The ferrous taste of it in his mouth, and the acrid smell of gun smoke and—

That was no tranq bullet! That was the real thing!

And he thinks he’s microseconds away from death, but he suddenly realizes that the blood isn’t his. In front of him, Mouthpiece’s face is a red, pulpy mess. The man goes down, dead before he hits the pavement and—

My God, that was a real bullet. Why does a Juvey-cop have real bullets? That’s illegal!

He can hear footsteps around the bend, and the dead cop is still dead, and he knows the whole world heard the gunshot, and everything hinges on his next action.

He is partners with the Akron AWOL now. The patron saint of runaway Unwinds is watching over his shoulder, waiting for Starkey to make a move, and he thinks, What would Connor do?

Just then another Juvey-cop comes around the bend—a cop he has never seen and is determined to never see again. Starkey raises Mouthpiece’s gun and shoots, turning what was just an accident into murder.

As he escapes—truly escapes—all he can think about is the bloody taste of victory, and how pleased the ghost of Connor Lassiter would be.

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To be an AWOL Unwind is one thing, but to be a cop killer is another. The manhunt for Starkey becomes more than just your typical Unwind chase. It seems the whole world is put on alert. First Starkey changes his look, dying his straggly brown hair red, cutting it bookworm-short, and shaving off the little victory garden goatee that he’s been cultivating since middle school. Now when people see him, they might get a feeling they’ve seen him before, but not know from where, because now he looks less like a face from a wanted poster and more like someone you’d see on a Wheaties box. The red hair is a bit of a disconnect with his olive complexion, but then, being a genetic hodgepodge has served him well all his life. He’s always been a chameleon who could pass for any ethnicity. The red hair just adds one more level of misdirection.

He skips town and never stays anywhere for more than a day or two. Word is that the Pacific Northwest is more sympathetic to AWOL Unwinds than Southern California, so that’s where he’s headed.

Starkey is prepared for life as a fugitive, because he has always lived in a kind of protective paranoia. Don’t trust anyone, not even your own shadow, and look out for your own best interests. His friends appreciated his clear-cut approach to life, because they always knew where they stood. He would fight to the end for his friends . . . as long as it was in his own interest to do so.

“You have the soul of a corporation,” a teacher once told him. It was meant as an insult, but he took it as a compliment. Corporations have great power and do fine things in this world when they choose to. She was a glacier-hugging math teacher who got laid off the following year, because who needs math teachers when you can just get a NeuroWeave? Just goes to show you, hugging a chunk of ice gets you nothing but cold.

Now, however, Starkey’s one with the huggers, because they’re the kind of people who run the Anti-Divisional Resistance, harboring runaway Unwinds. Once he’s in the hands of the ADR, he knows he’ll be safe, but finding them is the hard part.

“I’ve been AWOL for almost four months now and haven’t seen no sign of the resistance,” says an ugly kid with a bulldog face. Starkey met him while hanging out behind a KFC on Christmas Eve, waiting for them to throw out the leftover chicken. He’s not the kind of kid Starkey would hang with in real life, but now that real life has flipped into borrowed time, his priorities have changed.

“I’ve survived because I don’t fall for no traps,” Dogface tells him.

Starkey knows all about the traps. If a hiding place seems too good to be true, it probably is. An abandoned house with a comfortable mattress; an unlocked truck that happens to be full of canned food. They’re traps set by Juvey-cops for AWOL Unwinds. There are even Juvies pretending to be part of the Anti-Divisional Resistance.

“The Juvies are offering rewards now for people who turn in AWOLs,” Dogface says, as they stuff themselves sick with chicken. “And there are bounty hunters, too. Parts pirates, they call ’em. They don’t bother with collecting rewards—they sell the AWOLs they catch on the black market—and if you think regular harvest camps are bad, you don’t wanna know about the illegal ones.” The kid swallows a mouthful so big, Starkey can see it going down his gullet like a mouse being swallowed by a snake. “There never used to be parts pirates,” he says, “but since seventeen-year-olds can’t be unwound no more, there’s a shortage of parts, and AWOLs fetch a huge price on the black market.”

Starkey shakes his head. Making it illegal to unwind seventeen-year-olds was supposed to save a fifth of the kids marked for unwinding, but instead it forced a lot of parents to make their decision earlier. Starkey wonders if his parents would have changed their mind if they had another year to decide.

“Parts pirates are the worst,” Dogface tells him. “Their traps aren’t so nice as the ones the Juvies set. I heard this story about a trapper who got put out of business when fur was made illegal. So he took his heaviest animal traps and retooled them for Unwinds. Man, one of those traps snaps around your leg, and you can kiss that leg good-bye.” He snaps a chicken bone in half for emphasis, and Starkey shivers in spite of himself. “There are other stories,” Dogface says, licking chicken grease from his dirty fingers, “like this kid in my old neighborhood. His parents were total losers. Strung-out druggies who prolly shoulda been unwound themselves, if they had unwinding back in the day. Anyway, on his thirteenth birthday, they sign the unwind order and tell him about it.”

“Why would they tell him?”

“So he’d run away,” Dogface explains, “but see, they knew all his secret hiding places, and they told a parts pirate where to find him. He caught the kid, sold him, and split the fee with the kid’s parents.”

“Son of a bitch!”

Dogface shrugs, and flicks away a chicken bone. “The kid was a stork-job anyways, so it was no great loss, right?”

Starkey stops chewing, but just for a moment. Then he grins, keeping his thoughts to himself. “Right. No great loss.”

That night the dogfaced kid takes Starkey to a drainage tunnel where he’s been hiding out, and once the kid falls asleep, Starkey gets to work. He goes out into a nearby neighborhood and leaves a bucket of chicken at some strangers’ front door, rings the bell, and runs.

There’s no chicken in the bucket, though. Instead there’s a hand-drawn map, along with the following note:

Need money? Then send the Juvey-cops here, and you’ll collect a fat reward. Happy holidays!

Right around dawn, Starkey watches from a nearby rooftop as Juvies storm the drainage tunnel and pull out the dogfaced kid like so much earwax.

“Congratulations, asshole,” he says to himself. “You’ve been storked.”

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“When my parents signed the unwind order, I was scared. I didn’t know what would happen to me. I thought, ‘Why me? Why am I being punished?’ But once I got to BigSky Harvest Camp, all that changed. I found other kids like me and was finally accepted for who I was. I found out that every single part of me was precious and valuable. Thanks to the people at BigSky Harvest Camp, I’m not afraid of my unwinding anymore.

“The divided state? Wow. What an adventure!”

Every AWOL Unwind will steal. It’s an argument that the authorities like to use to convince the public that Unwinds are rotten apples from skin to core—that criminality is part of their very nature, and the only way to separate them from it is to separate them from themselves.

Theft, however, is not about predisposition when it comes to Unwinds. It’s simply a matter of necessity. Kids who would never steal a penny find their fingers stickier than molasses and full of all sorts of pilfered goods, from food to clothes to medicine—the various things they need to survive—and those who were already prone to crime simply become even more so.

Starkey is no stranger to criminal activity—although until recently most of his crimes were misdemeanors of the rebellious sort. He shoplifted if a shopkeeper looked at him suspiciously. He tagged bits of his own personal philosophy, which usually involved some choice four-letter words, on buildings that stood for the very things that ticked him off. He even stole a car from a neighbor who always made his young children go inside whenever Starkey came out. He took that guy’s car on a joyride with a couple of friends. Fun was had by all. Along the way he sideswiped a row of parked cars, losing two hubcaps and a bumper. Their ride ended when the car jumped a curb and mounted a very unresponsive mailbox. The damage was just enough to have the car labeled a total loss, which was exactly what Starkey wanted.

They never could prove it was him, but everybody knew. He had to admit, it wasn’t one of his shining moments, but he knew he had had to do something to a man who didn’t think Starkey was good enough to breathe the same air as his own children. The guy simply had to be punished for that kind of behavior.

All of it seemed to pale now that he was a murderer. But no—It would do him no good to think of himself that way. Better to think of himself as a warrior: a foot soldier in the war against unwinding. Soldiers were given medals for taking out the enemy, weren’t they? So even though that night in the alley still plagues him in moments of insecurity, most of the time his conscience is clear. His conscience is also clear when he begins parting people from their wallets.

Starkey, imagining himself as a big-time Las Vegas magician someday, used to amaze friends and terrify adults by making their watches disappear off their wrists and turn up in other people’s pockets. It was a simple parlor trick, but one that had taken lots of time to perfect. Making wallets and purses disappear followed the same principle. A combination of distraction, skilled fingers, and the confidence to get it done.

On this night, Starkey’s mark is a man who comes stumbling drunk out of a bar and slips an overstuffed wallet into the wide pocket of his overcoat. The drunk fumbles with his keys on the way to his car. Starkey strolls past, bumping him just hard enough to dislodge the keys, and they fall to the ground.

“Hey, man, I’m sorry,” Starkey says, picking up the keys and handing them to him. The man never feels the fingers of Starkey’s other hand in his pocket, lifting the wallet at the same moment Starkey’s handing him the keys. Starkey strolls off whistling to himself, knowing the man will be halfway home before he realizes that his wallet is gone, and even then, he’ll think he just left it at the bar.

Starkey turns a corner, making sure he’s out of sight before he opens the wallet, and the second he does, a jolt of electricity courses through him with such power his feet fall out from under him and he’s left semiconscious on the ground, twitching.

A stun-wallet. He’s heard of such things but never saw one in action until now.

Within seconds, the drunk is there, not so drunk after all, with three others whose faces he can’t make out. They lift him up and shove him into the back of a waiting van.

As the door is pulled closed and the van accelerates, Starkey, only barely conscious, sees the face of the drunk/not-drunk man looking down at him through an electrically charged haze.

“Are you an Unwind, a runaway, or just a lowlife?” he asks.

Starkey’s lips feel like rubber. “Lowlife.”

“Great,” says the un-drunk. “That narrows it down. Unwind or runaway?”

“Runaway,” mumbles Starkey.

“Perfect,” the man says. “Now that we’ve established you’re an Unwind, we know what to do with you.”

Starkey groans, and some woman beyond his limited peripheral vision laughs. “Don’t be so surprised. Unwinds all got this look in their eye that lowlifes and runaways don’t. We knew the truth without you saying a thing.”

Starkey tries to move, but he can barely lift his limbs.

“Don’t,” says a girl he can’t see from somewhere behind him. “Don’t move or I’ll zap you even worse than the wallet did.”

Starkey knows he’s fallen for a parts pirate’s trap. He thought he was smarter, and he silently curses his luck . . . until the man who pretended to be drunk says, “You’ll like this safe house. Good food, even if it does smell a little.”

“Wh-what?”

Laughs from everyone around him. There may be four or five people in the van. But his vision still isn’t clear enough to get an accurate count.

“I love that look on their faces,” the woman says. Now she comes into his field of vision and grins at him. “You know how they tranq escaped lions so they can bring them back to safety before they get themselves in a heap of trouble?” she says. “Well, today you’re the lion.”

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The safe house is a sewer pump station. Automated. No city workers ever show up unless something breaks.

“You get used to the smell,” Starkey is told as they bring him in, which he finds hard to believe—but it turns out to be true. Apparently one’s sense of smell realizes it’s going to lose the battle and just goes with it—and, as they told him in the van, the food makes up for it.

The whole place is a petri dish of angst, generated by kids whose parents gave up on them, which is the worst kind of angst there is. There are fights and ridiculous posturing on a daily basis.

Starkey’s always been a natural leader among sketchy outcasts and borderline personalities, and the safe house is no exception. He quickly rises in the social ranks. Word of his escape act is already churning out smoke in the rumor mill, helping his status from the very beginning.

“Is it true you shot two Juvey-cops?”

“Yep.”

“Is it true you shot your way out of lockup with a machine gun?”

“Sure, why not?”

And the best part is that the storked kids—who, even among Unwinds, are treated like second-class citizens—are now the elite, thanks to him!

Starkey says the storks get served first? They get served first. Starkey says they get the best beds, farthest from the stinking vents? They get the best beds. His word is law. Even those running the place know that Starkey is their greatest asset, and they know to keep him happy, because if he becomes an enemy, then every Unwind there is an enemy too.

He starts to settle in, figuring he’ll be there until he’s seventeen—but then in the middle of the night they’re rounded up and taken away by the ADR—shuffled like a deck of cards to different safe houses.

“This is the way it works,” they’re all told. The reason, Starkey comes to understand, is twofold. One, it keep the kids moving closer to their destination, wherever that might be. Two, it splits them apart to keep any alliances from becoming permanent. Kind of like unwinding the mob rather than the individuals to keep them in line.

Their plan, however, backfires with Starkey, because in each safe house he manages to earn respect, building his credibility among more and more kids. In each new location he comes across Unwinds who fancy themselves alpha males, trying to take charge, but in truth they’re just betas waiting for an alpha to humble them into submission.

In every instance, Starkey finds his opportunity to challenge, defeat, and rise above. Then there’s another midnight ride, another shake-up, and a new safe house. Each time Starkey learns a new social skill, something to serve him, something to make him even more effective at gathering and galvanizing these scared, angry kids. There could be no better leadership program than the safe houses of the Anti-Divisional Resistance.

And then come the coffins.

They show up at the final safe house: a shipment of lacquered wood caskets with rich satin linings. Most kids are terrified; Starkey is just amused.

“Get in!” they’re told by armed resistance fighters who look more like special ops. “No questions, just get in. Two to a box! Move it!”

Some kids hesitate, but the smarter ones quickly find a partner like it’s a sudden square dance, and nobody wants to be stuck with someone too tall, too fat, too unwashed, or too randy—because none of those things would fare well in the confines of a coffin—but no one actually gets in until Starkey gives the nod.

“If they meant to bury us,” he tells them, “they would have done it already.” As it turns out, he’s more persuasive than the guys with the guns.

He chooses to share his little box with a wisp of a girl who is giddy at having been chosen by him. Not that he particularly likes her, but she is so slight that she’ll barely take up any room. Once they’re wedged in together in a tight spoon position, they’re handed an oxygen tank and then closed into the darkness of the coffin together.

“I’ve always liked you, Mason,” says the girl, whose name he can’t recall. He’s surprised that she knows his first name, since he never uses it anymore. “Of all the boys in the safe houses, you’re the only one who makes me feel safe.”

He doesn’t respond; he just kisses her on the back of her head, to maintain his image as the safest port in her storm. It’s a powerful feeling to know you make others feel safe.

“We . . . could, you know . . . ,” she says coyly.

He reminds her that the ADR workers were very clear. “No extracurricular activities,” they had said, “or you’ll use up your oxygen and die.” Starkey doesn’t know if it’s true, but it certainly is a good argument for restraint. Besides, even if someone were stupid enough to tempt fate, there’s not enough space to move, much less generate any sort of friction, so the point is moot. He wonders if it’s some sort of twisted joke the adults are having, shoving hormonal teens into tight quarters but making it impossible to do anything but breathe.

“I wouldn’t mind suffocating if it was with you,” the girl says, which is flattering, but makes him even less interested in her.

“There’ll be a better time,” he tells her, knowing that such a time will never come—at least not for her—but hope is a powerful motivator.

Eventually they settle into a sort of symbiotic breathing rhythm. He breathes in when she breathes out, so their chests don’t fight for space.

After a while, there’s a jarring motion. With his arm now around the girl, he holds her a little more tightly, knowing that easing her fear somehow eases his own. Soon there’s a strange kind of acceleration, like they’re in a speeding car, but the angle changes, tilting them.

“A plane?” asks the girl.

“I think so.”

“What now?”

He doesn’t answer because he doesn’t know. Starkey begins to feel light-headed and, remembering the oxygen tank, turns the valve so that it slowly hisses. The coffin isn’t quite air tight, but closed tightly enough that they would suffocate without that oxygen, even in the pressurized hull of a plane. In a few minutes the stress-induced exhaustion puts the girl to sleep, but not Starkey. Finally, an hour later, the sudden jar of landing jolts the girl awake.

“Where do you think we are?” the girl asks.

Starkey is feeling irritable from the tight quarters but tries not to show it. “We’ll find out soon enough.”

Twenty minutes of anticipation, and finally the lid is unlatched and opened, resurrecting the two of them from the dead.

There’s a smiling kid with braces above them.

“Hello, I’m Hayden, and I’ll be your personal savior today,” he says brightly. “Oh look! No vomit or other unpleasant bodily fluids. Lucky you!”

With barely any blood circulating in his feet, Starkey joins a limping procession out of the jet’s cargo hold and into the blinding day. What he sees before him as his eyes adjust seems more like a mirage than anything real.

It’s a desert filled with thousands of airplanes.

Starkey’s heard of places like this, airplane boneyards where decommissioned aircraft go to die. Around them are teens in military camouflage, carrying weapons. They’re not unlike the adults back at the last safe house, just younger. They herd the kids into a loose formation at the bottom of the ramp.

A Jeep drives up. Clearly this is the approach of someone important, someone who will tell them why they’re here.

The Jeep comes to a halt, and out steps an unremarkable-looking teenager in blue camouflage. He’s Starkey’s age or maybe a little bit older, and he has scars on the right half of his face.

As the crowd gets a good look at him, people begin to murmur with excitement. The kid raises his hand to quiet them down, and Starkey spots a shark tattoo on his arm.

“No way!” a fat kid next to Starkey says. “You know who that is? That’s the Akron AWOL! That’s Connor Lassiter.”

Starkey scoffs, “Don’t be ridiculous, the Akron AWOL is dead.”

“No, he ain’t! He’s right there!”

The very idea sends a surge of adrenaline through Starkey’s body, finally bringing circulation back to his limbs. But no—as he looks at this teen trying to rein in the chaos, he realizes this couldn’t be Connor Lassiter. This kid does not look the part at all. His hair is tousled, not coolly slicked back, the way Starkey always imagined it would be. This kid looks too open and honest—not quite innocent, but he has nowhere near the level of jaded anger that the Akron AWOL would have. The only thing about him that could even slightly resemble Starkey’s image of Connor Lassiter would be the slight smirk that always seems to be on his face. No, this kid before them, trying to command their respect, is nobody special. Nobody at all.

“Let me be the first to welcome you to the Graveyard,” he says, delivering what must be the same speech he delivers to every batch of new arrivals. “Officially my name is Elvis Robert Mullard . . . but my friends call me Connor.”

Cheers from the Unwinds.

“Told you so!” says the fat kid.

“Doesn’t prove anything,” says Starkey, his jaw set and teeth clenched as the speech continues.

“You’re all here because you were marked for unwinding but escaped, and thanks to the efforts of a whole lot of people with the Anti-Divisional Resistance, you’ve made it here. This will be your home until you turn seventeen and can’t be unwound. That’s the good news. . . .”

The more he speaks, the more Starkey’s heart sinks, and he comes to realize the truth of it. This is the Akron AWOL—and he’s not larger than life at all. In fact, he barely lives up to reality.

“The bad news is that the Juvenile Authority knows about us. They know where we are and what we’re doing—but so far they’ve left us alone.”

Starkey marvels at the unfairness of it all. How could this be? How is it possible that the great champion of runaway Unwinds is just some ordinary kid?

“Some of you just want to survive to seventeen, and I don’t blame you,” Connor says. “But I know that many of you would risk everything to end unwinding forever.”

“Yeah!” Starkey shouts out, making sure it’s loud enough to draw everyone’s attention away from Connor, and he starts pumping his fist in the air. “Happy Jack! Happy Jack! Happy Jack!” He gets a whole chant going in the crowd. “We’ll blow up every last harvest camp!” Starkey shouts. Yet even though he’s riled them up, one look from Connor throws a wet blanket over the whole crowd, silencing them.

“There’s one in every crowd,” says Hayden, shaking his head.

“I’m sorry to disappoint you, but we will not be blowing up Chop Shops,” Connor says, looking right at Starkey. “They already see us as violent, and the Juvies use public fear to justify unwinding. We can’t feed into that. We’re not clappers. We will not commit random acts of violence. We will think before we act. . . .”

Starkey does not take the reprimand well. Who is this guy to shut him down? He keeps talking, but Starkey’s not listening anymore, because Connor has nothing to say to him. But the others listen, and that makes Starkey burn.

Now, as he stands there, waiting for the so-called Akron AWOL to shut up, a seed starts to take root in Starkey’s mind. He has killed two Juvey-cops. His legend is already set, and unlike Connor, he didn’t have to pretend to die to become legendary. Starkey has to smile. This airplane salvage yard is filled with hundreds of Unwinds, but in the end, it’s no different from the safe houses—and like those safe houses, here is just one more beta male waiting for an alpha like Starkey to put him in his place.

Content

UnStrung
An Unwind Story
by
Neal Shusterman & Michelle Knowlden

1 • Lev

2 • Wil

3 • Lev

4 • Wil

5 • Lev

6 • Wil

7 • Lev

8 • Wil

9 • Lev

10 • Wil

11 • Una

About authors

1 • Starkey