Текст книги "UnSouled"

Автор книги: Neal Shusterman

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

Una laughs. “Good luck with that one.” Then she snaps the rifle closed with a satisfying clang.

21 • Cam

Cam and Roberta’s Washington town house becomes the place to be invited to. Dinner soirees abound with international dignitaries, political movers and shakers, and pop culture icons, all of whom want a proverbial piece of Camus Comprix. Sometimes their attention is so aggressive, Cam wonders if they actually do want a piece of him as a souvenir. He dines with the crowned prince of a small principality he didn’t know existed until the entourage showed up at the door. He does an after-dinner jam with none other than music superstar Brick McDaniel—the artist who comes to mind when you think of the words “rock star.” Cam is actually so starstruck, he becomes a gushing fan—but when they jam side by side on guitar, they are equals.

The heady lifestyle he leads is addictive and all-encompassing. Cam keeps having to remind himself that this is not the prize—nor is it the path to the prize. All this glitz and glamour are merely distractions from his purpose.

But how can you bring down the people who’ve given you this extraordinary life? he occasionally asks himself in weaker moments. Like the moment when Brick McDaniel actually asked for his autograph. He knows he must be careful to ride the tornado—and not be drawn into it.

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“I’m needed back on Molokai,” Roberta tells him one evening. She’s come down to the basement where they’ve set up a full gym for him. His old physical therapist, back when he was first rewound, used to say that his muscle groups didn’t work and play well with others. If only he could see Cam now.

“I’ll return in a couple of days. In time for our luncheon with General Bodeker and Senator Cobb.”

Cam doesn’t let her announcement interrupt his set at the bench press station. “I want to come,” he tells her, and finds that it’s not just posturing—he does want to go back to the compound on Molokai, the closest thing to home that he knows.

“No. The last thing you need after all your hard work is Hawaiian jet lag. Rest up here. Focus on your language studies so you can impress General Bodeker with your Dutch.”

Dutch, one of the various languages that wasn’t included in the nine he came with, has to be learned by Cam the old-fashioned way. His knowledge of German helps, but it’s still a chore. He prefers when things come easier.

“Just because Bodeker has Dutch ancestry doesn’t mean he speaks it,” Cam points out.

“All the more reason for him to be impressed that you do.”

“Is my whole life now about impressing the general and the senator?”

“You have the attention of people who make things happen. If you want them to make things happen for you, then the answer is yes—impressing them should be your primary focus.”

Cam lets the weights drop heavily, with a resounding slam.

“Why do they need you on Molokai?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

He sits up and looks at her with something between a grin and a sneer. “ ‘Not at liberty to say.’ They should put that on your grave. ‘Here lies Roberta Griswold. Whether or not she rests in peace, we’re not at liberty to say.’ ”

Roberta is not amused. “Save your morbid sense of humor for the girls who fawn over you.”

Cam blots his face with a towel, grabs a sip of water, and asks, as innocently as he can, “Are you building a better me?”

“There is only one Camus Comprix, dear. You are unique in the universe.”

Roberta’s very good at telling him the things she thinks he wants to hear—but Cam is very good at getting past that. “The fact that you’re going to Molokai says otherwise.”

Roberta is careful in her response. She speaks as if navigating a minefield. “You are unique, but my work doesn’t end with you. It is my hope that yours will be a new variation of humanity.”

“Why?”

It’s a simple question, but Roberta seems almost angered by it. “Why do we build accelerators to find subatomic particles? Why did we decode the human genome? The exploration of possibility has always been the realm of science. The true scientist leaves practical application to others.”

“Unless that scientist works for Proactive Citizenry,” Cam points out. “I want to know how creating me serves them.”

Roberta waves her hand dismissively. “As long as they allow me to do my work, their money is far more important to me than their motives.”

It’s the first time Roberta has referred to Proactive Citizenry as “they” instead of “we.” Cam begins to wonder if the whole debacle with Risa has put Roberta in the organization’s dog house. He wonders how far she’ll go to get back into their good graces.

Roberta goes upstairs, leaving Cam to finish his workout, but his heart is no longer in it. He does take a moment, though, to examine his physique in the mirrored wall.

There were no mirrors when Cam was first rewound—when the scars were thick ropy lines all over his body and horrible to look at. Those scars are now gone, leaving behind smooth seams. And now there can never be enough mirrors for him. His guiltiest pleasure is how much he enjoys looking at himself and this body they’ve given him. He loves his body, yet that still falls short of loving himself.

If Risa loved me—truly and without coercion—then I could bridge that gap and feel it myself.

He knows what he has to do to make that happen—and now that Roberta will be five thousand miles away, he can begin the work necessary to bring this about without fear of her persistent scrutiny of everything he does. He’s been stalling for much too long.

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As soon as the limo spirits Roberta off the following morning, Cam gets to work on the computer in his room, moving his hands across the large screen as if casting a spell. He creates a nontraceable identity on the public nimbus—the global cloud so dense it would plunge the world into eternal darkness were it real instead of just virtual. He knows all his activity is monitored, so he piggybacks on an obsessive gamer somewhere in Norway. Anyone monitoring him will think he’s developed an interest in Viking raids on drug-dealing trolls.

Then, obscured within the nimbus, he tweaks and strokes the firewall of Proactive Citizenry’s server until it opens for him, giving him access to all sorts of coded information. But for Cam, making sense of the random and disjoint is a way of life. He was able to create order within the fragmented chaos of his rewound brain, so pulling order out of Proactive Citizenry’s protective scramble will be a walk in the park.

22 • Risa

Omaha. Arguably the geographic center of the American heartland. But Risa does not feel very centered. She needs to be elsewhere, but has no destination, no plan. More than once she has felt that leaving the protection of CyFi’s little commune was a mistake—but she was an outsider among the people of Tyler. Now Risa must live in the shadows. She sees no way out of it. She sees no future that doesn’t involve hiding.

She keeps hoping she’ll see signs of the Anti-Divisional Resistance—but the ADR has fallen apart. Today, she keeps thinking. Today I’ll find a path to follow. Today I’ll be hit by a revelation and I’ll know exactly what I need to do. But revelation has become a scarce commodity in Risa’s solitary existence. And beside her, she hears:

“It’s a birthday gift, Rachel—one that your father and I will be paying a pretty penny for. At the very least you could be grateful.”

“But it’s not what I asked for!”

Risa has come to realize that train stations like this one have two layers that don’t mix. They don’t even touch. The upper layer are the wealthy travelers like the mother and daughter down the bench from her, taking high-speed trains with every amenity to get them from one exclusive place to another. The lower layer are the dregs who have nowhere else but the station to hang their hat.

“I said I wanted to learn violin, Mom. You could have gotten me lessons.”

Risa knows she cannot board any of these trains. There’s too much security, and too many people know her face. She would be met at the next stop by a phalanx of federal officers who would be thrilled to take her into custody. The train, just like any other legitimate mode of transportation, is nothing but a dream for Risa.

“No one wants to learn an instrument, Rachel. It’s grueling repetition—and besides, you’re too old to start. Concert violinists who learn the traditional way begin when they’re six or seven.”

Risa can’t help but listen to the irritating conversation between the well-dressed woman and her fashionably disheveled teenaged daughter.

“It’s bad enough they’d be messing in my brain and giving me a NeuroWeave,” the girl whines. “But do I have to have the hands, too? I like my hands!”

The mother laughs. “Honey, you’ve got your father’s stubby, chubby little fingers. Trading up will only do you good in life, and it’s common knowledge that a musical NeuroWeave requires muscle memory to complete the brain-body connection.”

“There are no muscles in our fingers!” the girl announces triumphantly. “I learned that in school.”

The mother gives her a long-suffering sigh.

The most troubling thing about this conversation is that it’s not an isolated incident. It’s becoming more and more common for people to get vanity transplants. You want a new skill? Buy it instead of learn it. Can’t do a thing with your hair? Get a new scalp. Operators are standing by.

“Think of them like a pair of gloves, Rachel. Fancy silk gloves, like a princess wears.”

Risa can’t stand it anymore. Making sure her hood is low enough so that her face can’t be seen, she gets up, and as she walks past them, she says, “You’ll have someone else’s fingerprints.”

Princess Rachel looks horrified. “Ew! That’s it! I’m not doing it.”

Leaving the train station, Risa goes out into the steamy August evening. She knows she has to look like she’s occupied. Like she’s going somewhere with purpose. Looking indolent will make her a target for Juvies and parts pirates—and after her last run-in with a parts pirate, she does not want to repeat the experience.

She has a pink backpack she stole from a school playground, featuring hearts and pandas, slung over her shoulder. A police officer is coming down the street in her direction, so she pulls out a phone that doesn’t actually work and makes fake conversation into it as she walks.

“I know. Isn’t he just the cutest! Oh, I would die to sit next to him in math.”

She must appear to have a place to go and vapid people to talk to about her vapid life. She knows the look of an AWOL and has to give the impression of anything but.

“Ugh! I know! I hate her—she is such a loser!”

The officer passes and doesn’t even glance at Risa. She’s got this illusion down to a science. It’s exhausting though—and as the night ticks away, it will be too late for any respectable girl to be on a downtown Omaha street. No matter what image she tries to push forth, she’ll draw suspicion.

The train station was good for about an hour, but it’s a classic hangout for kids on the run. She knew she couldn’t stay very long. Now she reviews her options. There are some older landmark office buildings with old-fashioned fire escapes. She could climb up and find an unlocked window. She’s done that before and has always managed to avoid the nighttime cleaning staff. The risk is being spotted while breaking in.

There are plenty of parks, but while older vagrants can get away with sleeping on park benches, a young fugitive can’t. Unless she can break into a maintenance shed, she wouldn’t risk staying in a park. Usually she’ll scope out such places earlier in the day. When the shed is open, she’d replace the lock with one that she has the key to. Then when the groundskeeper locks up, he’ll have no idea he’s only locked himself out. But she was lazy today. Tired. She didn’t do her due diligence, and now she’s paying for it.

There’s a theater on the next street playing a revival of Cats, which mankind will likely have to suffer through for the rest of eternity. If she can pickpocket a single ticket, she can get in, and once inside, she can find a place to hide. Hidden space high above the flies. Basement crannies filled with props.

She cuts through a back alley to get to the theater. Mistake. Halfway down the alley, she encounters three boys. They look to be eighteen or so. She pegs them right away as either AWOLs who lived long enough to outgrow the threat of unwinding, or maybe they were among the thousands of seventeen-year-olds set free from harvest camps when the Cap-17 law passed. Sadly most of those kids were just hurled out into the streets with nowhere to go. So they got angry. Rotten, like fruit left too long on the vine.

“Well, well, what do we have here?” says the tallest of the three.

“Really?” says Risa, disgusted. “ ‘What do we have here?’ Is that your best line? If you’re going to attack a defenseless girl in an alley, at least try not to be cliché about it.”

Her attitude has the desired effect. It catches them off guard and makes the leader—a prime douche, if ever there was one—take a step back. Risa makes a move to push past, but a beefy kid, fat enough to block her way, eclipses her view of the end of the alley. Damn. She really hoped this didn’t have to get messy.

“Porterhouse don’t like uppity girls,” says the Prime Douche. He smiles, showing two of his front teeth are broken.

The fat kid, who must be Porterhouse, frowns and solidifies his mass like a nightclub bouncer. “That’s right,” he says.

It’s kids like these, thinks Risa, that made people think unwinding was a good idea.

The third kid lingers, saying nothing, looking a little bit worried. Risa marks him as her possible escape route. None of them have recognized her yet. If they do, their motives will instantly compound. Rather than trying to have their way with her, then leaving her there in the alley, they’ll have their way, then turn her in for the reward.

“Let’s not get off on the wrong foot, now,” Prime Douche says. “We could be of service to you.”

“Yeah,” says Porterhouse. “If you’re of ‘service’ to us.”

Sleaze number three snickers at that and moves forward, joining the other two. So much for an escape route. Prime Douche takes a bold step toward her. “We’re the kind a’ friends a girl like you needs. To protect you and such.”

Risa locks eyes with him. “Touch any part of me, and I break a part of you.”

She knows that a guy like this, with more bravado than brain, will take that as a dare—which he does. He grabs her wrist—then braces himself for whatever she might try to do.

She smiles at him, lifts her foot, and jams her heel into Porterhouse’s knee instead. Porterhouse’s kneecap breaks with an audible crunch, and he goes down, screaming and writhing in pain. It’s enough to shock Prime Douche into loosening his grip. Risa twists free and elbows him in the nose. She’s not sure if she’s broken it, but it does start gushing blood.

“YOU THTINKING BITH!!” he yells. Porterhouse is in such agony, he can only wail wordlessly. Sleaze number three takes this as his cue to exit, running off down the alley, knowing he’ll be next if he doesn’t.

Then Prime Douche produces more bad news. He pulls out a knife and starts swinging at Risa, trying to cut any part of her he can. His sweeping slashes are wild, but deadly.

She uses her backpack to block, and he slices it open. He swings again, coming dangerously close to her face. Then suddenly she hears—

“In here! Hurry!”

There’s a woman poking her head out of the back door of a shop. Risa doesn’t hesitate. She lurches into the open door, and the woman tries to close it behind her. She almost gets it closed, but Prime Douche gets his hand in, stopping it—so the woman slams the door on his hand. He screams on the other side of the door. Risa throws her shoulder against the door, slamming it on his fingers again. He screams even louder. She releases the tension just enough for him to pull his swelling fingers back, then pushes the door fully closed while the woman locks it.

They endure the furious barrage of bile—a vitriolic burst of curses that sound increasingly impotent, until the douche and Porterhouse stumble off, vowing vengeance.

Only now does Risa look at the woman. Middle-aged, wrinkles she tries to hide with makeup. Big hair. Kind eyes.

“You all right, hon?”

“Fine. My backpack might not pull through though.”

The woman throws a quick glance at the backpack. “Pandas and hearts? Hon, that thing needed to be put out of its misery.”

Risa grins, and the woman holds her gaze just a moment too long. Risa can clock the exact moment of recognition. The woman knows who she is—although she doesn’t let on right away.

“You can stay here until we’re sure they’re gone for good.”

“Thanks.”

A pause, then the woman drops all pretenses. “I suppose I should ask you for your autograph.”

Risa sighs. “Please don’t.”

The woman gives her a sly grin. “Well, being that I’m not turning you in for the reward money, I figured I could sell the signature someday. It might be worth something.”

Risa returns the grin. “You mean after I’m dead.”

“Well, if it was good enough for van Gogh . . .”

Risa laughs, and her laughter begins to chase away the anxiety of just a few moments ago. She still feels adrenaline making her fingers tingle. It will take longer for her physiology to recognize safety.

“Are you sure all the doors are locked?”

“Hon, those boys are long gone, licking their wounds and icing their bruised egos. But yes. Even if they came back, they couldn’t get in.”

“It’s boys like that who give the rest of us teenagers a bad name.”

The woman waves her hand at the suggestion. “Bottom-feeders come in all ages,” she says. “I should know. I’ve dated my share of them. You can’t just unwind the young ones, ’cause once they’re gone, others’ll sink down to take their place.”

Risa carefully gauges the woman, but she’s not all that easy to read. “So you’re against unwinding?”

“I’m against solutions that are worse than the problem. Like old women who want their hair dyed the color of shoe polish to hide the gray.”

Risa finally takes a moment to look around and quickly understands why the woman made the comparison she did. They’re in the back room of a salon—a retro kind of place with big hair dryers and notched black sinks. The woman introduces herself as Audrey, the proprietor of Locks and Beagles—an establishment specializing in salon services for people who absolutely, positively must bring their dog with them everywhere.

“You’d be surprised how much some of these ladies will pay for a shampoo and cut if their Chihuahua can sit in their lap.”

Audrey looks Risa over, like a prospective client. “Of course, we’re closed now, but I wouldn’t be disagreeable to an after-hours makeover.”

“Thank you, but I’m good,” Risa says.

Audrey frowns. “Come now. I thought you’d have better survival instincts than that!”

Risa bristles. “Excuse me?”

“What, do you think hiding under a hood is doing you any good?”

“I’ve done fine until now, thank you very much.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” Audrey says. “Smarts and instinct go a long way—but when you get too proud of how very clever you are at outwitting the powers that be, bad things are bound to happen.”

Risa begins to subconsciously rub her wrist. She had thought she was too good to fall for a trap—which is why she ended up getting caught. Changing her look would play to her advantage, so why is she so resistant?

Because you want to look the same for Connor.

She almost gasps at the realization. He’s been on her mind more and more, clouding her judgment in ways she never even considered. She can’t let her feelings for him get in the way of self-preservation.

“What kind of makeover?” Risa asks.

Audrey smiles. “Trust me, hon. When I’m done, it’ll be a whole new you!”

•   •   •

The makeover takes about two hours. Risa thinks Audrey must be bleaching her hair blond, but instead she gives Risa just a lighter shade of brown with highlights and a light perm.

“Most people think it’s hair color that changes a person’s looks—but it’s not. It’s all about texture,” Audrey tells Risa. “And hair’s not even the most important thing. The eyes are. Most people don’t realize how much of recognition is in the eyes.”

Which is why she suggests a pigment injection.

“Don’t worry. I’m a licensed ocular pigmentologist. I do it every day and never had complaints, except from the people who’d complain no matter what I did.”

Audrey goes on to talk about all her high-society patrons and their bizarre requests, from phosphorescent eye colors that match their nails, to midnight-black pigment injections that make it look like the pupil has swallowed the iris altogether. Her voice is soothing and as anesthetic as the drops she puts into Risa’s eyes. Risa lets her guard down and doesn’t notice until it is too late that Audrey has clamped her arms against the arms of the chair and has secured her head in place against the headrest. Risa begins to panic. “What are you doing? Let me go.”

Audrey just smiles. “I’m afraid I can’t do that, hon.” And she turns to reach for something Risa can’t see.

Now Risa realizes that Audrey’s agenda has nothing to do with helping her. She wants the reward after all! A single call and the police will be here. How stupid Risa was to trust her! How could she have been so blind!

Audrey comes back with a nasty-looking device in her hand. A syringe with a dozen tiny needles at the tip, forming a small circle.

“If you’re not immobilized, you might move during the process—even grab the device reflexively, and that could damage your cornea. Locking you down is for your own protection.”

Risa releases a shuddering breath of relief. Audrey takes it as anxiety from the sight of the injection needles. “Don’t you worry, hon. Those eye drops I gave you are like magic. I promise you won’t feel a thing.”

And Risa finds her eyes welling with tears. This woman truly does mean to help her. Risa feels guilty for her burst of paranoia, even though Audrey never knew. “Why are you doing this for me?”

Audrey doesn’t answer at first. She focuses on the task at hand, injecting Risa’s irises with a surprise shade that Audrey promised Risa would like. Risa believed her because the woman was so overwhelmingly confident about it. For a moment Risa feels as if she’s being unwound, but wills the feeling away. There is compassion here, not professional detachment.

“I’m helping you because I can,” Audrey says, as she works on her other eye. “And because of my son.”

“Your son . . .” Risa thinks she gets it. “Did you—”

“Unwind him? No. Nothing like that. From the moment he arrived on my doorstep, I loved him. I would never dream of unwinding him.”

“He was a stork?”

“Yep. Left at my door in the dead of winter. Premature, too. He was lucky to survive.” She pauses as she checks how the pigments are taking, then goes for a second layer of injections. “Then, when he was fourteen, he was diagnosed with cancer. Stomach cancer that had spread to his liver and pancreas.”

“I’m so sorry.”

Audrey leans back, looking Risa in the eyes, but not to gauge her own handiwork. “Honey, I’d never take an unwound part for myself. But when they told me the only way to save my boy’s life was to basically gut him and replace all his internal organs with someone else’s, I didn’t even hesitate. ‘Do it!’ I said. ‘Do it the second you can get him in that operating room.’ ”

Risa says nothing, realizing this woman needs to give her confession.

“You want to know the real reason unwinding keeps going strong, Miss Risa Ward? It isn’t because of the parts we want for ourselves—it’s because of the things we’re willing to do to save our children.” She thinks about that and laughs ruefully. “Imagine that. We’re willing to sacrifice the children we don’t love for the ones we do. And we call ourselves civilized!”

“It’s not your fault that unwinding exists,” Risa tells her.

“Isn’t it?”

“You had no other way to save your son. You had no choice.”

“There’s always a choice,” Audrey says. “But no other choice would have kept my son alive. If there were any another option, I would have taken it. But there wasn’t.”

She releases Risa’s bonds, then turns away to clean up her injection tray. “Anyway, my son’s alive and in college, and he calls me at least once a week—usually for money—but the fact that I can even get that call is a miracle to me. So my conscience will ache for the rest of my life, but that’s a small price to pay for having my son still on this earth.”

Risa offers her a nod of acceptance, no more, no less. Can Risa blame her for using every means at her disposal to save her son’s life?

“Here you go, hon,” Audrey says, turning her around to face the mirror. “What do you think?”

Risa can hardly believe the girl in the mirror is her. The perm was gentle enough that her hair, rather than being wide and poofy, falls in a gentle cascade of auburn ringlets, lightly highlighted. And her eyes! Audrey did not give her the obnoxious sort of pigmentation so many girls go for these days. Instead she boosted Risa’s eyes from brown to a very natural, very realistic green. She’s beautiful.

“What did I tell you?” Audrey said, clearly proud of her handiwork. “Texture for hair, color for eyes. A winning combination!”

“It’s wonderful! How can I ever thank you?”

“You already did,” Audrey told her. “Just by letting me do it.”

Risa admires herself in a way she’s never taken the time to do before. A makeover. That’s something this misguided world is long overdue for as well. If only Risa knew how to make that happen. Her mind goes back to Audrey’s heartfelt tale about her son. It used to be that medicine was about curing the world’s ills. Research money went into finding solutions. Now it seems medical research does nothing but find increasingly bizarre ways to use Unwinds’ various and sundry parts. NeuroWeaves instead of education. Muscle refits instead of exercise. And then there’s Cam. Could it be true what Roberta said—that Cam is the wave of the future? How soon until people start wanting multiple parts of multiple people because it’s the latest thing? Yes, perhaps unwinding is kept alive by parents desperate to save their children, but it’s the vanity trade that allows it to thrive with such gusto.

If there were any other option . . . It’s the first time Risa truly begins to wonder why there isn’t.