Текст книги "UnSouled"

Автор книги: Neal Shusterman

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 22 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

52 • Connor

They must travel by night, because a carload of young people is always suspect. At night it’s easier to hide their identities, and the highway patrol will leave them alone as long as Connor doesn’t speed or do anything to draw attention. Also, the car is a purple sedan. Not exactly low profile. Another reason why driving at night is called for.

“It was the best we could do,” Elina told them as they saw them off. The Tashi’ne family had said their good-byes at Una’s shop—and Una had volunteered to drive them to the car that was waiting just outside the northern gate of the reservation. It was the only way to keep Cam’s presence a secret from them.

Lev’s farewell to Connor was subdued and stilted, neither of them very good at saying good-bye.

“Do good. And stay whole,” Lev had said to Connor.

Connor had thrown him the slightest of grins. “Get a haircut,” he said, “by the next time I see you.”

It’s midnight when they cross from Colorado into Kansas. Cam and Grace are both in the back—Connor not trusting Cam enough to let him ride shotgun, but also not trusting him enough to leave him in the backseat by himself. With an unpleasant blast of déjà vu, Connor sees the sign for the Heartsdale exit and the approximate spot where he hit the ostrich. The bird is long gone, but Connor still grips the wheel, in case another one launches a suicide run into their path.

“Homesick, Grace?” he asks, as they near the town.

“Home always makes me sick,” she says. “Drive on.”

Connor finds himself holding his breath as they pass the exit, as if the place will reach out tentacles and drag them in. Once they’re past, the air in the car seems to lighten. Connor knows it’s just his imagination, but he’s grateful for the sense that their journey is back on track.

While Connor wants to drive through the night, drowsiness overtakes him a little after three in the morning.

“You can let me drive,” Cam says. “There are a few excellent drivers in my internal community. I’m sure I can rally them to do the job.”

“Thanks, but no thanks.” Putting Cam in control of anything is still far beyond Connor’s level of trust—and anyone who talks about an “internal community” really shouldn’t be behind the wheel of an automobile anyway.

They pull off in the town of Russell, Kansas, in search of an inconspicuous place to spend the night. Most hotels require interaction with people, and any interaction will mean trouble, but like most interstate towns, there’s an iMotel in Russell that dispenses its room keys via vending machine. All it requires is an ID and cash. As they stand before the vending kiosk, Cam grabs Connor’s ID to look at it and is irritatingly amused.

“ ‘Bees-Neb Hebííte.’ There’s a mouthful.”

“He’s the bees knees!” says Grace, and laughs.

Connor grabs the ID back and inserts it into the slot. “If it does the job, it’s the best name in the world.” Sure enough, the vending kiosk accepts the ID without a problem. Connor feeds in some of the money the Tashi’nes provided, and they have their room for the night. No worry, no hassle. They hunker down in a room with two beds that they’ll have to share, but since only two of them will be asleep at any given time, the arrangement is just fine.

“You want me to keep an eye on Cam till dawn so’s you can sleep?” Grace asks Connor, and although Cam protests that he doesn’t need to be guarded, Grace sets herself up in a chair by the door, so even were she to doze, Cam would have to go through her to escape, and amuses herself by watching old war documentaries on the History Channel.

“I’d think you’d be more interested in the Game Show Network,” Connor says innocently. “I mean, the way you like games.”

Grace glares at him, insulted. “Those shows are all dumb luck and dumber people. I like watchin’ wars. Strategy and tragedy all rolled up in one. Keeps your interest.”

Connor falls asleep in minutes to the faint sounds of twentieth-century artillery barrages. He wakes a few hours later to the sun streaming in through a slit in the curtains and the TV playing old cartoons almost as violent as the war documentaries.

“Sorry,” says Grace. “I couldn’t close them tighter than that.” Connor can hear activity in the rooms around them. Other muffled TVs, showers turning on and off, doors slamming as travelers leave to wherever it is they’re going. Cam sleeps, without a care in the world it seems, and Connor relieves a grateful Grace, who takes Connor’s space on the other bed and is snoring in a matter of minutes.

The room, which Connor had taken little notice of when they arrived, is the standard, unmemorable efficiency sleep space that dots highway off-ramps around the globe. Beige institutional furniture, dark carpet designed to hide stains. Comfortable beds to assure a return visit to the chain. There’s also a computer interface built into the desk—also standard these days. Connor pulls out the slip of paper with the ID and password Cam had given him and logs in, to see if Cam’s information is worth the trouble of having him along.

It turns out that Cam wasn’t bluffing. Once logged in, he’s given access to page after page of files Cam was hiding on the public nimbus. Files that had been digitally shredded but painstakingly reconstituted. These are communications within Proactive Citizenry that no one else was ever supposed to see. Much of it seems useless: Corporate e-mails that are mind-numbingly bland. Connor has to resist the urge to just skim through them. The more he reads however, the more key phrases begin to stand out. Things like “targeted demographic” and “placement in key markets.” What’s also curious are the domains where many of these e-mails are going to and coming from. These messages seem to be communications between the movers and shakers of Proactive Citizenry and media distributors, as well as production facilities. There are e-mails that discuss casting and expensive advertisements in all forms of media. It’s pretty vague—intentionally so—but taken together it begins to point in some frightening directions.

Connor views some of the ads the communications seem to indicate. If Connor is piecing it all together correctly, then Proactive Citizenry, under different nonprofit names, is behind all the political adds in support of teenage unwinding. That’s no surprise—in fact, Connor had already suspected that. What surprises him is that Proactive Citizenry is also behind the ads against the unwinding of teenagers but in favor of shelling prisoners and the voluntary unwinding of adults.

“Eye-opening, isn’t it? Even if one of those eyes isn’t yours.”

Connor turns to see Cam sitting up in bed, watching him wade through the material. “And this is just the opening of the rabbit hole,” Cam says. “I guarantee you there’s darker, scarier stuff to find, the deeper we go.”

“I don’t get it.” Connor points to the various windows of political ads on the desktop, ads that blast the Juvenile Authority and call the unwinding of kids unethical. “Why would Proactive Citizenry play both sides?”

“Two-headed coin,” Cam says. Then he asks the strangest question. “Tell me, Connor, is this the first time you’ve been pregnant?”

“What?”

“Just answer the question, yes or no.”

“Yes. I mean no! Shut up! What kind of stupid-ass question is that?”

Cam smiles. “You see? You’re damned no matter how you answer. By playing both sides, Proactive Citizenry keeps people focused on choosing between two different kinds of unwinding, making people forget that the real question . . .”

“Is whether or not anyone should be unwound at all.”

“Nail on the head,” says Cam.

Now it makes perfect sense. Connor thinks back to all the things Trace Neuhauser had told him back in the Graveyard about the shrewd, insidious nature of Proactive Citizenry’s dealings. Their subtle manipulation of the Juvenile Authority. The way they used the Admiral to warehouse Unwinds for them, all the while the Admiral—and then Connor—truly believing they were giving safe sanctuary to those kids.

“So whichever side wins, it keeps the status quo,” Connor says. “People get unwound and the Unwinding Consortium still gets rich.”

“The Unwinding Consortium?”

“It’s what a friend once called all the people who make their money from unwinding. The companies who own the harvest camps, hospitals who do the transplants, the Juvenile Authority . . .”

Cam considers it with a single raised eyebrow that throws the symmetrical seams on his forehead out of balance and says. “All roads lead to Rome. Unwinding is the single most profitable industry in America—maybe even the world. An economic engine like that protects itself. We’ll have to be smarter than they are to break it down.” And then Cam smiles. “But they made one big mistake.”

“What’s that?”

“They built someone who’s smarter than they are.”

•   •   •

Cam and Connor pore over the information for another hour. But there’s so much, it’s hard to pull out what’s important and what’s not.

“There are financial records,” Cam tells Connor. “They show huge amounts of money disappearing, as if into a black hole.”

“Or a rabbit hole,” suggests Connor.

“Exactly. If we can figure out where that money’s going, I think we’ll have the sword upon which Proactive Citizenry will impale itself.” Then Cam gets quiet. “I think they’re funding something very, very dark. I’m almost afraid to find out what it is.”

And although Connor won’t admit it, he is too.

53 • Bam

She carries out orders. She takes care of the new arrivals. She tries not to think about the MoonCrater five. That’s what the media calls the harvest camp workers whom Starkey hung. They’re martyrs now—evidence, according to some political pundits, of why certain incorrigible teens simply need to be unwound.

Two storks were killed and seven injured in the fake battle that Bam waged at the outer gate, for while Bam and her team weren’t actually trying to kill anyone, the guards firing at them were. That they even made it out of there was a miracle. In the end, their assault served its purpose. It appeared to be a botched attempt to break into the camp—until the security force released the dormitory building from lockdown and found what they found.

Five people lynched in the MoonCrater dormitory.

The pictures are as disturbing as anything Bam has seen in history books.

Busy. She must keep herself busy. The storks were separated from the nonstorks right after they arrived back at the mine. This time rather than just leaving the unchosen to fend for themselves in the middle of nowhere, Bam arranged for them to be taken to Boise—the nearest major city. They’d be on their own, but at least they’d have the camouflage of concrete and crowds to keep them hidden. And who knows, maybe the ADR will find them and give them sanctuary. That is if the ADR even exists anymore.

Five people.

The boys’ head counselor, a janitor, an office worker, a chop-shop nurse, and the chef’s boyfriend, who was visiting the wrong place on the wrong weekend.

And now, thanks to the one woman whose life he spared, everyone knows the name Mason Michael Starkey.

“Congratulations,” she told him when she had calmed down enough to speak to him without raging. “You’re now Public Enemy Number One.” To her disbelief, it actually made him smile.

“How could that possibly be a good thing?”

“I’m feared,” he told her. “I’m a force to be reckoned with. They know that now.”

And in the two days since the MoonCrater liberation, the fervent, ferocious, and almost viral support he gets from storks attests to his new larger-than-life status. It’s not just from the Stork Brigade, either. Whole online communities have sprung up out of nowhere. “Storks unite!” they proclaim and “Ride, Starkey, ride,” like he’s some sort of Jesse James robbing stagecoaches. It seems everyone who’s ever known him has tried to hop on his coattails to steal their own fifteen minutes of fame, posting stories and pictures of him, so the world knows every bit of his pre-AWOL life and every angle of his face.

It comes to light that he shot and killed one of the Juvey-rounders who picked him up from his home for unwinding, painting him in an even more dangerous light—and yet incredibly, the more vilified he is by polite society, the more support he gets from the disenfranchised.

Wrap it all together, and Starkey has achieved exactly what he wanted. His name has eclipsed the name of Connor Lassiter.

Because he hung five people in cold blood. Who knows how many it will be next time?

No! Bam can’t let herself think that way. It’s her job to shed light on the positive side. Hundreds of Unwinds saved. A rattling of the status quo. Bam reminds herself that she agreed to be a part of this. Back in the airplane graveyard, Starkey had put his faith in her when no one else would. He chose her to be his second in command in all things—if not his confidant, then at least his sounding board. She owes him allegiance in spite of everything. He’s taken on this mission to be the Savior of Storks, to be a voice for the voiceless, and he’s succeeding. Who is she to question his methods?

But Hayden has been questioning since the moment he arrived, if only to her and only when she will put up with it. He defied Starkey right to his face, though, when he found out about the hangings, refusing to return to the computer, wanting nothing to do with the next liberation. Starkey was furious, of course. He roared like a hurricane, but Hayden, who Bam never thought had much of a backbone, stood up to him.

“I won’t work for a terrorist,” Hayden had told him. “So behead me right here, or get the hell out of my face.” Had it been in front of anyone other than Bam and Jeevan, Starkey might actually have obliged an old-fashioned head rolling, to set an example for the storks. Those of them who still believed Hayden had collaborated with the Juvies would have welcomed it. But then Starkey’s anger suddenly broke and he began laughing, which somehow gave him more power in the moment than his anger had. If you can’t win, then make a joke out of it. That had always been Hayden’s MO, but Starkey had now stolen that from him.

“Never try to be serious, Hayden—it’s too funny.” Then he put Hayden back on food inventory, as if it had been his plan all along. “A menial job for a mediocre mind.”

Well, apparently, Hayden’s mind isn’t as mediocre as Starkey would like to think, because a day and a half later, Starkey sends Bam on a mission to coax Hayden back to the computer room. As if she’ll have any more sway than Starkey. Gentle persuasion is not one of Bam’s gifts—and Hayden has already shown that he won’t be bullied. It’s a fool’s errand, but lately, she’s been feeling very much the fool.

She finds Hayden in the supply room, sitting against a support beam in that central patch of darkness. He’s not doing much in terms of inventory and distribution, it seems. Although he’s writing in the inventory notebook. When the guard on Hayden duty sees her, he stands and hefts his weapon, trying to pretend like he hadn’t been dozing on a sack of rice.

Hayden doesn’t even look up at her as she approaches.

“Why are you writing in the dark?”

“Because I’m such an awful writer, it’s best no one sees it—not even me.”

She steps into the pool of darkness to find it’s not all that dark after all. It just seems that way when coming from the lighter edge. He doesn’t stand up to greet her; he just continues writing.

“So what is it?”

“I’m keeping a journal of my time here. That way, when it’s our turn to hang for the things we’re doing, there’ll be a record of what really happened. I’m calling it ‘Starkey’s Inferno,’ although I’m not quite sure which level of hell this is.”

“They don’t hang people anymore,” Bam points out. Then she thinks of Starkey’s lynchings. “Or at least they don’t hang people officially.”

“True. I suppose they’ll just shell us. Or at least they will if those shelling laws pass.” He closes the notebook and looks up at her for the first time. “The Egyptians were the first to think of shelling. Did you know that? They mummified their leaders to preserve their bodies for the afterlife—but before they sent them on their unmerry way, they sucked their brains out of their heads.” He pauses to consider it. “Geniuses, those Egyptians. They knew the last thing a pharaoh needs is a brain of his own, or he might do some real damage.”

Finally he stands to face her. “So what are you doing here, Bam? What do you want?”

“We need you to show Jeevan how to break through firewalls. You don’t have to do any of the breaking; you just need to show him.”

“Jeevan knows how to defeat firewalls—he did it all the time at the Graveyard. If he’s not doing it, it’s because he doesn’t want to but he’s afraid to tell the Stork Lord.”

“The Stork Lord—is that what the media’s calling him now?

“No. It’s my own term of endearment,” Hayden admits. “But if they did start calling him that, I’m sure Starkey would love it. I’ll bet he’d build himself an altar so that the common folk may worship in song and sacrifice. Which reminds me—I’ve been toying with the idea of an appropriate Stork Lord salute. It’s like a heil Hitler thing, but with just the middle finger. Like so.” He demonstrates, and it makes Bam laugh.

“Hayden, you really are an asshole.”

“Coming from you, I take that as a compliment.” He gives her a hint of his condescending smirk. She’s actually glad to see it.

He hesitates for a moment, takes a glance over at his guard, who is dozing on the rice again; then he steps closer to her and says quietly, “You’d be a better leader than Starkey, Bam.”

There’s silence between them. Bam finds she can’t even respond to that.

“You can’t tell me you haven’t thought of it,” Hayden says.

He’s right; she has thought about it. And she also dismissed the idea before it could take root. “Starkey has a mission,” she tells him. “He has a goal. What do I have?”

Hayden shrugs. “Common sense? A survival instinct? Good bone structure?”

Bam quickly decides this is not a conversation she’s going to have. “Put down the notebook and start doing your job. There wasn’t enough food yesterday—make sure there is tonight.”

He gives her a middle-finger heil, and she leaves, chucking a potato at the sleeping guard to wake him up.

•   •   •

It’s that afternoon when Bam’s world, already dangerously off-kilter, turns upside down entirely. It’s because of the Prissies. That’s always been her special word for the kind of girls she hates most. Dainty little things who have lived a carefree life of privilege, whose troubles are limited to choice of nail color and boyfriend woes and whose names sound normal but are weirdly spelled. Even among the Stork Brigade there are girls who qualify as Prissies, ever aloof and pretentious even as their clothes tatter into rags. Somehow, in spite of all the hardships they’ve endured, they manage to be pretty and petty and as shallow as an oil slick.

There are three in particular who have formed their own little click over the past few weeks. Two are sienna, one umber, and all three are annoyingly beautiful. They didn’t participate in either harvest camp liberation—in fact, they never seem to do much of anything but talk among themselves and whisper derision of others. More than once Bam has heard them snarking behind her back about her height, her arguably mannish figure, and her general demeanor. She avoids them on principle, but today Bam’s feeling belligerent. She wants to pick a fight, or at least to make others feel miserable—and who better to make miserable than girls who have a dainty figure instead of good bone structure?

She finds them in the area of the mine designated as “girls only.” It’s where they go to avoid unwanted advances from the hormonal male population when they’ve tired of flirting. Bam hasn’t noticed them flirting lately. She doesn’t think anything of it at first.

“Starkey needs munitions moved deeper into the mine,” she tells them. “I’ve elected you three to do it. Try not to blow yourselves up.”

“Why are you telling us?” Kate-Lynn asks. “Get some of the boys to do it.”

“Nope. It’s your turn today.”

“But I’m not supposed to be lifting heavy things,” whines Emmalee.

“Right,” says Makayla. “None of us are.”

“According to who?”

They look at one another like none of them wants to say. Finally Emmalee becomes the spokeswoman of the clique. “Well . . . according to Starkey.”

That Starkey would give special privileges to the Prissies irritates Bam even further. Well, she’s his workhorse around this place—she can take away any privileges she chooses.

“Every stork contributes,” Bam tells them. “Get off your lazy butts and get to work.”

Makayla whispers something into Kate-Lynn’s ear, and Kate-Lynn throws a telepathic sort of gaze at Emmalee, who shakes her head and turns back to Bam, offering an apologetic smile that’s not apologetic at all.

“We really do have special permission directly from Starkey,” she says.

“Permission to do nothing? I don’t think so.”

“Not to do nothing, but to take care of ourselves. And each other,” Kate-Lynn says.

“Right,” parrots Makayla. “Ourselves and each other.”

Every word out of their mouths makes Bam want to just slap them silly. “What on earth are you talking about?”

They share that three-way telepathic gaze again; then Emmalee says, “We’re really not supposed to talk about this with you.”

“Really. Did Starkey tell you that?”

“Not exactly.” Finally Emmalee rises to face Bam, holding her gaze and speaking slowly. “We have to take care of ourselves . . . because Starkey’s made us unwind proof.” Bam is not a stupid girl. She’s not much when it comes to school smarts, because her attitude always got in the way—but she’s always been a quick study in the school of life. This, however, is so far out of the realm of Bam’s concept of reality, she just doesn’t get it.

Now the other Prissies stand. Makayla puts a sympathetic hand on Bam’s shoulder. “Unwind proof for nine months,” she says. “Do you understand now?”

It hits her like a mortar blast. She actually stumbles back into the wall. “You’re lying! You have to be!”

But now that it’s out, their eyes take on a strange ecstatic look. They’re telling the truth! My God, they’re telling the truth!

“He’s going to be a great man,” Kate-Lynn says. “He already is.”

“We might all be storks, but his children won’t be,” says another. Bam doesn’t even know which one it is. They’re all the same to her now. Three talking heads on a single body, like some horrible, beautiful hydra.

“He promises he’ll take care of us.”

“All of us.”

“He swears he will.”

“And you don’t know what it’s like.”

“You can’t know what it’s like.”

“To be chosen by him.”

“To be touched by greatness.”

“So we can’t carry munitions today.”

“Or tomorrow.”

“Or ever.”

“So sorry, Bam.”

“Yes, so sorry.”

“We hope you can understand.”

•   •   •

Bam storms through the maze of the mine in search of Starkey, losing track of where she’s been, her thoughts and emotions in such a tailspin, it’s all she can do not to blow up like a clapper.

She finds him at the computer looking over Jeevan’s shoulder at their next target, but right now, there’s no room for that on Bam’s radar. She’s out of breath from running through the mine. She knows her emotions are on her sleeve, staining as brightly as blood. She knows she should have just run deeper into the mine and paced and stewed and broiled until her anger and disgust had faded. But she couldn’t do it.

“When were you going to tell me?”

Starkey regards her for a moment, takes a sip from his canteen, and sends Jeevan away. He knows from the look on her face exactly what she’s talking about. How could he not know?

“Why do you think it’s your business?”

“I am your second in command. You don’t keep secrets from me!”

“There a difference between a secret and discretion.”

“Discretion? Don’t you dare talk to me about discretion after scoring your little hat trick.”

“This is a dangerous thing I’m doing out there. I’m not entirely blind to that. I know it might be messed up, but I want to leave something behind if I don’t survive—and it’s not like I forced them.”

“You never force anyone, do you, Mason? You just hypnotize them. You dazzle them. And before you know it, people are willing to do anything for you.”

Then Starkey slices through to the one thing hanging in the air between them—the one thing that shouldn’t be said.

“You’re just pissed off because you’re not one of them.”

Bam slaps him so hard he stumbles, nearly knocking over the computer. And when he comes back at her, anger in his eyes, she’s ready. She grabs his ruined hand and squeezes it. Hard. The reaction is immediate. His legs buckle beneath him, and he falls to his knees. She squeezes harder.

“Let . . . go . . . ,” he squeaks. “Please . . . let . . . go . . . .”

She grips his hand a moment longer, then releases it, prepared for whatever he does to her next. Let him throw her to the ground. Let him spit in her face. Let him hit her and hit her again. At least that would be something. At least there’d be some passion from him launched in her direction.

Instead of retaliating, he just grabs his ruined hand, rises, and closes his eyes until the pain passes.

“After all I’ve done for you,” she says. “After all I’ve been for you, you go off with them?”

“Bambi, please—”

“Don’t call me that! Never call me that!”

“If it were you instead of them, you couldn’t be out there with me changing the world, could you? It would be too dangerous!”

“You could have given me the choice!”

“And then what? How could you be my second if that’s between us?”

Bam finds she has no answer to that, and Starkey must know he’s having an effect on her, because he takes a step closer. His voice becomes kinder. “Don’t you know how much you mean to me, Bam? What we have is something I’ll never have with those girls.”

“And what they have, I’ll never have.”

He regards her. Gauging. Assessing. “Is that what you really want, Bam? Is that what would make you happy? Really?” Then he steps deep into her airspace. She’s so tall that standing this close, he seems even shorter than he really is.

He cranes his neck to kiss her, but their lips are still an inch away, and instead of suffering the indignation of rising on his tiptoes, he reaches behind her head, pulling her down into the kiss. That kiss is like a conjurer’s act. It’s artful, it’s worthy of applause, it is everything Bam ever dreamed it might be . . . but nothing will change the fact that it’s only a trick, and today there is no audience to applaud it.

“I’m sorry I hurt you, Bam. And you’re right; you deserve something real from me.”

“That wasn’t real, Mason.”

He offers her something between a grin and a grimace. “It’s as real as I get.”

•   •   •

Bam wanders the mine, feeling spent in every possible way. Her fury at Starkey no longer knows where to go. Neither do any of her emotions. She feels the longing for something unnamable that’s been lost. If she were more naive, she’d call it her innocence, but Bambi Ann Covalt has not been innocent for a very long time.

She bumps her head hard on a rock jutting from the low-slung ceiling. She doesn’t even realize where she was going until her head smacks that rock.

“You again?” Hayden says when he sees her. This time, he’s actually loading a cart with food for the evening meal.

Bam turns to his guard. “Go get me something to drink.”

He looks confused. “But all the water and stuff is in here.”

“Fine. Then go get me some sushi!”

“Huh?”

“Could you really be that stupid? Just get the hell out of here!”

“Yes, Miss Bam.” He hurries out, practically tripping over his weapon.

Hayden is amused. “ ‘Miss Bam.’ Sounds like a good name for a kindergarten teacher. Have you ever considered the profession?”

“I don’t like children.”

“You don’t like adults much either. Or, for that matter, anything in between.”

For some reason, that makes tears rise like bile in her, but she bears down and holds them in, refusing to let Hayden see them.

“You’re bleeding,” Hayden says. Concerned, he takes a step toward her, but she waves him off.

“I’m fine.” She touches her head. There’s a small cut where she bumped it on the ceiling. The least of her problems. She’ll make an appointment with the kid with the dental floss. “We need to talk.”

“About?”

She checks to make sure the guard hasn’t come back and they are truly alone. “I promised you’d have my ear. So bend it. Now.”