Текст книги "UnWholly"
Автор книги: Neal Shusterman
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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 27 страниц)
19 • Cam
A suitable partner for Camus Comprix—one with all the right qualities—is not easy to find. More than two hundred girls go through the interview process. All of them have strong credentials. There are actresses and models, scholars, and high-society debutantes. Roberta has left no stone unturned in drumming up the perfect planet for her star.
The final twenty are brought to Cam for his assessment in a cushy fireside interview in the grand living room. They are all well-dressed, pretty, and smart. Most of them talk about their résumés as if applying for an office job. Some look at him with no qualms, while others can’t look him in the eye at all. There’s one girl who fawns all over him, putting off more heat than the fireplace.
“I would love to be your first,” she says. “You can do that, can’t you? I mean you’re . . . complete, right?”
“More than complete,” he tells her. “In fact, I have three.”
She just stares at him dumbfounded, and he decides not to tell her he’s joking.
He finds himself attracted to some, left cold by others—but in none of them does he find the spark of connection he has hoped for. By the time he gets to the last girl, a Boston scholar with New York fashion sense, he just wants to get this day over with. The girl is one of those who is intrigued by his face. She doesn’t just look at him, though, she studies him like a specimen under a microscope.
“So what do you see when you look at me?” he asks.
“It’s not what’s on the outside—it’s the inside that matters,” she responds.
“And what do you think is inside?”
She hesitates, then asks, “Is this a trick question?”
Roberta is exasperated when he refuses to accept a single one of them. Dinner between the two of them that night is all clattering silverware and intense cutting of meat. They barely look at each other across the table. Finally Roberta says, “We’re not looking for your soul mate, Cam, just someone to fill a role. A consort to help ease you into public life.”
“Maybe I’m not willing to settle for that.”
“Being practical is not the same as settling.”
Cam slams his fist down. “My decision! You will not force me.”
“Of course I won’t—but—”
“Conversation over.” Then the meal goes back to severe silverware. Deep down he knows she’s right, which just makes him furious. All they need to make Roberta’s scheme work is an attractive, personable girl holding his hand, convincing the public that there’s so much about Cam to love. But he finds no bit of actor in him. Perhaps he can feign it, but he dreads the moments alone when he has to face the emptiness of a false relationship.
Emptiness.
That’s what people believe is inside him. A great void. And if he can’t find a soul mate among the girls paraded before him, does that mean they’re right, and he has no soul?
“Incomplete,” he says. “If I’m whole, why do I feel like I’m not?” And as usual, Roberta has a calming platitude intended to ease his mind, but as time goes on her rote wisdom leaves him flat and disappointed.
“Wholeness comes from creating experiences that are solely yours, Cam,” she tells him. “Live your life and soon you’ll find the lives of those who came before won’t matter. Those who gave rise to you mean nothing compared to what you are.”
But how can he live his life when he’s not convinced he has one? The attacks in the press conference still plague him. If a human being has a soul, then where is his? And if the human soul is indivisible, then how can his be the sum of the parts of all the kids who gave rise to him? He’s not one of them, he’s not all of them, so who is he?
His questions make Roberta impatient. “I’m sorry,” she tells him, “but I don’t deal in the unanswerable.”
“So you don’t believe in souls?” Cam asks her.
“I didn’t say that, but I don’t try to answer things that don’t have tangible data. If people have souls, then you must have one, proved by the mere fact that you’re alive.”
“But what if there is no ‘I’ inside me? What if I’m just flesh going through the motions, with nothing inside?”
Roberta considers this, or at least pretends to. “Well, if that were the case, I doubt you’d be asking these questions.” She thinks for a moment. “If you must have a construct, then think of it this way: Whether consciousness is implanted in us by something divine, or whether it is created by the efforts of our brains, the end result is the same. We are.”
“Until we are not,” Cam adds.
Roberta nods. “Yes, until we are not.” And she leaves him with none of his questions answered.
• • •
Physical therapy has evolved into full-on training sessions with machines, free weights, and cardio. Kenny is the closest thing Cam has to a friend, unless you count Roberta and the guards who call him “sir.” They talk openly about things that Roberta would probably want to monitor.
“So the great girlfriend search was a bust, huh?” Kenny asks while Cam pushes himself on the treadmill.
“We have not yet found a consort for the creature,” Cam says, mimicking Roberta’s accent.
Kenny chuckles. “You got a right to be choosy,” he tells Cam. “You shouldn’t accept anything less than what you want.”
Cam reaches the end of his workout, and the machine begins its slowdown. “Even if I can’t have what I want?”
“All the more reason to demand it,” Kenny advises. “Because then maybe they’ll get closer to the mark.”
Sound logic, perhaps, although Cam suspects it will do nothing but set him up for disappointment.
That night he goes alone to the tabletop computer screen in the living room and starts digging through photo files. Most of it is random stuff—the images Roberta still tests him on, although not as frequently as before. None of it is what he’s looking for. He finds a file that features the head shots of all the girls who interviewed. Two hundred smiling, pretty faces, with attached résumés. After a while, they all begin to look alike.
“You won’t find her in there.”
He turns to see Roberta standing on the spiral staircase, watching him. She descends the rest of the way.
“Deleted?” he asks.
“Should be,” Roberta says, “but no.”
She touches the screen, logs in, and opens up files that had been locked to Cam. In just a few seconds she drags out not just one, but three photos and sighs. “Is this who you were looking for?”
Cam looks at the pictures. “Yes.” The other two photos, like the one he had already seen, seem to have been taken without her knowledge. He wonders why Roberta is now willing to show him these pictures of the girl in the wheelchair, when she was so much against it before.
“Bus,” says Cam. “She was on a bus.”
“Her bus never made it to its destination. It was run off the road and hit a tree.”
Cam shakes his head. “I didn’t get that memory.” Then he looks to Roberta. “Tell me about her.”
20 • Nelson
The Juvey-cop turned parts pirate has outdone himself this time! Not one, but two AWOLs!
Nelson attributes his success to the ingenuity of his tactics. He caught the girl at a food court by posing as a resistance worker. Gullibility has always been his greatest ally. The girl’s hair isn’t quite red, as Divan requested, but it could be strawberry blond in a certain light. As for the boy, Nelson used the girl as bait, securing her to a drainpipe near an abandoned factory in an umber neighborhood that was known to be AWOL-infested. He waited until her cries drew someone from the dark recesses of the building, and he watched as the boy freed her. Then, from his vantage point in a building across the street, Nelson tranq’d them both as they ran.
His DNA analyzer pegged them both as known AWOLs, which is always better for his conscience than catching kids who actually had a life to go back to.
The drive back to Divan’s auto dealership is filled with anticipation for Nelson. He was never an overachiever, so doing twice the job with half the effort is a rare thing indeed!
When he arrives, Divan is surprised but thrilled to see him so soon after the last delivery. “What a catch,” he exclaims, and for once, doesn’t even dicker—he gives Nelson the price he asks. Perhaps because Nelson doesn’t ask for his trophies this time. The girl’s eyes have fading purple pigment injections that are just plain ugly, and Nelson never did see the boy’s eyes. He rarely covets what he doesn’t see.
In a rare show of gratitude, Divan treats Nelson to dinner in the kind of restaurant he hasn’t frequented in quite a while.
“Business must be picking up,” Nelson comments.
“Business is business,” Divan says, “but prospects are good.”
Nelson can tell that the black marketeer has something on his mind. He watches and waits as Divan dips a spoon into his coffee, stirring slowly, methodically. “At our last encounter,” Divan says, “I spoke to you of rumors, did I not?”
“Yes, but you failed to share them with me,” Nelson says, drinking his own coffee much more quickly than Divan. “Are these rumors something I’ll enjoy hearing?”
“Not at first, I’m sure. I’ve heard it spoken of more than once now. I didn’t want to bring it to your attention until I had heard it from more than one source.” He continues to stir his coffee. Not drinking, just pondering the swirling liquid. “They are saying that the Akron AWOL is still alive.”
Nelson feels the little hairs on the back of his neck rise and embed themselves in his collar.
“That’s impossible.”
“Yes, yes—you’re probably right.” Then Divan puts down his spoon. “However, did anyone actually see or identify the body?”
“I wasn’t at Happy Jack. I imagine it was a mess.”
“Exactly,” says Divan slowly. “A mess.” Then he picks up his coffee and takes a long, slow sip. “Which means that any number of things could have happened.” Then he puts down his coffee and leans closer. “I believe these rumors may be true. Do you have any idea how much the parts of the Akron AWOL would go for? People will pay obscene amounts for a piece of him.” Then he smiles. “I’ll pay you ten, maybe twenty times what I paid you for today’s catch.”
Nelson tries not to react, but he knows that by not saying anything, his greed has expressed itself. But for him, this particular moment of greed is not about money. Bringing in Connor Lassiter wouldn’t just be about the cash, it would even out a very imbalanced score.
It’s as if Divan can read his mind. “I am telling you this before any of my other suppliers. It would bring me great pleasure if you were the one to catch him, considering your history with him.”
“Thank you,” Nelson says, genuinely grateful for the head start.
“Word has it that there are some sizable AWOL populations in hiding. It would be wise to find those places, as there’s a good chance he’s working for the Anti-Divisional Resistance now.”
“If he’s alive, I’ll catch him and bring him to you,” Nelson tells him. “One thing, though.”
Divan raises an eyebrow. “Yes?”
Nelson levels his stare, making it clear that this is nonnegotiable, and says, “I get his eyes.”
Part Four
Leviathan
SURGEONS HARVEST ORGANS AFTER EUTHANASIA
by Michael Cook, May 14, 2010, BioEdge web journal
How often is this going on in Belgium and the Netherlands? Bioethics blogger Wesley Smith drew our attention to a conference report by Belgian transplant surgeons about organ procurement after euthanasia. As the doctors from Antwerp University Hospital explained in the 2006 World Transplant Congress (in a section called “economics”), they killed a consenting forty-six-year-old woman with a neurological condition and took her liver, two kidneys, and islets.
In a 2008 report, the doctors explained that three patients had been euthanased between 2005 and 2007. . . .
At the time of writing the article, the doctors were enthusiastic about the potential for organ donation in countries where euthanasia is legal. . . .
The curious thing about this is how little publicity this has received, even though the Belgian doctors published their achievement in the world’s leading journal of transplant surgery. ~
Transplantation
, July 15, 2006;
Transplantation,
July 27, 2008.
Full article is available at:
http://www.bioedge.org/index.php/bioethics/bioethics_article/8991/
21 • Lev
It’s a very rare thing that a clapper doesn’t clap, because by the time one gets to the stage of being willing to make one’s own blood explosive enough to take out a whole building, that soul is far beyond the point of no return.
There had still been a spark of light in Levi Jedediah Calder, however. Enough to ignite a powerful change of heart.
The clapper who didn’t clap.
It made him famous. His face was known nationwide and beyond. WHY, LEV, WHY? magazine headlines read, with his life story spread out like a centerfold, ready to be ogled and gobbled by a world greedy for dirt and personal tragedy.
“He was always the perfect son,” his parents were quoted as saying more than once. “We’ll never understand it.” To see their teary interviews, you’d think Lev had actually blown himself up and truly was dead. Well, maybe in a way he was, because the Levi Calder he had been on the day he was sent to be tithed no longer existed.
Almost a year after his capture at Happy Jack Harvest Camp, Lev sits in a detention center rec room on a rainy Sunday morning. He is not a resident of the detention center; he’s a visitor on a mission of mercy.
Across from him sits a kid in an orange jumpsuit, his arms crossed. Between them are the sorry ruins of a jigsaw puzzle left from the last person to sit at the table, one of many unfinished projects that plague this place. It’s February, and the walls are halfheartedly hung with Valentine’s Day decorations that are supposed to add a sense of festivity but just seem sadistic, because in an all-boys’ detention center, only a select few are finding romance this year.
“So you’re supposed to have something useful to say to me?” the kid in the orange jumpsuit says, all attitude, tattoos, and body odor. “What are you, like, twelve?”
“Actually, I’m fourteen.”
The kid smirks. “Well, good for you. Now get out of my sight. I don’t need spiritual guidance from baby Jesus.” Then he reaches out and flicks up Lev’s hair, which, over the past year, has grown to his shoulders in a very Jesus-like way.
Lev is not bothered. He gets this all the time. “We still have half an hour. Maybe we should talk about why you’re in here.”
“I’m in here because I got caught,” the punk says. Then his eyes narrow, and he takes a closer look at Lev. “You look familiar. Do I know you?”
Lev doesn’t answer. “I would guess you’re sixteen, right? You’re labeled a ‘divisional risk,’ you know that, don’t you? It means you’re at risk for being unwound.”
“What, you think my mother would unwind me? She wouldn’t dare. Who’d pay her friggin’ bills?” Then he rolls up a sleeve, revealing that the tattoos visible on his wrists go all the way up to his shoulder. Bones and brutality painted on his flesh. “Besides, who’s gonna want these arms?”
“You’d be surprised,” Lev tells him. “People actually pay extra for ink as good as yours.”
The punk is taken aback by the thought, then studies Lev again. “Are you sure I don’t know you? You live here in Cleveland?”
Lev sighs. “You don’t know me, you just know of me.”
Another moment, then the punk’s eyes go wide with recognition. “No way! You’re that tithe kid! I mean the clapper! I mean the one who didn’t blow up! You were all over the news!”
“Right. But we’re not here to talk about me.”
Suddenly the punk seems like a different kid. “Yeah, yeah, I know. I’m sorry I was an ass before. So, like, why aren’t you in jail?”
“Plea bargain. Not allowed to talk about it,” Lev tells him. “Let’s just say talking to you is part of my punishment.”
“Damn!” says the kid, grinning. “They give you a penthouse suite, too?”
“Seriously, I’m not allowed to talk about it . . . but I can listen to anything you want to tell me.”
“Well, all right. I mean, if you really wanna hear it.”
And then the kid launches into a confessional life story that he probably never told anyone before. It’s the one positive thing about Lev’s notoriety—it gets him respect among those who usually don’t give it.
These kids in detention always want to know all about him, but the terms of the settlement were very clear. With so much sympathy from some people, and so much anger from others, it was “in the public’s best interest” to get Lev out of the news as quickly as possible and keep him from becoming the national voice against unwinding. In the end, he was sentenced to house arrest, complete with a tracking chip embedded in his shoulder, and 520 hours of community service every year, until his eighteenth birthday. His service consisted of picking up trash in local parks and ministering to wayward youth about the ills of drugs and violent behavior. In return for the relative lightness of his sentence, he agreed to give them all the inside information he knew about clappers and other terrorist activities. That part was easy—he knew very little beyond his own clapper cell, and the other members were all dead. He was also put under a permanent gag order. He could never speak in public about unwinding, tithing, and what happened at Happy Jack. He was basically sentenced to disappear.
“We should call you the little mermaid,” his brother Marcus had joked, “because they let you magically walk, in exchange for your voice.”
So now every Sunday, Pastor Dan picks Lev up at Marcus’s town house, and they share their own brand of spirituality with kids in juvenile detention.
At first it was painfully awkward, but within a few months Lev became very good at reaching into the hearts of strangers, figuring out what made them tick, and then defusing them before the tick became a countdown.
“The Lord works in mischievous ways,” Pastor Dan once told him, taking an old adage and giving it a necessary tweak. If Lev has any heroes, they would be Pastor Dan and his brother Marcus. Marcus not just for standing up to their parents, but also for going the distance and taking Lev in, even though it got him cut off entirely from their family. They were both outcasts now from a family so rigid in their beliefs that they’d rather pretend Marcus and Lev were dead than face the choices the two had made.
“It’s their loss,” Marcus often tells Lev, but he can’t say it without looking away to hide the sorrow it makes him feel.
As for Pastor Dan, he’s a hero to Lev for having the courage to lose his convictions without losing his faith. “I still believe in God,” Pastor Dan told him, “just not a God who condones human tithing.” And in tears, Lev asked if he could believe in that God too, never having realized he had such a choice.
Dan, who no one but Lev calls “Pastor” anymore, listed himself as a nondenominational cleric on the form they had to fill out before they began meeting with kids at the detention center.
“So then what religion are we?” Lev asks him each week as they walk in. The question has become a running joke, and each time Pastor Dan has another answer.
“We’re Pentupcostal because we’re sick of all the hypocrisy.”
“We’re Clueish, because we finally got a clue.”
“We’re PresbyPterodactyl, because we’re making this whole thing fly against all reason.”
But Lev’s favorite was, “We’re Leviathan, because what happened to you, Lev, is at the heart of it all.”
It made him feel both terribly uncomfortable and also a little bit blessed to be at the core of a spiritual movement, even if it was only a movement of two.
“Isn’t a leviathan a big, ugly monster?” he pointed out.
“Yes,” said Pastor Dan, “so let’s hope you never become one.”
Lev is never going to become a big anything. The reason why he doesn’t quite look fourteen is more than just looking young for his age. In the weeks after his capture, he endured transfusion after transfusion to clean out his blood, but poisoning his body with explosive compounds had damaged him. For weeks Lev’s body was bound in puffy cotton gauze like a mummy, yet with arms stretched wide to keep him from detonating himself.
“You’ve been cruci-fluffed,” Pastor Dan told him. At the time, Lev didn’t find it very funny.
His doctor tried to mask his disdain for Lev by hiding it behind a cold, clinical demeanor.
“Even when we purge your system of the chemicals,” the doctor said, “they’ll take their toll.” Then he’d chuckled bitterly. “You’ll live, but you’ll never be unwound. You have just enough damage to your organs to make them useless to anybody but you.”
The damage also stunted his growth, as well as his physical development. Now Lev’s body is perpetually trapped at the age of thirteen. The wage of being a clapper who doesn’t clap. The only thing that will still grow is his hair—and he made a conscious decision that he would just let it grow, never again becoming the clean-cut, easily manipulated boy he had once been.
Luckily, the worst predictions didn’t come true. He was told he would have permanent tremors in his hands and a slur in his speech. Didn’t happen. He was told that his muscles would atrophy and he’d become increasingly weak. Didn’t happen. In fact, regular exercise, while it hasn’t bulked him up like some, has left him with fairly normal muscle tone. True, he’ll never be the boy he could have been—but then, he would never have been that boy anyway. He would have been unwound. All things considered, this is a better option.
And he doesn’t mind spending his Sundays talking to kids who, once upon a time, he would have been afraid of.
“Dude,” the tattooed punk whispers, leaning over the rec room table and pushing some stray puzzle pieces to the floor. “Just tell me—what was it like at harvest camp?”
Lev looks up, catching a security camera trained on the table. There’s one trained on every table, every conversation. In this way, it’s not all that different from harvest camp.
“Like I said, I can’t talk about it,” Lev tells him. “But trust me, you want to stay clean till seventeen, because you don’t want to find out.”
“I hear ya,” says the punk. “Clean till seventeen—that oughta be the motto.” And he leans back, looking at Lev with the kind of admiration Lev doesn’t feel he’s earned.
When visiting hours are over, Lev leaves with his former pastor.
“Productive?” Dan asks.
“Can’t tell. Maybe.”
“Maybe’s better than not at all. A good day’s work for a nice Clueish boy.”
• • •
There’s a jogging path in downtown Cleveland that runs along the marina on Lake Erie. It curves around the Great Lakes Science Center and along the back side of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, where the memories of those who are notorious for rebellion far hipper than Lev’s are immortalized. Lev jogs past it every Sunday afternoon, wondering what it must be like to be both famous and infamous, yet more adored than hated, more admired than pitied. He shudders to think what type of museum exhibit would feature him, and hopes he never finds out.
It’s relatively warm for February. Temperatures in the forties. Rain instead of snow that morning, and a dreary afternoon drizzle instead of flurries. Marcus runs along with him, winded, his breath coming in puffs of steam.
“Do you have to run so fast?” he calls after Lev. “It’s not a race. And anyway, it’s raining.”
“What does that have to do with it?”
“You could slip and lose control—there are still slushy spots.”
“I’m not a car.”
Lev splashes through a slush puddle, splattering Marcus, and grins while his brother curses. Years of fast food and endlessly hitting the books in law school has left Marcus not exactly flabby, but certainly out of shape.
“I swear, if you keep showing me up, I won’t run with you anymore. I’ll call the feds back in. They always keep up with you.”
Ironically, it had been Marcus’s idea that Lev begin an exercise routine once he was released into his brother’s custody. In those early days of recovery, when his blood was still poisoned, just getting up and down the stairs in Marcus’s town house was a workout for Lev—but Marcus had the vision to see that the rehabilitation of Lev’s soul was closely tied to rehabilitating his body. For many weeks it had been Marcus pushing Lev to cover just one more block. And yes, when he first began, there were G-men escorting him. At first they escorted him everywhere on his Sundays out, perhaps to show that there was no leniency to house arrest. Eventually they began to trust the tracking chip and allowed Lev to be out without an official escort, as long as either Dan or Marcus was with him.
“If I have a heart attack, it’ll have your name all over it!” Marcus calls from farther back.
Lev was never a distance runner. Once upon a time, he was all about baseball; a real team player. Now a more individual sport suits him.
As the rain gets heavier, he stops, only halfway through the run, and lets Marcus catch up with him. They buy Aquafina from a die-hard vendor outside the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, who’ll probably still be selling bottled water and Red Bull as the world is ending.
Marcus catches his breath as he drinks, then mentions casually, “You got a letter from Cousin Carl yesterday.”
Lev holds his reaction inside, giving no outward indication that this is any big deal. “If it came yesterday, why are you telling me today?”
“You know how you get.”
“No,” Lev says a bit coldly. “Tell me how I get.”
But Marcus doesn’t have to, because Lev knows exactly what he means.
The first letter from Cousin Carl was a complete mystery at first, until Lev realized it was a coded message from Connor. With the possibility that Lev’s mail is being monitored by one government agency or another, it was the only way Connor could get him a message and hope that Lev was clever enough to figure it all out. One arrives every few months, always postmarked from someplace different, so it can’t be traced back to the Graveyard.
“So what does he say?” Lev asks Marcus.
“It’s addressed to you. Believe it or not, I don’t read your mail.”
When they arrive home, Marcus hands the letter to him but holds it out of reach for a moment. “Promise me you won’t go into some black-hole brooding funk where you sit and do nothing but play video games for a week.”
“When do I ever do that?”
Marcus just gives him his “Are you kidding me?” scowl. Fair enough. Being under house arrest leaves Lev with little to do to occupy his time. But it’s true that hearing from Connor always gets him thinking, and thinking gets him spiraling, and spiraling sends him to places it would be better not to go.
“It’s a part of your life you need to leave behind you,” Marcus reminds him.
“You’re right, and you’re wrong, “ Lev tells him. He doesn’t try to explain himself, because he’s not even sure what he means, except to know that it’s true. He opens the letter. The handwriting is the same, but he suspects it’s not Connor’s, to prevent it from being analyzed and linked to him. The paranoia that engulfs them has no end.
Dear Cousin Levi,
A belated birthday card for you. I know fourteen means more to you than to most, what with the things you’ve been through. The ranch has been busy. The big beef companies keep threatening to take us over, but it hasn’t happened yet. We got a business plan that could save us from that, should it come to pass.
Hard work since I took over the ranch, and not much help from the neighbors. Wish I could just up and leave it, but who could handle these ranch hands but me?
We know of your current situation, and how you can’t come visit. Wouldn’t want you to. A lot of mad cow going on around here. Best to stay away and hope for the best.
Take care, and say hello to your brother for us. He’s almost as much of a lifesaver as you.
Sincerely,
Cousin Carl
Lev reads the letter four times, trying to parse out the various possible meanings. The Juvies’ looming threat to take the place out. The difficulty of running a sanctuary without enough help from the resistance. Lev’s daily life has grown so distant from that underworld of desperate souls, hearing about it is like listening to ice crack beneath his feet. It makes him want to run—anywhere. Run to Connor, or run away from him. He doesn’t know which direction, only that he can’t stand running in place. He wishes he could write back but knows how foolhardy that would be. It’s one thing receiving a random letter from a generic “cousin,” but sending one to the Graveyard might as well be painting a target on Connor’s back. To Lev’s frustration, communication with “Cousin Carl” can only be one-way.
“How are things on ‘the ranch’?” Marcus asks.
“Troubled.”
“We do what we can do, right?”
Lev nods. Marcus is no slouch when it comes to the resistance. He volunteers time pulling AWOLs off the street and getting them to safe houses, and gives a healthy share of the money he makes as a legal assistant to the cause.
He hands Marcus the letter to read, and Marcus seems as bothered by it as Lev does. “We’ll have to wait and see how it all shakes out.”
Lev paces the living room. There are no bars on his window. Still, they might as well have put him in solitary for the sudden claustrophobia he feels.
“I should speak out against unwinding,” Lev says, dispensing with all their coded talk. There’s nobody listening anymore anyway. Now that his life has settled into this reclusive version of normal, surveillance feels like a nonissue. The Juvey-cops have better things to do these days than to keep their eyes on a kid who’s not doing anything but hanging around his brother’s house, trying to disappear.
“If I speak up, people will listen to me—they had sympathy before, didn’t they? They’ll listen!”
Marcus slaps the letter down on the table. “For a kid who’s been through as much as you, you’re still so damn naive! People don’t have sympathy for you—they have sympathy for the little kid who became a clapper. They look at you like you’re the one who killed him.”
“I’m tired of sitting here and doing nothing!” Lev storms into the kitchen, trying to distance himself from the truth in Marcus’s words, but Marcus follows him.
“You’re not doing nothing—you still have your weekend ministries with Dan.”
The thought of it just makes Lev furious. “That’s my punishment! You think I like being partners with the Juvey-cops? Keeping kids in line for them?” If there’s one thing he knows, it’s that Connor would never do the Juvies’ dirty work.
