Текст книги "UnWholly"
Автор книги: Neal Shusterman
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Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 27 страниц)
2 • Miracolina
The girl has known since before she can remember that her body has been sanctified to God.
She has always been aware that on her thirteenth birthday she would be tithed and would experience the glorious mystery of having a divided body and a networked soul. Not networked in the computer sense—for the pouring of one’s soul into hardware happens only in the movies, and never to good results. No, this would be a true networking within living flesh. A stretching of her spirit among the dozens of people touched by her divided body. There are people who say it’s death, but she believes it to be something else—something mystical, and she believes it with every ounce of her soul.
“I suppose one cannot know what such division is like until one experiences it,” her priest once told her. It struck her as odd that the priest, who was always so confident in church dogma, spoke of uncertainty whenever he talked about tithing.
“The Vatican has yet to take a position on unwinding,” he pointed out, “and so until it is either condoned or condemned, I can be as uncertain about it as I please.”
It always made her bristle when he called tithing unwinding, as if they were the same thing. They’re not. The way she sees it, the cursed and unwanted are unwound—but the blessed and the loved are tithed. The process might be the same, but the intent is different, and in this world, intent is everything.
Her name is Miracolina—from the Italian word for “miracle.” She was named this because she was conceived to save her brother’s life. Her brother, Matteo, was diagnosed with leukemia when he was ten. The family had moved from Rome to Chicago for his treatment, but even with harvest banks all over the nation, a marrow match could not be found for his rare blood type. The only way to save him was to create a match—and so that’s exactly what his parents did. Nine months later Miracolina was born, doctors took marrow from her hip and gave it to Matteo, and her brother was saved. Easy as that. Now he’s twenty-four and in graduate school, all thanks to Miracolina.
Even before she understood what it meant to be a tithe, she knew she was 10 percent of a larger whole. “We had ten embryos in vitro,” her mother once told her. “Only one was a match for Matteo, and that was you. You were no accident, mi carina. We chose you.”
The law was very specific when it came to the other nine embryos. Her family had to pay nine women to carry them to term. After that, the surrogates could do as they pleased—either raise the babies or stork them to a good home. “But whatever it cost, it was worth it,” her parents had told her, “to have both Matteo and you.”
Now, as her tithing approaches, it comforts Miracolina to know that she has nine fraternal twins out there—and who knows? Maybe a part of her divided self will go to help one of these unknown twins.
As to why she is being tithed, it has nothing to do with percentages.
“We made a pact with God,” her parents told her when she was young, “that if you were born, and Matteo was saved, we would show our gratitude by gifting you back to God through tithing.” Miracolina understood, even at an early age, that such a powerful pact was not easily broken.
Lately, however, her parents have become more and more emotional at the thought of it. “Forgive us,” they begged her over and over again—quite often in tears. “Please forgive us for this thing we’ve done.” And she would always forgive them, even though the request baffled her. Miracolina always felt blessed to be a tithe—to know, without question, her destiny and her purpose. Why should her parents feel sorry for giving her a purpose?
Perhaps the guilt they feel is for not throwing her a big party—but then, that had been her own choice. “First of all,” she told her parents, “a tithing should be solemn, not loud. Secondly, who’s going to come?”
They couldn’t dispute her logic. While most tithes come from rich communities, and belong to the kinds of churches that expect tithing, theirs is a working-class neighborhood that’s not exactly tithe-friendly. When you’re like those rich families, surrounding yourself with like-minded people, there are plenty of friends to support you at a tithing party—enough to offset the guests who find it uncomfortable. But if Miracolina had a party, everyone there would feel awkward. That’s not how she wanted to spend her last night with her family.
So there’s no party. Instead she spends the evening in front of the fireplace, sitting between her parents and clicking through favorite scenes from favorite movies. Her mom even prepares her favorite meal, rigatoni Amatriciana. “Bold and spicy,” her mom says, “just like you.”
She sleeps that night, having no unpleasant dreams, or at least none she can remember, and in the morning she rises early, dresses in her simple daily whites, and tells her parents that she’s going to school. “The van doesn’t come for me until four this afternoon, so why waste the day?”
Although her parents would prefer she stay home with them, her wishes come first on this day.
At school, she sits through classes, already feeling a dreamy distance from it all. At the end of each class, the teacher awkwardly hands her all her collected classwork and grades, calculated early.
“Well then, I guess that’s that,” each teacher says in one way or another. Most of them can’t wait for her to get out of their room. Her science teacher is the kindest, though, taking some extra time with her.
“My nephew was tithed a few years ago,” he tells her. “A wonderful boy. I miss him terribly.” He pauses, seeming to go far away in his thoughts. “I was told his heart went to a firefighter who saved a dozen people from a burning building. I don’t know if it’s true, but I’d like to believe it is.”
Miracolina would like to believe it too.
Throughout the day, her classmates are just as awkward as her teachers. Some kids make a point to say good-bye. Some even give her uncomfortable hugs, but the rest say their farewells from a safe distance, as if tithing is somehow contagious.
And then there are the other ones. The cruel ones.
“See you here and there,” a boy says behind her back during lunch, and the kids around him snicker. Miracolina turns, and the boy tries to hide behind his gaggle of friends, thinking he’s safe within that cloud of rank middle-school perspiration—but she recognized his voice and knows exactly who it is. She pushes through his friends to coldly face him.
“Oh, you won’t see me, Zach Rasmussen . . . but if any part of me sees you, I will definitely let you know.”
Zach’s face goes a little green. “Get lost,” he says. “Go get tithed.” But still there’s that look of uneasy fear beneath his idiotic bravado.
Good, thinks Miracolina, I hope I’ve given him a few nightmares.
Her school is a huge one, so even though tithes aren’t common in her neighborhood, there are four others, all dressed in white like her. There used to be six, but the oldest two are already gone. These remaining tithes are her true friends. These are the ones to whom she feels a need to say one last good-bye. Oddly, they’re all from different backgrounds and faiths. Each is a member of a splinter sect of their particular religion—a sect that takes its commitment to self-sacrifice very seriously. Funny, Miracolina thinks, how these same religions fought over their differences for thousands of years, and yet in tithing, they all come together as one.
“We are all asked to give of ourselves—to be charitable and selfless,” says Nestor, her tithe friend closest to her in age, only a month short of his own tithing. He clasps her hands, giving Miracolina a warm good-bye. “If technology allows us a new way to give, how could it be wrong?”
Except there are people who do say that it’s wrong. More and more people these days. There’s even that ex-tithe out there—the one who became a clapper, who people hold up as an example. Well, how stable can he be? After all, he became a clapper, for goodness’ sake. The way Miracolina sees it, if someone would rather blow themselves up than be tithed, well, that’s like stealing from the collection plate, isn’t it? It’s just plain wrong.
When the school day ends, she walks home just like on any other day. As she comes onto her street, she sees her brother’s car in the driveway. She’s surprised at first—he goes to school five hours away—but she’s happy Matteo’s come to see her off.
It’s three o’clock, an hour until the van comes, and her parents are already crying. She wishes they weren’t, that they could take this as stoically as she, or even Matteo, who spends his time chatting about only the good memories.
“Remember that time we went to Rome, and you wanted to play hide-and-seek in the Vatican Museum?”
Miracolina smiles at the memory. She had tried to hide in Nero’s bathtub—this huge maroon stone bowl that could practically fit an elephant. “The security guards had a fit! I thought they’d take me to the pope, and he’d spank me—so I ran.”
Matteo laughs. “You went missing for, like, an hour—Mom and Dad were pulling their hair out.”
Missing isn’t the word for it, though. You don’t go missing in a museum—you just get temporarily absorbed by the walls. She remembers moving through the crowds of the Vatican, until she found herself standing in the middle of the Sistine Chapel, gazing up toward Michelangelo’s masterpiece, which covered the walls and ceiling. And there in the center was the divine link between heaven and earth. So close was Adam’s hand to the hand of God, both straining to touch each other, but the impossible weight of gravity kept Adam from truly touching the heavens.
She stood there, looking up, forgetting that she was supposed to be hiding, for who could hide in a place that was all about revealed mystery? And that’s exactly where her family found her; amid hundreds of tourists, staring up at the greatest work of art ever created by the hand of man—humanity’s grandest attempt to touch perfection.
She was only six, but even then, the images of the chapel spoke to her, although she had no idea what they said. All she knew was that she herself was just like this beautiful place, and if someone could go inside her, they would see glorious frescoes painted on the walls of her soul.
The van arrives ten minutes early and waits out front. There’s a brightly painted logo on the van’s side that reads wood hollow harvest camp! a place for teens!
Miracolina goes to her room to get her suitcase—a small one filled with just a few sets of tithing whites and some basic necessities. Now her parents cry and cry, begging again for her forgiveness. This time, however, it just angers her.
“If tithing makes you feel guilty, that’s not my problem,” she tells them, “because I’m at peace with it. Please have enough respect for me to be at peace with it too.”
It doesn’t help matters. It just makes their tears flow in a steadier stream.
“The only reason you’re at peace with it,” her father tells her, “is because we made you feel that way. It’s our fault. It’s all our fault.”
Miracolina looks at them and shrugs. “So change your mind, then,” she suggests. “Break your pact with God and don’t tithe me.”
They look back at her like she’s giving them a glorious gift, a reprieve from hell. Even Matteo is hopeful.
“Yes, that’s what we’ll do!” her mother says. “We haven’t signed the final papers yet. We can still change our minds!”
“Fine,” says Miracolina. “Are you sure that’s what you want?”
“Yes,” says her father with intense relief. “Yes, we’re sure.”
“Positive?”
“Yes.”
“Good, now you can be guilt free.” Miracolina picks up her suitcase. “But regardless of what you choose, I’m going anyway. That’s my choice.”
Then she hugs her mother, father, and brother and leaves without looking back—without even saying good-bye, because good-byes imply an end, and more than anything else in this life, Miracolina Roselli wants to believe that her tithing is a beginning.
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It’s a three-hour drive to Wood Hollow Harvest Camp. The van is all plush leather seats and pop music pumped through expensive speakers. The driver is a man with a salt-and-pepper beard, a big smile, and just enough of a gut to be jolly. Santa Claus in training.
“Excited for your big day?” Chauffeur-Claus asks as they drive away from Miracolina’s home and family. “Did you have a big tithing party?”
“Yes, and no,” she says. “I’m excited, but no party.”
“Aww . . . that’s too bad. Why not?”
“Because tithing shouldn’t be about me.”
“Oh,” is all Chauffeur-Claus can say to that. Miracolina’s response is the perfect conversation killer, which is fine. The last thing she wants is to recap her life for this man, no matter how jolly he is.
“There are drinks in the cooler,” he tells her. “Help yourself.” And then he leaves her alone.
Twenty minutes into the drive, instead of turning onto the interstate, they enter a gated community.
“One more pickup this afternoon,” Chauffeur-Claus tells her. “Tuesdays are lean, so it’s just this stop. Hope you don’t mind.”
“Not at all.”
They stop at a house that’s at least three times larger than her own, where a boy in white waits out front with his family. She does not watch as he says his good-byes. She looks out of the other window, giving them their privacy. Finally Chauffeur-Claus opens the door, and in comes a boy with straight dark hair, perfectly trimmed, bright blue eyes, and skin as pale as bone china—as if he had been kept out of the sun all his life to keep his skin pure as a baby’s bottom for his tithing.
“Hi,” he says shyly. His tithing whites are shiny satin and trimmed in fine gold brocade. This boy’s parents spared no expense. Miracolina’s tithing whites, on the other hand, are simple raw silk, unbleached so their whiteness won’t be so blinding that it draws attention to itself. Compared to hers, this boy’s whites are like a neon advertisement.
The seats in the van aren’t in rows—they all face center, to encourage camaraderie. The boy sits across from Miracolina, thinks for a moment, then reaches across the gap, offering his hand for her to shake. “I’m Timothy,” he says. She shakes his hand. It’s clammy and cold, like the way your hands get before a school play.
“My name’s Miracolina.”
“Wow, that’s a mouthful!” Then he chuckles, probably mad at himself for saying it. “Do people call you Mira, or Lina, or something to shorten it?”
“It’s Miracolina,” she tells him. “And no one shortens it.”
“Okay, well, pleased to meet you, Miracolina.”
The van starts up, and Timothy waves good-bye to his large family still outside, and although they wave to him as well, it’s clear that they can’t even see him through the dark glass. The van pulls out and begins to wind out of the neighborhood. Even before they leave the gate, Timothy begins to look uncomfortable, like he’s got a stomachache, but Miracolina knows if his stomach bothers him, it’s just a symptom of something else. This boy has not found peace with his tithing yet. Or if he had, he lost it the moment the van door closed, cutting the umbilical to his old life. As insulted as she is by his lavish whites and exclusive neighborhood, Miracolina begins to feel sorry for him. His fear hangs in the air around them like a web full of black widows. No one should journey to their tithing in terror.
“So, the ride is like three hours, or something?” Timothy asks, his voice shaky.
“Yes,” says Chauffeur-Claus brightly. “There’s an entertainment system with hundreds of preprogrammed movies to pass the time. Help yourselves!”
“Yeah, okay, sure,” says Timothy. “Maybe later, though.”
For a few minutes, he seems lost in his own thoughts. Then he turns to Miracolina again.
“They say tithes get treated really well at harvest camp. You think it’s true? They say it’s lots of fun, and we’re with tons of other kids just like us.” He clears his throat. “They say we even get to choose the day when we . . . when we . . . well, you know . . .”
Miracolina smiles at him warmly. Usually tithes like Timothy go to harvest camp in a limo—but she knows why Timothy didn’t, without having to ask. He didn’t want to make the journey alone. Well, if fate has brought them together on this momentous day, she will be the friend he needs.
“I’m sure harvest camp will be just the experience you want it to be,” she tells him, “and when you choose your date, you’ll choose it because you’re ready. That’s why they let us choose. So it’s our decision, no one else’s.”
Timothy looks into her with those piercing perfect eyes. “You’re not scared at all, are you?”
She chooses to answer his question with another question. “Have you ever been on an airplane?” she asks him.
“Huh?” Timothy is thrown by the change of subject. “Yeah, a bunch of times.”
“Were you scared the first time you flew?”
“Yeah, sure, I guess.”
“But you went anyway. Why?”
Timothy shrugs. “I wanted to get where I was going, and my parents were with me and said it would be okay.”
“Well,” says Miracolina, “there you go.”
Timothy looks at her, blinking with a kind of innocence Miracolina doesn’t think she ever had. “So then, you’re not scared?”
She sighs. “Yes, I’m scared,” she admits. “Very scared. But when you trust that it will all be okay, you can enjoy the fear. You can use it to help you instead of letting it hurt you.”
“Oh, I get it,” says Timothy. “It’s like a scary movie, you know? You can have fun with it because you know it’s not real no matter how scared it makes you.” Then he thinks about it a bit more. “But getting unwound is real. It’s not like we’re going to walk out of the theater and go home. It’s not like I’m going to get off a plane and be in Disneyland.”
“Tell you what,” Miracolina says, before Timothy can drag himself back into his pit of spider-filled despair. “Let’s watch one of those scary movies and get it all out of our systems before we get to harvest camp.”
Timothy nods obediently. “Yeah, sure, okay.”
But as she scrolls through all the preprogrammed movies, none of them are scary. They’re all family films and comedies.
“It’s okay,” says Timothy. “To tell you the truth, I don’t like scary movies anyway.”
In a few minutes, they’re on the interstate making good time. Timothy contents himself with video games to keep his mind from going to dark places, and Miracolina puts in her earphones, listening to her own eclectic mix of music, rather than the van’s vapid pop tunes. There are 2,129 songs in her iChip, and she’s determined to listen to as many as she can before the day she enters the divided state.
About two hours and thirty songs later, the van exits the interstate and turns down a scenic road winding through dense woods. “Just half an hour now,” Chauffeur-Claus tells them. “We made good time!”
Then, as they come around a bend, he slams on the brakes, and the van screeches to a halt.
Miracolina takes off her earphones. “What’s going on? What’s wrong?”
“Stay here,” orders Chauffeur-Claus, no longer jolly, and he jumps out of the van.
Timothy already has his nose pressed against the window, looking out. “This can’t be good.”
“No,” agrees Miracolina. “It can’t.”
Just off the road in a ditch is another Wood Hollow Harvest Camp van, but this one is overturned, wheels to the sky. There’s no telling how long it has been there.
“He must have blown a tire or something, and skidded off the road,” says Timothy. But none of the tires look blown.
“We should call for help,” says Miracolina—but no one brings a phone to harvest camp, so neither she nor Timothy has one.
Just then there’s a commotion outside. Half a dozen people dressed in black with faces hidden by ski masks come leaping out of the woods from all directions. The chauffeur is hit with a tranq bullet to the neck and goes down like an overstuffed rag doll.
“Lock the door!” shouts Miracolina, and doesn’t wait. She pushes Timothy out of the way to get to the driver’s unlocked door—but she’s not fast enough. Just as she reaches for the lock, the door is pulled open, and the assailant hits the button that pops all the locks. All the van’s doors are pulled open at once by the masked attackers. Clearly these attackers have done this before and have gotten good at it. Timothy screams as hands reach in, pulling him out. He tries to wriggle free, but it’s useless. If his fear is a web, then the spiders have got him.
Two more figures reach for Miracolina, and she drops to the floor, kicking at them.
“Don’t you touch me! Don’t you touch me!”
Her fear, which had been so well under control, explodes from her now, because this violation of her journey is a far greater unknown than harvest camp. She kicks, and bites, and claws in terror and outrage, but it’s no use—because in the end, she hears the telltale pffft of a tranq gun firing. She feels the sharp jab of the tranq bullet as it embeds itself in her arm, and the world goes dark as she spirals helplessly into that timeless place where all sedated souls go.
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“And now the same people who lowered the age restriction on unwinding want to have a six-month waiting period once parents sign an unwind order, in case they change their minds. Six months? I won’t be here in six months.”
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Waking up after being tranq’d is not a pleasant experience. With consciousness comes a splitting headache, a terrible taste in one’s mouth, and the disturbing feeling that something has been stolen from you.
Miracolina awakes to the sound of someone crying beside her, begging for mercy. She recognizes the voice as Timothy’s. He’s definitely not the kind of boy built to handle something like this. She can’t see him, though, because her eyes are covered by a thick blindfold.
“It’s all right, Timothy,” she calls to him. “Whatever’s going on, it’s going to be okay.” Hearing her voice makes his pleas and sobs settle into whimpers.
Miracolina shifts to feel the position of her body. She’s sitting upright, and her neck aches from the position in which it had hung while she slept. Her hands are behind her back, tied together. Her legs are tied to the chair she sits in. Not painfully, but tight enough to ensure she won’t break free.
“Okay,” says the voice of a boy in front of them. “You can take off their blindfolds.”
Her blindfold is pulled off, and although the light around her is not bright, it’s still painful to keep her eyes open. She squints, slowly letting her eyes adjust and focus.
They’re in some sort of grand, high-ceilinged ballroom. Crystal chandeliers, artwork on the walls—it looks like the kind of place where French royalty would have entertained high society before getting themselves beheaded. Except that this place is falling apart. There are holes in the ceiling through which pigeons freely fly in and out of the daylight. The paintings are peeling with weather damage, and the rank smell of mildew fills the air. There’s no telling how far they’ve been taken from their destination.
“I’m really sorry we had to do it this way,” the boy sitting in front of them says. He’s not dressed like any sort of royalty. Even moldy royalty. He wears simple jeans and a light blue T-shirt. His hair is pale brown, almost blond, and too long—like he hasn’t had a haircut in recent memory. He seems to be her age, but the tired look around his eyes makes him appear older, like he’s seen many more things than anyone ought to see at their age. He also seems a little bit frail in some indefinable way.
“We couldn’t risk you getting hurt, or figuring out where we were taking you. It was the only way to safely rescue you.”
“Rescue us?” says Miracolina, speaking up for the first time. “Is that what you call this?”
“Well, it might not feel that way at the moment, but yes, that’s exactly what we’ve done.”
And all at once, Miracolina knows who this is. A wave of rage and nausea courses through her. Of all the unfair things to happen to her, why did she have to face this? Why did she have to be captured by him? She feels the kind of anger, the kind of hatred she knows is not good for her soul, especially this close to her tithing—but try as she might, she can’t purge herself of the bitterness.
Then Timothy gasps, and his watery eyes go wide.
“You’re him!” he says with the kind of enthusiasm boys like Timothy usually save for encounters with sports stars. “You’re that tithe who became a clapper! You’re Levi Calder!”
The boy across from them nods and smiles. “Yes, but my friends call me Lev.”
