Текст книги "Undivided"

Автор книги: Neal Shusterman

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

21 • Risa

The ride home from the hospital is a triumphant one. They play music that makes them feel cocooned in normality. Even though it’s an illusion, Risa’s happy for a respite from being “the one and only Risa Ward.”

Connor tells her and Beau about the fanboy lab tech. Connor seems to preen a bit in the light of it, but Risa has always found herself painfully out of her element when faced with such adulation. She never wanted to be some sort of counterculture heroine. All she wanted was to survive. She would have been happy to stay at Ohio State Home 23 playing piano, graduating with unremarkable grades, and then being dumped at eighteen into the grand mosh pit of mediocre mankind, like all other state wards. Maybe she could have gotten herself into community college, working her way through with some service job. She could have eventually become a concert pianist, or, more realistically, a keyboardist in some bar band. It wouldn’t be ideal, but at least it would be a life. She could have eventually married the unremarkable guitar player and had some unremarkable kids, whom she would love dearly and would never even think of storking. But her unwind order severed all ties Risa had to the hope of a normal future.

Thoughts of a guitar player bring her musings around to Cam. Where is he now that Proactive Citizenry has him in their clutches again? Does she care? Should she care? What a mixed bag of connections she has. . . . It’s as if her whole life has been rewound with the strangest bits and pieces of humanity, from Connor, to Cam, to Sonia, to Grace and all the odd acquaintances in between.

There’s no telling what her life will be like a day from now, much less a year from now. That’s the best argument for living in the moment, but how can you live in the moment when all you want is for the moment to end?

“You look sad,” Connor comments. “You should be happy—for once we did something right.”

Risa smiles. “We do a lot right,” she tells him. “Why else would random people want to shake our hands?” Or, she thinks, kiss us, and she throws a chilly glance back to Beau in the backseat, who plays the air drums, completely oblivious. Connor hasn’t asked about Beau’s black eye. Either he doesn’t care, or he doesn’t want to know. Risa wonders how many girls have thrown themselves at Connor in a similar way, and finds herself pleasantly jealous at the very idea. Pleasantly, because Risa has what those nameless girls could only grasp at: the Akron AWOL all to herself.

Maybe this is better than her dream of normal. Living a high-octane, on-the-edge sort of life has its perks. Namely, Connor.

“Hey, you know that Upchurch dude, right?” Beau asks between drum solos.

“Who?” asks Risa, having no clue what he’s talking about.

“You know—Hayden Upchurch. The guy who gave the news a mouthful when he got caught at the Graveyard.”

“Oh,” says Risa. “Hayden.” She had never known his last name—and by the look on Connor’s face, he never had either. A lot of Unwinds tried to erase their last name in defiance of parents who tried to unwind them. In Hayden’s case, he probably avoided it because it was so easily made fun of.

“What about him? Risa asks, looking nervously to Connor. “Did something happen to him?”

“No—he’s just shooting off his mouth again.”

The next song starts, and Connor turns the volume down. “How do you know that?”

“Back in the basement, Jake was fiddling with that old computer Sonia lets us use down there, and he says there was something up on the Web. He tried to find it again to show me, but it was gone. He said Upchurch was calling for a teen uprising, like he did when he got caught. I’m thinking it might happen.” Beau considers it for a moment more. “If it does, I know a whole lot of kids—not just the kids at Sonia’s, but kids back home, too—who’d follow me into battle.”

“More likely off a cliff, like lemmings,” Connor says.

“Careful,” Beau warns, and he pulls out the pistol he had taken from Connor, “or I might tranq you with your own gun, like you did to that Nelson guy.”

Risa sees Connor’s face go stony, and his knuckles whiten on the steering wheel. She touches Connor’s leg to get him to relax. To remind him it’s not worth it.

“Put that thing away,” Risa orders Beau, “before you accidentally shoot yourself.”

“Best thing that could happen,” says Connor, with a deadpan delivery that could take the bounce out of a basketball. Then he softens. “But I’m glad to hear that Hayden’s okay. That is, if it’s true.”

If Hayden’s really AWOL again, hiding out somewhere and calling for kids to take matters into their own hands, Risa wonders how many will be moved to action. There are stories about the first uprising. “Feral” kids took violently to the streets after the school failures. They wreaked havoc coast to coast, spreading terror and fear enough to make unwinding sound like an answer to all their problems. Anger with no direction.

Once the Heartland War ended, no one really spoke about the days leading up to the Unwind Accord. Risa suspects it’s more than just bad memories. If people don’t think about it, then they can deny their complicity in ongoing institutional murder. Well, thinks Risa, we’ll make people remember . . . and we’ll give them a path to penance.

It’s as they reach the outlying neighborhoods of Columbus that Connor veers out of their lane, nearly slamming into a pickup truck next to them. The guy leans on his horn, gives them the finger, and shouts curses at them that they can’t hear but that are easily read on his lips.

“What was that about?” Risa asks, realizing that Connor was distracted when he veered out of their lane.

“Nothing!” snaps Connor. “Why does it have to be about anything?”

“I told you I should be the one driving,” says Beau.

Risa drops it, sensing something in Connor that’s best left alone—but the moment lingers long after they’re past the road sign above the freeway that Connor was staring at with such intensity it nearly got them killed.

22 • Connor

He steps back and allows Sonia to transfer the biomatter from the stasis container to the printer. He doesn’t want to touch it.

“The stuff of life,” Sonia says as she pours the red, syrupy suspension into the printer reservoir. It’s not exactly the most hygienic of transfers, but then, they’re in the back room of a cluttered antique shop, not a laboratory.

“It looks like the Blob,” Grace comments.

Connor recalls the old movie about a flesh-eating mass of gelatinous space-goo that devours the hapless residents of a town that very well could have been Akron. He watched it with his brother when they were little. Lucas kept hiding his face in Connor’s shoulder so he didn’t have to look. Like all his memories before the unwind order, it comes with a mix of feelings as amorphous as the Blob.

Risa takes Connor’s hand. “I hope it’s worth what we went through to get it.”

It’s just after dark, and it’s the four of them: Connor, Risa, Sonia, and Grace. Beau was quickly dispatched by Sonia to resolve some sort of petty territorial dispute in the basement that arose in his absence. “It all goes to hell without you down there, Beau,” Sonia told him. “I need you to take charge and bring things back to order.” Connor turned away when she said it, because his grin might have given Beau a clue as to how easily he was being manipulated. Beau knew the goal of their mission, but not the purpose of the cells they retrieved.

“Injection for my hip,” Sonia had told him, “so I don’t need a hip replacement from some poor unlucky unwind.”

He had accepted the explanation at face value, partly because it sounded plausible under the circumstances, but mostly because Sonia is an accomplished liar. Probably half of her success as an antiques dealer comes from the lies she tells about her merchandise. Not to mention her success in harboring fugitive kids.

With the magic blob safely in the printer, Sonia turns to them. “So who would like to do the honors?”

Connor, who is closest to the controls, hits the “on” button, hesitates for a breath, then hits the little green button labeled “print.” The device clicks and whirrs to life, making them all jump just the tiniest bit. Could it be as simple as hitting the “print” button? He supposes the most advanced of technology all comes down to a human being hitting a button or throwing a switch.

“What’s it gonna make?” Grace asks—a question that’s on all of their minds.

Sonia shrugs. “Whatever Janson last programmed it to make.”

Her eyes seem to lose some of their light for a moment as she struggles with the memory of her husband. He’s been dead for maybe thirty years, but clearly their devotion ran deeper than time.

They watch as the printer head flies back and forth over a petri dish, laying down microscopic layers of cells. In a few minutes the pale ghost of a shape appears. Oblong, about three inches across.

Risa gets it first. “Is that . . . an ear?”

“I do believe it is,” Sonia says.

There’s something wonderful and terrifying about this. Like watching life emerging from the first primordial pool.

“So it works,” Connor says, finding he doesn’t have patience for the printing process. Sonia says nothing, holding judgment for the fifteen minutes it takes for the printer to complete its cycle. The sudden silence when it’s done is just as jarring as when it first grinded to life.

Before them in the dish is, as Risa predicted, an ear.

“Can it hear us?” Grace asks, leaning forward. “Hello?” she says into it.

Connor gently grabs her shoulder and pulls her back.

“It’s just a pinna,” says Sonia. “The outside part of an ear. It has none of the functional parts of the organ.”

“It doesn’t look too healthy,” Risa points out. She’s right. It looks pale and slightly gray.

“Hmm . . .” Sonia pulls out her reading glasses, slips them on, and leans closer to observe the thing. “It has no blood supply. And we didn’t prepare the cells to properly differentiate into skin and cartilage—but that doesn’t matter. All that matters is that it does exactly what it was designed to do.”

Then she reaches out, picks the ear up between her thumb and forefinger, and drops it into the stasis container, where it sinks into the thick green oxygenated gel. Connor closes the box, it seals, and the light indicating hibernation goes green. Now it will be preserved for however long it needs to be.

“We’re going to have to get this to a place that can mass-produce it, right?” Connor says. “Some big medical manufacturer.”

“Nope,” says Grace. “Big is bad, big is bad.” She furrows her brow and rings her hands as she looks at the stasis box. “Can’t go too small, either. Kinda like Goldilocks, it’s gotta be just right.”

Sonia, who is rarely impressed by anything, is impressed by Grace’s assessment. “A very good point. It needs to be a company that’s hungry, but not so hungry that it carries no clout.”

“And,” adds Risa, “it has to be a company with no ties to Proactive Citizenry.”

“Does such a thing even exist?” asks Connor.

“Don’t know,” says Sonia. “Wherever we go, it will be a gamble. The best we can do is better the odds.”

The thought gives Connor an unexpected shiver that must be strong enough for Risa to feel because she looks to him. So much of his life these past few years has been a gamble. Somehow in spite of the odds, he’s managed to come through it all in once piece. What felt like bad luck at the time ultimately became good fortune, as evidenced by his continued survival. Which means he’s overdue for something truly unfortunate. He can’t help but feel that no matter what he does, he’s still just circling the drain. He silently curses his parents for pulling the plug on that drain to begin with. And with that anger comes a sorrow that he wishes he were strong enough to ignore.

“Something wrong?” Risa asks.

Connor withdraws his hand from hers. “Why do you always think something’s wrong with me?”

“Because something always is,” she says, a little miffed. “You’re a streaming meme of things that are wrong.”

“And you’re not?”

Risa sighs. “I am too. Which is why it’s so easy for me to know when something’s bothering you.”

“Well, this time, you’re wrong.” Connor gets up and goes to the trapdoor. The trunk is already pushed to the side, and the rug is rolled away, making an escape from Risa’s inquisition easy. He reaches down to pull open the trap door, and Connor feels something being pulled from his back pocket.

He turns to see Risa holding his letter. THE letter. From the moment Sonia gave it to him, he’s been keeping it in that pocket. He’s taken it out several times, each time determined to tear it up, or burn it up, or otherwise dismiss it from his life, but each time it winds up back in his pocket, and each time he feels a little angrier, and a little weaker for it.

“What’s this?” Risa asks.

Connor grabs it back from her. “If it were your business, I’d tell you about it, but it’s not.” He slips it back in his pocket, but she already saw who it was addressed to. She knows exactly what it is.

“You think I don’t know what’s been going on in your head? Why you almost crashed us when we were leaving Columbus?”

“That has nothing to do with anything!”

“It was your old neighborhood, wasn’t it? And you’re thinking of going back.”

Connor finds he can’t deny it. “What I’m thinking and what I’m doing are two different things, okay?”

Sonia struggles to her feet. “Keep your voices down!” she growls. “Do you want people in the street to hear you?”

Grace, a bit anxious at the storm brewing around her, slips past Connor in a hurry to remove herself from the equation. She grabs the printer. “I’ll take this back downstairs and hide it again. No point leaving it out in the open.”

Sonia tries to stop her—“Grace, wait!”—but she’s not fast enough.

The printer’s power cord, which is still plugged in, goes taut and the printer flies from Grace’s hands.

They all leap for it. Risa is closest. She gets a hand on it, but her momentum only serves to slap it away. It tumbles toward the open trapdoor, bounces once on the edge, and falls through. The cord goes taut again. And the printer dangles in the hole for a painful instant before the plug pulls free from the outlet.

Connor dives for that cord, knowing it’s the last chance to save it. He grasps it with both hands, but the cord is slick with spilled bioslime. It slips through his fingers, his hands close on empty air, and he hears with a deadly finality as horrific as a car crash their last hope for a sane future smashing to bits on the basement floor.

•  •  •

Grace is inconsolable.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it, I’m sorry.” She wails desperate apologies while her eyes let loose a typhoon of tears with no sign of clear skies any time soon. “I’m so stupid, I didn’t mean it, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

Risa does her best to comfort her. “You’re not stupid, and it’s not your fault, Grace.” She rubs Grace’s back that now hunches under the weight of their loss.

“It was, it was,” wails Grace. “Argent always says I ruin everything.”

“Risa’s right, it’s not your fault,” Connor assures her. “You wouldn’t have been in such a hurry to leave if Risa and I weren’t fighting. We’re the stupid ones.”

Risa meets his eye, but Connor can’t read her. Is that look an apology for having grabbed the letter from his pocket like the pin from a grenade? Or is she waiting for him to apologize for losing his temper? Or maybe that gaze is just mirroring his own look of defeat.

Connor has picked up all the pieces of the printer. He now has them laid out on a table before him in the basement. Broken plastic, twisted metal. Gears and belts. When Sonia saw the state it was in, she grunted, climbed back up the stairs, and went home. Connor suspects there’ll be no dinner for them tonight as she privately mourns their loss. For longer than Connor’s been alive, the thing has sat in a box in a corner of the antique shop. It took an instant for them to destroy it.

“What’s the big deal?” asks Jack. “It’s just some old printer.” He, like the other kids in the basement, is totally oblivious, and bewildered by the sudden air of despair, even more potent than the usual air of despair that permeates Sonia’s basement.

“It belonged to Sonia’s husband,” Connor tells him. “It has sentimental value.”

“Right,” says Beau. “Sentimental value.” And he slowly draws a finger along the broken plastic casing, coating his fingertip with the bioslime he risked his life to retrieve. He holds that finger up to Connor as an accusation, and tries to stare Connor down. Connor coldly holds that glare, refusing to give him anything. Beau finally backs down and returns to his task of ruling the roost.

Grace, her face in her hands now, sobs more quietly, and Risa leaves her long enough to assess the damage with Connor.

“You can fix it, can’t you?” Her voice has none of its usual confidence. It’s not a question; it’s a plea. “You’re good at fixing things.”

“This isn’t a TV or a refrigerator,” he tells her. “I have to know how something works before I can fix it.”

“But you can try.”

Before, Connor had been afraid to even open the casing to look inside. Now he picks up each of the pieces, rearranging them on the table, trying to get a feel for how it goes back together. “It looks like the printing cartridge and head are still intact,” Connor tells her, although he can’t even be sure of that. He holds up an electronic component. “This looks like a hard drive, and it’s not broken either, which means it probably still has the software it needs to do what it does. It’s mostly the mechanical parts that are broken.”

“Mostly?”

“I can’t be sure about anything, Risa. It’s a machine. It’s broken. That’s all I know.”

“Well, someone somewhere’s got to know how to fix it.”

The thought that comes to Connor next hits him with such grand and absurd unease, he doesn’t know whether to laugh or puke.

“My father could fix it,” he says.

Risa leans away, as if trying to escape the deadly gravity of the thought.

“I mean, I’m good at fixing stuff because he taught me.”

Risa doesn’t say anything for a long time. She lets Connor’s words drift in the air, maybe hoping they’ll hang themselves. Finally she says, “Congratulations. You’ve been looking for an excuse to go back there since the moment you arrived.”

Connor opens his mouth to deny it, but hesitates, because on some level Risa is right. “It’s . . . not that simple,” he says.

“Did you forget that these are the people who tried to unwind you? How can you forgive them for that?”

“I can’t! But what if they can’t forgive themselves either? I’ll never know unless I face them.”

“Are you entirely delusional? What do you think they’ll do—take you back into their home and pretend like these past two years never happened?”

“Of course not.”

“Then what?”

“I don’t know! All I know is that I feel as broken as this machine.” He looks at the fragmented device on the table before him. He may be whole, but there are times he feels unwound in the deepest possible way. “I can fix myself, but part of that means facing my parents on my own terms.”

Connor looks around, realizing that they’ve been raising their voices again, attracting the attention of other kids. The others pretend like they’re not listening, but he knows they are. He lowers his voice to an ardent whisper.

“And it’s not just my parents, it’s my brother, too. I never thought I’d say this about the little snot, but I miss him, Risa. I miss him like you can’t believe.”

“Missing your brother is not a reason to forfeit your life!”

And then it occurs to Connor that not only can’t Risa ever understand—she can’t even understand why she can’t. She was raised in a state home. No parents. No family. There was no one who cared enough to love her or to hate her. No one whose lives were so focused on hers that they could be made either proud or furious by her actions. Even her unwind order was not signed out of impassioned desperation, as Connor’s was. For Risa it was a product of indifference. The deepest, most personal wound of her life wasn’t personal for those who inflicted it. She was a budget cut. Suddenly Connor finds himself feeling sorry for her because of the pain she’ll never be able to feel.

“I put a lot of trust in your opinions, Risa,” he tells her. “Most of the time you’re right. But not this time.”

She studies him, maybe looking for a crack into which she can inject some doubt. What she doesn’t know is that he’s all doubt—but that doesn’t change his need to do this.

“What can I say that will talk you out of it?”

Connor just shakes his head. Even if he had an answer to her question, he wouldn’t tell her. “I’ll be careful. And if I can safely get to them, I’ll feel them out, see where they stand. If time has turned them against unwinding, maybe they’ll see helping us as a second chance.”

“They’re unwinders, Connor. They’ll always be unwinders.”

“They were parents first.”

Risa finally backs down, accepting it with mournful resignation. Funny, but Connor wasn’t even sure he’d go until Risa challenged him. Now he’s committed.

Risa stands up and suddenly the gulf between them feels immense. “When your parents turn you in to the Juvenile Authority—and they will—I will not shed a single tear for you, Connor Lassiter.”

But that’s a lie, because her tears have already started.

•  •  •

“The house will be under surveillance,” Sonia says. “Not as much as before—after all, thanks to that Starkey person, you’re no longer public enemy number one—but the Juvies still want to take you out if they can.”

“I’ll be careful.”

“You realize how much danger you’re putting yourself in. You don’t know what your parents have been told, or what they believe about you. They might even think you mean to kill them.”

Connor shakes his head to scramble away the thought. Was it possible that his mother and father knew him so little to think he’d do that? But on the other hand, they must feel responsible for everything that’s happened to him since signing that unwind order, and might think he’d want vengeance. Was there ever a time he would have taken their lives to avenge himself? No, there wasn’t. And not just because of his brother. Even were he an only child, he wouldn’t do it. Someone like Starkey might target his own family—but Connor is not Starkey.

Connor turns the letter over in his hands. “I need to do this, and I need to do it soon. Or I’ll never have the nerve again.”

“You’ll have the nerve,” Sonia assures him, “but not the need. There’s a critical time for everything. I do believe you need to do this now, or forever hold your peace.”

He knows the worst that could happen probably outweighs the best that could happen. Lev found that out, didn’t he? He found out the hard way.

“My friend Lev—I’m sure you’ve heard of him—he saw his parents again. They disowned him.”

“Then Lev’s parents are assholes.”

Connor guffaws in surprise. Not that he wouldn’t expect that out of Sonia, but to be so blunt about it. After everything, it’s refreshing.

“I never met the boy, or his parents, but I see kids like him every day.” Sonia tells Connor. “Their world is shattered, and they’re so desperate for validation that they’d blow themselves up to get it. Any parent who disowns that boy after what he did, and didn’t do . . . doesn’t deserve to have children at all, much less a child to give away.”

Connor smiles, thinking of Lev. He was mad when Lev chose not to come here with him, but he was only mad for selfish reasons. “He saved my life,” Connor tells Sonia. “Twice now. He’s a pretty amazing kid.”

“If you ever see him again, you should tell him that. After what his parents did, he needs to hear it, and never stop hearing it.”

Connor promises Sonia—and himself—that he will. Then he looks down the stairs to the basement. He considers going down, but knows if he does, he’ll find too many reasons not to go. To reassure himself—and to remind himself of his resolve—he pulls the letter out of his back pocket. The envelope is tattered and beginning to fall apart. He takes a deep breath and tears it open, pulling out the pages within. He had planned to read it, but he can’t bring himself to do it, because he doesn’t know what emotional acrobatics his own words might send him through.

When he looks up, Sonia is watching him to see what he’ll do. “Do you need some time alone?” she asks.

He answers by folding the pages of the letter and slipping them back into his pocket. “They’re only words,” he says, and Sonia doesn’t argue.

“If you get there and change your mind at the last minute, you can always mail that letter instead.” Then she looks over at the trunk. “In the meantime, I think I’ll get all these other letters stamped and in the mail. I’ve never felt the time was right to send them. But if the Akron AWOL is going home, maybe it’s time for all of these kids to be heard too.”

“Have Grace help you,” Connor suggests. “She needs it. I’ll try to be back as soon as I can. Even if it looks like they’re willing to help, I won’t bring them back here . . .” Then he swallows hard, forcing himself to admit the real possibility. “. . . just in case they’re lying.”

“Fair enough.” Then Sonia takes a few steps closer to Connor, considering him like she might appraise an antique. “I hope this brings you some peace. We all need a moratorium on misery now and then.”

“Moratorium. Right,” says Connor.

Sonia regards him with the sort of mock contempt usually displayed by people his own age. “It means a temporary break.”

“I knew that,” says Connor, which he didn’t.

Sonia shakes her head dismissively and sighs. “It’s Sunday morning—do your parents go to church?” Until then Connor had no idea the day of the week.

“Only on holidays and when someone dies.”

“Well,” says Sonia, “let’s hope nobody dies today.”