Текст книги "Undivided"

Автор книги: Neal Shusterman

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

3 • Connor

In a dusty corner of a cluttered antique shop on a weedy side street of Akron, Ohio, Connor Lassiter waits for the world to change before his eyes.

“I know it’s here somewhere,” Sonia says as she digs through a pile of obsolete electronics. Connor wonders if the old woman was alive to witness the birth and the death of all that technology.

“Can I help?” Risa asks.

“I’m not an invalid!” Sonia responds.

It’s a dizzying prospect to think that they are about to lay eyes upon the object on which the entire future hinges. The future of unwinding. The future of the Juvenile Authority’s iron grip on kids like him. Then he looks over to Risa, who waits with the same electric anticipation. Our future, he thinks. It’s been hard to consider the concept of tomorrow, when life has been all about surviving today.

Grace Skinner, sitting beside Risa, wrings her hands with friction-burn intensity. “Is it bigger than a bread box?” Grace asks.

“You’ll see soon enough,” Sonia says.

Connor has no idea what a bread box is, yet just like anyone who’s ever played twenty questions, he knows its precise size. It’s all he can do to keep from wringing his own hands too, as he waits for the device to be revealed.

When Sonia began to tell the tale of her husband, Connor thought he might, at best, get some information—clues as to why Proactive Citizenry was so afraid of not just the man, but the world’s memory of him. Janson and Sonia Rheinschild, winners of the Nobel Prize for medicine, were erased from history. Connor thought Sonia might give him information. He never expected this!

“What if you invented a printer that could build living human organs?” Sonia said, after telling them of the disillusionment that ultimately took her husband’s life. “And what if you sold the patent to the nation’s largest medical manufacturer . . . and what if they took all of that work . . . and buried it? And took the plans and burned them? And took every printer and smashed it, and prevented anyone from ever knowing that the technology existed?”

Sonia trembled with such powerful fury as she spoke, she seemed much larger than her diminutive size—much more powerful than any of them.

“What if,” Sonia said, “they made the solution to unwinding disappear because too many people have too much invested in keeping things exactly . . . the way . . . they are?”

It was Grace—“low-cortical” Grace—who figured out where this was leading.

“And what if there’s still one organ printer left,” she said, “hiding in the corner of an antique shop?”

The idea seemed to suck all the air out of the room. Connor actually gasped, and Risa gripped his hand, as if she needed to hold on to him to stave off her own mental vertigo.

Finally Sonia pulls forth a cardboard box that is about exactly the size of what Connor imagines a bread box would be. He makes room on a little round cherrywood table, and she sets the box down gently.

“You can take it out,” Sonia says to him, a bit out of breath from her efforts.

Connor reaches in, gets his fingers around the dark object, then lifts it out of the box and sets it on the table.

“That’s it?” says Grace, clearly disappointed. “It’s just a printer.”

“Exactly,” says Sonia, with a smug sort of pride. “Earthshaking technology doesn’t arrive with bells and whistles. Those get added later.”

The organ printer is small but deceptively heavy, packed with electronics tweaked for its peculiar purpose. To the eye, it is gunmetal gray and, as Grace already noted, entirely unremarkable. It looks like an ordinary printer that might have been manufactured before Connor was born, and the casing itself probably came from a standard printer.

“Like so many things in this world,” Sonia tells them, “what matters is what’s inside.”

“Make it work,” asks Grace, practically bouncing in her chair. “Make it print me out an eye, or something.”

“Can’t. The cartridge needs to be filled with pluripotent stem cells,” Sonia explains. “Beyond that, I couldn’t tell you much more. I’ll be damned if I know how the thing does what it does; my forte was neurobiology, not electronics. Janson built it.”

“We’ll have to reverse engineer it,” Risa says. “So it can be reproduced.”

The small prototype has an output dish large enough to deliver the eye Grace requested—but clearly the technology could be applied to larger machines. The very idea sets Connor’s mind reeling. “If every hospital could print organs and tissues for its patients, the whole system of unwinding collapses!”

Sonia leans back slowly shaking her head. “It won’t happen that way,” Sonia says. “It never does.” She makes sure she looks at each of them as she talks, to make sure she drives the point home.

“There isn’t one single thing that will end unwinding,” she tells them. “It will take a hodgepodge of random events that come together in just the right way and at just the right time to remind society it’s got a conscience.” Then she gently pats the organ printer. “All these years I was afraid of putting it out there because if they were to destroy this one, there’s no recourse. The technology dies with the machine. But now I think the time is right. Getting it out there won’t solve everything, but it could be the lynchpin that holds together all those other events.”

Then she smacks Connor so hard with her cane it could raise a welt. “God help me, but I think you’re the ones to take charge of it. Janson’s machine is your baby now. So go fix the world.”

ADVERTISEMENT

You don’t know me, but you know my story, or one just like it. My daughter was run down by a sixteen-year-old on a joyride. Afterward, I found out that this boy had already been in trouble with the law three times, and had been released. Now he’s back in custody, and may be tried as an adult, but that won’t bring my daughter back. He never should have been there to steal that car—but in spite of his criminal record, and in spite of a clear penchant for reckless and violent behavior, his parents refused to have him unwound. The Marcella Initiative, named after my daughter, will make sure this kind of thing never happens again. If voters pass the Marcella Initiative, it will become mandatory that incorrigible teens of divisional age be unwound automatically after a third offense. Please vote for the Marcella Initiative. Don’t we owe it to our children?

–Paid for by the Coalition of Parents for a Safer Tomorrow

Connor immediately takes the secret artifact to the back room. He’s always had an uncanny skill with mechanics, but this time, he doesn’t even dare to open the casing for fear of doing something irreparable.

“We have to get this device into the right hands,” says Connor. “Someone who knows what to do with it.”

“And,” points out Risa, “someone who isn’t so tied to the current system that they’d rather destroy it than put it to use.”

“Some trick that’ll be,” says Grace.

Sonia hobbles into the back room and catches the three of them still staring at the printer. “It’s not a religious relic,” she announces. “Get over it.”

“Well, it is sacred in its own way,” says Risa.

Sonia waves her hand dismissively. “Tools are neither demonic nor divine. It’s all about who wields them.” Then she points her cane to the old trunk, indicating it’s time to descend into the shadows of her basement.

Grace pushes the trunk aside. She grunts as she does it. “What’s in this thing anyway? Lead?”

Risa looks to Connor, and Connor looks away. They both know what’s in there. He doubts even Risa knows how heavily it weighs on his heart. Much more heavily than the weight of the letters in the trunk. He wonders how many letters from how many kids are in there to make it weigh so much.

When the trunk is out of the way, Sonia rolls away the rug beneath it, revealing the trapdoor. Connor reaches down and lifts it up.

“I’m opening my store now,” Sonia tells them. “Like it or not, I gotta make a living, so down you go. You know the drill. Mind the noise, and don’t for once think you’re too smart to be caught.” Then she points to the printer. “And take that with you. I don’t want some nosy-Nellie poking around back here and seeing it on display.”

•  •  •

Connor has not been in Sonia’s basement for almost two years. He came here on his second day AWOL. He had taken a tithe hostage, tranq’d a Juvey-cop with his own gun, and gotten caught up with an orphan girl who’d escaped from a bus headed to a harvest camp. What a mismatched band of fools they had been! Connor still feels the fool from time to time, but so much has changed, he can barely even remember the troubled kid he used to be. Now Lev—once an innocent kid brainwashed to want his own unwinding—was an old soul in a body that had stopped growing. Risa, who at first just scrambled to survive, had taken on Proactive Citizenry on national TV—but not before having her spine shattered, and then replaced against her will. And as for Connor—he had taken charge of the world’s largest secret sanctuary for AWOL Unwinds . . . only to discover that it wasn’t so secret after all. The memory of the Graveyard takedown is still a fresh wound in his soul. He had fought tooth and nail—valiantly, some might say—but in the end, the Juvenile authority won and sent hundreds of kids to harvest camp.

Kids just like the ones who now occupy Sonia’s basement.

Connor knows it’s crazy, but he feels he somehow let these kids down too, that day in the Graveyard. As he descends behind Risa, he feels apprehension and a vague kind of shame that just makes him angry. He’s got nothing to be ashamed of. What happened at the Graveyard was beyond his control. And then there was Starkey, who double-crossed him and flew off with his storks in the only means of escape. No, Connor has nothing to be ashamed of . . . so why, as kids begin coming out of the basement shadows, can’t he look any of them in the eye?

“Déjà vu?” asks Risa, when she hears him take a deep, shuddering breath.

“Something like that.”

Risa, who has already spent a few weeks helping Sonia, knows all the players down here. She tries to smooth the way for Connor. The kids are either starstruck or threatened by his presence. The resident alpha—a tall meatless kid named Beau—is quick to urinate on his territory by saying, “So you’re the Akron AWOL? I thought you’d look . . . healthier.”

Connor’s not quite sure what that means, and the kid probably isn’t either. While Connor could make an enjoyable pastime of challenging Beau’s bogus sense of testosterone supremacy, he decides it’s not worth the effort.

“What’s that you’re holding?” asks an innocent-looking thirteen-year-old who reminds Connor a little bit of Lev, back in the days before Lev grew his hair long and got jaded.

“Just an old printer,” says Connor. Grace chuckles at that, but doesn’t speak of what she knows. Instead she goes around introducing herself and shaking hands, even with kids who would prefer not to shake hands with anyone.

“An old printer?” says Beau. “Like we need more junk down here.”

“Yeah, well, it has sentimental value.”

Beau hmmphs dismissively and saunters off. Connor suppresses the urge to stick out his foot and trip him.

Connor sets the printer down on a shelf, knowing if he treats it with too much care and attention, the smarter kids will figure something out. Right now, the fewer people who know about it, the better. At least until they can figure out a way to let everyone know about it.

“They’re good kids,” Risa tells Connor. “Of course, they’ve got issues, or they wouldn’t be here.”

Regardless of how much he loves Risa, he can’t help but bristle a little. “I know how to deal with AWOLs. I’ve been doing it for a long time now.”

Risa takes a moment to take an all-too-invasive look at him. “What’s bothering you?” she asks.

And although he still hasn’t gotten a handle on it himself, he finds that his gaze immediately goes to the shark tattooed on his arm. The last time he was in this basement, that arm was part of Roland. Risa catches that gaze and, as always, reads him better than he reads himself.

“Being down here might feel like we’re back where we started—but we’re not.”

“I know,” Connor admits. “But knowing that and feeling it are two different things. And there’s a lot of . . . stuff . . . that being here brings back.”

“Being here?” she asks. “Or being home?”

“Akron isn’t home,” he reminds her. “They might call me the Akron AWOL because it all went down here, but it’s not home.”

She smiles at him gently, and it melts at least some of his frustration. “You know, you never actually told me where home is for you.”

He hesitates, as if saying it might bring it closer. He’s not sure if he wants that or not. “Columbus,” he finally tells her.

She considers it. “About an hour and a half from here?”

“About.”

She nods. “The state home where I spent most of my life is much closer. And you know what? I couldn’t care in the least.”

And she walks away, leaving Connor unsure if her words were an attempt at commiseration, or a gentle slap in the face.

THE FOLLOWING IS A PAID POLITICAL ADVERTISEMENT

With all the confusing information out there, it’s hard to know what to vote for. But not when it comes to Measure F—“the Prevention Initiative.” Measure F is simple. It provides special funds to form a new arm of the Juvenile Authority that will monitor thousands of preteens who are at risk, offering counseling, treatment, and alternative options for their futures before they reach divisional age. What’s more, Measure F won’t cost taxpayers a dime! It will be fully funded by harvest camp proceeds.

Vote yes on Measure F. Isn’t an ounce of prevention worth a pound of flesh?

–Sponsored by the Brighter Day Coalition

In Sonia’s basement, it’s hard to tell when night has fallen. There’s a small window high up in a far back corner, but it’s behind such a maze of junk, one has to strain to detect any light coming in through the frosted glass. The few clocks among the junk in the basement don’t work, nor does the TV, and of the dozen kids down there, not a single one has a watch. Either they traded it for food before they landed here, or they were so used to using their phones as timepieces, they never had them. Phones, however, being traceable, are the first accessory ditched by the smart AWOL. Connor, of course, wasn’t too smart his first night on the run. They tracked him by his phone, and he came within a hairsbreadth of getting caught. He wised up fast, though.

While everyone waits for Sonia to bring dinner—an event that never happens on any predictable schedule—Grace weaves the tale of the night before, getting more and more animated as she realizes she has the rapt attention of most of the kids.

“So we’re upstairs in some lady’s house, and I see these special-ops guys in black slinking across the lawn in the middle of the night,” she says. “Prob’ly trained to kill. Hands are lethal weapons, that kind of thing.” Connor cringes at her embellishments. The next time she tells it, they’ll be dropping by helicopter.

“I hear them whispering and there’s something in their words and the way they’re speaking that makes me realize they’re not after Connor or Risa or me—they’re here for Camus Comprix! They want the rewind, and they don’t even know that the rest of us are there!” She pauses for dramatic effect. “Suddenly they crash in through the back door, and they crash in through the front door, and we’re all upstairs, and I tell Cam he’s done for, but the rest of us don’t have to be. Then I push Risa under the bed, and squeeze in after her, and Connor makes like he’s asleep on the bed facedown, and they burst into the room, and tranq Connor and take Cam away, never realizing they just missed a chance at the Akron AWOL—and all because I figured it out!”

Some of the kids seem a bit dubious, and Connor feels its his responsibility to back Grace up. After all, credit where credit is due. “It’s true,” he tells them. “If Grace didn’t lay it all on the table like that, I would have fought them, and probably would have been recognized and caught.”

“But wait a second,” says Jack, the Lev-ish kid. “Why would he let himself be taken without turning the rest of you in too? I mean, you guys are a big catch—he could probably cut himself a deal or something.”

Grace grins way too broadly, and Connor knows what she’s about to say. Now he wishes she’d never started this story.

“Because,” says Grace, “Camus Comprix is in love with Risa!”

She lets her words hang in the air. Connor reflexively glances to Risa, but she won’t meet his eye.

“But I don’t get it,” says another kid. “That whole media thing about them being a couple was fake, I thought.”

Grace’s grin doesn’t slip an inch. “Not to Cam . . .”

It’s Risa who finally puts an end to it. “Grace, enough. Okay?”

Grace deflates a bit, realizing that her moment in the spotlight is over. “Anyway,” she says, without any of her previous dramatic flair, “that’s what happened. Cam got caught, and we didn’t.”

“Wow,” says Jack, “who’d have thought the rewind would be some sort of hero?”

“Hero?”

They all turn to see Beau, who was elsewhere in the basement, pretending not to listen, but apparently he had. “How many dozens of kids like us did it take to make one of him? There’s nothing ‘heroic’ about him.”

And Connor can’t help but say, “I couldn’t agree with you more.”

Beau gives Connor a nod, finally finding himself and the Akron AWOL on common ground.

THE FOLLOWING IS A PAID POLITICAL ADVERTISEMENT

DON’T BE FOOLED BY MEASURE F!

Supporters of the so-called Prevention Initiative claim that it’s all about the protection of at-risk children—but read the fine print! Measure F allows the Juvenile Authority to identify and track incorrigible children for the purpose of unwinding them as soon as they turn thirteen—which will be legal once the Parental Override bill becomes law.

Measure G, on the other hand, funds the Juvenile Authority by giving cash incentives for the capture of AWOLs—who have already proven themselves to be menaces to society.

No on F! Yes on G! Make the sensible choice!

Paid for by the Alliance for an AWOL-Free Nation

Later that evening, as everyone settles in for the night, Connor lays his bedroll next to Risa’s in the same semiprivate nook where Risa slept their first time here. It’s away from the other kids, and Connor shifts a tall bookcase to make it even more private. Risa watches him create their secluded nest, and doesn’t bat an eye. Connor takes a deep breath of anticipation. This could well be the night where the stars of their relationship finally align. He’s certainly imagined it long enough. He wonders if she has too. Connor tentatively lies down beside her. “Just like old times,” he says.

“Yes, but the last time we were here, we were only pretending to be a couple to keep Roland’s hands off of me.”

He reaches out then, gently caressing her cheek with Roland’s fingers. “And yet his hand is still all over you.”

“Not all over,” she says playfully. Then she rolls away, but grabs the offending arm as she does, wrapping it around herself like a blanket, and pulling them into a tight spoon position, his chest to her back. The moment is electric, and they both know that anything is possible between them now. There’s nothing to hold them back. Except this:

“I can’t stop thinking about Cam,” Risa says. “The way he sacrificed himself for us.”

Connor’s grafted arm pulls her tighter. He wishes it could be his own arm, but he’s facing the wrong way for that. “Cam is the last thing on my mind.”

“But after what he did for us, I feel like we need to . . . honor him somehow.”

“I am,” Connor says, smirking, although she can’t see. “In fact, I’m saluting him right now—can’t you tell?”

“Ha-ha.”

In the silence, he can feel her heartbeat in his arm as he holds her. Her heartbeat in his chest pressed to her back. It’s almost too much to bear. He wants to curse Cam for still being here between them, no matter how close they press. “So what do we owe him? Our eternal restraint?”

“No,” Risa says, “Just . . . our hesitation.”

Connor says nothing for a while. There are so many layers to his disappointment, but yet within that strata might there not be a vein of relief as well? He lets himself settle into the reality of what won’t be happening tonight, setting his hope and desire at a distance, close enough that he’s still aware of it, but far enough away so that it’s not so tormenting.

“Okay,” he tells her. “This night is for Cam. Let’s hesitate our brains out.”

She snickers gently, and they settle quietly into the night. Body heat and heartbeats until dawn.

•  •  •

Connor doesn’t remember his dreams, only an amnesic sense that he had them, and that they were powerful. No nightmares—he’s sure of that. They were dreams of fulfillment and empowerment, for that’s how he feels as the faint, diffused light of morning touches upon the tiny basement window behind them.

To fall asleep, and to wake up with your arm around the only girl you’ve ever truly loved . . .

To know that the two of you have in your possession a device as earthshaking as a warhead . . .

To feel invincible, if only for a fleeting moment . . .

These things are enough to stop the world in its tracks and start it spinning in a new direction. At least that’s how it feels to Connor. Until now he had been clinging to a threadbare hope, but now that hope feels full to bursting.

There’s never been a moment in Connor’s life that he could call perfect, but this moment, with his arm numb from being around Risa all night, and his sense of smell overwhelmed by the fragrance of her hair—this moment is the closest to perfection he’s ever known. Even the shark seems to be smiling.

Such moments, however, never last for long.

Soon all the other kids are waking up. Beau moves the bookcase that gave them some level of privacy, claiming it was blocking the path to the bathroom, and the day begins. The kids down here have become creatures of routine, going about their business, or lack thereof, as if nothing has changed. Yet it has. They just don’t know it. The world has just been turned upside down—or more accurately, it’s been turned right side up after having been capsized for so long.

In a few minutes there’s the bang of the trapdoor opening as Sonia arrives with breakfast, calling down for “some goddam help up here.”

“Why don’t you go help her,” Risa suggests gently, for she knows that nothing short of a call to duty will peel Connor away from her.

Upstairs, Sonia has groceries enough to feed an army. Between Beau, Connor, and Grace, who is aggressively helpful today, the supplies are brought down in two trips, and Connor finds himself with nothing to carry the third time he comes up the stairs.

Today the trunk has been pushed off the trapdoor at a haphazard angle, impinging on a small plastic trash can that got in its way.

That trunk has been the elephant in the room since Connor arrived, although he hasn’t dared to speak of its contents. Connor turns to see that Sonia has left to park her Suburban somewhere legal.

He’s alone with the trunk.

Unable to resist its gravity, he kneels before it. It’s a heavy, old thing. Antique to be sure. Old travel stickers adorn it, practically shellacked to the surface. Connor can’t tell whether the old steamer trunk has actually been to those places, or if the stickers are merely decorations applied once it stopped travelling and became a piece of furniture.

He doesn’t dare open it, but he knows what’s inside.

Letters.

Hundreds of them.

Each one was written by an AWOL who’d been through Sonia’s basement. Most wrote to their parents. They are missives of sorrow and disillusionment. Anger and the screaming question of “why?” Why did you? How could you? When did things go so wrong? Even the state wards, unloved but tolerated by the institution that raised them, found something to say to someone.

He wonders if Sonia ever sent his letter, or if it’s still in there, buried among the other raging voices. He wonders what he would say to his parents now, and if it’s any different from what he wrote. His letter began with how much he hated them for what they did, but by the time he reached the end, he was in tears, telling them that he loved them in spite of it. So much confusion. So much ambivalence. Just writing the letter helped him understand that—helped him to understand himself a bit more. Sonia had given him a gift that day, and the gift of the letter was in the writing, not in the sending. But still . . .

“I’d ask you to move the trunk back into place for me—but you’ve gotta be on the other side of the trapdoor before I do.” Sonia raises her cane, pointing down the steep basement steps.

“Right. I’m going—don’t use the cattle prod.”

She doesn’t whack him with her cane, but on his way down, she does tap him gently on the head with it to get his attention.

“Be good to her, Connor,” Sonia says, gently. “And don’t let Beau get to you. He just likes to be the big man.”

“No worries.”

He descends, and she closes the trapdoor above him. The basement smells like teen spirit, as the old prewar song goes. For a brief moment he has a flashback without words or images—just a swell of feeling—back to the first time he was herded down those steps two years ago. The invincibility he was feeling when he woke up is now tempered by the cold concentrate of that memory.

Risa’s at her little first aid station tending to a girl’s swollen, slightly bloody lip. “I bit my lip in my sleep—so?” the girl says, instantly on the defensive. “I have nightmares—so?”

Once the girl is tended to, Connor sits down in the treatment chair. “Doctor, I have a problem with my tongue,” he says.

“And what might that be?” asks Risa cautiously.

“I can’t keep it out of my girlfriend’s ear.”

She gives him the best Oh, please look he’s ever seen, and says, “I’ll call the Juvies to cut it out. I’m sure that’ll take care of the problem.”

“And it’ll give some other poor soul a highly talented sensory organ.”

She allows him the last laugh, studying him for a few moments.

“Tell me about Lev,” she finally says.

He’s a bit deflated to have the playfulness so totally squashed out of their conversation.

“What about him?” Connor asks.

“You said you were with him for a while. What’s he like now?”

Connor shrugs, like it’s nothing. “He’s different.”

“Good different, or bad different?

“Well, the last time you saw him, he was planning on blowing himself up—so anything is an improvement.”

Another kid comes to Risa with what looks like a splinter in his finger, sees the two of them talking, and goes away to take care of it himself.

Connor knows he can’t get out of this conversation, so he tells Risa what he can. “Lev’s been through a lot since the harvest camp. You know that, right? Clappers tried to kill him. And that asshole Nelson captured him, but he got away.”

“Nelson?” Risa says caught completely by surprise. “The Juvey-cop you tranq’d?”

“He’s not a cop anymore. He’s a parts pirate, and he’s nuts. He’s got it out for me and Lev. Probably you, too, if he could find you.”

“Great,” says Risa, “I’ll add him to my list of people who want me dead.”

Suddenly, with the specter of Nelson in the conversation, Connor finds bringing the conversation back to Lev is now a relief. “Anyway, Lev hasn’t grown any—except for his hair. I don’t like it. It’s past his shoulders now.”

“I worry about him,” Risa says.

“Don’t,” Connor tells her. “He’s safe on the Arápache reservation, communing with whatever it is that Chancefolk commune with.”

“You don’t sound too happy about that.”

Connor sighs. When Connor and Grace left the Rez, Lev was filled with all of this crazy talk about getting the Arápache to take a stand against unwinding. As if they ever would. In some ways, he’s just as naïve as the day Connor saved him from his tithing. “He says he wants to fight unwinding, but how can he do it from an isolationist reservation? The truth is, I think he just wants to disappear someplace safe.”

“Well, if he’s found peace, then I’m happy for him—and you should be too.”

“I am,” Connor admits. “Maybe I’m just jealous.”

Risa smiles. “You wouldn’t know what to do with peace if you had it.”

Connor smiles right back at her. “I know exactly what I’d do.” Then he leans in close to whisper, she leans in close to hear—and he licks her ear with precision enough to get him happily slapped. He thinks it might get her off the subject, but it doesn’t.

“I miss Lev,” she says. “He’s kind of like a brother. I never had a brother—or at least not that I know of.”

“I have a brother,” Connor tells her. He doesn’t know why he’s chosen to volunteer this. He’s never spoken of him to Risa. Mentioning his life before the unwind order somehow feels taboo. It’s like conjuring ghosts.

“He’s a few years younger than you, isn’t he?” Risa asks.

“Three years younger.”

“Right—now I remember,” she says, which surprises him. But then he shouldn’t be surprised at all. The whole life of the notorious Akron AWOL has been dissected by the media since the day he first got away.

“What’s your brother’s name?” Risa asks.

“Lucas,” Connor tells her—and with the mention of the name comes a wave of emotion more powerful than he was prepared for. He feels regret, but also resentment, because Lucas was the child their parents chose over Connor. He has to remind himself that it wasn’t his brother’s fault.

“Do you miss him?” Risa asks.

Connor shrugs uncomfortably. “He was a pain in the ass.”

Risa grins. “That doesn’t answer the question.”

Connor meets her eyes, so beautifully green, and just as deep and expressive as their natural color.

“Yeah,” Connor admits. “Sometimes.” Back before Connor’s parents gave up on him, he was constantly being compared to Lucas. Grades, sports—never mind that it was Connor who taught Lucas to play every sport. While Connor never had the dedication to stay on a team for a whole season, Lucas excelled, to their parents’ enduring joy. And the more Lucas shone, the dimmer Connor’s light seemed to them.

“I really don’t want to talk about this,” Connor tells her. And as easily as that, his old life and memories of his family are locked away just as securely as his letter to them is locked in Sonia’s trunk.