• • •
The next morning, when they are lined up for inspection, Sonthi the overlord—if that’s what you call such a person—looks them over. He wears camo, as if he’s living in an eternal war.
Sonthi stops by Gamon, quickly noticing his bruises and swollen face. The kid shivers and whimpers.
“Who did this?” he asks, looking to the others.
No one says anything.
So he approaches Colton, grabs his hands, then turns them over to look at his knuckles. Satisfied, he moves on to Jenson and catches him, very literally, red-handed. Sonthi glares at him until Jenson looks away, then Sonthi turns to all the members of their little cell squad. “Guilt for one is guilt for all.” He turns to the guards around them. “Take them to the Haunted Mansion.”
Colton has a feeling this will not be a fun ride.
• • •
They’re marched across the harvest camp, passing five other buildings, each larger than the one they’re being housed in. Colton wonders if they’re all full of Unwinds awaiting their fate. There’s no way to tell from the outside, since there are no windows.
At the far side of the camp there’s one building that stands alone. It looks like it was once an elaborate residence, or maybe even a temple, but now it’s covered with forest growth and moss. Pravda suddenly tries to bolt, but she never gets past the guard beside her, who grabs her and pulls her back in line.
Sonthi opens a heavy door and leads them in.
The inside is spotless. Oddly so, considering the exterior. The stone walls echo with strange noises from deeper in the structure. Grunting and panting. Gibbering and licking. Colton feels the perpetual knot in his stomach seize tighter.
The narrow entry corridor leads them to a huge open-air courtyard. Around them are doors. Many, many doors. It is from behind these doors that the sounds come.
“Ah! Mr. Sonthi! You bring me visitors, yes? Welcome to the Green Manor!”
Dr. Rodín descends a grand staircase into the vast courtyard, his arms wide in a warm gesture of greeting, followed by a dark-skinned teen—not umber, but perhaps Pakistani or Indian. He lumbers with an odd side-to-side gate.
Rodín reaches them and claps his hands together. “So these five have been exceptionally well behaved—and you thought you’d treat them to a glimpse of creation, yes?”
Sonthi is clearly annoyed but remains respectful. “No. They’ve caused trouble. They are here as punishment.”
Now it’s Rodín’s turn to be annoyed. “Yes, well, we do see things differently.”
“What is this place?” Colton dares to ask.
Rodín smiles at him. “This place I call my factory of miracles.”
That causes Sonthi to stifle a guffaw.
Rodín indicates the boy who came down with him. “This is Kunal, my valet.”
The boy nods to them respectfully, but his eyes dart back and forth between Rodín and Sonthi with practiced caution.
“Show them, Kunal,” says Rodín, and Kunal obediently goes to a huge tree with gnarled, twisted limbs in the middle of the courtyard and begins to climb—but not quite the way another person might climb it. His movements are disturbingly graceful. Like a chimpanzee. It is then that Colton realizes that Kunal doesn’t have feet. He has a second pair of hands grafted in their place.
Pravda gasps, Jenson looks terrified, Kemo almost loses his composure, and Gamon just whimpers.
Kunal returns, hobbling in a perverted right-side-up handstand. None of the kids can look at him.
“Perhaps you should show them Marisol,” says Sonthi.
“I was just about to suggest the same thing.” Rodín leads them to one of the many doors on the edge of the courtyard. Kunal produces a key from an overstuffed key chain and opens a door, and Rodín ushers them in.
There’s a girl in the room. Or something that was once a girl. Now it looks more like an alien one might find in a prewar movie. She has four eyes, each a different color, with cheekbones that are way too low in order to accommodate the extra pair of eyes. And she has four arms.
“Isn’t she a wonder,” Rodín says, gazing at her in bemused admiration.
Colton does his best to keep from hurling what little food is inside him. Pravda loses the same battle, and Kunal hurries off to get towels to clean the mess.
“She can be off-putting, I admit,” Rodín says. “Exotic creations are an acquired sight, much like exotic foods are an acquired taste.”
It stands there in the corner of the small cell, almost, but not quite, cowering.
“Please . . . ,” begs Jenson. “For the love of God, please take us out of here.”
Rodín ignores him. “Marisol, are you happy here?”
“Yes, Dr. Rodín,” she says timidly, not meeting his eyes with any of hers.
“You are pleased with what we’ve done for you, no?”
“Yes, Dr. Rodín.” Her voice is dead. Resigned. Colton looks down to see that there is a heavy shackle on one of her legs. Just in case she’s less happy than she cares to admit.
Rodín reaches into his pocket and puts a piece of candy into each of her four hands. One by one she lifts the candy to her mouth—but the fourth one connects with her cheek instead and falls to the ground.
“We’re still working on eye-hand coordination on Marisol’s lower left arm.” Then he tells them how he hopes, in time, to create a girl with eight arms. “A living, breathing version of Kali, the Hindu goddess,” he says. “What a price that would fetch on the black market, yes, Sonthi?”
Sonthi raises his eyebrows and nods. Colton suspects he might not like this place either, but with the Dah Zey, it’s all about money. It’s then that Colton begins to understand the power structure here. At first he had wondered why Sonthi allows the doctor to do the things he does. But now Colton understands. This palace is Rodín’s; the camp is Rodín’s. Everyone here, including Sonthi, works for the doctor.
“Tell me,” Rodín says. “Which of our guests has been a problem today?” He looks at Colton when he says it, smiling at him, and Colton has to look away. “Is it this one? The one with the eyes?”
“We all have eyes,” Colton says under his breath.
Sonthi grabs Jenson’s shoulder and pushes him forward.
“This one,” Sonthi says. “He beat the crap out of the little one. We warned him before, but he doesn’t listen.”
Rodín looks Jenson over like he might appraise a painting. “Yes, well, I know a way to make him listen.” Then he nods to the guards. It takes three of them to drag Jenson away, kicking and screaming.
• • •
Colton and the others are taken back to their room in silence. The message is clear without Sonthi saying a thing. Cause trouble, and you become Rodín’s next experiment.
“What do you think they’ll do to him?” Pravda asks, sounding much more frightened and innocent than she had before their visit to the mansion.
Colton doesn’t want to think about it, but Kemo speaks. Since returning, he has tried unsuccessfully to pervade the air with peace. Clearly he can’t find any of that peace within himself. His meditations are getting shorter, and he spends a lot of time reciting mantras under his breath while pacing. “Whatever they do,” says Kemo, “I hope Jenson’s transformation has meaning for him.”
That just makes Colton angry. “How can you even say that? What kind of ‘meaning’ could it have?”
Kemo remains calm, or at least fakes it. “Everything has meaning, or nothing has meaning,” he says. “Which world would you rather live in?”
Gamon has stopped crying. It seems the Haunted Mansion has gotten through to him. He still doesn’t talk, but he doesn’t cry. Pravda just huddles alone, picking at the skin of her elbows until they’re raw and bleeding. Colton wonders if the Dah Zey will punish her for damaging their property.
Apparently the question is moot, because the following day, she’s taken at inspection for unwinding. She screams and protests as they all do, cursi
ng in half a dozen languages, but it changes nothing. In the end she’s led off to one of the other windowless buildings—the one where the actual unwinding is done. He hopes for her sake that it’s quick.
It’s just before they are sent back inside that Colton catches sight of Rodín, lurking in the background, holding a pair of binoculars. When he takes the binoculars away, Colton can tell that he’s not surveying the scene; he’s staring right at him. The boy with the eyes. He smiles at Colton. Yesterday that smile made Colton look away, but this time he refuses to let Rodín intimidate him. Colton holds the doctor’s gaze, without smiling back.
In their cell no one speaks of Pravda. To do so would be bad luck, and they need all the luck they can get.
“Whose fate is worse?” Kemo ponders aloud. “To be shelled and unwound, or to be an experiment?”
It’s not the question that bothers Colton but the calm way in which Kemo asks it—as if it’s a hypothetical and not the reality they’re facing. “How can you even compare them?”
“I can’t,” says Kemo. “Not really. A shelled unwinding is different from a regular unwinding. Without a brain there’s no question that one is dead, even if one’s flesh lives. And with death come the mysteries of what lies beyond. Death I am ready for. But to become one of Rodín’s . . . things?” Kemo shivers. “And yet as a thing, one lives on, presumably with one’s own brain.” Then Kemo looks through Colton with a question that rings with the solemnity of a ghanta bell. “Are you tempted?”
“No!” says Colton. “Absolutely not! I’d rather be shelled.”
But Kemo grins because he knows that Colton isn’t entirely sure.
• • •
The day after Pravda is taken they are given a new cell mate. The door to their holding tank bursts open, and the guards drag in a girl. A girl who’s covered head to toe in animal tattoos.
“You can’t do this, you bastards!” shouts Karissa, flinging her arms as the guards struggle to hold her still. “How can you do this to me?”
They throw her to the ground and leave. Colton is the first to approach her, taking great pleasure in her newfound misery. “Let me be the first to welcome you.”
“Oh crap!” The fight seems to drop right out of her when she sees him. She rises to her feet, brushing blood from her mouth.
“Is this the girl who turned you in?” asks Kemo, stalking closer. His calm presence has suddenly become coolly menacing.
Karissa backs all the way to a spider-infested corner. “They made me do it!”
“Really.” Colton moves closer to her, not sure what he plans to do, but enjoying the fact that she’s frightened of his righteous rage.
“They have my sister!” Karissa blurts out, bursting into tears that are convenient, but perhaps sincere. “But if I bring them AWOLs, they won’t unwind her. Fifty AWOLs in exchange for her freedom. That’s what they promised.”
“Let me guess,” says Kemo. “You gave them forty-nine, and they made you number fifty.”
Karissa appeals to Colton. “What would you have done if it were your brother?”
“Leave him out of this!” In his stupidity Colton had told her the whole story the night she destroyed his life. “You knew I wasn’t an AWOL, but you turned me in anyway.”
She has no defense for that other than to look down and say, “I had to save my sister.”
Gamon looks back and forth between them, clearly not comprehending, but at the very least getting the emotional gist.
“Do you really think they honored their end of the bargain?” Colton says. “I’m sure she was unwound weeks ago.”
But Karissa shakes her head. “No. I call every week, and they let me talk to her. I know Marisol is still alive!”
“Marisol . . . ,” says Kemo, then glances to Colton. “Yes, you’re right. She is still alive.” But he tells her nothing more, and as furious as Colton is at Karissa, he won’t tell her what her sister has become. He’s not that cruel.
“You know her?” Karissa asks. “Where is she? Is she nearby?”
No one says anything.
“Tell me where she is,” Karissa offers, “and I’ll let you in on a little secret.”
Colton is intrigued but guarded. “What kind of secret?”
Karissa smiles and takes her time. Colton crosses his arms, expecting a lie or a trick or both.
“I might know a way out of here,” she says.
“Hmm,” says Kemo. “You mean other than leaving in small refrigerated boxes?”
“There’s information out there, if you know where to find it.” Then Karissa launches into a history lesson—all about Burma in the old days. “A while back—before unwinding and before the Dah Zey even existed—the military junta that ran Burma secretly hired North Korean engineers to build tunnels.”
“What for?” Colton asks dubiously.
Karissa shrugs. “To escape a coup? To hide weapons? No one knows for sure—but the point is, this place, after it was an opium farm and before it was a harvest camp, was a military training ground. The only building that still exists from those days is on the north end of the camp. They took an old temple and turned it into a palace for the general.”
“The Haunted Mansion!” Colton says. Karissa looks at him funny. “Go on,” he says.
“There are pictures in the public nimbus that show this place—or at least how it looked all those years ago. There’s an old well right in the middle that leads down to the tunnel. I was trying to find where it exits, so I could sneak in and save my sister—but all I know is where those tunnels start, not where they end.”
“So,” says Colton, “they could lead right to another Dah Zey stronghold.”
“Or,” says Karissa, “they could lead to freedom. . . .”
• • •
At the next inspection, a whole host of kids are pulled out of the line and dragged off to be unwound. If there’s any rhyme or reason to whom they choose, Colton can’t see it. He’s become used to the dread of inspection. Used to the relief of being allowed to return to the horrible little holding cell, as if returning there is some sort of triumph.
Rodín doesn’t keep his distance today. He’s right at the front line, checking sores, determining the quality of the product and who might need medical attention to bring up the price of their parts. But Colton knows why he’s really here. He’s looking for subjects. As Rodín moves down the line toward him, Colton gets an idea. It’s probably a very bad idea, but it’s a desperate measure in a very desperate time. He steps forward out of line and waits to be noticed.
A guard lifts his rifle butt, moving as if to strike Colton, but Colton knows he won’t. Not in front of Sonthi, who is farther down the line, and definitely not in front of the doctor. Mustn’t damage the merchandise.
“I want to volunteer,” Colton says as soon as the doctor sees him standing here. He’s horrified by his own words but also energized by the risk he’s taking. “I want you to change me, Dr. Rodín. I want to be something new. Something different. Something great.”
Rodín smiles like he’s just unwrapped the perfect present. “A volunteer. I very rarely get volunteers. Few are so brave.”
Colton knows Rodín already had him pegged. If it wasn’t today, it would be tomorrow or the day after. Then he would be a prisoner. But now he’s a willing subject. It could make all the difference.
“And what sort of creation would you like to be?” Rodín asks.
Colton swallows and tries to sell it. “I surrender to your imagination.”
Rodín looks him over, judging him, trying to read him. “You fear the shelling.”
“We all do,” Colton tells him. “But it’s not just that. I want something . . . more.”
Rodín turns to the guard, speaking in Burmese. The guard nods. Colton has no idea what he says, but then Rodín smiles at him again. “I must complete the inspection,” Rodín says. “Then we shall talk.”
After Rodín is gone, Kemo turns to Colton, his calm entirely
shaken. “Why?” he asks. “Why would you do such a thing?”
“To save us,” Colton whispers. “If the tunnel exists, I’ll find it. Give me three days, then at inspection on the third day, demand to see your sister,” he tells Karissa.
“Why would they let me?”
“They will,” Colton says, sure of it. Sonthi will bring her, if only to see the look on her face. “The hard part will be convincing them that Kemo and Gamon should come too, but I have faith you’ll figure out a way.”
Karissa gives him a twisted grin. “You’re a regular Akron AWOL,” she says.
Colton shakes his head. “I’m not a hero—I just want to survive.”
“I’m sure that’s what Connor Lassiter said when he tranq’d that Juvey-cop and took a tithe hostage.”
“And what if you can’t find a tunnel?” Kemo asks.
“Then we’re no worse off than we are now.”
“You’ll be worse off,” Kemo points out, and Colton agrees—but he can’t stand the frying pan any longer. He’s ready to take on the fire.
• • •
When inspection is done, and the others return to their dingy gray holding pens, Rodín, speaking Burmese, Lao, or some hybrid of the two, instructs the guards, and they roughly grab Colton. Rodín stops them right away, chastising them. They release Colton but stand close as they escort him to the moss-covered stone palace.
“You’ll have a private room here in the Green Manor,” Rodín tells him after they’ve closed the wrought-iron gates behind him. Colton wonders if he knows that everyone else calls it the Haunted Mansion.
“All your needs will be taken care of.” He waves his hand, and Kunal comes running. Or hobbling.
“We have a volunteer.”
“Yes, Dr. Rodín.”
“Show him to chamber twenty-three.”
“Yes, Dr. Rodín.”
Rodín turns to Colton. “I’ve been teaching Kunal English. I intend to bring him into the West and impress the world with what we’ve done here.”
Colton finds that very unlikely. Rodín is as delusional as Pravda is. Was.
Kunal obediently leads Colton across the courtyard, and Colton looks around, trying not to be obvious about it and trying to ignore the sounds coming from the rooms that border the courtyard. Creations he doesn’t even want to imagine reside in there. He focuses his attention toward the middle of the courtyard. Karissa talked of a well in the center, but now there’s only a huge, gnarled tree—the one Kunal had climbed at the doctor’s request.