“Hey,” Argent says to him. “Funny that we’re in a U-Haul, because we’re hauling you. Get it? Hauling U?”
“Do your lips ever stop flapping?” Nelson asks.
“Just having some fun.” Argent has to admit that there’s something very rewarding in talking to people who can’t talk back. “Hey—I think you’re gonna want this kid’s eyes,” Argent tells Nelson. “They’re even nicer than the ones you got now.”
And after an uncomfortable pause, Nelson says, “There’s only one pair of eyes I want.”
Even without Nelson telling him, Argent knows whose eyes he wants as his ultimate trophy. “You know, one of them’s not even his,” Argent points out. “Connor got stuck with a new eye along with his new arm.”
“That doesn’t matter,” Nelson snaps. “It’s not about whose eyes I receive; it’s about whose eyes I take.”
“Yeah, I get that. If you’re seeing through his eyes it means he’s not seeing through them anymore.” Then Argent grins. “And besides, who wants a trophy on a shelf somewhere, when it can be right in your face. Get it? In your face?”
Nelson doesn’t even offer him the courtesy of a groan. “I don’t want to hear your voice anymore,” Nelson says. “Just because you’re a waste of life doesn’t mean you have to be a waste of breath as well.”
“Yeah? Well, this waste of life just caught four prime AWOLs for you to sell to your black-market buddy.”
Nelson turns to him, revealing the good half of his face—the half that wasn’t burned when he lay unconscious in the Arizona sun. Here is something else that bonds them beyond their shared hatred: They both have half of a face. Put Nelson’s left half together with Argent’s right, and you’ve got a whole. That proves they belong together as a team.
“He’s not my buddy!” Nelson says. “Divan is the premier flesh trader in the western world. He even gives the Burmese Dah Zey a run for its money. He is a gentleman who appreciates formality, and when you meet him, you will treat him as such.”
“Whatever,” Argent says. Then he has to ask “So does this Divan guy treat Unwinds like the Dah Zey? Without anesthesia and stuff?”
The suggestion elicits groans and muffled sobs from the back, and Nelson throws Argent a searing glance. “Do I really need to tranq you again to get you to shut up?”
Argent, not caring for those little glimpses of death and the headaches that follow, zips his lips, determined to stay quiet for the duration.
Nelson tells him they’re still not done.
“We’ll catch one more AWOL before we bring them to Divan,” he says. “If I’m not bringing him Lassiter, I want to show up with a full load.” Then Nelson glances at Argent again. “I need to know that you’ll make good on your promise once we arrive.”
Argent swallows, suddenly feeling bound just as tightly as the kids in the back. “Of course,” he says. “I’m a man of my word. I’ll give you the tracking code the second we unload the ‘merchandise.’ ”
Nelson nods, accepting it. “For your sake, you’d better hope that your sister’s tracking chip is still active—and that she’s still with Lassiter.”
“She is,” Argent tells him. “Grace is like a barnacle. Once she clings to a person, it takes an act of God to pull her off.”
“Or a gun to the head,” says Nelson.
It chills Argent to think about it. True, he’s furious at Grace for siding with Connor over him, but would Connor kill her to get rid of her? After everything, Argent still doesn’t see him as the type to do such a thing. Still, it’s something he’d rather not think about, so he lets his thoughts drift to something more pleasant.
“So does this Divan guy have any kids? Like maybe a daughter my age?”
Nelson sighs, pulls out his tranq pistol, and fires a low-dose dart at Argent. The tranq dart hits him painfully in his Adam’s apple. He pinches the little flag and pulls the thing out of his neck, but not before it delivers its full dose.
“That’s coming out of your pay,” Nelson says, which is a joke because Argent receives no pay from Nelson. He had made it clear it’s an unpaid sort of internship. But that’s okay. Even getting tranq’d is okay. Because life is good for Argent Skinner.
As he dives down toward tranq sleep, he takes comfort in the absolute knowledge that Connor Lassiter will soon be going down too—but unlike Argent, Connor will never be getting up.
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.”
* * *
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—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.