Unwind

1. Connor

“There are places you can go,” Ariana tells him, “and a guy as smart as you has a decent chance of surviving to eighteen.”

Connor isn’t so sure, but looking into Ariana’s eyes makes his doubts go away, if only for a moment. Her eyes are sweet violet with streaks of gray. She’s such a slave to fashion—always getting the newest pigment injection the second it’s in style. Connor was never into that. He’s always kept his eyes the color they came in. Brown. He never even got tattoos, like so many kids get these days when they’re little. The only color on his skin is the tan it takes during the summer, but now, in November, that tan has long faded. He tries not to think about the fact that he’ll never see the summer again. At least not as Connor Lassiter. He still can’t believe that his life is being stolen from him at sixteen.

Ariana’s violet eyes begin to shine as they fill with tears that flow down her cheeks when she blinks. “Connor, I’m so sorry.” She holds him, and for a moment it seems as if everything is okay, as if they are the only two people on Earth. For that instant, Connor feels invincible, untouchable . . . but she lets go, the moment passes, and the world around him returns. Once more he can feel the rumble of the freeway beneath them, as cars pass by, not knowing or caring that he’s here.

Once more he is just a marked kid, a week short of unwinding.

The soft, hopeful things Ariana tells him don’t help now. He can barely hear her over the rush of traffic. This place where they hide from the world is one of those dangerous places that make adults shake their heads, grateful that their own kids aren’t stupid enough to hang out on the ledge of a freeway overpass. For Connor it’s not about stupidity, or even rebellion—it’s about feeling life. Sitting on this ledge, hidden behind an exit sign is where he feels most comfortable. Sure, one false step and he’s roadkill. Yet for Connor, life on the edge is home.

There have been no other girls he’s brought here, although he hasn’t told Ariana that. He closes his eyes, feeling the vibration of the traffic as if it’s pulsing through his veins, a part of him. This has always been a good place to get away from fights with his parents, or when he just feels generally boiled. But now Connor’s beyond boiled—even beyond fighting with his mom and dad. There’s nothing more to fight about. His parents signed the order—it’s a done deal.

“We should run away,” Ariana says. “I’m fed up with everything, too. My family, school, everything. I could kick-AWOL, and never look back.”

Connor hangs on the thought. The idea of kicking-AWOL by himself terrifies him. He might put up a tough front, he might act like the bad boy at school—but running away on his own? He doesn’t even know if he has the guts.

But if Ariana comes, that’s different. That’s not alone. “Do you mean it?”

Ariana looks at him with her magical eyes. “Sure. Sure I do. I could leave here. If you asked me.”

Connor knows this is major. Running away with an Unwind—that’s commitment. The fact that she would do it moves him beyond words. He kisses her, and in spite of everything going on in his life Connor suddenly feels like the luckiest guy in the world. He holds her—maybe a little too tightly, because she starts to squirm. It just makes him want to hold her even more tightly, but he fights that urge and lets go. She smiles at him.

“AWOL . . .” she says. “What does that mean, anyway?”

“It’s an old military term or something,” Connor says. “It means ‘absent without leave.’ ”

Ariana thinks about it, and grins. “Hmm. More like ‘alive without lectures.’ ”

Connor takes her hand, trying hard not to squeeze it too tightly. She said she’d go if he asked her. Only now does he realize he hasn’t actually asked yet.

“Will you come with me, Ariana?”

Ariana smiles and nods. “Sure,” she says. “Sure I will.”

Ariana’s parents don’t like Connor. “We always knew he’d be an Unwind,” he can just hear them saying. “You should have stayed away from that Lassiter boy.” He was never “Connor” to them. He was always “that Lassiter boy.” They think that just because he’s been in and out of disciplinary school they have a right to judge him.

Still, when he walks her home that afternoon, he stops short of her door, hiding behind a tree as she goes inside. Before he heads home, he thinks how hiding is now going to be a way of life for both of them.

Home.

Connor wonders how he can call the place he lives home, when he’s about to be evicted—not just from the place he sleeps, but from the hearts of those who are supposed to love him.

His father sits in a chair, watching the news as Connor enters.

“Hi, Dad.”

His father points at some random carnage on the news. “Clappers again.”

“What did they hit this time?”

“They blew up an Old Navy in the North Akron mall.”

“Hmm,” says Connor. “You’d think they’d have better taste.”

“I don’t find that funny.”

Connor’s parents don’t know that Connor knows he’s being unwound. He wasn’t supposed to find out, but Connor has always been good at ferreting out secrets. Three weeks ago, while looking for a stapler in his dad’s home office, he found airplane tickets to the Bahamas. They were going on a family vacation over Thanksgiving. One problem, though: There were only three tickets. His mother, his father, his younger brother. No ticket for him. At first he just figured the ticket was somewhere else, but the more he thought about it, the more it seemed wrong.

So Connor went looking a little deeper when his parents were out, and he found it. The Unwind order. It had been signed in old-fashioned triplicate. The white copy was already gone—off with the authorities. The yellow copy would accompany Connor to his end, and the pink would stay with his parents, as evidence of what they’d done. Perhaps they would frame it and hang it alongside his first-grade picture.

The date on the order was the day before the Bahamas trip. He was going off to be unwound, and they were going on vacation to make themselves feel better about it. The unfairness of it had made Connor want to break something. It had made him want to break a lot of things—but he hadn’t. For once he had held his temper, and aside from a few fights in school that weren’t his fault, he kept his emotions hidden. He kept what he knew to himself. Everyone knew that an unwind order was irreversible, so screaming and fighting wouldn’t change a thing. Besides, he found a certain power in knowing his parents’ secret. Now the blows he could deal them were so much more effective. Like the day he brought flowers home for his mother and she cried for hours. Like the B-plus he brought home on a science test. Best grade he ever got in science. He handed it to his father, who looked at it, the color draining from his face. “See, Dad, my grades are getting better. I could even bring my science grade up to an A by the end of the semester.” An hour later his father was sitting in a chair, still clutching the test in his hand, and staring blankly at the wall.

Connor’s motivation was simple: Make them suffer. Let them know for the rest of their lives what a horrible mistake they made.

But there was no sweetness to this revenge, and now, three weeks of rubbing it in their faces has made him feel no better. In spite of himself he’s starting to feel bad for his parents, and he hates that he feels that way.

“Did I miss dinner?”

His father doesn’t look away from the TV. “Your mother left a plate for you.”

Connor heads off toward the kitchen, but halfway there he hears: “Connor?”

He turns to see his father looking at him. Not just looking, but staring. He’s going to tell me now, Connor thinks. He’s going to tell me they’re unwinding me, and then break down in tears, going on and on about how sorry sorry sorry he is about it all. If he does, Connor just might accept the apology. He might even forgive him, and then tell him that he doesn’t plan to be here when the Juvey-cops come to take him away. But in the end all his father says is, “Did you lock the door when you came in?”

“I’ll do it now.”

Connor locks the door, then goes to his room, no longer hungry for whatever it is his mother saved for him.

At two in the morning Connor dresses in black and fills a backpack with the things that really matter to him. He still has room for three changes of clothes. He finds it amazing, when it comes down to it, how few things are worth taking.

Memories, mostly. Reminders of a time before things went so wrong between him and his parents. Between him and the rest of the world.

Connor peeks in on his brother, thinks about waking him to say good-bye, then decides it’s not a good idea. He silently slips out into the night. He can’t take his bike, because he had installed an antitheft tracking device. Connor never considered that he might be the one stealing it. Ariana has bikes for both of them though.

Ariana’s house is a twenty-minute walk, if you take the conventional route.

Suburban Ohio neighborhoods never have streets that go in straight lines, so instead he takes the more direct route, through the woods, and makes it there in ten.

The lights in Ariana’s house are off. He expected this. It would have been suspicious if she had stayed awake all night. Better to pretend she’s sleeping, so she won’t alert any suspicion. He keeps his distance from the house. Ariana’s yard and front porch are equipped with motion-sensor lights that come on whenever anything moves into range. They’re meant to scare off wild animals and criminals. Ariana’s parents are convinced that Connor is both.

He pulls out his phone and dials the familiar number. From where he stands in the shadows at the edge of the backyard he can hear it ring in her room upstairs. Connor disconnects quickly and ducks farther back into the shadows, for fear that Ariana’s parents might be looking out from their windows. What is she thinking? Ariana was supposed to leave her phone on vibrate.

He makes a wide arc around the edge of the backyard, wide enough not to set off the lights, and although a light comes on when he steps onto the front porch, only Ariana’s bedroom faces that way. She comes to the door a few moments later, opening it not quite wide enough for her to come out or for him to go in.

“Hi, are you ready?” asks Connor. Clearly she’s not; she wears a robe over satin pajamas. “You didn’t forget, did you?”

“No, no, I didn’t forget. . . .”

“So hurry up! The sooner we get out of here, the more of a lead we’ll get before anyone knows we’re gone.”

“Connor,” she says, “here’s the thing . . .”

And the truth is right there in her voice, in the way it’s such a strain for her to even say his name, the quiver of apology lingering in the air like an echo. She doesn’t have to say anything after that, because he knows, but he lets her say it anyway. Because he sees how hard it is for her, and he wants it to be. He wants it to be the hardest thing she’s ever done in her life.

“Connor, I really want to go, I do . . . but it’s just a really bad time for me. My sister’s getting married, and you know she picked me to be the maid of honor. And then there’s school.”

“You hate school. You said you’d be dropping out when you turn sixteen.”

“Testing out,” she says. “There’s a difference.”

“So you’re not coming?”

“I want to, I really, really want to . . . but I can’t.”

“So everything we talked about was just a lie.”

“No,” says Ariana. “It was a dream. Reality got in the way, that’s all. And running away doesn’t solve anything.”

“Running away is the only way to save my life,” Connor hisses. “I’m about to be unwound, in case you forgot.”

She gently touches his face. “I know,” she says. “But I’m not.”

Then a light comes on at the top of the stairs, and reflexively Ariana closes the door a few inches.

“Ari?” Connor hears her mother say. “What is it? What are you doing at the door?”

Connor hacks up out of view, and Ariana turns to look up the stairs.

“Nothing, Mom. I thought I saw a coyote from my window and I just wanted to make sure the cats weren’t out.”

“The cats are upstairs, honey. Close the door and go back to bed.”

“So, I’m a coyote,” says Connor.

“Shush,” says Ariana, closing the door until there’s just a tiny slit and all he can see is the edge of her face and a single violet eye. “You’ll get away, I know you will. Call me once you’re somewhere safe.” Then she closes the door.

Connor stands there for the longest time, until the motion sensor light goes out. Being alone had not been part of his plan, but he realizes it should have been.

From the moment his parents signed those papers, Connor was alone.

He can’t take a train; he can’t take a bus. Sure, he has enough money, but nothing’s leaving until morning, and by then they’ll be looking for him in all the obvious places. Unwinds on the run are so common these days, they have whole teams of Juvey-cops dedicated to finding them. The police have it down to an art.

He knows he’d be able to disappear in a city, because there are so many faces, you never see the same one twice. He knows he can also disappear in the country, where people are so few and far between; he could set up house in an old barn and no one would think to look. But then, Connor figures the police probably thought of that. They probably have every old barn set up to spring like a rat trap, snaring kids like him. Or maybe he’s just being paranoid. No, Connor knows his situation calls for justified caution—not just tonight, but for the next two years. Then once he turns eighteen, he’s home free. After that, sure, they can throw him in jail, they can put him on trial—but they can’t unwind him. Surviving that long is the trick.

Down by the interstate there’s a rest stop where truckers pull off the road for the night. This is where Connor goes. He figures he can slip in the back of an eighteen-wheeler, but he quickly learns that truckers keep their cargo locked. He curses himself for not having forethought enough to consider that. Thinking ahead has never been one of Connor’s strong points. If it was, he might not have gotten into the various situations that have plagued him over these past few years. Situations that got him labels like “troubled” and “at risk,” and finally this last label, “unwind.”

There are about twenty parked trucks, and a brightly lit diner where half a dozen truckers eat. It’s 3:30 in the morning. Apparently truckers have their own biological clocks. Connor watches and waits. Then, at about a quarter to four, a police cruiser pulls silently into the truck stop. No lights, no siren. It slowly circles the lot like a shark. Connor thinks he can hide, until he sees a second police car pulling in. There are too many lights over the lot for Connor to hide in shadows, and he can’t bolt without being seen in the bright moonlight. A patrol car comes around the far end of the lot. In a second its headlights will be on him, so he rolls beneath a truck and prays the cops haven’t seen him.

He watches as the patrol car’s wheels slowly roll past. On the other side of the eighteen-wheeler the second patrol car passes in the opposite direction.

Maybe this is just a routine check, he thinks. Maybe they’re not looking for me.

The more he thinks about it, the more he convinces himself that’s the case. They can’t know he’s gone yet. His father sleeps like a log, and his mother never checks on Connor during the night anymore.

Still, the police cars circle.

From his spot beneath the truck Connor sees the driver’s door of another eighteen-wheeler open. No—it’s not the driver’s door, it’s the door to the little bedroom behind the cab. A trucker emerges, stretches, and heads toward the truckstop bathrooms, leaving the door ajar.

In the hairbreadth of a moment, Connor makes a decision and bolts from his hiding spot, racing across the lot to that truck. Loose gravel skids out from under his feet as he runs. He doesn’t know where the cop cars are anymore, but it doesn’t matter. He has committed himself to this course of action and he has to see it through. As he nears the door he sees headlights arcing around, about to turn toward him. He pulls open the door to the truck’s sleeper, hurls himself inside, and pulls the door closed behind him.

He sits on a bed not much bigger than a cot, catching his breath. What’s his next move? The trucker will be back. Connor has about five minutes if he’s lucky, one minute if he’s not. He peers beneath the bed. There’s space down there where he can hide, but it’s blocked by two duffle bags full of clothes. He could pull them out, squeeze in, and pull the duffle bags back in front of him. The trucker would never know he’s there. But even before he can get the first duffle bag out, the door swings open. Connor just stands there, unable to react as the trucker reaches in to grab his jacket and sees him.

“Whoa! Who are you? What the hell you doin’ in my truck?”

A police car cruises slowly past behind him.

“Please,” Connor says, his voice suddenly squeaky like it was before his voice changed. “Please, don’t tell anyone. I’ve got to get out of this place.” He reaches into his backpack, fumbling, and pulls out a wad of bills from his wallet. “You want money? I’ve got money. I’ll give you all I’ve got.”

“I don’t want your money,” the trucker says.

“All right, then, what?”

Even in the dim light the trucker must see the panic in Connor’s eyes, but he doesn’t say a thing.

“Please,” says Connor again. “I’ll do anything you want. . . .”

The trucker looks at him in silence for a moment more. “Is that so?” he finally says. Then he steps inside and closes the door behind him.

Connor shuts his eyes, not daring to consider what he’s just gotten himself into.

The trucker sits beside him. “What’s your name?”

“Connor.” Then he realizes a moment too late he should have given a fake name.

The trucker scratches his beard stubble and thinks for a moment. “Let me show you something, Connor.” He reaches over Connor and grabs, of all things, a deck of cards from a little pouch hanging next to the bed. “Did ya ever see this?”

The trucker takes the deck of cards in one hand and does a skillful one-handed shuffle. “Pretty good, huh?”

Connor, not knowing what to say, just nods.

“How about this?” Then the trucker takes a single card and with sleight of hand makes the card vanish into thin air. Then he reaches over and pulls the card right out of Connor’s shirt pocket. “You like that?”

Connor lets out a nervous laugh.

“Well, those tricks you just saw?” The trucker says, “I didn’t do em.”

“I . . . don’t know what you mean.”

The trucker rolls up his sleeve to reveal that the arm, which had done the tricks, had been grafted on at the elbow.

“Ten years ago I fell asleep at the wheel,” the trucker tells him. “Big accident. I lost an arm, a kidney, and a few other things. I got new ones, though, and I pulled through.” He looks at his hands, and now Connor can see that the trick-card hand is a little different from the other one. The trucker’s other hand has thicker fingers, and the skin is a bit more olive in tone.

“So,” says Connor, “you got dealt a new hand.”

The trucker laughs at that, then he becomes quiet for a moment, looking at his replacement hand. “These fingers here knew things the rest of me didn’t. Muscle memory, they call it. And there’s not a day that goes by that I don’t wonder what other incredible things that kid who owned this arm knew, before he was unwound . . . whoever he was.”

The trucker stands up. “You’re lucky you came to me,” he says. “There are truckers out there who’ll take whatever you offer, then turn you in anyway.”

“And you’re not like that?”

“No, I’m not.” He puts out his hand—his other hand—and Connor shakes it.

“Josias Aldridge,” he says. “I’m heading north from here. You can ride with me till morning.”

Connor’s relief is so great, it takes the wind right out of him. He can’t even offer a thank-you.

“That bed there’s not the most comfortable in the world,” says Aldridge, “but it does the job. Get yourself some rest. I just gotta go take a dump, and then we’ll be on our way.” Then he closes the door, and Connor listens to his footsteps heading off toward the bathroom. Connor finally lets his guard down and begins to feel his own exhaustion. The trucker didn’t give him a destination, just a direction, and that’s fine. North, south, east, west—it doesn’t matter as long as it’s away from here. As for his next move, well, first he’s got to get through this one before he can think about what comes next.

A minute later Connor’s already beginning to doze when he hears the shout from outside.

“We know you’re in there! Come out now and you won’t get hurt!”

Connor’s heart sinks. Josias Aldridge has apparently pulled another sleight of hand. He’s made Connor appear for the police. Abracadabra. With his journey over before it even began, Connor swings the door open to see three Juvey-cops aiming weapons.

But they’re not aiming at him.

In fact, their backs are to him.

Across the way, the cab door swings open of the truck he had hidden under just a few minutes before, and a kid comes out from behind the empty driver’s seat, his hands in the air. Connor recognizes him right away. It’s a kid he knows from school. Andy Jameson.

My God, is Andy being unwound too?

There’s a look of fear on Andy’s face, but beyond it is something worse. A look of utter defeat. That’s when Connor realizes his own folly. He’d been so surprised by this turn of events that he’s still just standing there, exposed for anyone to see. Well, the policemen don’t see him. But Andy does. He catches sight of Connor, holds his gaze, only for a moment . . .

. . . and in that moment something remarkable happens.

The look of despair on Andy’s face is suddenly replaced by a steely resolve bordering on triumph. He quickly looks away from Connor and takes a few steps before the police grab him—steps away from Connor, so that the police still have their backs to him.

Andy had seen him and had not given him away! If Andy has nothing else after this day, at least he’ll have this small victory.

Connor leans back into the shadows of the truck and slowly pulls the door closed. Outside, as the police take Andy away, Connor lies back down, and his tears come as sudden as a summer downpour. He’s not sure who he’s crying for—for Andy, for himself, for Ariana—and not knowing makes his tears flow all the more. Instead of wiping the tears away he lets them dry on his face like he used to when he was a little boy and the things he cried about were so insignificant that they’d be forgotten by morning.

The trucker never comes to check on him. Instead Connor hears the engine start and feels the truck pulling out. The gentle motion of the road rocks him to sleep.

The ring of Connor’s cell phone wakes him out of a deep sleep. He fights consciousness. He wants to go back to the dream he was having. It was about a place he was sure he had been to, although he couldn’t quite remember when. He was at a cabin on a beach with his parents, before his brother was born. Connor’s leg had fallen through a rotted board on the porch into spiderwebs so thick, they felt like cotton. Connor had screamed and screamed from the pain, and the fear of the giant spiders that he was convinced would eat his leg off. And yet, this was a good dream—a good memory—because his father was there to pull him free, and carry him inside, where they bandaged his leg and sat him by the fire with some kind of cider so flavorful, he could still taste it when he thought about it.

His father told him a story that he can no longer remember, but that’s all right. It wasn’t the story but the tone of his voice that mattered, a gentle baritone rumble as calming as waves breaking on a shore. Little-boy-Connor drank his cider and leaned back against his mother pretending to fall asleep, but what he was really doing was trying to dissolve into the moment and make it last forever. In the dream he did dissolve. His whole being flowed into the cider cup, and his parents placed it gently on the table, close enough to the fire to keep it warm forever and always.

Stupid dreams. Even the good ones are bad, because they remind you how poorly reality measures up.

His cell phone rings again, chasing away the last of the dream. Connor almost answers it. The sleeper room of the truck is so dark, he doesn’t realize at first that he’s not in his own bed. The only thing that saves him is that he can’t find his phone and he must turn on a light. When he finds a wall where his nightstand should be, he realizes that this isn’t his room. The phone rings again.

That’s when it all comes back to him, and he remembers where he is. Connor finds his phone in his backpack. The phone ID says the call is from his father.

So now his parents know he’s gone. Do they really think he’ll answer his phone? He waits until voicemail takes the call, then he turns off the power. His watch says 7:30 a.m. He rubs the sleep out of his eyes, trying to calculate how far they’ve come. The truck isn’t moving anymore, but they must have traveled at least two hundred miles while he slept. It’s a good start.

There’s a knock on the door. “Come on out, kid. Your ride’s over.”

Connor’s not complaining—it was outrageously generous of this truck driver to do what he did. Connor won’t ask any more of him. He swings open the door and steps out to thank the man, but it’s not Josias Aldridge at the door. Aldridge is a few yards away being handcuffed, and in front of Connor is a policeman: a Juvey-cop wearing a smile as big as all outdoors. Standing ten yards away is Connor’s father, still holding the cell phone he had just called from.

“It’s over, son,” his father says.

It makes Connor furious. I’m not your son! He wants to shout. I stopped being your son when you signed the unwind order! But the shock of the moment leaves him speechless.

It had been so stupid of Connor to leave his cell phone on—that’s how they tracked him—and he wonders how many other kids are caught by their own blind trust of technology. Well, Connor’s not going the way Andy Jameson did. He quickly assesses the situation. The truck has been pulled over to the side of the interstate by two highway patrol cars and a Juvey-cop unit. Traffic barrels past at seventy miles per hour, oblivious to the little drama unfolding on the shoulder.

Connor makes a split-second decision and bolts, pushing the officer against the truck and racing across the busy highway. Would they shoot an unarmed kid in the back, he wonders, or would they shoot him in the legs and spare his vital organs? As he races onto the interstate, cars swerve around him, but he keeps on going.

“Connor, stop!” he hears his father yell. Then he hears a gun fire.

He feels the impact, but not in his skin. The bullet embeds in his backpack.

He doesn’t look behind him. Then, as he reaches the highway median, he hears another gunshot, and a small blue splotch appears on the center divider. They’re firing tranquilizer bullets. They’re not taking him out, they’re trying to take him down—and they’re much more likely to fire tranq bullets at will, than regular bullets.

Connor climbs over the center divider, and finds himself in the path of a Cadillac that’s not stopping for anything. The car swerves to avoid him, and by sheer luck Connor’s momentum takes him just a few inches out of the Caddy’s path. Its side mirror smacks him painfully in the ribs before the car screeches to a halt, sending the acrid stench of burned rubber up his nostrils. Holding his aching side, Connor sees someone looking at him from an open window of the backseat. It’s another kid, dressed all in white. The kid is terrified.

With the police already reaching the center divider, Connor looks into the eyes of this frightened kid, and knows what he has to do. It’s time for another split-second decision. He reaches through the window, pulls up the lock, and opens the door.

2. Risa

Risa paces backstage, waiting for her turn at the piano.

She knows she could play the sonata in her sleep—in fact, she often does. So many nights she would wake up to feel her fingers playing on the bed sheets. She would hear the music in her head, and it would still play for a few moments after she awoke, but then it would dissolve into the night, leaving nothing but her fingers drumming against the covers.

She has to know the Sonata. It has to come to her as easily as breathing.

“It’s not a competition,” Mr. Durkin always tells her. “There are no winners or losers at a recital.”

Well, Risa knows better.

“Risa Ward,” the stage manager calls. “You’re up.”

She rolls her shoulders, adjusts the barrette in her long brown hair, then she takes the stage. The applause from the audience is polite, nothing more. Some of it is genuine, for she does have friends out there, and teachers who want her to succeed. But mostly it’s the obligatory applause from an audience waiting to be impressed.

Mr. Durkin is out there. He has been her piano teacher for five years. He’s the closest thing Risa has to a parent. She’s lucky. Not every kid at Ohio State Home 23 has a teacher they can say that about. Most StaHo kids hate their teachers, because they see them as jailers.

Ignoring the stiff formality of her recital dress, she sits at the piano; it’s a concert Steinway as ebony as the night, and just as long.

Focus.

She keeps her eyes on the piano, forcing the audience to recede into darkness. The audience doesn’t matter. All that matters is the piano and the glorious sounds she’s about to charm out of it.

She holds her fingers above the keys for a moment, then begins with perfect passion. Soon her fingers dance across the keys making the flawless seem facile.

She makes the instrument sing . . . and then her left ring finger stumbles on a B-flat, slipping awkwardly onto B-natural.

A mistake.

It happens so quickly, it could go unnoticed—but not by Risa. She holds the wrong note in her mind, and even as she continues playing, that note reverberates within her, growing to a crescendo, stealing her focus until she slips again, into a second wrong note, and then, two minutes later, blows an entire chord. Tears begin to fill her eyes, and she can’t see clearly.

You don’t need to see, she tells herself. You just need to feel the music. She can still pull out of this nosedive, can’t she? Her mistakes, which sound so awful to her, are barely noticeable.

“Relax,” Mr. Durkin would tell her. “No one is judging you.”

Perhaps he truly believes that—but then, he can afford to believe it. He’s not fifteen, and he’s never been a ward of the state.

Five mistakes.

Every one of them is small, subtle, but they are mistakes nonetheless. It would have been fine if any of the other kids’ performances were less than stellar, but the others shined.

Still, Mr. Durkin is all smiles when he greets Risa at the reception. “You were marvelous!” he says. “I’m proud of you.”

“I stunk up the stage.”

“Nonsense. You chose one of Chopin’s most difficult pieces. Professionals can’t get through it without an error or two. You did it justice!”

“I need more than justice.”

Mr. Durkin sighs, but he doesn’t deny it. “You’re coming along nicely. I look forward to the day I see those hands playing in Carnegie Hall.” His smile is warm and genuine, as are the congratulations from the other girls in her dorm. It’s enough warmth to ease her sleep that night, and to give her hope that maybe, just maybe, she’s making too much of it and being unnecessarily hard on herself. She falls asleep thinking of what she might choose to play next.

One week later she’s called into the headmaster’s office.

There are three people there. A tribunal, thinks Risa. Three adults sitting in judgment, like the three monkeys: hear-no-evil, see-no-evil, speak-no-evil.

“Please sit down, Risa,” says the headmaster.

She tries to sit gracefully but her knees, now unsteady, won’t allow it. She slaps awkwardly down into a chair far too plush for an inquisition.

Risa doesn’t know the other two people sitting beside the headmaster, but they both look very official. Their demeanor is relaxed, as if this is business as usual for them.

The woman to the headmaster’s left identifies herself as the social worker assigned to Risa’s “case.” Until that moment, Risa didn’t know she had a case.

She says her name. Ms. Something-or-other. The name never even makes it into Risa’s memory. She flips through the pages of Risa’s fifteen years of life as casually as if she were reading a newspaper. “Let’s see . . . you’ve been a ward of the state from birth. It looks like your behavior has been exemplary. Your grades have been respectable, but not excellent.” Then the social worker looks up and smiles. “I saw your performance the other night. You were very good.”

Good, thinks Risa, but not excellent.

Ms. Something-or-other leafs through the folder for a few seconds more, but Risa can tell she’s not really looking. Whatever’s going on here was decided long before Risa walked through the door.

“Why am I here?”

Ms. Something-or-other closes her folder and glances at the headmaster and the man beside him in an expensive suit. The suit nods, and the social worker turns back to Risa with a warm smile. “We feel you’ve reached your potential here,” she says. “Headmaster Thomas and Mr. Paulson are in agreement with me.”

Risa glances at the suit. “Who’s Mr. Paulson?”

The suit clears his throat and says, almost as an apology, “I’m the school’s legal counsel.”

“A lawyer? Why is there a lawyer here?”

“Just procedure,” Headmaster Thomas tells her. He puts a finger into his collar, stretching it, as if his tie has suddenly become a noose. “It’s school policy to have a lawyer present at these kinds of proceedings.”

“And what kind of proceeding is this?”

The three look at one another, none of them wanting to take the lead.

Finally Ms. Something-or-other speaks up. “You must know that space in state homes are at a premium these days, and with budget cuts, every StaHo is impacted—ours included.”

Risa holds cold eye contact with her. “Wards of the state are guaranteed a place in state homes.”

“Very true—but the guarantee only holds until thirteen.”

Then all of a sudden everyone has something to say.

“The money only stretches so far,” says the headmaster.

“Educational standards could be compromised,” says the lawyer.

“We only want what’s best for you, and all the other children here,” says the social worker.

And back and forth it goes like a three-way Ping-Pong match. Risa says nothing, only listens.

“You’re a good musician, but . . .”

“As I said, you’ve reached your potential.”

“As far as you can go.”

“Perhaps if you had chosen a less competitive course of study.”

“Well, that’s all water under the bridge.”

“Our hands are tied.”

“There are unwanted babies born every day—and not all of them get storked.”

“We’re obliged to take the ones that don’t.”

“We have to make room for every new ward.”

“Which means cutting 5 percent of our teenage population.”

“You do understand, don’t you?”

Risa can’t listen anymore, so she shuts them up by saying what they don’t have the courage to say themselves.

“I’m being unwound?”

Silence. It’s more of an answer than if they had said “yes.”

The social worker reaches over to take Risa’s hand, but Risa pulls it back before she can. “It’s all right to be frightened. Change is always scary.”

“Change?” yells Risa, “What do you mean ‘change’? Dying is a little bit more than a ‘change.’ ”

The headmaster’s tie turns into a noose again, preventing blood from getting to his face. The lawyer opens his briefcase. “Please, Miss Ward. It’s not dying, and I’m sure everyone here would be more comfortable if you didn’t suggest something so blatantly inflammatory. The fact is, 100 percent of you will still be alive, just in a divided state.” Then he reaches into his briefcase and hands her a colorful pamphlet. “This is a brochure from Twin Lakes Harvest Camp.”

“It’s a fine place,” the headmaster says. “It’s our facility of choice for all our Unwinds. In fact, my own nephew was unwound there.”

“Goody for him.”

“Change,” repeated the social worker, “that’s all. The way ice becomes water, the way water becomes clouds. You will live, Risa. Only in a different form.”

But Risa’s not hearing anymore. Panic has already started to set in. “I don’t have to be a musician. I can do something else.”

Headmaster Thomas sadly shakes his head. “Too late for that, I’m afraid.”

“No, it’s not. I could work out. I could become a boeuf. The military always needs more boeufs!”

The lawyer sighs in exasperation and looks at his watch. The social worker leans forward. “Risa, please,” she says. “It takes a certain body type for a girl to be an Army boeuf, and many years of physical training.”

“Don’t I have a choice in this?” But when she looks behind her, the answer is clear. There are two guards waiting to make sure that she has no choice at all.

And as they lead her away, she thinks of Mr. Durkin. With a bitter laugh, Risa realizes that he may get his wish after all. Someday he may see her hands playing in Carnegie Hall. Unfortunately, the rest of Risa won’t be there.

She is not allowed to return to her dormitory. She will take nothing with her, because there’s nothing she needs. That’s the way it is with unwinds. Just a handful of her friends sneak down to the school’s transportation center, stealing quick hugs and shedding quick tears, all the while looking over their shoulders, afraid of getting caught.

Mr. Durkin does not come. This hurts Risa most of all.

She sleeps in a guest room in the home’s welcome center, then, at dawn, she’s loaded onto a bus full of kids being transferred from the huge StaHo complex to other places. She recognizes some faces, but doesn’t actually know any of her travel companions.

Across the aisle, a fairly nice-looking boy—a military boeuf by the look of him—gives her a smile. “Hey,” he says, flirting in a way only boeufs can.

“Hey,” Risa says back.

“I’m being transferred to the state naval academy,” he says. “How about you?”

“Oh, me?” She quickly sifts through the air for something impressive. “Miss Marple’s Academy for the Highly Gifted.”

“She’s lying,” says a scrawny, pale boy sitting on Risa’s other side. “She’s an Unwind.”

Suddenly the boeuf boy leans away, as if unwinding is contagious. “Oh,” he says. “Well . . . uh . . . that’s too bad. See ya!” And he leaves to sit with some other boeufs in the back.

“Thanks,” snaps Risa at the scrawny kid.

The kid just shrugs. “It doesn’t matter, anyway.” Then he holds out his hand to shake. “I’m Samson,” he says. “I’m an Unwind too.”

Risa almost laughs. Samson. Such a strong name for such a mealy boy. She doesn’t shake his hand, still annoyed at having been exposed to the handsome boeuf.

“So, what did you do to get yourself unwound?” Risa asks.

“It’s not what I did, it’s what I didn’t do.”

“What didn’t you do?”

“Anything,” Samson answers.

It makes sense to Risa. Not doing anything is an easy path to unwinding.

“I was never going to amount to much anyway,” Samson says, “but now, statistically speaking, there’s a better chance that some part of me will go on to greatness somewhere in the world. I’d rather be partly great than entirely useless.”

The fact that his twisted logic almost makes sense just makes her angrier.

“Hope you enjoy harvest camp, Samson.” Then she leaves to find another seat.

“Please sit down!” calls the chaperone from the front, but no one’s listening to her. The bus is full of kids moving from seat to seat, trying to find kindred spirits or trying to escape them. Risa finds herself a window seat, with no one beside her.

This bus trip will be only the first leg of her journey. They explained to her—to all the kids after they boarded the bus—that they would first be taken to a central transportation center, where kids from dozens of state homes would be sorted onto buses that would take them to wherever they were going. Risa’s next bus would be a bus full of Samsons. Wonderful. She had already considered the possibility of sneaking onto another bus, but the bar codes on their waistbands make that an impossibility. It’s all perfectly organized, and foolproof. Still, Risa occupies her mind with all the scenarios that could lead to escape.

That’s when she sees the commotion out of her window. It’s farther up the road. Squad cars are on the other side of the freeway, and as the bus changes lanes, she sees two figures in the road: two kids racing across traffic. One kid has the other in a chokehold and is practically dragging him. And both of them have run right in front of the bus.

Risa’s head is slammed against the window as the bus suddenly pulls to the right to avoid the two kids. The bus fills with gasps and screams, and Risa is thrown forward, down the aisle, as the bus comes to a sudden, jarring stop. Her hip is hurt, but not bad. It’s just a bruise. She gets up, quickly taking stock of the situation. The bus leans sideways. It’s off the road, in a ditch. The windshield is smashed, and it’s covered with blood. Lots of it.

Kids around her all check themselves. Like her, no one is badly hurt, although some are making more of a fuss than others. The chaperone tries to calm down one girl who’s hysterical.

And in this chaos, Risa has a sudden realization.

This is not part of the plan.

The system might have a million contingencies for state wards trying to screw with things, but they don’t have a plan of action for dealing with an accident. For the next few seconds, all bets are off.

Risa fixes her eyes on the front door of the bus, holds her breath, and races toward that door.

3. Lev

The party is big, the party is expensive, the party has been planned for years.

There are at least two hundred people in the country club’s grand ballroom.

Lev got to pick the band, he got to choose the food—he even got to select the color of the linens: red and white—for the Cincinnati Reds—and his name, Levi Jedediah Calder, is stamped in gold on the silk napkins for people to take home as a remembrance.

This party is all for him. It’s all about him. And he’s determined to have the best time of his life.

The adults at the party are relatives, friends of the family, his parents’ business associates—but at least eighty of the guests are Lev’s friends. There are kids from school, from church, and from the various sports teams he’s been on.

Some of his friends had felt funny about coming of course.

“I don’t know, Lev,” they had said, “it’s kind of weird. I mean, what kind of present am I supposed to bring?”

“You don’t have to bring anything,” Lev had told them. “There are no presents at a tithing party. Just come and have a good time. I know I will.”

And he does.

He asks every girl he invited to dance, and not a single one turns him down.

He even has people lift him up in a chair and dance with him around the room, because he had seen them do that at a Jewish friend’s bar mitzvah. True, this is a very different kind of party, but it’s also a celebration of him turning thirteen, so he deserves to get lifted up in a chair too, doesn’t he?

Lev finds that the dinner is served far too soon. He looks at his watch to see that two hours have already gone by. How could it have gone so quickly?

Soon people grab the microphone and, holding up glasses of champagne, they start making toasts to Lev. His parents give a toast. His grandmother gives a toast. An uncle he doesn’t even know gives a toast.

“To Lev: It’s been a joy to watch you grow into the fine young man you are, and I know in my heart that you’ll do great things for everyone you touch in this world.”

It feels wonderful and weird for so many people to say so many kind things about him. It’s all too much, but in some strange way it’s not enough. There’s got to be more. More food. More dancing. More time. They’re already bringing out the birthday cake. Everyone knows the party ends once the cake is served. Why are they bringing out the cake? Can it really be three hours into the party?

Then comes one more toast. It’s the toast that almost ruins the evening.

Of Lev’s many brothers and sisters, Marcus has been the quietest all evening. It’s unlike him. Lev should have known something was going to happen.

Lev, at thirteen, is the youngest often. Marcus, at twenty-eight, is the oldest. He flew halfway across the country to be here at Lev’s tithing party, and yet he’s barely danced, or spoken, or been a part of any of the festivities. He’s also drunk.

Lev has never seen Marcus drunk.

It happens after the formal toasts are given, when Lev’s cake is being cut and distributed. It doesn’t start as a toast; it starts as just a moment between brothers.

“Congrats, little bro,” Marcus says, giving him a powerful hug. Lev can smell the alcohol on Marcus’s breath. “Today you’re a man. Sort of.”

Their father, sitting at the head table just a few feet away, lets out a nervous chuckle.

“Thanks . . . sort of,” Lev responds. He glances at his parents. His father waits to see what’s coming next. His mother’s pinched expression makes Lev feel tense.

Marcus stares at Lev with a smile that doesn’t hold any of the emotion a smile usually comes with. “What do you think of all this?” he asks Lev.

“It’s great.”

“Of course it is! All these people here for you? It’s an amazing night. Amazing!”

“Yeah,” says Lev. He’s not sure where this is going, but he knows it’s going somewhere. “I’m having the time of my life.”

“Damn right! The time of your life! Gotta wrap up all those life events, all those parties, into one—birthdays, wedding, funeral.” Then he turns to their father. “Very efficient, right, Dad?”

“That’s enough,” their father says quietly, but it only makes Marcus get louder.

“What? I’m not allowed to talk about it? Oh, that’s right—this is a celebration. I almost forgot.”

Lev wants Marcus to stop, but at the same time he doesn’t.

Mom stands up and says in a voice more forceful than Dad’s, “Marcus, sit down. You’re embarrassing yourself.”

By now everyone in the banquet hall has stopped whatever they were doing and are tuned in to the unfolding family-drama. Marcus, seeing he has the room’s attention, picks up someone’s half-empty glass of champagne, and holds it high.

“Here’s to my brother, Lev,” Marcus says. “And to our parents! Who have always done the right thing. The appropriate thing. Who have always given generously to charity. Who have always given 10 percent of everything to our church. Hey, Mom—we’re lucky you had ten kids instead of five, otherwise we’d end up having to cut Lev off at the waist!”

Gasps from all those assembled. People shaking their heads. Such disappointing behavior from an eldest son.

Now Dad comes up and grabs Marcus’s arm tightly. “You’re done!” Dad says. “Sit down.”

Marcus shakes Dad’s arm off. “Oh, I’ll do better than sit down.” Now there are tears in Marcus’s eyes as he turns to Lev. “I love you, bro . . . and I know this is your special day. But I can’t be a part of this.” He hurls the champagne glass against the wall, where it shatters, spraying fragments of crystal all over the buffet table. Then he turns and storms out with such steady confidence in his stride that Lev realizes he’s not drunk at all.

Lev’s father signals the band and they kick into a dance number even before Marcus is gone from the huge room. People begin to fill the void of the dance floor, doing their best to make the awkward moment go away.

“I’m sorry about that, Lev,” his father tells him. “Why don’t you . . . why don’t you go dance?”

But Lev finds he doesn’t want to dance anymore. The desire he had to be the center of attention left along with his brother. “I’d like to talk to Pastor Dan, if that’s all right.”

“Of course it is.”

Pastor Dan has been a family friend since before Lev was born, and he has always been much easier to talk to than his parents about any subject that required patience and wisdom.

The banquet hall is too loud, too crowded, so they go outside to the patio overlooking the country club’s golf course.

“Are you getting scared?” Pastor Dan asks. He’s always able to figure out what’s on Lev’s mind.

Lev nods. “I thought I was ready. I thought I was prepared.”

“It’s natural. Don’t worry about it,”

But it doesn’t ease the disappointment Lev feels in himself. He’s had his entire life to prepare for this—it should have been enough. He knew he was a tithe from the time he was little. “You’re special,” his parents had always told him. “Your life will be to serve God, and mankind.” He doesn’t remember how old he was when he found out exactly what that meant for him.

“Have kids in school been giving you a hard time?”

“No more than usual,” Lev tells him. It’s true. All his life he’s had to deal with kids who resented him, because grownups treated him as if he was special.

There were kids who were kind, and kids who were cruel. That was life. It did bother him, though, when kids called him things like “dirty Unwind.” As if he was like those other kids, whose parents signed the unwind order to get rid of them.

That couldn’t be further from the truth for Lev. He is his family’s pride and joy.

Straight As in school, MVP in little league. Just because he’s to be unwound does NOT means he’s an Unwind.

There are, of course, a few other tithes at his school, but they’re all from other religions, so Lev has never felt a real sense of camaraderie with them. The huge turnout at tonight’s party testifies to how many friends Lev has—but they’re not like him: Their lives will be lived in an undivided state. Their bodies and their futures are their own. Lev has always felt closer to God than to his friends, or even his family. He often wonders if being chosen always leaves a person so isolated. Or is there something wrong with him?

“I’ve been having lots of wrong thoughts,” Lev tells Pastor Dan.

“There are no wrong thoughts, only thoughts that need to be worked through and overcome.”

“Well . . . I’ve just been feeling jealous of my brothers and sisters. I keep thinking of how the baseball team is going to miss me. I know it’s an honor and a blessing to be a tithe, but I can’t stop wondering why it has to be me.”

Pastor Dan, who was always so good at looking people in the eye, now looks away. “It was decided before you were born. It’s not anything you did, or didn’t do.”

“The thing is, I know tons of people with big families . . .”

Pastor Dan nodded. “Yes, it’s very common these days.”

“But lots of those people don’t tithe at all—even families in our church—and nobody blames them.”

“There are also people who tithe their first, second, or third child. Every family must make the decision for itself. Your parents waited a long time before making the decision to have you.”

Lev reluctantly nods, knowing it’s true. He was a “true tithe.” With five natural siblings, plus one adopted, and three that arrived “by stork,” Lev was exactly one-tenth. His parents had always told him that made him all the more special.

“I’ll tell you something, Lev,” Pastor Dan says, finally meeting his eye. Like Marcus, his eyes are moist, just one step short of tears. “I’ve watched all your brothers and sisters grow and, although I don’t like playing favorites, I think you are the finest of all of them in so many ways, I wouldn’t even know where to start. That’s what God asks for, you know. Not first fruits but best fruits.”

“Thank you, sir.” Pastor Dan always knows what to say to make Lev feel better. “I’m ready for this,” and saying it makes him realize that, in spite of his fears and misgivings, he truly is ready. This is everything he has lived for. Even so, his tithing party ends much too soon.

In the morning the Calders have to eat breakfast in the dining room, with all the leaves in the table. All of Lev’s brothers and sisters are there. Only a few of them still live at home, but today they’ve all come over for breakfast. All of them, that is, except Marcus.

Yet, for such a large family it’s unusually quiet, and the clatter of silverware on china makes the lack of conversation even more conspicuous.

Lev, dressed in his silk tithing whites, eats carefully, so as not to leave any stains on his clothes. After breakfast, the good-byes are long, full of hugs and kisses. It’s the worst part. Lev wishes they would all just let him go and get the good-byes over with.

Pastor Dan arrives—he’s come at Lev’s request—and once he’s there, the good-byes move more quickly. Nobody wants to waste the pastor’s valuable time.

Lev is the first one out in his Dad’s Cadillac, and although he tries not to look back as his father starts the car and drives away, he can’t help it. He watches as his home disappears behind them.

I will never see that home again, he thinks, but he pushes the thought out of his mind. It’s unproductive, unhelpful, selfish. He looks at Pastor Dan, who sits beside him in the backseat watching him, and the pastor smiles.

“It’s all right, Lev,” he says. Just hearing him say it makes it so.

“How far is the harvest camp?” Lev asks to whoever cares to answer.

“It’s about an hour from here,” his Mom says.

“And . . . will they do it right away?”

His parents look to each other. “I’m sure there’ll be an orientation,” says his father.

That short answer makes it clear to Lev that they don’t know any more than he does.

As they pull onto the interstate, Lev rolls down the window to feel the wind on his face, and closes his eyes to prepare himself.

This is what I was born for. It’s what I’ve lived my life for. I am chosen. I am blessed. And I am happy.

Suddenly his father slams on the brakes.

With his eyes closed, Lev doesn’t see the reason for their unexpected stop.

He just feels the sharp deceleration of the Cadillac and the pull of the seat belt on his shoulder. He opens his eyes to see they have stopped on the interstate. Police lights flash. And—was that a gunshot he just heard?

“What’s going on?”

Then, just outside his window is another kid, a few years older than him. He looks scared. He looks dangerous. Lev reaches over to quickly put up his window, but before he can this kid reaches in, pulls up the lock on the door, and tugs the door open. Lev is frozen. He doesn’t know what to do. “Mom? Dad?” he calls.

The boy with murder in his eyes tugs on Lev’s white silk shirt, trying to pull him out of the car, but the seat belt holds him tight.

“What are you doing? Leave me alone!”

Lev’s mom screams for his father to do something, but he’s fumbling with his own seat belt.

The maniac reaches over and in one swift motion unclips Lev’s seat belt.

Pastor Dan grabs at the intruder, who responds with a quick powerful punch—a jab right at Pastor Dan’s jaw. The shock of seeing such violence distracts Lev at a crucial moment. The maniac tugs on him again, and this time Lev falls out of the car, hitting his head on the pavement. When he looks up he sees his father finally getting out of the car, but the crazy kid swings the car door hard against him, sending him flying.

“Dad!” His father lands in the path of an oncoming car. The car swerves and, thank God, it misses him—but it cuts off another car, hitting it, that car spins out of control, and the sound of crashes fills the air. Lev is pulled to his feet again by the kid, who grabs Lev’s arm and drags him off. Lev is small for his age. This kid is a couple of years older, and much bigger. Lev can’t break free.

“Stop!” yells Lev. “You can have whatever you want. Take my wallet,” he says, even though he has no wallet. “Take the car. Just don’t hurt anyone.”

The kid considers the car, but only for an instant. Bullets now fly past them.

On the southbound roadway are policemen who have finally stopped traffic on their side of the interstate, and have made it to the median dividing the north and southbound lanes. The closest officer fires again. A tranq bullet hits the Cadillac and splatters.

The crazy kid now puts Lev into a choke hold, holding Lev between himself and the officers. Lev realizes that he doesn’t want a car, or money: He wants a hostage.

“Stop struggling—I’ve got a gun!” And Lev feels the kid poke him in the side. Lev knows it’s not a gun—he knows it’s just the kid’s finger, but this is clearly an unstable individual, and he doesn’t want to set him off.

“I’m worthless as a human shield,” Lev says, trying to reason with him. “Those are tranq bullets they’re shooting, which means the cops don’t care if they hit me—they’ll just knock me out.”

“Better you than me.”

Bullets fly past them as they wind around swerving traffic. “Please—you don’t understand—you can’t take me now, I’m being tithed. I’ll miss my harvest! You’ll ruin everything!”

And finally, a hint of humanity comes to the maniac’s eyes. “You’re an Unwind?”

There are a million more things to be furious about, but Lev finds himself incensed by what he’s just been called. “I’m a tithe!”

A blaring horn, and Lev turns to see a bus bearing down on them. Before either of them has a chance to scream, the bus careens off the road to avoid them and smashes head-on against the fat trunk of a huge oak, stopping the bus cold.

There’s blood all over the smashed windshield. It’s the bus driver’s blood.

He hangs halfway through, and he’s not moving.

“Oh, crap!” says the maniac, a creepy whine in his voice. A girl has just stepped out of the bus. The crazy kid looks at her, and Lev realizes that now, while he’s distracted, is the last chance he’s going to have to get away. This kid is an animal. The only way to deal with him is for Lev to become an animal himself.

So Lev grabs the arm that’s locked around his neck and sinks his teeth in with the full force of his jaws until he tastes blood. The kid screams, letting go, and Lev bolts away, racing toward his father’s car.

As he nears it, a back door opens. It’s Pastor Dan opening the door to receive him, yet the expression on the man’s face is anything but happy.

With his face already swelling from the crazy kid’s brutal punch, Pastor Dan says with a hiss and strange warble to his voice, “Run, Lev!”

Lev wasn’t expecting this. “What?”

“Run! Run as fast and as far as you can. RUN!”

Lev stands there, impotent, unable to move, unable to process this. Why is Pastor Dan telling him to run? Then comes a sudden pain in his shoulder, and everything starts spinning round and round and down a drain into darkness.

4. Connor

The pain in Connor’s arm is unbearable. That little monster actually bit him—practically took a chunk out of his forearm. Another car slams the brakes to avoid hitting him, and gets rear-ended. The tranq bullets have stopped flying, but he knows that’s temporary. The accidents have gotten the Juvey-cops momentarily distracted, but they won’t stay that way for long.

Just then, he makes eye contact with the girl who got off the bus. He thinks she’s going to go stumbling toward all the people who are running from their cars to help, but instead she turns and runs into the woods. Has the whole world gone insane?

Still holding his stinging, bleeding arm, he turns to run into the woods as well, but stops. He turns back to see the kid in white just reaching his car. Connor doesn’t know where the Juvey-cops are. They’re lurking, no doubt, somewhere in the tangle of vehicles. That’s when Connor makes a split-second decision. He knows it’s a stupid decision, but he can’t help himself. All he knows is that he’s caused death today. The bus driver’s, maybe more. Even if it risks everything, he’s got to balance it somehow. He’s got to do something decent, something good to make up for the awful consequence of his kicking-AWOL. And so, battling his own instinct for self-preservation, he races toward the kid in white who was so happily going to his own unwinding.

It’s as Connor gets close that he sees the cop twenty yards away, raising his weapon, and firing. He shouldn’t have risked this! He should have gotten away when he could. Connor waits for the telltale sting of the tranq bullet but it never comes, because the moment the bullet is fired, the boy in white takes a step back, and he’s hit in the shoulder. Two seconds, and his knees buckle. The kid hits the ground, out cold, unwittingly taking the bullet meant for Connor.

Connor wastes no time. He picks the kid up off the ground and flips him over his shoulder. Tranq bullets fly, but no others connect. In a few seconds Connor’s past the bus, where a gaggle of shell-shocked teens are getting off. He pushes past them and into the woods.

The woods are dense, not just with trees but with tall shrubs and vines, yet there’s already a path of broken branches and parted shrubs made by the girl who ran from the bus. They might as well have arrows pointing the police in their direction. He sees the girl up ahead and calls out to her. “Stop!” She turns, but only for an instant, then renews her battle with the dense growth all around her.

Connor gently puts down the boy in white and hurries forward, catching up with her. He grabs her arm gently, yet firmly enough so that she can’t pull away.

“Whatever you’re running from, you won’t get away unless we work together,” he tells her. He glances behind him to make sure that no Juvey-cops are in sight yet.

There aren’t. “Please—we don’t have much time.”

The girl stops fighting the bushes and looks at him.

“What do you have in mind?”

5. Cop

Officer J. T. Nelson has spent twelve years working Juvenile. He knows AWOL Unwinds will not give up as long as there’s an ounce of consciousness left in them. They are high on adrenaline, and often high on illegal substances as well.

Nicotine, caffeine, or worse. He wishes his bullets were the real thing. He wishes he could truly take these wastes-of-life out rather than just taking them down.

Maybe then they wouldn’t be so quick to run—and if they did, well, no great loss.

The officer follows the path made through the woods by the AWOL Unwind, until he comes to a lump on the ground. It’s the hostage, just dumped in the path, his white clothes smudged green from the foliage, and brown from the muddy earth. Good, thinks the officer. It was a good thing this boy took that bullet after all. Being unconscious probably saved this kid’s life. No telling where the Unwind would have taken him, or what he’d have done to him.

“Help me!” says a voice just ahead of him. It’s the voice of a girl. The officer isn’t expecting this.

“Help me, please, I’m hurt!”

Deeper in the woods a girl sits up against a tree, holding her arm, grimacing in pain. He doesn’t have time for this, but “Protect and Serve” is more than just a motto to him. He sometimes wishes he didn’t have such moral integrity.

He goes over to the girl. “What are you doing here?”

“I was on the bus. I got off and ran away because I was scared it would explode. I think my arm’s broken.”

He looks at the girl’s arm. It’s not even bruised. This should be his first clue, but his mind is already too far ahead of him to catch it. “Stay here, I’ll be right back.” He turns, ready to pick up his pursuit, when something drops on him from above. Not something, someone. The AWOL Unwind! The officer is knocked to the ground, and suddenly there are two figures attacking him—the Unwind and the girl. They’re in this together. How could he have been so stupid? He reaches for his tranq pistol, but it’s not there. Instead he feels its muzzle against his left thigh, and he sees triumph in the Unwinds dark, vicious eyes.

“Nighty-night,” the Unwind says.

A sharp pain in the officer’s leg, and the world goes away.

6. Lev

Lev wakes up to a dull ache in his shoulder. He thinks maybe he slept funny, but he quickly realizes the ache is from an injury. His left shoulder was the entry point of a tranq bullet, though he doesn’t realize that just yet. All the things that had happened to him twelve hours before are like faint clouds in his mind that have lost their shape. All he knows for sure is that he was on his way to his tithing, he was kidnapped by a murderous teenager, and for some strange reason the image of Pastor Dan keeps coming back to him.

Pastor Dan was telling him to run.

He’s sure that it must be a false memory, because he can’t believe Pastor Dan would do such a thing.

Everything’s blurry as Lev opens his eyes. He doesn’t know where he is, only that it’s night and he’s not where he should be. The insane teen who took him sits across a small fire. There’s a girl there, too.

That’s when he realizes he’d been hit by a tranq bullet. His head hurts, he feels like he might puke, and his brain is still only at half power. He tries to get up, but can’t. At first he thinks that’s also because of the tranquilizers, but then he realizes he’s tied to a tree by thick vines.

He tries to speak, but his voice comes out as a little groan and a lot of drool.

The boy and girl look at him, and he’s sure they’re going to kill him now. They kept him alive just so he’d be awake when they killed him. Maniacs are like that.

“Look who’s back from Tranqville,” says the boy with wild eyes. Only his eyes aren’t wild now, just his hair—it’s all sticking up like he slept on it.

Although Lev’s tongue feels like rubber, he manages to get out a single word. “Where . . .”

“Not sure,” says the boy.

Then the girl adds, “But at least you’re safe.”

Safe? thinks Lev. What could possibly be safe about this?

“H . . . h . . . hostage?” Lev gets out.

The boy looks to the girl, then back to Lev. “Kind of. I guess.” These two talk in an easy tone of voice, like they’re all friends. They’re trying to lull me into a false sense of security, thinks Lev. They’re trying to get me on their side, so I’ll take part in whatever criminal activities they have planned. There’s an expression for that, isn’t there? When a hostage joins the kidnappers’ cause? The Something syndrome.

The crazy kid looks to a pile of berries and nuts obviously foraged from the woods. “You hungry?”

Lev nods, but the act of nodding makes his head spin so much, he realizes that no matter how hungry he is, he’d better not eat, because it’ll come right back up. “No,” he says.

“You sound confused,” says the girl. “Don’t worry, it’s just the tranqs. They should wear off pretty soon.”

Stockholm syndrome! That’s it! Well, Lev won’t be won over by this pair of kidnappers. He’ll never be on their side.

Pastor Dan told me to run.

What had he meant? Did he mean run from the kidnappers? Maybe, but he seemed to be saying something else entirely. Lev closes his eyes and chases the thought away.

“My parents will look for me,” Lev says, his mouth finally able to put together whole sentences.

The kids don’t answer because they probably know it’s true.

“How much is the ransom?” Lev asks.

“Ransom? There’s no ransom,” says the crazy kid. “I took you to save you, idiot!”

To save him? Lev just stares at him in disbelief. “But . . . but my tithing . . .”

The crazy kid looks at him and shakes his head. “I’ve never seen a kid in such a hurry to be unwound.”

It’s no use trying to explain to this godless pair what tithing is all about.

How giving of one’s self is the ultimate blessing. They’d never understand or care.

Save him? They haven’t saved him, they’ve damned him.

Then Lev realizes something. He realizes that he can use this entire situation to his advantage. “My name’s Lev,” he says, trying to play it as cool as he can.

“Pleased to meet you, Lev,” says the girl. “I’m Risa, and this is Connor.”

Connor throws her a dirty look, making it clear that she gave him their real names. Not a good idea for hostage-takers, but then most criminals are stupid like that.

“Didn’t mean for you to take the tranq bullet,” Connor tells him. “But the cop was a bad shot.”

“Not your fault,” says Lev, even though every bit of it is Connor’s fault. Lev thinks about what happened, and says, “I would never have run from my own tithing.” That much, Lev knows, is true.

“Good thing I was around, then,” says Connor.

“Yeah,” says Risa. “If it wasn’t for Connor running across that highway, I’d probably be unwound by now too.”

There’s a moment of silence, then Lev, biting back his anger and revulsion, says, “Thank you. Thank you for saving me.”

“Don’t mention it,” says Connor.

Good. Let them think he’s grateful. Let them think they’re earning his trust. And once they’re lulled into their own false sense of security, he’ll make sure they both get exactly what they deserve.

7. Connor

Connor should have kept the Juvey-cop’s gun, but he wasn’t thinking. He was so freaked out at having tranq’d a cop with his own weapon, he just dropped it and ran—just as he dropped his backpack on the interstate so he could carry Lev. His wallet with all his money was in that pack. Now he has nothing but pocket lint.

It’s late now—or, more accurately, early—almost dawn. He and Risa had kept moving through the woods all day, as best they could with Connor having to carry an unconscious tithe. Once night fell, he and Risa had taken turns keeping watch while the other slept.

Connor knows that Lev can’t be trusted, that’s why Connor tied him to the tree—but there’s no reason to trust this girl who had come running out of a bus either. It’s only their common goal of staying alive that binds them.

The moon has left the sky now, but there’s a faint glow promising a quick arrival of dawn. By now their faces would be everywhere. Have you seen these teens? Do not approach. Considered extremely dangerous. Call the police immediately. Funny how Connor had wasted so much time in school trying to convince people he was dangerous, but when it came down to it, he was never sure if he was all that dangerous at all. A danger to himself, maybe.

All the while, Lev watches him. At first the boy’s eyes had been lazy and his head lolling to one side, but now those eyes are sharp. Even in the dimness of the dying fire Connor can see them. Chilly blue. Calculating. This kid is an odd bird.

Connor’s not quite sure what’s going on on Planet Lev, and not quite sure he wants to know.

“That bite’s gonna get infected if you don’t take care of it,” Lev says.

Connor looks to the spot on his arm where Lev bit him, still puffy and red.

He had tuned the pain out until Lev reminded him. “I’ll deal with it.”

Lev continues to study him. “Why are you being unwound?”

Connor doesn’t like the question for a whole lot of reasons. “You mean why WAS I being unwound—because, as you can see, I’m not being unwound anymore.”

“They will if they catch you.”

Connor feels like punching that smug look off the kid’s face, but he restrains himself. He didn’t rescue the kid just to beat him up.

“So, what’s it like,” Connor asks, “knowing all your life you’re going to be sacrificed?” He meant it as a jab, but Lev takes the question seriously.

“It’s better than going through life without knowing your purpose.”

Connor’s not sure if that was intentionally meant to make him squirm—as if his life has no purpose. It makes him feel like he’s the one tied to a tree, not Lev.

“I guess it could be worse,” says Connor. “We could have all ended up like Humphrey Dunfee.”

Lev seems surprised by the mention of the name. “You know that story? I thought they only told it in my neighborhood.”

“Nah,” says Connor. “Kids tell it everywhere.”

“It’s made up,” says Risa, having just woken up.

“Maybe,” says Connor. “But there was this one time a friend and I tried to find out about it while surfing one of the school’s computers. We hit this one website that talked about it, and how his parents went all psycho. Then the computer crashed. It turns out we were hit by a virus that wiped out the entire district server. Coincidence? I don’t think so.”

Lev’s taken in, but Risa, fairly disgusted, says, “Well, I’ll never end up like Humphrey Dunfee, because you have to have parents for them to go psycho—and I don’t.” She stands up. Connor looks away from the dying fire to see that dawn has arrived.

“If we’re going to keep from being caught, then we should change direction again,” Risa says. “We should also think about disguising ourselves.”

“Like how?” asks Connor.

“I don’t know. Change our clothes first. Haircuts maybe. They’ll be looking for two boys and a girl. Maybe I can disguise myself as a boy.”

Connor takes a good look at her and smiles. Risa’s pretty. Not in the way Ariana was pretty—in a better way. Ariana’s prettiness was all about makeup and pigment injections and stuff. Risa has a natural kind of beauty. Without thinking, Connor reaches out to touch her hair, and gently says, “I don’t think you could ever pass for a guy—”

Then suddenly, he finds his hand tugged behind him, his whole body spins around, and she painfully wrenches his arm up the small of his back. It hurts so much, he can’t even say “Ouch.” All he can say is, “Eh-eh-eh!”

“Touch me again and your arm gets ripped off,” Risa tells him. “Got that?”

“Yeah. Yeah. Fine. Hands off. Got it.”

Over at the oak tree, Lev laughs, apparently pleased to see Connor in pain.

She lets him go, but his shoulder still throbs. “You didn’t have to do that,” Connor says, trying not to show how much it still hurts. “It’s not like I was going to hurt you or anything.”

“Yeah, well, now you won’t for sure,” says Risa, maybe sounding a bit guilty for being so harsh. “Don’t forget I lived in a state home.”

Connor nods. He knows about StaHo kids. They have to learn to take care of themselves real young, or their lives are not very pleasant. He should have realized she was a touch-me-not.

“Excuse me,” says Lev, “but we can’t go anywhere if I’m tied to a tree.”

Still, Connor doesn’t like that judgmental look in Lev’s eyes. “How do we know you won’t run?”

“You don’t, but until you untie me, I’m a hostage,” Lev says. “Once I’m free, I’m a fugitive, like you. Tied up, I’m the enemy. Cut loose, I’m a friend.”

“If you don’t run,” says Connor.

Risa impatiently begins untying the vines. “Unless we want to leave him here, we’ll have to take that chance.” Connor kneels to help, and in a few moments, Lev is free. He stands and stretches, rubbing his shoulder where the tranq bullet had hit him. Lev’s eyes are still blue ice and hard for Connor to read, but he’s not running. Maybe, thinks Connor, he’s over the “duty” of being tithed. Maybe he’s finally starting to see the sense of staying alive.

8. Risa

Risa finds herself unsettled by the food wrappers and broken bits of plastic they start coming across in the woods, because the first sign of civilization is always trash. Civilization means people who could recognize them if their faces have been smeared on the newsnet.

Risa knows that staying completely clear of human contact is an impossibility. She has no illusion about their chances, or their ability to remain unseen. As much as they need to remain anonymous, they cannot get by entirely alone. They need the help of others.

“No, we don’t,” Connor is quick to argue as the signs of civilization grow around them. It’s not just trash now, but the mossy remnants of a knee-high stone wall, and the rusty remains of an old electrical tower from the days when electricity was transmitted by wires. “We don’t need anyone. We’ll take what we need.”

Risa sighs, trying to hold together a patience that has already worn through.

“I’m sure you’re very good at stealing, but I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

Connor appears insulted by the insinuation. “What do you think—people are just going to give us food and whatever else we need out of the goodness of their hearts?”

“No,” says Risa, “but if we’re clever about it instead of rushing into this blind, we’ll have a better chance.”

Her words or maybe just her intentionally condescending tone makes Connor storm off.

Risa notices Lev watching the argument from a distance. If he’s going to run, thinks Risa, now’s the time for him to do it, while Connor and I are busy fighting. And then it occurs to her that this is an excellent opportunity to test Lev, and see if he really is standing by them now, or biding his time until he can escape.

“Don’t you walk away from me!” she growls at Connor, doing her best to keep the argument alive, all the while keeping an eye on Lev to see if he bolts. “I’m still talking to you!”

Connor turns toward her. “Who says I have to listen?”

“You would if you had half a brain, but obviously you don’t!”

Connor moves closer until he’s deeper into her airspace than she likes anyone to get. “If it wasn’t for me you’d be on your way to harvest camp!” he says.

Risa raises a hand to push him back, but his hand shoots up faster, and he grabs her wrist before she can shove him. This is the moment Risa realizes she’s gone too far. What does she really know about this boy? He was going to be unwound.

Maybe there’s a reason for it. Maybe a good reason.

Risa is careful not to struggle because struggling gives him the advantage.

She lets her tone of voice convey all the weight. “Let go of me.”

“Why? Exactly what do you think I’ll do to you?”

“This is the second time you’ve touched me without permission,” Risa says.

Still, he does not let go—yet she does notice his grip isn’t all that threatening. It isn’t tight, it’s loose. It isn’t rough, it’s gentle. She could easily pull out of it with a simple flick of her wrist. So why doesn’t she?

Risa knows he’s doing this to make a point, but what the point is, Risa isn’t sure. Is he warning her that he can hurt her if he wants to? Or maybe his message is in the gentle nature of his grip—a way of saying he’s not the hurting type.

Well, it doesn’t matter, thinks Risa. Even a gentle violation is a violation.

She looks at his knee. A well-placed kick could break his kneecap.

“I could take you out in a second,” she threatens.

If he’s concerned, he doesn’t show it. “I know.”

Somehow he also knows that she won’t do it—that the first time was just a reflex. If she were to hurt him a second time, though, it would be a conscious act. It would be by choice.

“Step off,” she says. Her voice now lacks the force it had only moments before.

This time he listens and lets go, moving back to a respectable distance. They both could have hurt one another, but neither of them did. Risa isn’t quite sure what that means, all she knows is that she feels angry at him for such a mixture of reasons, she can’t sort them out.

Then suddenly a voice calls to them from the right. “This is very entertaining and all, but I don’t think fighting is going to help much.”

It’s Lev—and Risa realizes that her little ruse has backfired. She had set out to test him with a fake argument but the argument turned real, and in the process she completely forgot about Lev. He could have taken off, and they would not have known until he was long gone.

Risa throws Connor an evil look for good measure and the three of them continue on. It isn’t until ten minutes later, when Lev goes off to relieve himself in private, that Connor talks to Risa again.

“Good one,” Connor says. “It worked.”

“What?”

Connor leans closer and whispers, “The argument. You put it on to see if Lev would run when we weren’t paying attention, right?”

Risa is bowled over. “You knew that?”

Connor looks at her, a bit amused. “Well . . . yeah.”

If Risa felt uncertain about him before, it’s even worse now. She has no idea what to think. “So . . . everything that happened back there was all a show?”

Now it’s Connor’s turn to be unsure. “I guess. Sort of. Wasn’t it?”

Risa has to hold back a smile. Suddenly she’s feeling strangely at ease with Connor. She marvels at how that could be. If their argument had been entirely real, she’d be on her guard against him. If it had been entirely a show she’d be on guard too, because if he could lie so convincingly, she’d never be able to trust him. But this was a mixture of both. It was real, it was pretend, and that combination made it all right—it made it safe, like performing death-defying acrobatic tricks above a safety net.

She holds on to that unexpected feeling as the two of them catch up with Lev, and move toward the frightening prospect of civilization.