Everything is labeled with numbered codes that mean nothing to Connor.
“Adult pluripotent stem cells,” Sonia said. He knows he’s in the right place, but things in this lab are labeled for the researchers, not for an intruder looking to steal something.
He has an expandable tote bag that he can load with as many specimens as he can fit. He decides to take only stasis containers—because specimens in test tubes and dishes probably won’t survive any temperature change in transport. He fills his bag like the Grinch stealing Christmas—then suddenly the lab door opens, and he’s caught red-handed with his hand in the biological cookie jar by a lab tech who is so shocked by Connor’s unexpected presence that he drops the glass vials he’s holding and they shatter on the ground.
“Don’t move,” says Connor, because clearly the man is going to bolt and probably call security. “I’ve got a gun.” Connor reaches into his jacket pocket.
“N . . . no, you don’t,” says the nervous tech, calling his bluff.
So Connor pulls out his pistol, showing that he’s not bluffing at all.
The guy gasps and begins to wheeze, reminding Connor of Emby, his old asthmatic friend.
It then occurs to Connor that this confrontation doesn’t need to happen. As Sonia pointed out, tranqs aren’t just for Juvies anymore. They can be an AWOL’s best friend too.
“Sorry, man,” Connor says, “but I’ve got to send you off to Tranqistan.” And he pulls the trigger—only to find out that his gun isn’t loaded. He looks at the weapon and realizes that this isn’t the gun Sonia gave him at all. This is Beau’s. The one that Risa emptied. Crap.
“Wait! I know who you are! You’re the Akron AWOL!”
Double crap. “Don’t be a moron! The Akron AWOL is hiding with the Hopi. Haven’t you been watching the news?”
“Well, you’re here, so the news is wrong. You’re from around here, aren’t you? They call you the Akron AWOL, but you lived in Columbus!”
What, does everyone in Columbus know that? Is his house like a freaking landmark now? “Shut the hell up, or I swear . . .” Connor considers knocking the guy out. He could certainly do it, but he waits to see how this unfolds before he takes such a drastic move.
The lab tech just looks at him, breathing uneasily, keeping his eyes locked on Connor. No movement on either of their parts. Then the man says, “You don’t want those specimens—they’re already differentiated. You want the ones at the far end.”
Connor wasn’t expecting this. “How do you know what I want?”
“There’s only one thing the Akron AWOL would be looking for here,” he says. “Pluripotent cells. To build organs. It won’t make a difference, though. Organ-building technology was a total bust; all the research led nowhere.”
Connor says nothing—but his silence telegraphs the truth.
“You know something, don’t you?” the lab tech asks, and dares to take a step closer, excitement trumping caution. “You know something, or you wouldn’t be here!”
Connor won’t answer him or let on how troubled he is that his intentions are so transparent. “The door at the far end?”
He nods. Connor makes his way to the far end of the lab, keeping one eye on the lab tech as he removes the containers in his bag and refills it with containers pulled from the last cooler.
“One problem,” the lab tech says. “Our biomaterial is monitored. If any of it goes missing, it gets reported. Our funding will probably get pulled.”
Connor looks to the mess of broken glass by the front door. “What was in those?”
The tech looks over to the broken vials. “Biomatter.” Then he nods and grins at Connor, catching on to his train of thought. “A whole lot of biomatter. I’ll get hell for dropping that . . . and forgetting to measure how much was lost before I disposed of it.”
“Yeah,” says Connor, “too bad about that.” And he finishes filling the bag. When he’s done, he sees the lab tech has taken a position by the door, peering out of the little window like he’s Connor’s lookout.
“So,” says Connor, “I was never here, right?”
The tech nods his agreement. “It’s our secret . . . on one condition.”
Connor doesn’t like the sound that. He braces for some impossible request. “What?”
Then the tech timidly asks, “Can I . . . shake your hand?”
Connor laughs, so unexpected is the request. He’s seen starstruck kids, but this guy is at least thirty. Then he sees that his laughter has embarrassed the man.
“Naah, forget it,” the guy says. “It was stupid of me to ask.”
“No, no, it’s okay.” Cautiously Connor approaches him, and holds out his hand. He shakes Connor’s hand with his cold, damp one.
“A lot of folks don’t like unwinding, but no one knows how to stop it, so they don’t even try,” the man says. And then he whispers, “But if you’ve got an idea—there are people ready to listen. Not everyone—but maybe enough.”
“Thanks,” Connor says, glad that he didn’t tranq the guy—although he’s still furious at Beau for switching guns.
Connor slips out, and the tech gets to cleaning the mess of broken vials on the floor, happily whistling to himself.
“A lot of people want to stop unwinding,” the lab tech said. It’s not the first time Connor has heard that. Maybe if he hears it enough, he might begin to believe it.
21 • Risa
The ride home from the hospital is a triumphant one. They play music that makes them feel cocooned in normality. Even though it’s an illusion, Risa’s happy for a respite from being “the one and only Risa Ward.”
Connor tells her and Beau about the fanboy lab tech. Connor seems to preen a bit in the light of it, but Risa has always found herself painfully out of her element when faced with such adulation. She never wanted to be some sort of counterculture heroine. All she wanted was to survive. She would have been happy to stay at Ohio State Home 23 playing piano, graduating with unremarkable grades, and then being dumped at eighteen into the grand mosh pit of mediocre mankind, like all other state wards. Maybe she could have gotten herself into community college, working her way through with some service job. She could have eventually become a concert pianist, or, more realistically, a keyboardist in some bar band. It wouldn’t be ideal, but at least it would be a life. She could have eventually married the unremarkable guitar player and had some unremarkable kids, whom she would love dearly and would never even think of storking. But her unwind order severed all ties Risa had to the hope of a normal future.
Thoughts of a guitar player bring her musings around to Cam. Where is he now that Proactive Citizenry has him in their clutches again? Does she care? Should she care? What a mixed bag of connections she has. . . . It’s as if her whole life has been rewound with the strangest bits and pieces of humanity, from Connor, to Cam, to Sonia, to Grace and all the odd acquaintances in between.
There’s no telling what her life will be like a day from now, much less a year from now. That’s the best argument for living in the moment, but how can you live in the moment when all you want is for the moment to end?
“You look sad,” Connor comments. “You should be happy—for once we did something right.”
Risa smiles. “We do a lot right,” she tells him. “Why else would random people want to shake our hands?” Or, she thinks, kiss us, and she throws a chilly glance back to Beau in the backseat, who plays the air drums, completely oblivious. Connor hasn’t asked about Beau’s black eye. Either he doesn’t care, or he doesn’t want to know. Risa wonders how many girls have thrown themselves at Connor in a similar way, and finds herself pleasantly jealous at the very idea. Pleasantly, because Risa has what those nameless girls could only grasp at: the Akron AWOL all to herself.
Maybe this is better than her dream of normal. Living a high-octane, on-the-edge sort of life has its perks. Namely, Connor.
“Hey, you know that Upchurch dude, right?” Beau asks between drum solos.
“Who?” asks Risa, having no clue what he’s talking about.
“You know—Hayden Upchurch. The guy who gave the news a mouthful when he got caught at the Graveyard.”
“Oh,” says Risa. “Hayden.” She had never known his last name—and by the look on Connor’s face, he never had either. A lot of Unwinds tried to erase their last name in defiance of parents who tried to unwind them. In Hayden’s case, he probably avoided it because it was so easily made fun of.
“What about him? Risa asks, looking nervously to Connor. “Did something happen to him?”
“No—he’s just shooting off his mouth again.”
The next song starts, and Connor turns the volume down. “How do you know that?”
“Back in the basement, Jake was fiddling with that old computer Sonia lets us use down there, and he says there was something up on the Web. He tried to find it again to show me, but it was gone. He said Upchurch was calling for a teen uprising, like he did when he got caught. I’m thinking it might happen.” Beau considers it for a moment more. “If it does, I know a whole lot of kids—not just the kids at Sonia’s, but kids back home, too—who’d follow me into battle.”
“More likely off a cliff, like lemmings,” Connor says.
“Careful,” Beau warns, and he pulls out the pistol he had taken from Connor, “or I might tranq you with your own gun, like you did to that Nelson guy.”
Risa sees Connor’s face go stony, and his knuckles whiten on the steering wheel. She touches Connor’s leg to get him to relax. To remind him it’s not worth it.
“Put that thing away,” Risa orders Beau, “before you accidentally shoot yourself.”
“Best thing that could happen,” says Connor, with a deadpan delivery that could take the bounce out of a basketball. Then he softens. “But I’m glad to hear that Hayden’s okay. That is, if it’s true.”
If Hayden’s really AWOL again, hiding out somewhere and calling for kids to take matters into their own hands, Risa wonders how many will be moved to action. There are stories about the first uprising. “Feral” kids took violently to the streets after the school failures. They wreaked havoc coast to coast, spreading terror and fear enough to make unwinding sound like an answer to all their problems. Anger with no direction.
Once the Heartland War ended, no one really spoke about the days leading up to the Unwind Accord. Risa suspects it’s more than just bad memories. If people don’t think about it, then they can deny their complicity in ongoing institutional murder. Well, thinks Risa, we’ll make people remember . . . and we’ll give them a path to penance.
It’s as they reach the outlying neighborhoods of Columbus that Connor veers out of their lane, nearly slamming into a pickup truck next to them. The guy leans on his horn, gives them the finger, and shouts curses at them that they can’t hear but that are easily read on his lips.
“What was that about?” Risa asks, realizing that Connor was distracted when he veered out of their lane.
“Nothing!” snaps Connor. “Why does it have to be about anything?”
“I told you I should be the one driving,” says Beau.
Risa drops it, sensing something in Connor that’s best left alone—but the moment lingers long after they’re past the road sign above the freeway that Connor was staring at with such intensity it nearly got them killed.
22 • Connor
He steps back and allows Sonia to transfer the biomatter from the stasis container to the printer. He doesn’t want to touch it.
“The stuff of life,” Sonia says as she pours the red, syrupy suspension into the printer reservoir. It’s not exactly the most hygienic of transfers, but then, they’re in the back room of a cluttered antique shop, not a laboratory.
“It looks like the Blob,” Grace comments.
Connor recalls the old movie about a flesh-eating mass of gelatinous space-goo that devours the hapless residents of a town that very well could have been Akron. He watched it with his brother when they were little. Lucas kept hiding his face in Connor’s shoulder so he didn’t have to look. Like all his memories before the unwind order, it comes with a mix of feelings as amorphous as the Blob.
Risa takes Connor’s hand. “I hope it’s worth what we went through to get it.”
It’s just after dark, and it’s the four of them: Connor, Risa, Sonia, and Grace. Beau was quickly dispatched by Sonia to resolve some sort of petty territorial dispute in the basement that arose in his absence. “It all goes to hell without you down there, Beau,” Sonia told him. “I need you to take charge and bring things back to order.” Connor turned away when she said it, because his grin might have given Beau a clue as to how easily he was being manipulated. Beau knew the goal of their mission, but not the purpose of the cells they retrieved.
“Injection for my hip,” Sonia had told him, “so I don’t need a hip replacement from some poor unlucky unwind.”
He had accepted the explanation at face value, partly because it sounded plausible under the circumstances, but mostly because Sonia is an accomplished liar. Probably half of her success as an antiques dealer comes from the lies she tells about her merchandise. Not to mention her success in harboring fugitive kids.
With the magic blob safely in the printer, Sonia turns to them. “So who would like to do the honors?”
Connor, who is closest to the controls, hits the “on” button, hesitates for a breath, then hits the little green button labeled “print.” The device clicks and whirrs to life, making them all jump just the tiniest bit. Could it be as simple as hitting the “print” button? He supposes the most advanced of technology all comes down to a human being hitting a button or throwing a switch.
“What’s it gonna make?” Grace asks—a question that’s on all of their minds.
Sonia shrugs. “Whatever Janson last programmed it to make.”
Her eyes seem to lose some of their light for a moment as she struggles with the memory of her husband. He’s been dead for maybe thirty years, but clearly their devotion ran deeper than time.
They watch as the printer head flies back and forth over a petri dish, laying down microscopic layers of cells. In a few minutes the pale ghost of a shape appears. Oblong, about three inches across.
Risa gets it first. “Is that . . . an ear?”
“I do believe it is,” Sonia says.
There’s something wonderful and terrifying about this. Like watching life emerging from the first primordial pool.
“So it works,” Connor says, finding he doesn’t have patience for the printing process. Sonia says nothing, holding judgment for the fifteen minutes it takes for the printer to complete its cycle. The sudden silence when it’s done is just as jarring as when it first grinded to life.
Before them in the dish is, as Risa predicted, an ear.
“Can it hear us?” Grace asks, leaning forward. “Hello?” she says into it.
Connor gently grabs her shoulder and pulls her back.
“It’s just a pinna,” says Sonia. “The outside part of an ear. It has none of the functional parts of the organ.”
“It doesn’t look too healthy,” Risa points out. She’s right. It looks pale and slightly gray.
“Hmm . . .” Sonia pulls out her reading glasses, slips them on, and leans closer to observe the thing. “It has no blood supply. And we didn’t prepare the cells to properly differentiate into skin and cartilage—but that doesn’t matter. All that matters is that it does exactly what it was designed to do.”
Then she reaches out, picks the ear up between her thumb and forefinger, and drops it into the stasis container, where it sinks into the thick green oxygenated gel. Connor closes the box, it seals, and the light indicating hibernation goes green. Now it will be preserved for however long it needs to be.
“We’re going to have to get this to a place that can mass-produce it, right?” Connor says. “Some big medical manufacturer.”
“Nope,” says Grace. “Big is bad, big is bad.” She furrows her brow
and rings her hands as she looks at the stasis box. “Can’t go too small, either. Kinda like Goldilocks, it’s gotta be just right.”
Sonia, who is rarely impressed by anything, is impressed by Grace’s assessment. “A very good point. It needs to be a company that’s hungry, but not so hungry that it carries no clout.”
“And,” adds Risa, “it has to be a company with no ties to Proactive Citizenry.”
“Does such a thing even exist?” asks Connor.
“Don’t know,” says Sonia. “Wherever we go, it will be a gamble. The best we can do is better the odds.”
The thought gives Connor an unexpected shiver that must be strong enough for Risa to feel because she looks to him. So much of his life these past few years has been a gamble. Somehow in spite of the odds, he’s managed to come through it all in once piece. What felt like bad luck at the time ultimately became good fortune, as evidenced by his continued survival. Which means he’s overdue for something truly unfortunate. He can’t help but feel that no matter what he does, he’s still just circling the drain. He silently curses his parents for pulling the plug on that drain to begin with. And with that anger comes a sorrow that he wishes he were strong enough to ignore.
“Something wrong?” Risa asks.
Connor withdraws his hand from hers. “Why do you always think something’s wrong with me?”
“Because something always is,” she says, a little miffed. “You’re a streaming meme of things that are wrong.”
“And you’re not?”
Risa sighs. “I am too. Which is why it’s so easy for me to know when something’s bothering you.”
“Well, this time, you’re wrong.” Connor gets up and goes to the trapdoor. The trunk is already pushed to the side, and the rug is rolled away, making an escape from Risa’s inquisition easy. He reaches down to pull open the trap door, and Connor feels something being pulled from his back pocket.
He turns to see Risa holding his letter. THE letter. From the moment Sonia gave it to him, he’s been keeping it in that pocket. He’s taken it out several times, each time determined to tear it up, or burn it up, or otherwise dismiss it from his life, but each time it winds up back in his pocket, and each time he feels a little angrier, and a little weaker for it.