Vote yes on Measure F. Isn’t an ounce of prevention worth a pound of flesh?
—Sponsored by the Brighter Day Coalition
* * *
In Sonia’s basement, it’s hard to tell when night has fallen. There’s a small window high up in a far back corner, but it’s behind such a maze of junk, one has to strain to detect any light coming in through the frosted glass. The few clocks among the junk in the basement don’t work, nor does the TV, and of the dozen kids down there, not a single one has a watch. Either they traded it for food before they landed here, or they were so used to using their phones as timepieces, they never had them. Phones, however, being traceable, are the first accessory ditched by the smart AWOL. Connor, of course, wasn’t too smart his first night on the run. They tracked him by his phone, and he came within a hairsbreadth of getting caught. He wised up fast, though.
While everyone waits for Sonia to bring dinner—an event that never happens on any predictable schedule—Grace weaves the tale of the night before, getting more and more animated as she realizes she has the rapt attention of most of the kids.
“So we’re upstairs in some lady’s house, and I see these special-ops guys in black slinking across the lawn in the middle of the night,” she says. “Prob’ly trained to kill. Hands are lethal weapons, that kind of thing.” Connor cringes at her embellishments. The next time she tells it, they’ll be dropping by helicopter.
“I hear them whispering and there’s something in their words and the way they’re speaking that makes me realize they’re not after Connor or Risa or me—they’re here for Camus Comprix! They want the rewind, and they don’t even know that the rest of us are there!” She pauses for dramatic effect. “Suddenly they crash in through the back door, and they crash in through the front door, and we’re all upstairs, and I tell Cam he’s done for, but the rest of us don’t have to be. Then I push Risa under the bed, and squeeze in after her, and Connor makes like he’s asleep on the bed facedown, and they burst into the room, and tranq Connor and take Cam away, never realizing they just missed a chance at the Akron AWOL—and all because I figured it out!”
Some of the kids seem a bit dubious, and Connor feels its his responsibility to back Grace up. After all, credit where credit is due. “It’s true,” he tells them. “If Grace didn’t lay it all on the table like that, I would have fought them, and probably would have been recognized and caught.”
“But wait a second,” says Jack, the Lev-ish kid. “Why would he let himself be taken without turning the rest of you in too? I mean, you guys are a big catch—he could probably cut himself a deal or something.”
Grace grins way too broadly, and Connor knows what she’s about to say. Now he wishes she’d never started this story.
“Because,” says Grace, “Camus Comprix is in love with Risa!”
She lets her words hang in the air. Connor reflexively glances to Risa, but she won’t meet his eye.
“But I don’t get it,” says another kid. “That whole media thing about them being a couple was fake, I thought.”
Grace’s grin doesn’t slip an inch. “Not to Cam . . .”
It’s Risa who finally puts an end to it. “Grace, enough. Okay?”
Grace deflates a bit, realizing that her moment in the spotlight is over. “Anyway,” she says, without any of her previous dramatic flair, “that’s what happened. Cam got caught, and we didn’t.”
“Wow,” says Jack, “who’d have thought the rewind would be some sort of hero?”
“Hero?”
They all turn to see Beau, who was elsewhere in the basement, pretending not to listen, but apparently he had. “How many dozens of kids like us did it take to make one of him? There’s nothing ‘heroic’ about him.”
And Connor can’t help but say, “I couldn’t agree with you more.”
Beau gives Connor a nod, finally finding himself and the Akron AWOL on common ground.
* * *
THE FOLLOWING IS A PAID POLITICAL ADVERTISEMENT
DON’T BE FOOLED BY MEASURE F!
Supporters of the so-called Prevention Initiative claim that it’s all about the protection of at-risk children—but read the fine print! Measure F allows the Juvenile Authority to identify and track incorrigible children for the purpose of unwinding them as soon as they turn thirteen—which will be legal once the Parental Override bill becomes law.
Measure G, on the other hand, funds the Juvenile Authority by giving cash incentives for the capture of AWOLs—who have already proven themselves to be menaces to society.
No on F! Yes on G! Make the sensible choice!
Paid for by the Alliance for an AWOL-Free Nation
* * *
Later that evening, as everyone settles in for the night, Connor lays his bedroll next to Risa’s in the same semiprivate nook where Risa slept their first time here. It’s away from the other kids, and Connor shifts a tall bookcase to make it even more private. Risa watches him create their secluded nest, and doesn’t bat an eye. Connor takes a deep breath of anticipation. This could well be the night where the stars of their relationship finally align. He’s certainly imagined it long enough. He wonders if she has too. Connor tentatively lies down beside her. “Just like old times,” he says.
“Yes, but the last time we were here, we were only pretending to be a couple to keep Roland’s hands off of me.”
He reaches out then, gently caressing her cheek with Roland’s fingers. “And yet his hand is still all over you.”
“Not all over,” she says playfully. Then she rolls away, but grabs the offending arm as she does, wrapping it around herself like a blanket, and pulling them into a tight spoon position, his chest to her back. The moment is electric, and they both know that anything is possible between them now. There’s nothing to hold them back. Except this:
“I can’t stop thinking about Cam,” Risa says. “The way he sacrificed himself for us.”
Connor’s grafted arm pulls her tighter. He wishes it could be his own arm, but he’s facing the wrong way for that. “Cam is the last thing on my mind.”
“But after what he did for us, I feel like we need to . . . honor him somehow.”
“I am,” Connor says, smirking, although she can’t see. “In fact, I’m saluting him right now—can’t you tell?”
“Ha-ha.”
In the silence, he can feel her heartbeat in his arm as he holds her. Her heartbeat in his chest pressed to her back. It’s almost too much to bear. He wants to curse Cam for still being here between them, no matter how close they press. “So what do we owe him? Our eternal restraint?”
“No,” Risa says, “Just . . . our hesitation.”
Connor says nothing for a while. There are so many layers to his disappointment, but yet within that strata might there not be a vein of relief as well? He lets himself settle into the reality of what won’t be happening tonight, setting his hope and desire at a distance, close enough that he’s still aware of it, but far enough away so that it’s not so tormenting.
“Okay,” he tells her. “This night is for Cam. Let’s hesitate our brains out.”
She snickers gently, and they settle quietly into the night. Body heat and heartbeats until dawn.
• • •
Connor doesn’t remember his dreams, only an amnesic sense that he had them, and that they were powerful. No nightmares—he’s sure of that. They were dreams of fulfillment and empowerment, for that’s how he feels as the faint, diffused light of morning touches upon the tiny basement window behind them.
To fall asleep, and to wake up with your arm around the only girl you’ve ever truly loved . . .
To know that the two of you have in your possession a device as earthshaking as a warhead . . .
To feel invincible, if only for a fleeting moment . . .
These things are enough to stop the world in its tracks and start it spinning in a new direction. At least that’s how it feels to Connor. Until now he had been clinging to a threadbare hop
e, but now that hope feels full to bursting.
There’s never been a moment in Connor’s life that he could call perfect, but this moment, with his arm numb from being around Risa all night, and his sense of smell overwhelmed by the fragrance of her hair—this moment is the closest to perfection he’s ever known. Even the shark seems to be smiling.
Such moments, however, never last for long.
Soon all the other kids are waking up. Beau moves the bookcase that gave them some level of privacy, claiming it was blocking the path to the bathroom, and the day begins. The kids down here have become creatures of routine, going about their business, or lack thereof, as if nothing has changed. Yet it has. They just don’t know it. The world has just been turned upside down—or more accurately, it’s been turned right side up after having been capsized for so long.
In a few minutes there’s the bang of the trapdoor opening as Sonia arrives with breakfast, calling down for “some goddam help up here.”
“Why don’t you go help her,” Risa suggests gently, for she knows that nothing short of a call to duty will peel Connor away from her.
Upstairs, Sonia has groceries enough to feed an army. Between Beau, Connor, and Grace, who is aggressively helpful today, the supplies are brought down in two trips, and Connor finds himself with nothing to carry the third time he comes up the stairs.
Today the trunk has been pushed off the trapdoor at a haphazard angle, impinging on a small plastic trash can that got in its way.
That trunk has been the elephant in the room since Connor arrived, although he hasn’t dared to speak of its contents. Connor turns to see that Sonia has left to park her Suburban somewhere legal.
He’s alone with the trunk.
Unable to resist its gravity, he kneels before it. It’s a heavy, old thing. Antique to be sure. Old travel stickers adorn it, practically shellacked to the surface. Connor can’t tell whether the old steamer trunk has actually been to those places, or if the stickers are merely decorations applied once it stopped travelling and became a piece of furniture.
He doesn’t dare open it, but he knows what’s inside.
Letters.
Hundreds of them.
Each one was written by an AWOL who’d been through Sonia’s basement. Most wrote to their parents. They are missives of sorrow and disillusionment. Anger and the screaming question of “why?” Why did you? How could you? When did things go so wrong? Even the state wards, unloved but tolerated by the institution that raised them, found something to say to someone.
He wonders if Sonia ever sent his letter, or if it’s still in there, buried among the other raging voices. He wonders what he would say to his parents now, and if it’s any different from what he wrote. His letter began with how much he hated them for what they did, but by the time he reached the end, he was in tears, telling them that he loved them in spite of it. So much confusion. So much ambivalence. Just writing the letter helped him understand that—helped him to understand himself a bit more. Sonia had given him a gift that day, and the gift of the letter was in the writing, not in the sending. But still . . .
“I’d ask you to move the trunk back into place for me—but you’ve gotta be on the other side of the trapdoor before I do.” Sonia raises her cane, pointing down the steep basement steps.
“Right. I’m going—don’t use the cattle prod.”
She doesn’t whack him with her cane, but on his way down, she does tap him gently on the head with it to get his attention.
“Be good to her, Connor,” Sonia says, gently. “And don’t let Beau get to you. He just likes to be the big man.”
“No worries.”
He descends, and she closes the trapdoor above him. The basement smells like teen spirit, as the old prewar song goes. For a brief moment he has a flashback without words or images—just a swell of feeling—back to the first time he was herded down those steps two years ago. The invincibility he was feeling when he woke up is now tempered by the cold concentrate of that memory.
Risa’s at her little first aid station tending to a girl’s swollen, slightly bloody lip. “I bit my lip in my sleep—so?” the girl says, instantly on the defensive. “I have nightmares—so?”
Once the girl is tended to, Connor sits down in the treatment chair. “Doctor, I have a problem with my tongue,” he says.
“And what might that be?” asks Risa cautiously.
“I can’t keep it out of my girlfriend’s ear.”
She gives him the best Oh, please look he’s ever seen, and says, “I’ll call the Juvies to cut it out. I’m sure that’ll take care of the problem.”
“And it’ll give some other poor soul a highly talented sensory organ.”
She allows him the last laugh, studying him for a few moments.
“Tell me about Lev,” she finally says.
He’s a bit deflated to have the playfulness so totally squashed out of their conversation.
“What about him?” Connor asks.
“You said you were with him for a while. What’s he like now?”
Connor shrugs, like it’s nothing. “He’s different.”
“Good different, or bad different?
“Well, the last time you saw him, he was planning on blowing himself up—so anything is an improvement.”
Another kid comes to Risa with what looks like a splinter in his finger, sees the two of them talking, and goes away to take care of it himself.
Connor knows he can’t get out of this conversation, so he tells Risa what he can. “Lev’s been through a lot since the harvest camp. You know that, right? Clappers tried to kill him. And that asshole Nelson captured him, but he got away.”
“Nelson?” Risa says caught completely by surprise. “The Juvey-cop you tranq’d?”
“He’s not a cop anymore. He’s a parts pirate, and he’s nuts. He’s got it out for me and Lev. Probably you, too, if he could find you.”
“Great,” says Risa, “I’ll add him to my list of people who want me dead.”
Suddenly, with the specter of Nelson in the conversation, Connor finds bringing the conversation back to Lev is now a relief. “Anyway, Lev hasn’t grown any—except for his hair. I don’t like it. It’s past his shoulders now.”
“I worry about him,” Risa says.
“Don’t,” Connor tells her. “He’s safe on the Arápache reservation, communing with whatever it is that Chancefolk commune with.”
“You don’t sound too happy about that.”
Connor sighs. When Connor and Grace left the Rez, Lev was filled with all of this crazy talk about getting the Arápache to take a stand against unwinding. As if they ever would. In some ways, he’s just as naïve as the day Connor saved him from his tithing. “He says he wants to fight unwinding, but how can he do it from an isolationist reservation? The truth is, I think he just wants to disappear someplace safe.”
“Well, if he’s found peace, then I’m happy for him—and you should be too.”
“I am,” Connor admits. “Maybe I’m just jealous.”
Risa smiles. “You wouldn’t know what to do with peace if you had it.”
Connor smiles right back at her. “I know exactly what I’d do.” Then he leans in close to whisper, she leans in close to hear—and he licks her ear with precision enough to get him happily slapped. He thinks it might get her off the subject, but it doesn’t.
“I miss Lev,” she says. “He’s kind of like a brother. I never had a brother—or at least not that I know of.”
“I have a brother,” Connor tells her. He doesn’t know why he’s chosen to volunteer this. He’s never spoken of him to Risa. Mentioning his life before the unwind order somehow feels taboo. It’s like conjuring ghosts.
“He’s a few years younger than you, isn’t he?” Risa asks.
“Three years younger.”
“Right—now I remember,” she says, which surprises him. But then he shouldn’t be surprised at all. The whole life of the notorious Akron AWOL has been dissec
ted by the media since the day he first got away.
“What’s your brother’s name?” Risa asks.
“Lucas,” Connor tells her—and with the mention of the name comes a wave of emotion more powerful than he was prepared for. He feels regret, but also resentment, because Lucas was the child their parents chose over Connor. He has to remind himself that it wasn’t his brother’s fault.
“Do you miss him?” Risa asks.
Connor shrugs uncomfortably. “He was a pain in the ass.”
Risa grins. “That doesn’t answer the question.”
Connor meets her eyes, so beautifully green, and just as deep and expressive as their natural color.
“Yeah,” Connor admits. “Sometimes.” Back before Connor’s parents gave up on him, he was constantly being compared to Lucas. Grades, sports—never mind that it was Connor who taught Lucas to play every sport. While Connor never had the dedication to stay on a team for a whole season, Lucas excelled, to their parents’ enduring joy. And the more Lucas shone, the dimmer Connor’s light seemed to them.
“I really don’t want to talk about this,” Connor tells her. And as easily as that, his old life and memories of his family are locked away just as securely as his letter to them is locked in Sonia’s trunk.
4 • Lev
Lev is anything but at peace.
He’s in the treetops again. It’s the dead of night, but the night is alive. The forest canopy rolls like aquamarine clouds beneath a blue floodlight moon.
He’s following the kinkajou again, that large-eyed monkey-like creature. Adorable but deadly. He now knows that it is his spirit he chases. It races before him through the highest branches of the dense rainforest, drawing him toward something resembling destiny, but not quite as fixed and fated. Not something inevitable, but something he could make real.