He dreams of the kinkajou, and this journey through the trees, often. Each visit to this peculiar sanctuary of purpose feeds him and sustains him. It reminds him that there is a worthwhile goal to the things he drives himself to do.
The dreams are remarkably vivid, and he always remembers them. That, in and of itself, is a gift he’s grateful for. It’s not just the vibrancy of the sights that makes it so palpable, but the chirping, screeching, singing sounds of nocturnal life around him. The scent of the trees and the ground far below, so earthy, yet unearthly. The feel of the branches on his hands, feet, and tail. Yes, his tail, for he has caught up with the kinkajou now. He has become the creature, and becoming it makes him whole.
He knows what comes next. The edge of the forest, the edge of the world. But this time something’s different. A feeling begins to well up inside of him. A foreboding that’s way too familiar in his life, but unknown here, until now.
Something acrid wafts toward him now on the breeze. The stench of smoke. The soothing blue light around him is tainted to lavender then maroon. He turns behind him to see a forest fire that stretches like a blazing wall in the distance behind him. It’s still perhaps a mile away, but it’s consuming the trees with alarming speed.
The sounds of life become shrieks of warning and terror. Birds frantically take to the sky, but burst into flames before they can escape. Lev turns from the approaching firestorm, and leaps from branch to branch trying to outrun it. Branches appear before him exactly where he needs them to be, and he knows he could outrun whatever that fire is, were the forest canopy endless. But it’s not.
Far too soon he comes to the place where the forest ends at a cliff that drops off into bottomless oblivion, and in the sky before him, just out of reach it seems, is the moon.
Bring it down, Lev.
He knows he can do it! If he leaps high enough, he can dig his claws into it and pull it from the sky. And when it falls, the shock wave it will create shall blow out the blaze like the breath of God blowing out a candle.
Lev gathers his courage as searing heat blooms against his back. He must have faith. He must not fail. On fire now, he leaps to the sky, and to his amazement he grasps the moon . . . but his claws don’t dig deep enough to give him purchase.
It slips from his hands, and he falls, while behind him the fire consumes the last of the forest. He plummets from that world into an unfinished corner of the universe that not even dreams have reached.
• • •
Lev’s teeth chatter uncontrollably and he shivers with the force of convulsions.
“Playing the castanets tonight, little brother?” says a figure standing over him. In the moment before time and place settle in his mind, he thinks this is one of his older sisters, and that he’s home, a much younger, much more innocent child. But in an instant he knows it’s not true. His sisters, along with the rest of his family, have disowned him. This is his Arápache sister, Una.
“If I could shut off the air conditioner I would, but like everything else in this lousy iMotel, it’s automated, and for some reason the thermostat thinks it’s ninety-two degrees.”
Lev’s too cold to speak yet. He clenches his teeth to stop from chattering, but is only partially successful.
Una grabs his blanket from where it has fallen on the floor, and covers him with it. Then she takes the bedspread and covers him with that as well.
“Thank you,” he’s finally able to squeak out.
“Is it just the cold, or do you have a fever?” she asks, then she feels his forehead. There’s been no one for almost two years to feel his forehead for a fever. It brings him a wave of unwanted emotion, yet he can’t be sure what that emotion is.
“Nope, no fever. You’re just cold.”
“Thanks again,” he tells her. “I’m better now.”
His chattering becomes intermittent, and eventually begins to fade, his body heat now held in by the covers. He marvels at how far his dream was from the real world, how the searing heat of the flames so quickly became the cold of a roadside motel room halfway between two nowheres. But then heat and cold are two sides of the same coin, aren’t they? Either extreme is lethal. Lev closes his eyes, and tries to get back to the business of sleep, knowing his body needs as much rest as it can get for the days ahead.
• • •
In the morning, he awakes to the sound of a door closing. He thinks Una must have left—but no, she’s been out and has just returned.
“Good morning,” she says.
He grunts, still not having mustered enough energy to speak. The room is still cold, but with double covers, he feels warm.
Una holds up a McDonald’s bag in either hand. “Your choice,” she says, “heart attack or stroke?”
He yawns and sits up. “Don’t tell me they were out of cancer . . .”
Una shakes her head. “Sorry, not served until after eleven thirty.”
He takes the bag in her left hand and finds inside an Egg McSomething that tastes too good to be anything but deadly. Well, if it wants to kill him, it’ll have to get in line behind the Juvenile Authority and the clappers and, of course, Nelson.
“What’s the plan, little brother?” Una asks.
Lev gobbles down the rest of his breakfast.
“How far are we from Minneapolis?”
“About three hours.”
Lev reaches over and pulls out of his backpack the pictures of the two parts pirates they’re hunting. One is missing an ear, and the other is as ugly as a goat. “Do you need another look?”
“I’ve memorized every inch of those faces,” Una says not even trying to hide her disgust at the thought of them. “But I’m still not thinking it’ll make a difference. Minneapolis and St. Paul are big cities. It will be next to impossible to find two losers who don’t want to be found.”
Lev offers her the faintest of grins. “Who says they don’t want to be found?”
Now Una sits on the bed next to his, regards him closely, and says again, “So what’s the plan, little brother?”
• • •
Chandler Hennessey and Morton Fretwell. The two surviving parts pirates who infiltrated Arápache territory, and captured Lev and a bunch of younger kids in the woods.
It was Wil Tashi’ne—the love of Una’s life—who saved them. He traded himself for Lev’s life and the lives of the others, a trade the pirates took because he had something that would fetch them a very high price. Wil had talent. Talent in his hands, and in the parts of his brain that had mastered the guitar like few others. They took him, leaving Lev to deal with the consequences. He was helpless to stop Wil from sacrificing himself, and yet the Arápache blamed him. Lev was an outsider, like the parts pirates. He was a refugee from the same broken world. Even Una’s feelings about him had a measure of ambivalence. “You’re the harbinger of doom,” she had told him. And she was right. Where Lev goes, terrible things always seem to follow. Yet still, he dreams he can break that pattern. It certainly would be easier than bringing down the moon.
Wil Tashi’ne’s unwinding left a wound in the Arápache people that Lev knows he cannot mend, but perhaps he can soothe it. The scar will always be there, but if Lev has his way, he and Una will bring those flesh thieves back to face Arápache justice.
And then the Tribal Council will have to listen to him.
They will have to consider his plea to finally take a public stand against the Juvenile Authority.
Catching Hennessey and Fretwell won’t quite bring down the moon, but if the Arápache—arguably the most influential Chancefolk tribe—can be brought into the battle against unwinding, it will be more than the moon that falls.
5 • Starkey
Mason Michael Starkey couldn’t care less about what some Chancefolk tribe does or doesn’t do. He doesn’t need their pathetic support because he’s taken his battle against unwinding right to the enemy, in the form of a gun muzzle rammed down the Juvenile Authority’s throat. As far as he’s concerned, anythin
g less is for losers. Starkey knows he is poised for greatness. In fact, he’s already achieved it. Now it’s just a matter of degree.
“A little higher,” he says. “Yes, right there.”
He escaped with his storks from the Graveyard before the Juvies could capture them. He survived a plane crash. And now Starkey is a war hero. Never mind that no official war has been declared—he has declared it, and that’s all that matters. If others out there choose to behave like this isn’t a war, then they deserve what’s coming to them.
“I’m not feeling it,” he says. “A little harder.”
Starkey is the savior of storks. He and his brigade of unwanted babies who grew into unwanted kids have now grown into an army bursting with righteous rage against a system that would permanently silence them. Society would have them dismantled, their parts going to “serve humanity.” Well, now humanity is getting a slightly different sort of service from them.
“You’re not very good at this, are you?”
“I’m trying! I’m doing everything you say!”
Starkey lies facedown on a massage table in a room that used to be the executive office of a power plant. The plant was gutted years ago, leaving nothing but a rusty shell within a chain-link fence, miles away from anyplace anyone wants to be. It’s a weedy corner of northern Mississippi, as overgrown and unloved as a place can be. The perfect hiding spot for an army of six hundred.
Starkey pushes himself up on one elbow. His masseuse, a pretty girl whose name he can’t remember, looks away, too intimidated to meet his eye. “A good back massage should hurt as much as it soothes,” Starkey tells her. “You have to work out the knots. You need to leave me loose and limber and ready for our next mission. Do you understand?”
The girl nods, overly obedient and too eager to please. “I think so.”
“You said you’ve done this before.”
“I know,” she tells him. “I just wanted the chance . . .”
Starkey sighs. This is the way of things around him now. They climb over each other like rats to be close to him. To bask in his light. He can’t blame them, really. He should applaud this girl for her ambition—but right now all he wants is a good massage.
“You can go,” he tells her.
“I’m sorry . . .”
She lingers, and he contemplates the moment. Starkey knows he could take a detour with this afternoon and maybe get something other than a massage from this eager girl. Whatever he wants, he knows she will oblige . . . but the fact that he can have it so easily makes it so much less desirable.
“Just go,” he tells her.
She slinks away, trying to do so quietly, but the rusty hinges on the door complain when she opens it. Rather than making the door squeal again, she leaves it open. Starkey can hear her clambering down the metal stairs, probably in tears at her failure to please him.
Alone now, he rolls his left shoulder and checks the bandage there. He took a bullet in the last harvest camp liberation. Well, not really. The bullet grazed him so slightly, it couldn’t even be called a flesh wound. Yes, it drew blood, and yes, it will leave a scar, but as wounds go, on a scale of one to ten, this one is somewhere around one-point-five. Still the bandage makes it look worse, and so he wears a tank top that clearly displays the bandage on his upper arm for all the storks to see. Another war wound to go with the one farther down that same arm. His ruined hand, the hand he smashed to free himself from handcuffs back at the airplane graveyard. Smashing his hand saved him. It freed him to escape with the storks and start his war. Considering that he was once on the fast track to be unwound, giving up one hand seems like a bargain. Now he keeps it in a very expensive Louis Vuitton glove. That day at the Graveyard was early July, and now it’s September. Less than three months have passed. Although it feels like a lifetime ago, his body measures the time properly, even if his mind doesn’t. His broken hand still aches, still oozes, still requires a nice dose of painkillers every once in a while. It will never heal properly. He will never use that hand again, but it matters little. He has hundreds of other hands to do the work for him.
He looks out of the cracked, grimy windows that overlook the gutted power plant floor, now lined with bedrolls, folding tables, and the various necessities of the Stork Brigade’s nomadic life.
“Keeping watch over your subjects?”
He turns to see Bam, his second-in-command, coming into the room, carrying a few newspapers.
“Some of the tabloids are now suggesting that you’re Satan’s spawn,” she says. “A woman in Peoria claims she saw a jackal give birth to you.”
Starkey laughs. “I’ve never even been to Peoria.”
“That’s okay,” she says. “I don’t think there are any jackals in Peoria either.”
She drops the newspapers on the massage table. Starkey is pleased to find that he’s on the first page of each one. He’s seen his face on the newsfeeds and the public nimbus, but there’s something very visceral about seeing his face in hard print.
“I must be doing something right, if the crazies think I’m as powerful as the Antichrist.”
He leafs through the newspapers. The legitimate papers have more legitimate takes on him, but none of them are silent on the subject of Mason Michael Starkey. Experts try to psychoanalyze his motives. The Juvenile Authority goes rabid at the mention of his name, and in schools across the country, riots are breaking out, stork against nonstork. Everywhere, other kids like himself are demanding equal treatment in a world that would rather they just go away.
People call him a monster for lynching “innocent workers” at harvest camps. They call him a murderer for brutally executing doctors who perform unwindings. Let them call him whatever they want. Each label just adds to his growing legend.
“There’s a new supply of ammo coming in today,” he tells Bam. “Maybe some new guns, too.” Then he watches her closely to see her response. Not what she says, but what she feels. Her body language. He can tell that she’s bristling.
“If the clappers are going to supply weapons, maybe they could teach these kids how to use them so they don’t accidentally blow their own brains out.”
That actually makes Starkey laugh. “They send kids out to blow themselves up for their cause,” Starkey reminds her. “Do you really think they care if a few storks shoot themselves?”
“Maybe not,” Bam says. “But you should care. They’re your beloved storks.”
This gives Starkey pause for thought, but he tries not to show it. “Our storks,” he corrects.
“If you care about them as much as you say you do, you would take measures to protect them from themselves . . . and each other.”
But Starkey knows what she’s really thinking. If you care about them, then you’ll stop attacking harvest camps.
“How many storks died in the last attack?” he asks.
Bam shrugs. “How should I know?”
“Because you do,” Starkey says. A simple statement of fact. He knows she keeps track of such things to use against him, or maybe just to torture herself.
Bam holds eye contact, but her feigned ignorance fails her. “Seven,” she says.
“And how many storks did we add to our numbers?” Starkey asks.
Bam clearly doesn’t want to say, but he waits until she spits it out. “Ninety-three.”
“Ninety-three storks . . . and two hundred seventy-five nonstorks freed from harvest camp hell. I think that’s worth the seven lives we lost, don’t you?”
She won’t answer him.
“Don’t you?” he demands.
Finally she casts her eyes out of the window, looking down on the hundreds of kids on the power plant floor. “Yes,” she concedes.
“Then why are we having this argument?”
“We’re not arguing,” Bam says as she turns to go. “No one argues with you, Mason. There’d be no point.”
* * *
THE FOLLOWING IS A PAID POLITICAL ADVERTISEMENT
There’s no que
stion that these are frightening times. Clappers terrorize our neighborhoods; AWOL storks murder the innocent; violent feral teens threaten a deadly uprising—and while there are various measures on state and local ballots to help reign in incorrigible youth, those measures just don’t go far enough. What we need is a comprehensive national policy that will take the incorrigibles out of the equation before they darken tomorrow’s headlines.
The Greater Good Divisional Option—also known as the Parental Override bill—will do just that! It will identify the most dangerous teens and allow for their unwinding, taking the decision away from negligent parents and putting it in the hands of the Juvenile Authority, where it belongs.
Write to your congressman and senators. Tell them that you support Parental Override. Your family won’t be safe until Parental Override becomes law.
—Paid for by Citizens For the Greater Good
* * *
As the sun begins to sink low, and the power plant’s grime-covered windows begin to cast long shadows across the factory floor, Starkey descends to mingle among the masses. Many kids greet him; others are too intimidated to even look at him. He moves through the crowd of kids trouble-free. No one brings him their problems. This is yet another way he runs his ship differently than Connor ran the Graveyard. Connor was constantly inundated by daily minutia. Backed-up latrines, shortages on medical supplies, things like that. But here, kids know better than to waste Starkey’s time. If they have a problem, they either live with it or take care of it themselves. He can’t be bothered—he has a war to run.
With dinner fifteen minutes late, he checks their makeshift galley, where Hayden Upchurch and his food-prep team are all sweaty from moving industrial-size cans of processed ham.
“Hail, O mighty chief.” Hayden says.
“Where’s dinner?”
“We were waiting for the delivery from the ‘applause department,’ but apparently the clappers just sent guns and ammo, no food. So tonight we’ll have to make do with SPAM.”