“Dagger plunged deep,” he says. Risa has no idea what he’s talking about but doesn’t really care.
“Get it out of my sight,” she yells at Roberta, “and if you have any decency in you at all, you’ll kill it!”
Roberta looks at her sternly, and then turns to Cam. “You can go, Cam. Wait outside for me.”
Cam quickly, awkwardly, leaves, and Roberta closes the door. Now she’s fuming. If Risa can take anything positive out of this, it’s that she’s gotten the better of Roberta.
“You’re a cruel girl,” Roberta says.
“And you’re a monster to create a thing like that.”
“History will be the judge of who we are, and what we’ve done.” And then she puts a piece of paper down on the table. “This is a consent form. Sign it and you can have a new working spine by the end of the week.”
Risa picks it up, tears it to shreds, and throws the pieces in the air. Roberta must have been expecting this, because she instantly pulls out a second consent form from her folder and slaps it down on the table.
“You will be healed, and you will make up to Cam for how badly you’ve treated him today.”
“Not in this life, or any other.”
Roberta smiles like she knows something Risa doesn’t. “Well then . . . here’s hoping you have a sudden change of heart.” Then she exits the room, leaving the pen and the consent form on the table.
Risa looks at the consent form long after Roberta has gone. She knows she won’t sign it, but the fact that they want her to intrigues her. Why is it so important to them that her broken body be repaired? There’s only one answer to that: For some reason Risa is much more important than she ever dreamed she was. Important to both sides.
29 - Cam
He sits in the observation room. He’s been there more often than he’d like to admit, spying on Risa—although when it’s officially allowed through a one-way mirror, it’s not called spying. It’s called surveillance.
On the other side of the glass, Risa stares at the contract Roberta put before her. Her face is stony, her jaw clenched. Finally she picks up the page . . . then folds it into a paper airplane and throws it at the mirror. Cam jolts in spite of himself. He knows she can’t see him, but still she looks into the mirror at almost the right spot to make eye contact. For a moment Cam feels like she can see not only through the glass, but through him as well, and he has to look away.
He hates the fact that she hates him. He should have expected it, but still, her words hurt him deeply and make him want to hurt her back. But no. That’s just the reaction of the various Unwinds in his head; kids who would lash out at the slightest provocation. He won’t give in to those impulses. There are enough sensible parts of him to balance things and allow him to control those parts that threaten to disturb the peace. He reminds himself that, as Roberta has said, he is the new paradigm—the new model of what humanity could, and should, be. The world will get used to him, and in time revere him. And so will Risa.
Roberta comes into the room behind him and speaks quietly. “There’s no point staying here.”
“Jericho,” he says. “She’s a wall, but she’ll crumble. I know she will.”
Roberta smiles at him. “I have no doubt that you’ll win her over. In fact, I suspect she’ll change her mind sooner than you think.”
Cam tries to read between the lines of her smile, but she reveals nothing. “Cat that ate the canary—I don’t like when you keep secrets.”
“No secret,” Roberta tells him. “Just an undying faith in human nature. Now come, it’s almost time for your photo shoot.”
Cam sighs. “Another one?”
“Would you prefer a press conference?”
“A sharp stick in the eye? No thank you!”
Cam has to admit that this new approach to the media is far better than press conferences and interviews. Roberta and her friends at Proactive Citizenry have cooked up a first-class advertising campaign. Billboards, print ads, digital, the works. All just photos, but even so, the ads are powerful.
The first round of ads will feature extreme close-ups of various parts of him. An eye; streaks of his multicolored hair; the starburst of flesh tones on his forehead. Each image will be accompanied by a pithy but enigmatic caption like, “The Time Has Come,” or “The Brilliant Tomorrow,” with no other clue as to what’s being advertised. Then, when public curiosity is piqued, they move to phase two, where the ads will feature his face, his body, and finally his whole self.
“We’ll create a mystique around you,” Roberta told him. “Play into their puerile fascination with the exotic until they’re champing at the bit to see more.”
“Striptease,” Cam had said.
“An elevated version of the same concept, I suppose,” Roberta admitted. “Once the ad campaign has rolled out, you will enter the public eye not as an oddity, but as a celebrity—and when you finally deign to do interviews, it will be on our terms.”
“My terms,” Cam corrected.
“Yes, of course. Your terms.”
Now, as Cam watches Risa through the one-way glass, he wonders what could possibly make her live by his terms too. Roberta has told him that he can have anything he desires, but what if the thing he desires most is Risa choosing to be with him of her own free will?
“Cam, please—come now, or we’ll be late.”
Cam stands, but before he leaves, he spares one last glance through the mirror at Risa, who has struggled onto her bed. Now she lies stretched out on her back, looking morosely at the ceiling. Then she closes her eyes.
The eternally sleeping princess, thinks Cam. But I shall free you from those poisoned brambles that surround your heart. And then you will have no choice but to love me.
30 - Nelson
The Juvey-cop turned parts pirate makes a side trip to check one of his most successful traps. It is, however, in an unfortunate location. Unfortunate because it’s in a field that floods during storms. Nothing’s more irritating than a drowned AWOL. Except maybe disposing of one. He would rather continue searching for safe houses, with hopes of finding Connor Lassiter in one of them, but with major storms projected throughout the Midwest, checking this particular trap is worth the effort.
The trap is a piece of drainage pipe—a concrete cylinder five feet high and twenty feet long, lying in a fallow field that no one has farmed for years. Half a dozen such pipes rest in the field, surrounded by weeds—all abandoned when some public works project got canceled. It’s a nice hiding spot for runaway Unwinds—and in fact, one of the tunnel segments has a store of canned food right in the middle. The inside surface of that same cylinder, however, is painted with super-adhesive resin that sticks to clothes and flesh with such tenacity that anyone caught in the pipe might as well be nailed to the concrete. It tickles Nelson that he can catch Unwinds the way other people catch roaches.
Sure enough, there’s a kid stuck in the pipe. “Help me!” the boy shouts, kind of like the Fly caught in the spiderweb. “Help me, please!” The kid is scrawny and acne-ridden, with crooked teeth yellowed from chewing tobacco or just bad genetics. Either way, he’s not a prime specimen and won’t fetch much on the black market. His hair is plastered with glue, although Nelson suspects it doesn’t look much better clean.
“My God! What happened to you?” Nelson says, feigning concern.
“It’s like glue or somethin’! I can’t get out!”
“Okay,” Nelson says, “I think I can get you out of there. I have some adhesive remover in the van.” Actually he already has it with him. He pretends to jog away and jog back, then soaks a foul-smelling rag with the fluid, climbs into the tunnel, and begins dabbing the kid’s clothes and skin. Bit by bit the boy comes free from the adhesive.
“Thanks, mister,” says the kid. “Thanks a lot!” Nelson climbs out and waits at the mouth of the tunnel as the gooey, glue-covered kid slides himself out, just as nasty as a baby being born. Then, as he comes into the light of day, something finally occurs to this dim bulb. “Hey, wait a second . . . why would someone have that there adhesive remover stuff unless—”
Nelson doesn’t give him the chance to finish his thought. He grabs the boy, wrenches his arms behind his back, and tugs a plastic cable tie around his wrists. Then Nelson pushes him to the ground and pricks him with the DNA reader.
“William Yotts,” Nelson announces, and the kid groans. “AWOL for four days. Not too good at hiding, are ya?”
“You ain’t takin’ me in,” Yotts screams. “You ain’t takin’ me in!”
“You’re right, I’m not,” Nelson tells him. “You’re not going ‘in,’ you’re going ‘up.’ As in ‘up’ on the black market auction block. Ka-ching!”
The kid seems to go both pale and red in the face at the same time, making him all blotchy. Nelson surprises him with a hypodermic. Not tranqs, though. “Antibiotics,” he tells the boy. “Clean out whatever diseases crawled into your system while you were in that pipe. Even the ones that were there before. Most of them, anyway.”
“Please, mister, you don’t gotta do this. Please . . .”
Nelson kneels down and takes a good look at him.
“I’ll tell you what,” he says. “I like your eyes, so I’ll make you a deal.”
He cuts the cable tie, and offers the same deal he always offers. A countdown. A chance to run. These AWOLs never realize that the game is rigged. It never occurs to them that Nelson can count as fast as he chooses, and they don’t know that he’s a very, very good shot.
This boy, like all the others, thinks he’ll be the one to escape. He takes off, tripping in the field and picking himself up while Nelson counts. He nears the road as Nelson gets to “eight” and raises his gun. “Nine.” He has a clear target—the clothing logo on the kid’s back. “Ten!” Then Nelson lowers the gun and doesn’t fire. Instead he watches as the kid races across the road, nearly getting hit by a car—but the car swerves around him. The kid then disappears into the woods.
Nelson applauds his own restraint. It would have been so easy to take the kid down. But he has other plans for this AWOL. The injection he gave the kid wasn’t an antibiotic at all, but a delivery system for a microscopic tracking chip. The kind they used to monitor the populations of endangered species. This is the fourth AWOL Nelson has tagged and released into the wild since his new mission began. With any luck they’ll get picked up by the resistance and give him a clear path to the AWOL sanctuary where Connor Lassiter is holed up. But in the meantime, there are plenty of local leads to follow up on. Nelson smiles. It’s good to have a goal. Something joyful to look forward to.
31 - Miracolina
Miracolina endures her captivity and deprogramming at the hands of the Anti-Divisional Resistance for weeks but never surrenders her core. She never gives in to the things they try to teach her. Oh, she’s learned to function within their little world of ex-tithes, doing what’s expected, if only so they’ll leave her alone. More tithes are brought in, others are placed with families and given new identities. There’s no such plan for Miracolina. Even semi-cooperative, she’s still too much of a risk. They have no idea, however, what she’s really planning.
