But as the bus hits a patch of rough road, it becomes painfully clear that holding it in is not an option. He will not foul the compartment . . . then he realizes that absorbency is only a luggage zipper away. He moves away from Miracolina and begins to unzip a suitcase.
“You’re going to pee in someone’s suitcase?”
“Do you have any other ideas?”
And suddenly Miracolina begins to snicker, then giggle, then cackle uncontrollably. “He’s going to pee in someone’s suitcase!”
“Quiet! Do you want the people in the bus to hear you?”
But Miracolina is beyond help. She’s entered into a full-fledged laughter fit—the kind that leaves your stomach hurting. “They’re gonna open their suitcase,” she blurts between bursts of glee, “and their clothes’ll be full of pee!
For Lev this is no laughing matter. He opens the suitcase and feels around to make sure it’s just clothes and nothing electronic, because that would be really bad—and Miracolina can’t catch her breath. “And I thought it was bad when shampoo spilled in mine!”
“Shampoo!” says Lev. “You’re a genius.”
Lev rifles blindly through one suitcase, then a second, until he comes up with a nice-size shampoo bottle. Then he frantically dumps the shampoo out in the corner of the luggage compartment and, without a second to lose, refills it with sweet relief. When he’s done, he caps the bottle tightly. He considers putting it back in the suitcase, but decides it’s best to just leave it rolling around at the far corner of the luggage compartment.
Lev releases a shivering sigh, then returns to his space next to Miracolina.
“Did you wash your hands?” she asks.
“Wash them?” Lev tells her. “They’re covered with shampoo!”
Now they’re both laughing, and when they breathe in, the cloying smell of cherry blossom shampoo fills the air around them, which just makes them laugh harder, until they’re all laughed out.
And in the silence that falls afterward, something changes. The tension that has been strung taut between them since the moment they met now goes slack. Soon the motion of the bus begins lulling them to sleep. Lev feels Miracolina lean into his shoulder. He doesn’t move for fear of waking her. He just enjoys the feeling of her there—certain that she would never do such a thing if she were awake.
And then she says, with no hint of sleep in her voice, “I forgive you.”
Lev feels it begin deep inside him, just as it did on the day he realized his parents would never take him back. It’s an emotional swell that can’t be contained, and there’s no bottle in the world big enough to hold it. And although he fights to keep his sobs silent, his chest begins to heave with them, and he knows he won’t be able to stop any more than Miracolina was able to stop laughing. Although she must know he’s racked with tears, she says nothing, just keeps her head on his shoulder as his tears fall into her hair.
All this time, Lev never realized what he needed. He did not need to be adored or pitied. He needed to be forgiven. Not by God, who is all-forgiving. Not by people like Marcus and Pastor Dan, who would always stand by his side. He needed to be forgiven by an unforgiving world. By someone who once despised him. Someone like Miracolina.
Only once his silent sobs have stopped does she speak to him. “You’re so weird,” she says. He wonders if she has any idea of the gift she has just given him. He’s pretty sure she does.
Lev knows his world is different now. Maybe it’s exhaustion, or stress, but in that rattling, bouncing, greasy, shampooey compartment, his life suddenly feels like it couldn’t be any better.
Both he and Miracolina close their eyes and fall asleep, blissfully unaware of the brown van with a dented roof and shattered side window that has been following the bus since it left Tulsa.
57 - Connor
“Chatter,” Hayden tells Connor. “All kinds of chatter.”
Hayden paces the tight space in Connor’s jet, hitting his head on the ceiling more than once. Connor has rarely seen Hayden this agitated. Until now, he always managed to keep the world at smirking distance.
“Is it just on the Tucson police bands, or the juvey bands too?”
“Everywhere,” Hayden tells him. “Radio, e-mails, every communication we can intercept. The analysis programs have us shooting to red alert.”
“They’re just programs,” Connor reminds him. “It doesn’t necessarily mean—”
“There’s chatter specifically about us. Code words mostly, but they’re easy to crack.”
Connor begins to wonder if his own paranoia has infected Hayden as well. “Just calm down and give me specifics.”
“Okay,” says Hayden, pacing and trying to slow his breathing. “There have been three house fires over the past two weeks. Three homes in different Tucson neighborhoods got burned to the ground, and they’re blaming us for it.”
Connor’s grafted hand balls into a fist. That iron fist the Admiral had spoken of, perhaps. Didn’t Trace say that there were people itching for a reason to take the Graveyard out? If they couldn’t find a reason, it would be pretty easy to manufacture one.
“Where’s Trace?” Connor asks. “If something’s really going on, he would know.”
Hayden just looks at him, confused. “Trace? Why would Trace know?”
“Never mind why, he just would. I have to talk to him.”
Hayden shakes his head. “He’s gone.”
“What do you mean ‘gone’?”
“No one’s seen him since yesterday. I figured you sent him on some mission.”
“Damn it!” Connor punches the wall, cracking the fiberglass interior of the corporate jet. So Trace finally decided which side he’s on—and without him, they have no escape plan. No one but Trace can fly the Dreamliner.
“There’s more,” Hayden says, hesitating long enough for Connor to know that there’s yet another round of bad news. “All three homes had Unwinds—and they burned the day before the Juvey-rounders were due to take them to Harvest camp. I checked, and the kids were on our list. And all three of them were storks.”
- - -
“What the hell were you thinking?”
Connor doesn’t hide his fury as he storms into GymBo, where Starkey works out like he doesn’t have a care in the world.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Like hell you don’t!”
Around them other kids leave their equipment and slowly approach, taking menacing positions. Only now does Connor realize that Starkey has completely surrounded himself with members of the Stork Club. There’s not a single bio-raised kid there.
“How many of you were with him?” Connor demands. “How many of you are as crazy as he is?”
“Let me show you something, Connor.” Starkey saunters over to a kid sitting on a side bench, who looks both angry and scared at the same time. “I’d like you to meet Garrett Parks, the newest member of the Stork Club. We liberated him last night.”
Connor looks the kid over. He has a black eye, a swollen lip. He was pretty roughed up during his “liberation.”
“They burned down your house—you know that, don’t you?” Connor asks him.
The kid can’t look Connor in the eye. “Yeah, I know.”
“He also knows,” adds Starkey, “that his so-called parents were about to have him unwound. We saved him, and sent a message.”
“Yeah, you sent a message, all right. To the Juvies. You told them that it’s time to take every last one of us out. You didn’t save him, you’ve condemned him. You’ve condemned all of us! Do you really think they’ll stand for us burning down homes?”
Starkey crosses his arms. “Let them try to take us down. We’ve got weapons. We’ll fight them off.”
“How long do you think we can last? An hour? Two? No matter how many weapons we have, they have more, and they’ll just keep coming and coming until we’re all dead or captured.”
Finally Starkey begins to show a hint of uncertainty.
“You’re just a coward,” shouts Bam, glowering at him just as she did the day Connor fired her.
“Yeah, yeah, a coward,” the others echo.
The chorus of support gives Starkey all the justification he needs to bury any doubts beneath his own blind confidence. “I’ve been here long enough to know that you’re nothing but a babysitter. We need more than that. We need someone who’s not afraid to take this battle to the streets. I gave you every chance to leave on your own, but you wouldn’t go. You leave me no choice but to take you down.”
“Not gonna happen.”
Connor is clearly outnumbered. Starkey’s inner circle of storks advance on him—but Starkey’s not the only one with tricks up his sleeve. Suddenly Hayden and half a dozen others, who’ve been waiting outside, begin piling through the door, firing tranq pistols at every stork in their path until half of Starkey’s inner circle is unconscious on the floor of the jet, and the others drop their weapons.
Connor looks straight into Starkey’s eyes. “Cuff him.”
“With pleasure,” says Hayden, pulling Starkey’s hands behind his back and cuffing them together.
Connor has been foolish enough to trust him, and to believe that Starkey’s ambition was healthy, not blind.
“The difference between me and you, Connor,” Starkey says, still defiant, “is that—”
“—is that you’re in handcuffs and I’m not. Get him out of here.”
Hearing the gunfire of tranq pistols, dozens of kids have gathered in front of GymBo, as they haul Starkey out and down the stairs.
“Put his little mutiny team in the detention jet with two armed guards,” Connor says.
“Starkey, too?” Hayden asks.
Connor knows he can’t put Starkey in the same holding pen as his coconspirators. It would just lead to more plotting.
“No. Lock him in my jet,” Connor orders, and one of the kids holding Starkey throws him to the ground, but Connor pulls the kid back.
“No! We are not the Juvies. Treat him with dignity. Whether he deserves it or not.”
They obey, although no one helps Starkey up. With his hands cuffed behind his back, he has to wiggle and contort himself to get to his feet.
“This isn’t over!” Starkey yells.
“Yeah, that’s what they always say when it is.”
Starkey is taken away, and Connor begins damage control. He tunes in to the rumbles of conversation on the perimeter. Some kids are just wondering what the hell happened, but there are other voices. Disapproving voices. The Stork Club. He wonders how much support Starkey has. It might be a mile wide, but Connor hopes it’s only an inch deep.
“Listen to me, all of you,” Connor says, knowing he has to sell himself as their leader more than ever. “Whether you’re a stork, or a ward, or bio-raised, we have to stand united now. What we do now will decide whether we live or die. The Juvies are about to make a move. We have to work together, unless you want to end up in pieces.”