Unwind

9. Mother

The mother is nineteen, but she doesn’t feel that old. She feels no wiser, no more capable of dealing with this situation, than a little girl. When, she wonders, did she stop being a child? The law says it was when she turned eighteen, but the law doesn’t know her.

Still aching from the trauma of delivery, she holds her newborn close. It’s just after dawn on a chilly morning. She moves now through back alleys. Not a soul around. Dumpsters cast angular black shadows. Broken bottles everywhere.

This she knows is the perfect time of day to do this. There’s less of a chance that coyotes and other scavengers would be out. She couldn’t bear the thought of the baby suffering needlessly.

A large green Dumpster looms before her, listing crookedly on the uneven pavement of the alley. She holds the baby tight, as if the Dumpster might grow hands and pull the baby into its filthy depths. Maneuvering around it, she continues down the alley.

There was a time, shortly after the Bill of Life was passed, that Dumpsters such as that would be tempting to girls like her. Desperate girls who would leave unwanted newborns in the trash. It had become so common that it wasn’t even deemed newsworthy anymore—it had become just a part of life.

Funny, but the Bill of Life was supposed to protect the sanctity of life.

Instead it just made life cheap. Thank goodness for the Storking Initiative, that wonderful law that allows girls like her a far better alternative.

As dawn becomes early morning, she leaves the alleys and enters a neighborhood that gets better with each street she crosses. The homes are large and inviting. This is the right neighborhood for storking.

She chooses the home shrewdly. The house she decides on isn’t the largest, but it’s not the smallest, either. It has a very short walkway to the street, so she can get away quickly, and it’s overgrown with trees, so no one either inside or out will be able to see her as she storks the newborn.

She carefully approaches the front door. No lights are on in the home yet, that’s good. There’s a car in the driveway—hopefully that means they’re home.

She gingerly climbs the porch steps, careful not to make a sound, then kneels down, placing the sleeping baby on the welcome mat. There are two blankets wrapped around the baby, and a wool cap covers its head. She makes the blankets nice and tight. It’s the only thing she’s learned to do as a mother.

She considers ringing the bell and running, but she realizes that would not be a good idea. If they catch her, she’s obliged to keep the baby—that’s part of the Storking Initiative too—but if they open the door and find nothing but the child, it’s “finder’s keepers” in the eyes of the law. Whether they want it or not, the baby is legally theirs.

From the time she learned she was pregnant she knew she would end up storking this baby. She had hoped that when she finally saw it, looking up at her so helplessly, she might change her mind—but who was she kidding? With neither the skill nor the desire to be a mother at this point in her life, storking had always been her best option.

She realizes she’s lingered longer than is wise. There’s an upstairs light on now, so she forces herself to look away from the sleeping newborn, and leaves.

With the burden now lifted from her, she has sudden strength. She now has a second chance in life, and this time she’ll be smarter—she’s sure of it. As she hurries down the street, she thinks how wonderful it is that she can get a second chance. How wonderful it is that she can dismiss her responsibility so easily.

10. Risa

Several streets away from the storked newborn, at the edge of a dense wood, Risa stands at the door of a home. She rings the bell, and a woman answers in her bathrobe.

Risa offers the woman a big smile. “Hi, my name is Didi? And I’m collecting clothes and food for our school? We’re, like, giving them to the homeless? And it’s like this competition—whoever gets the most wins a trip to Florida or something? So it would be really, really great if you could help out?”

The sleepy woman tries to get her brain up to speed with “Didi,” airhead for the homeless. The woman can’t get a word in edgewise because Didi talks way too fast. If Risa had had a piece of chewing gum, she would have popped a bubble somewhere in there to add more authenticity.

“Please-please-pretty-please? I’m, like, in second place right now?”

The woman at the door sighs, resigned to the fact that “Didi” isn’t going away empty-handed, and sometimes the best way to get rid of girls like this is just to give them something. “I’ll be right back,” the woman says.

Three minutes later, Risa walks away from the house with a bag full of clothes and canned food.

“That was amazing,” says Connor, who had been watching with Lev from the edge of the woods.

“What can I say? I’m an artist,” she says. “It’s like playing the piano; you just have to know which keys to strike in people.”

Connor smiles. “You’re right, this is way better than stealing.”

“Actually,” says Lev, “scamming IS stealing.”

Risa feels a bit prickly and uncomfortable at the thought, but tries not to show it.

“Maybe so,” says Connor, “but it’s stealing with style.”

The woods have ended at a tract community. Manicured lawns have turned yellow along with the leaves. Autumn has truly taken hold. The homes here are almost identical, but not quite, full of people almost identical, but not quite. It’s a world Risa knows about only through magazines and TV. To her, suburbia is a magical kingdom. Perhaps that’s why Risa was the one who had the nerve to approach the house and pretend to be Didi. The neighborhood drew her like the smell of fresh bread baking in the industrial ovens of Ohio State Home 23.

Back in the woods where they can’t be seen from anyone’s window, they check their goody bag, as if it’s full of Halloween candy.

There’s a pair of pants and a blue button-down shirt that fits Connor.

There’s a jacket that fits Lev. There are no clothes for Risa, but that’s okay. She can play Didi again at a different house.

“I still don’t know how changing our clothes is going to make a difference.” Connor asks.

“Don’t you ever watch TV?” says Risa. “On the cop shows they always describe what perps were last wearing when they put out an APB.”

“We’re not perps,” says Connor, “we’re AWOLs.”

“We’re felons,” says Lev. “Because what you’re doing—I mean, what we’re doing—is a federal crime.”

“What, stealing clothes?” asks Connor.

“No, stealing ourselves. Once the unwind orders were signed, we all became government property. Kicking-AWOL makes us federal criminals.”

It doesn’t sit well with Risa, or for that matter with Connor, but they both shake it off.

This excursion into a populated area is dangerous but necessary. Perhaps as the morning goes on they can find a library where they can download maps and find themselves a wilderness large enough to get lost in for good. There are rumors of hidden communities of AWOL Unwinds. Maybe they can find one.

As they move cautiously through the neighborhood, a woman approaches them—just a girl, really, maybe nineteen or twenty. She walks fast, but she’s walking funny, like she’s got some injury or is recovering from one. Risa’s certain she’s going to see them and recognize them, but the girl passes without even making eye contact and hurries around a corner.

11. Connor

Exposed. Vulnerable. Connor wishes they could have stayed in the woods, but there are only so many acorns and berries he can eat. They’ll find food in town. Food, and information.

“This is the best time not to be noticed,” Connor tells the others. “Everyone’s in a hurry in the morning. Late to work, or whatever.”

Connor finds a newspaper in the bushes, misthrown by a delivery boy.

“Look at this!” says Lev. “A newspaper. How retro is that?”

“Does it talk about us?” asks Lev. He says it like it’s a good thing. The three of them scan the front page. The war in Australia, King politicians—the same old stuff. Connor turns the page clumsily. Its pages are large and awkward. They tear easily and catch the breeze like a kite, making it hard to read.

No mention of them on page two, or page three.

“Maybe it’s an old newspaper,” suggests Risa.

Connor checks the date on top. “No, it’s today’s.” He fights against the breeze to turn the page. “Ah—there it is.”

The headline reads, PILEUP ON INTERSTATE. It’s a very small article. A morning car accident, blah-blah-blah, traffic snarled for hours, blah-blah-blah.

The article mentions the dead bus driver, the fact that the road was closed for three hours. But nothing about them. Connor reads the last line of the article aloud.

“It is believed that police activity in the area may have distracted drivers, leading to the accident.”

They’re all dumbfounded. For Connor, there’s a sense of relief—a sense of having gotten away with something huge.

“That can’t be right,” says Lev, “I was kidnapped, or . . . uh . . . at least they think I was. That should be in the news.”

“Lev’s right,” says Risa. “They always have incidents with Unwinds in the news. If we’re not in there, there’s a reason.”

Connor can’t believe these two are looking this gift horse in the mouth! He speaks slowly as if to idiots. “No news report means no pictures—and that means people won’t recognize us. I don’t see why that’s a problem.”

Risa folds her arms. “Why are there no pictures?”

“I don’t know—maybe the police are keeping it quiet because they don’t want people to know they screwed up.”

Risa shakes her head. “It doesn’t feel right. . . .”

“Who cares how it feels!”

“Keep your voice down!” Risa says in an angry whisper. Connor fights to keep his temper under control. He doesn’t say anything for fear he’s going to start yelling again and draw attention to them. He can see Risa puzzling over the situation and Lev looking back and forth between the two of them. Risa’s not stupid, thinks Connor. She’s going to figure out that this is a good thing, and that she’s worrying for nothing.

But instead, Risa says, “If we’re never in the news, then who’s going to know if we live or die? See—if it’s all over the news that they’re tracking us, then when they find us, they have to take us down with tranquilizer bullets and take us to be harvested, right?”

Connor has no idea why she’s stating the obvious. “So, what’s your point?”

“What if they don’t want to take us to be unwound. What if they want us dead?”

Connor opens his mouth to tell her how stupid that is, but stops himself.

Because it’s not stupid at all.

“Lev,” says Risa, “your family’s pretty rich, right?”

Lev shrugs modestly. “I guess.”

“What if they paid off the police to get you back by killing the kidnappers . . . and to do it quietly, so no one ever knew it happened?”

Connor looks to Lev, hoping the kid will laugh at the very suggestion, telling them that his parents would never, ever do such a terrible thing. Lev, however, is curiously silent about it as he considers the possibility.

And at that moment two things happen. A police car turns onto the street, and somewhere very close by, a baby begins to cry.

Run!

This is the first thought in Connor’s mind, his first instinct, but Risa grabs his arm tightly the moment she sees the police car, and it makes him hesitate.

Connor knows hesitation can mean the difference between life and death in dire situations. But not today. Today it gives him enough time to do something Connor rarely does in an emergency. He goes beyond his first thought, and processes his second thought: Running will attract attention.

He forces his feet to stay in one place, and takes a quick moment to assess their surroundings. Cars are starting in driveways as people head off to work.

Somewhere a baby is crying. High-school-aged kids are gathered on a corner across the street, talking, pushing each other, laughing. As he looks to Risa, he can tell they’re both of one mind, even before she says, “Bus stop!”

The patrol car rolls leisurely down the street. Leisurely, that is, to someone who has nothing to hide, but to Connor its slow pace is menacing. There’s no way of telling if these officers are looking for them or just on a routine patrol. Again, he fights down the urge to run.

He and Risa turn their backs to the police car, ready to stride off inconspicuously toward the bus stop, but Lev is not with the program. He faces the wrong way, staring straight at the approaching cop car.

“What, are you nuts?” Connor grabs his shoulder and forces him around. “Just do what we do, and act natural.”

A school bus approaches from the other direction. The kids at the corner begin gathering their things. Now, at last, there’s permission to run without looking out of place. Connor begins it, taking a few strides ahead of Risa and Lev, then turns back, calling with a calculated whine, “C’mon, you guys—we’re gonna miss the bus again!”

The cop car’s right beside them now. Connor keeps his back to it and doesn’t turn to see if the officers inside are watching them. If they are, hopefully they’ll just hear the conversation and assume this is normal morning mayhem, and not think twice. Lev’s version of “acting natural” is walking with wide eyes and arms stiff by his side like he’s crossing a minefield. So much for being inconspicuous.

“Do you have to walk so slow?” Connor yells. “If I get another tardy, I’ll get detention.”

The squad car rolls past them. Up ahead, the bus nears the stop. Connor, Risa, and Lev hurry across the street toward it—all part of the charade, just in case the cops are watching them through their rearview mirror. Of course, thinks Connor, it could backfire on them, and the cops could cite them for jaywalking.

“Are we really going to get on the bus?” asks Lev.

“Of course not,” says Risa.

Now Connor dares to glance at the cop car. Its blinker is on. It’s going to turn the corner, and once it does, they’ll be safe. . . . But then the school bus stops and turns on its blinking red lights as it opens its door—and anyone who’s ever ridden a school bus knows that when those red lights start blinking, all traffic around them must stop and wait until the bus moves on.

The cop car comes to a halt a dozen yards short of the corner, waiting until the bus is finished loading. That means that the cop car will still be sitting right there when the bus pulls away. “We’re screwed,” Connor says. “Now we have to get on the bus.”

It’s as they reach the sidewalk that a sound which has been too faint and too low-priority to care about suddenly snares Connor’s attention. The crying baby.

At the house in front of them, there’s a bundle on the porch. The bundle is moving.

Connor instantly knows what this is. He’s seen it before. He’s seen a storked baby twice on his own doorstep. Even though it’s not the same baby, he stops in his tracks as if it is.

“C’mon, Billy, you’ll miss the bus!”

“Huh?”

It’s Risa. She and Lev are a few yards ahead of him. She speaks to Connor through gritted teeth. “C’mon, ‘Billy.’ Don’t be an idiot.”

Kids have already started piling onto the bus. The police car sits motionless behind the blinking red lights.

Connor tries to make himself move, but can’t. It’s because of the baby.

Because of the way it wails. This is not the same baby! Connor tells himself. Don’t be stupid. Not now!

“Connor,” whispers Risa, “what’s wrong with you?”

Then the door of the house opens. There’s a fat little kid at the door—six, maybe seven. He stares down at the baby. “Aw, no way!” Then he turns and calls back into the house, “Mom! We’ve been storked again!”

Most people have two emergency modes. Fight and Flight. But Connor always knew he had three: Fight, Flight, and Screw Up Royally. It was a dangerous mental short circuit. The same short circuit that made him race back toward armed Juvey-cops to rescue Lev instead of just saving himself. He could feel it kicking in again right now. He could feel his brain starting to fry. “We’ve been storked again,” the fat kid had said. Why did he have to say “again”? Connor might have been all right if he hadn’t said “again.”

Don’t do it! Connor tells himself. This is not the same baby!

But to some deep, unreasoning part of his brain, they’re all the same baby.

Going against all sense of self-preservation, Connor bolts straight for the porch. He approaches the door so quickly, the kid looks up at him with terrified eyes and backs into his mother, an equally plump woman who has just arrived at the door. Her face wears an unwelcoming scowl. She stares at Connor, then spares a quick glance down at the crying baby, but she makes no move toward it.

“Who are you?” she demands. The little boy now hides behind her like a cub behind a mother grizzly. “Did you put this here? Answer me!” The baby continues to cry.

“No . . . No, I—”

“Don’t lie to me!”

He doesn’t know what he hoped to accomplish coming here. This is none of his business, not his problem. But now he’s made it his problem.

And behind him the bus is still loading kids. The police car is still there, waiting. Connor could have very well just ended his life by coming to this house.

Then there’s a voice behind him. “He didn’t put it there. I did.”

Connor turns to see Risa. Her face is stony. She won’t even look at Connor.

She just glares at the woman, whose beady eyes shift from Connor to Risa.

“You got caught in the act, little dearie,” she says. The words “little dearie” come out like a curse. “The law might let you stork, but only if you don’t get caught. So take your baby and go, before I call those cops over.”

Connor tries desperately to unfry his brain. “But . . . but . . .”

“Just shut up!” says Risa, her voice full of venom and accusation.

This makes the woman at the door smile, but it’s not a pleasant thing.

“Daddy here ruined it for you, didn’t he? He came back instead of just running away.” The woman spares a quick dismissive look at Connor. “First rule of motherhood, dearie: Men are screwups. Learn it now and you’ll be a whole lot happier.”

Between them, the baby still cries. It’s like a game of steal the bacon, where no one wants to take the bacon. Finally, Risa bends down and lifts the baby from the welcome mat, holding it close to her. It still cries, but much more softly now.

“Now get out of here,” says the fat woman, “or you’ll be talking to those cops.”

Connor turns to see the cop car partially blocked by the school bus. Lev stands halfway in and halfway out of the bus, keeping the door from closing, a look of utter desperation on his face. The irritated bus driver peers out at him.

“C’mon, I don’t have all day!”

Connor and Risa turn away from the woman at the door and hurry for the bus.

“Risa, I—”

“Don’t,” she snaps. “I don’t want to hear it.”

Connor feels as broken as he did the moment he found out his parents had signed the order to unwind him. Back then, however, he had anger to help dilute the fear and the shock. But there’s no anger in him now, except for anger at himself. He feels helpless, hopeless. All of his self-confidence has imploded like a dying star. Three fugitives running from the law. And now, thanks to his shortcircuit stupidity, they are three fugitives with a baby.

12. Risa

She can’t even begin to guess what possessed Connor.

Now Risa realizes he doesn’t just make bad decisions, he makes dangerous ones. The school bus only has a few kids on it as they step on, and the driver angrily closes the door behind them, making no comment about the baby.

Perhaps because it’s not the only baby on the bus. Risa pushes past Lev and leads the three of them to the back. They pass another girl with her own little bundle of joy, which couldn’t be any older than six months. The young mother curiously eyes them, and Risa tries not to make eye contact.

After they’re sitting in the back, a few rows away from the nearest riders, Lev looks at Risa, almost afraid to ask the obvious question. Finally he says.

“Uh . . . why do we have a baby?”

“Ask him,” says Risa.

Stone-faced, Connor looks out the window. “They’re looking for two boys and a girl. Having a baby will throw them off.”

“Great,” snaps Risa. “Maybe we should all pick up a baby along the way.”

Connor goes visibly red. He turns toward her and holds out his hands. “I’ll hold it,” he says, but Risa keeps it away from him.

“You’ll make it cry.”

Risa is no stranger to babies. At the state home she occasionally got to work with the infants. This one probably would have ended up at a state home too. She could tell that the woman at the door had no intention of keeping it.

She looks at Connor. Still red, he intentionally avoids her gaze. The reason Connor gave was a lie. Something else drove him to run to that porch. But whatever the real reason was, Connor’s keeping it to himself.

The bus comes to a jarring halt and more kids get on. The girl at the front of the bus—the one with the baby—makes her way to the back and sits right in front of Risa, turning around and looking at her over the seat back.

“Hi, you must be new! I’m Alexis, and this is Chase.” Her baby looks at Risa curiously, and drools over the seat back. Alexis picks up the baby’s limp hand, and makes it wave like she might wave the hand of a toy doll. “Say hello, Chase!”

Alexis seems even younger than Risa.

Alexis peers around to get a look at the sleeping baby’s face. “A newborn! Oh, wow! That’s so brave of you, coming back to school so soon!” She turns to Connor. “Are you the father?”

“Me?” Connor looks flustered and cornered for a moment before he comes to his senses and says, “Yeah. Yeah, I am.”

“That’s sooooo great that you’re still seeing each other. Chaz—that’s Chase’s father—doesn’t even go to our school anymore. He got sent to military school. His parents were so mad when they found out that I was, you know, ‘uploaded,’ he was afraid they might actually have him unwound. Can you believe it?”

Risa could strangle this girl if it weren’t for the fact that it would leave drooling Chase motherless.

“So, is yours a boy, or a girl?”

The pause before answering is awkward and uncomfortable. Risa wonders whether or not there’s a discreet way to check without Alexis seeing, but realizes there isn’t. “Girl,” Risa says. At least there’s a 50 percent chance she’s right.

“What’s her name?”

This time Connor pipes up. “Didi,” he says. “Her name’s Didi.” This brings forth a little grin from Risa in spite of how angry she is at him.

“Yeah,” says Risa. “Same as me. Family tradition.”

Clearly Connor has recovered at least a portion of his senses. He seems a bit more relaxed and natural, playing the role as best he can. The redness in his face has receded until it’s only his ears that are red.

“Well, you’re going to love Center-North High,” Alexis says. “They’ve got a great day care center, and really take care of student-mothers. Some teachers even let us nurse in class.”

Connor puts his hand over Risa’s shoulder. “Do fathers get to watch?”

Risa shrugs off his arm, and quietly stomps on his foot. He winces, but says nothing. If he thought he was out of the doghouse, he’s dead wrong. As far as she’s concerned, his name is Fido.

“It looks like your brother is making friends,” says Alexis. She looks to where Lev was sitting, but he’s moved a seat ahead and is talking to boy sitting next to him. She tries to hear what they’re talking about but can’t hear anything beyond Alexis’s blathering.

“Or is it your brother?” Alexis says to Connor.

“No, he’s mine,” says Risa.

Alexis grins and rolls her shoulders a bit. “He’s kind of cute.”

Risa didn’t think it was possible to like Alexis any less than she already did.

Apparently she was wrong. Alexis must see the look in Risa’s eyes, because she says, “Well, I mean cute for a freshman.”

“He’s thirteen. He skipped a grade,” Risa says, burning Alexis an even meaner warning gaze that says, Keep your claws away from my little brother. She has to remind herself that Lev really isn’t her little brother. Now it’s Connor’s turn to stomp on her foot—and he’s right to do it. Too much information. Lev’s real age was more than Alexis needed to know. And besides, making an enemy is not in their best interests.

“Sorry,” says Risa, softening her gaze. “Long night with the baby. It’s made me cranky.”

“Oh, believe me, I’ve totally been there.”

It looks as if the Alexis Inquisition might continue until they reach the school, but the bus comes to another sudden stop, making little Chase bump his chin on the seat back, and he begins to cry. Suddenly Alexis goes into mother mode, and the conversation ends.

Risa heaves a deep sigh, and Connor says, “I really am sorry about this.”

Although he sounds sincere, she’s not accepting any apologies.

13. Lev

This day has not gone according to plan.

The plan was to get away as soon as they reached civilization. Lev could have run the moment they broke out of the woods. He could have, but he didn’t.

There’ll be a better time, he had thought. A perfect time would present itself if he had patience, and kept watchful.

Pretending to be one of them—pretending to be like them had taken every ounce of Lev’s will. The only thing that kept him going was the knowledge that very soon everything would be as it should be.

When the police car had turned onto the street, Lev was fully prepared to throw himself at the car and turn himself in. He would have done it if it weren’t for one thing.

Their pictures weren’t in the paper.

That bothered Lev even more than the others. His family was influential.

They were not to be trifled with. He felt certain that his face would be the biggest thing on the front page. When it wasn’t, he didn’t know what to think. Even Risa’s theory that his parents wanted her and Connor killed seemed a possibility.

If he gave himself up to the police, what if they turned and fired real bullets at Risa and Connor? Would the police do that? He wanted them brought to justice, but he couldn’t bear the thought of their deaths on his head, so he had let the squad car go past.

And now things are worse. Now there’s this baby. Stealing a storked baby!

These two Unwinds are out of control. He no longer fears that they’ll kill him, but that doesn’t make them any less dangerous. They need to be protected from themselves. They need . . . they need . . . they need to be unwound. Yes. That’s the best solution for these two. They’re of no use to anyone in their current state, least of all themselves. It would probably be a relief for them, for now they’re all broken up on the inside. Better to be broken up on the outside instead. That way their divided spirits could rest, knowing that their living flesh was spread around the world, saving lives, making other people whole. Just as his own spirit would soon rest.

He ponders this as he sits on the bus, trying to deny how mixed his feelings about it are.

While Risa and Connor talk to a painfully perky girl and her baby, Lev moves one seat forward in the bus, putting more distance between them. A boy gets on the bus and sits down next to him, wearing headphones and singing to music that Lev can’t hear. The kid slips his backpack in between them on the seat, practically wedging Lev in, and returns his full attention to his tunes.

That’s when Lev gets an idea. He looks behind him to see Connor and Risa still involved with the other girl and her baby. Carefully Lev reaches into the kid’s backpack and pulls out a dog-eared notebook. Written on it in big black letters is DEATH BY ALGEBRA, with little skulls and crossbones. Inside are messy math equations and homework graded down for sloppiness. Lev quietly turns to a blank page, then he reaches into the kid’s pack again, pulling out a pen. All the while, the kid is so absorbed in his music, he doesn’t notice. Lev begins to write:

HELP! I’M BEING HELD HOSTAGE

BY TWO AWOL UNWINDS.

NOD IF YOU UNDERSTAND . . .

When he’s done, he tugs the boy’s shoulder. It takes two tugs to get his attention.

“Yeah?”

Lev holds out the notebook, making sure he docs it in such a way that it’s not too obvious. The boy looks at him and says: “Hey, that’s my notebook.”

Lev takes a deep breath. Connor’s looking at him now. He’s got to be careful.

“I know it’s your notebook,” Lev says, trying to say as much as he can with his eyes. “I just . . . needed . . . one . . . page. . . .”

He holds the notebook a little higher for the kid to read, but the kid’s not even looking at it. “No! You should have asked first.” Then he rips out the page without even looking at it, crumples the paper, and to Lev’s horror hurls it toward the front of the bus. The paper wad bounces off the head of another kid, who ignores it, and it falls to the floor. The bus comes to a stop, and Lev feels his hope trampled beneath thirty pairs of scuffed shoes.

14. Connor

Dozens of buses pull up to the school. Kids mob every doorway. As Connor gets off the bus with Risa and Lev, he scans for a way to escape, but there is none.

There are campus security guards and teachers on patrol. Anyone seen walking away from school would draw the attention of everyone watching.

“We can’t actually go in,” says Risa.

“I say we do,” says Lev, acting more squirrelly than usual.

A teacher has already taken notice of them. Even though the school has a day care center for student mothers, the baby is very conspicuous.

“We’ll go in,” says Connor. “We’ll hide in a place where there aren’t any security cameras. The boys’ bathroom.”

“Girls’,” says Risa. “It’ll be cleaner, and there’ll be more stalls to hide in.”

Connor considers it, and figures she’s probably right on both counts. “Fine. We’ll hide until lunch, then slip out with the rest of the kids going off campus.”

“You’re assuming this baby wants to cooperate,” says Risa. “Eventually it’s going to want to be fed—and I don’t exactly have the materials, if you know what I mean. If it starts crying in the bathroom, it will probably echo throughout the whole school.”

It’s another accusation. Connor can hear it in her voice. It says: Do you have any idea how much harder you’ve made things on us?

“Let’s just hope it doesn’t cry,” says Connor. “And if it does, you can blame me all the way to harvest camp.”

Connor is no stranger to hiding in school bathrooms. Of course, before today, the reason was simply to get out of class. Today, however, there’s no class where he’s expected, and if he’s caught, the consequences are a little bit more severe than Saturday school.

They slip in after the first period bell rings and Connor coaches them on the finer points of bathroom stealth. How to tell the difference between kids’ footsteps and adults’. When to lift your feet up so no one can see you, and when to just announce that the stall is occupied. The latter would work for both Risa and Lev, since his voice is still somewhat high, but Connor doesn’t dare pretend to be a girl.

They stay together yet alone, each in their own stall. Mercifully, the bathroom door squeals like a pig whenever it’s opened, so they have warning when anyone comes in. There are a few girls at the beginning of first period but then it quiets down and they are left with no sound but the echoing drizzle of a leaky flush handle.

“We won’t make it in here until lunch,” Risa announces from the stall to Connor’s left. “Even if the baby stays asleep.”

“You’d be surprised how long you can hide in a bathroom.”

“You mean you’ve done this often?” asks Lev, in the stall to his right.

Connor knows this fits right into Lev’s image of Connor as a bad seed. Fine, let him think that. He’s probably right.

The bathroom door squeals. They fall silent. Dull, rapid footsteps—it’s a student in sneakers. Lev and Connor raise their feet and Risa keeps hers down, as they had planned. The baby gurgles, and Risa clears her throat, masking the noise perfectly. The girl is in and out in less than a minute.

After the bathroom door squeaks closed, the baby coughs. Connor notices that it’s a quick, clean sound. Not sickly at all. Good.

“By the way,” says Risa, “it is a girl.”

Connor thinks to offer to hold it once more, but figures right now that would be more trouble than it’s worth. He doesn’t know how to hold a baby to keep it from crying. Connor decides he has to tell them why he went temporarily insane and took the baby. He owes them that much.

“It was because of what the kid said,” Connor says gently.

“What?”

“Back at that house—the fat kid at the door. He said they’d been storked again.”

“So what?” says Risa. “Lots of people get storked more than once.”

Then, from his other side, Connor hears, “That happened to my family. I have two brothers and a sister who were brought by the stork before I was born. It was never a problem.”

Connor wonders if Lev actually thinks the stork brought them, or if he’s just using it as an expression. He decides he’d rather not know. “What a wonderful family. They take in storked babies, and send their own flesh and blood to be unwound. Oh, sorry—tithed.”

Clearly offended, Lev says, “Tithing’s in the Bible; you’re supposed to give 10 percent of everything. And storking’s in the Bible too.”

“No, it isn’t!”

“Moses,” says Lev. “Moses was put in a basket in the Nile and was found by Pharaoh’s daughter. He was the first storked baby, and look what happened to him!”

“Yeah,” says Connor, “but what happened to the next baby she found in the Nile?”

“Will you keep your voices down?” says Risa. “People could hear you in the hall, and anyway, you might wake Didi.”

Connor takes a moment to collect his thoughts. When he speaks again, it’s a whisper, but in a tiled room there are no whispers. “We got storked when I was seven.”

“Big deal,” says Risa.

“No, this was a big deal. For a whole lot of reasons. See, there were already two natural kids in the family. My parents weren’t planning on any more. Anyway, this baby shows up at our door, my parents start freaking out . . . and then they have an idea.”

“Do I want to hear this?” Risa asks.

“Probably not.” But Connor’s not about to stop. He knows if he doesn’t spill this now, he’s never going to. “It was early in the morning, and my parents figured no one saw the baby left at the door, right? So the next morning, before the rest of us got up, my dad put the baby on a doorstep across the street.”

“That’s illegal,” announces Lev. “Once you get storked, that baby’s yours.”

“Yeah, but my parents figured, who’s gonna know? My parents swore us to secrecy, and we waited to hear the news from across the street about their new, unexpected arrival . . . but it never came. They never talked about getting storked and we couldn’t ask them about it, because it would be a dead giveaway that we’d dumped the baby on them.”

As Connor speaks, the stall, as small as it is, seems to shrink around him.

He knows the others are there on either side, but he can’t help but feel desperately alone.

“Things go on like it never happened. Everything was quiet for a while, and then two weeks later, I open the door, and there on that stupid welcome mat, is another baby in a basket . . . and I remember . . . I remember I almost laughed. Can you believe it? I thought it was funny, and I turned back to my mother, and I say ‘Mom, we got storked again’—Just like that little kid this morning said. My Mom, all frustrated, brought the baby in . . . and that’s when she realizes—”

“Oh, no!” says Risa, figuring it out even before Connor says: “It’s the same baby!” Connor tries to remember the baby’s face, but he can’t.

All he sees in his mind’s eye is the face of the baby Risa now holds. “It turns out that the baby had been passed around the neighborhood for two whole weeks—each morning, left on someone else’s doorstep . . . only now it’s not looking too good.”

The bathroom door squeals, and Connor falls silent. A flurry of footsteps.

Two girls. They chat a bit about boys and dates and parties with no parents around. They don’t even use the toilets. Another flurry of footsteps heading out, the squeal of the door, and they are alone again.

“So, what happened to the baby?” Risa asks.

“By the time it landed on our doorstep again, it was sick. It was coughing like a seal and its skin and eyes were yellow.”

“Jaundice,” says Risa, gently. “A lot of babies show up at StaHo that way.”

“My parents brought it to the hospital, but there was nothing they could do. I was there when it died. I saw it die.” Connor closes his eyes, and grits his teeth, to keep tears back. He knows the others can’t see them, but he doesn’t want them to come anyway. “I remember thinking, if a baby was going to be so unloved, why would God want it brought into the world?”

He wonders if Lev will have some pronouncement on the topic—after all, when it comes to God, Lev claimed to have all the answers. But all Lev says is, “I didn’t know you believed in God.”

Connor takes a moment to push his emotions down, then continues.

“Anyway, since it was legally ours, we paid for the funeral. It didn’t even have a name, and my parents couldn’t bear to give it one. It was just ‘Baby Lassiter,’ and even though no one had wanted it, the entire neighborhood came to the funeral. People were crying like it was their baby that had died. . . . And that’s when I realized that the people who were crying—they were the ones who had passed that baby around. They were the ones, just like my own parents, who had a hand in killing it.”

There’s silence now. The leaky flush handle drizzles. Next door in the boys’ bathroom a toilet flushes, and the sound echoes hollowly around them.

“People shouldn’t give away babies that get left at their door,” Lev finally says.

“People shouldn’t stork their babies,” Risa responds.

“People shouldn’t do a lot of things,” says Connor. He knows they’re both right, but it doesn’t make a difference. In a perfect world mothers would all want their babies, and strangers would open up their homes to the unloved. In a perfect world everything would be either black or white, right or wrong, and everyone would know the difference. But this isn’t a perfect world. The problem is people who think it is.

“Anyway, I just wanted you to know.”

In a few moments the bell rings, and there’s commotion in the hall. The bathroom door creaks open. Girls laughing, talking about everything and nothing.

“Next time wear a dress.”

“Can I borrow your history book?”

“That test was impossible.”

Unending squeals from the door and constant tugs on Connor’s locked stall door. No one’s tall enough to look over, no one has any desire to look under. The late bell rings; the last girl hurries to class. They’ve made it to second period. If they’re lucky, this school will have a midmorning break. Maybe they can sneak out then. In Risa’s stall, the baby is making wakeful noises. Not crying but sort of clicking. On the verge of hungry tears.

“Should we change stalls?” asks Risa. “Repeat visitors might get suspicious if they see my feet in the same stall.”

“Good idea.” Listening closely to make sure he can’t hear any footfalls in the hall, Connor pulls open his stall, switching places with Risa. Lev’s door is open as well, but he’s not coming out. Connor pushes Lev’s door open all the way. He’s not there.

“Lev?” He looks to Risa, who just shakes her head. They check every stall, then check the one Lev was in again, as if he might reappear—but he doesn’t. Lev is gone. And the baby begins wailing for all it’s worth.

15. Lev

Lev is convinced his heart will explode in his chest.

It will explode, and he will die right here in a school hallway. Slipping out of the bathroom once the bell rang had been nerve-racking. He had unlocked his stall door, and had kept his hand on the handle for ten minutes waiting for the electronic buzz of the bell to mask the sound of its opening. Then he’d had to make it to the bathroom entrance without the others hearing his brand-new sneakers squeaking on the floor. (Why did they call them sneakers if it was so hard to sneak in them?) He couldn’t open that squealing door, then walk out by himself. It would be too conspicuous. So he waited until a bathroom-bound girl did it for him. Since the bell had just rung, he only had to wait a few seconds. She pulled open the door and he pushed his way past her, hoping she didn’t say anything that would give him away. If she commented about a boy being in the girl’s bathroom, Connor and Risa would know.

“Next time, wear a dress,” the girl said to him as he hurried away, and her friend laughed. Was that enough to alert Connor and Risa to his escape? He hadn’t turned back to find out, he had just pressed forward.

Now he’s lost in the hallways of the huge high school, his heart threatening to detonate at any second. A wild mob of kids hurrying to their next class surround him, bump him, disorient him. Most of the kids here are bigger than Lev. Imposing. Intimidating. This is how he always imagined high school—a dangerous place full of mystery and violent kids. He had never worried about it because he had always known he would never have to go. In fact, he only had to worry about getting partway through eighth grade.

“Excuse me, can you tell me where the office is?” he asks one of the slowermoving students.

The kid looks down at him as if Lev were from Mars. “How could you not know that?” And he just walks away shaking his head. Another, kinder kid points him in the right direction.

Lev knows that things must be put back on track. This is the best place to do it: a school. If there are any secret plans to kill Connor and Risa, it can’t happen here with so many kids around, and if he does this right, it won’t happen at all. If he does it right, all three of them will be safely on their way to their unwinding, as it ought to be. As it was ordained to be. The thought of it still frightens him, but these days of not knowing what the next hour will bring—that is truly terrifying.

Being torn from his purpose was the most unnerving thing that had ever happened to Lev, but now he understands why God let it happen. It’s a lesson. It’s to show Lev what happens to children who shirk their destiny: They become lost in every possible way.

He enters the school’s main office and stands at the counter, waiting to be noticed, but the secretary is too busy shuffling papers. “Excuse me . . .”

Finally, she looks up. “Can I help you, dear?”

He clears his throat. “My name is Levi Calder, and I’ve been kidnapped by two runaway Unwinds.”

The woman, who really wasn’t paying attention before, suddenly focuses her attention entirely on him. “What did you say?”

“I was kidnapped. We were hiding in a bathroom, but I got away. They’re still there. They’ve got a baby, too.”

The woman stands up and calls out, her voice shaky, like she’s looking at a ghost. She calls in the principal, and the principal calls in a security guard.

A minute later, Lev sits in the nurse’s office, with the nurse doting on him like he’s got a fever.

“Don’t you worry,” she says. “Whatever happened to you, it’s all over now.”

From here in the nurse’s office, Lev has no way of knowing if they’ve captured Connor and Risa. He hopes that, if they have, they don’t bring them here. The thought of having to face them makes him feel ashamed. Doing the right thing shouldn’t make you ashamed.

“The police have been called, everything’s being taken care of,” the nurse tells him. “You’ll be going home soon.”

“I’m not going home,” he tells her. The nurse looks at him strangely, and he decides not to go into it. “Never mind. Can I call my parents?”

She looks at him, incredulous. “You mean, no one’s done that for you?” She looks at the school phone in the corner, then fumbles for the cell phone in her pocket instead. “You call and let them know you’re okay—and talk as long as you like.”

She looks at him for a moment, then decides to give him his privacy, stepping out of the room. “I’ll be right here if you need me.”

Lev begins to dial, but stops himself. It’s not his parents he wants to talk to.

He erases the numbers and keys in a different one, hesitates for a moment, then hits the send button.

It’s picked up on the second ring.

“Hello?”

“Pastor Dan?”

There’s only a split second of dead air, and then recognition. “Dear God, Lev? Lev, is that you? Where are you?”

“I don’t know. Some school. Listen, you have to tell my parents to stop the police! I don’t want them killed.”

“Lev, slow down. Are you all right?”

“They kidnapped me—but they didn’t hurt me, so I don’t want them hurt. Tell my father to call off the police!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. We never told the police.”

Lev is not expecting to hear this. “You never . . . what?”

“Your parents were going to. They were going to make a whole big deal about it—but I convinced them not to. I convinced them that your being kidnapped was somehow God’s will.”

Lev starts shaking his head like he can shake the thought away. “But . . . but why would you do that?”

Now Pastor Dan starts to sound desperate. “Lev, listen to me. Listen to me carefully. No one else knows that you’re gone. As far as anyone knows, you’ve been tithed, and people don’t ask questions about children who are tithed. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

“But . . . I want to be tithed. I need to be. You have to call my parents and tell them. You have to get me to harvest camp.”

Now Pastor Dan gets angry. “Don’t make me do that! Please, don’t make me do that!” It’s as if he’s fighting a battle, but somehow it’s not Lev he’s battling.

This is so far from Lev’s image of Pastor Dan, he can’t believe it’s the same person he’s known all these years. It’s like an impostor has stolen the Pastor’s voice, but none of his convictions.

“Don’t you see, Lev? You can save yourself. You can be anyone you want to be now.”

And all at once the truth comes to Lev. Pastor Dan wasn’t telling him to run away from the kidnapper that day—he was telling Lev to run away from him.

From his parents. From his tithing. After all of his sermons and lectures, after all that talk year after year about Lev’s holy duty, it’s all been a sham. Lev was born to be tithed—and the man who convinced him this was a glorious and honorable fate doesn’t believe it.

“Lev? Lev, are you there?”

He’s there, but he doesn’t want to be. He doesn’t want to answer this man who led him to a cliff only to turn away at the last minute. Now Lev’s emotions spin like a wheel of fortune. One moment he’s furious, the next, relieved. One instant he’s filled with terror so extreme, he can smell it like acid in his nostrils, and the next, there’s a spike of joy, like what he used to feel when he swung away and heard the crack of his bat against a ball. He is that ball now, soaring away.

His life has been like a ballpark, hasn’t it? All lines, structure, and rules, never changing. But now he’s been hit over the wall into unknown territory.

“Lev?” says Pastor Dan. “You’re scaring me. Talk to me.”

Lev takes a slow, deep breath, then says, “Good-bye, sir.” Then he hangs up without another word.

Lev sees police cars arrive outside. Connor and Risa will soon be caught, if they haven’t been caught already. The nurse is no longer standing at the door—she’s chiding the principal for how he’s handling this situation. “Why didn’t you call the poor boy’s parents? Why haven’t you put the school in lock-down?”

Lev knows what he has to do. It’s something wrong. It’s something bad. But suddenly he doesn’t care. He slips out of the office right behind the nurse’s and principal’s backs, and goes out into the hallway. It only takes a second to find what he’s looking for. He reaches for the little box on the wall.

I am lost in every possible way.

Then, feeling the coldness of the steel against his fingertips, he pulls the fire alarm.

16. Teacher

The fire alarm goes off during the teacher’s prep period, and she silently curses the powers that be for their awful timing. Perhaps, she thinks, if she can just stay in her empty classroom until the false alarm—and it’s always a false alarm—is dealt with. But then, what kind of example would she be setting if students passing by looked in to see her sitting there.

As she leaves the room, the hallways are already filling with students.

Teachers try their best to keep them organized, but this is a high school; the organized lines of elementary school fire drills are long gone, having been replaced by the brazen hormonal zigzags of kids whose bodies are too big for their own good.

Then she sees something strange. Something troubling.

There are two policemen by the front office—they actually seem intimidated by the mob of kids flowing past them and out the front doors of the school. But why policemen? Why not firemen? And how could they have gotten here so quickly? They couldn’t have—they must have been called before the alarm went off. But why?

The last time there were policemen in the school, someone called in a clapper threat. The school was evacuated, and no one knew why until after the fact. Turns out, there was no clapper—the school was never in danger of being blown up. It was just some kid pulling a practical joke. Still, clapper threats are always taken seriously, because you never know when the threat might be real.

“Please, no pushing!” she says to a student who bumps her elbow. “I’m sure we’ll all make it outside.” Good thing she didn’t take her coffee.

“Sorry, Ms. Steinberg.”

As she passes one of the science labs, she notices the door ajar. Just to be thorough, she peeks in to make sure there are no stragglers, or kids trying to avoid the mass exodus. The stone-top tables are bare and the chairs are all in place. No one had been in the lab this period. She reaches to pull the door closed, more out of habit than anything else, when she hears a sound that is wholly out of place in the room.

A baby’s cry.

At first she thinks it might be coming from the student mother nursery, but the nursery is way down the hall. This cry definitely came from the lab. She hears the cry again, only this time it sounds oddly muffled, and angrier. She knows that sound. Someone’s trying to cover the baby’s mouth to keep it from crying. These teen mothers always do that when they have their babies where they don’t belong.

They never seem to realize it only makes the baby cry louder.

“Party’s over,” she calls out. “C’mon, you and your baby have to leave with everyone else.”

But they don’t come out. There’s that muffled cry again, followed by some intense whispering that she can’t quite make out. Annoyed, she steps into the lab and storms down the center aisle looking left and right until she finds them crouched behind one of the lab tables. It’s not just a girl and a baby; there’s a boy there too. There’s a look of desperation about them. The boy looks as if he might bolt, but the girl grabs him firmly with her free hand. It keeps him in place. The baby wails.

The teacher might not know every name in school, but she’s fairly certain she knows every face—and she certainly knows all the student mothers. This isn’t one of them, and the boy is completely unfamiliar too.

The girl looks at her, eyes pleading. Too frightened to speak, she just shakes her head. It’s the boy who speaks.

“If you turn us in, we’ll die.”

At the thought, the girl holds the baby closer to her. Its cries lessen, but don’t go away entirely. Clearly these are the ones the police are looking for, for reasons she can only guess at.

“Please . . . ,” says the boy.

Please what? the teacher thinks. Please break the law? Please put myself and the school at risk? But, no, that’s not it at all. What he’s really saying is:

Please be a human being. With a life so full of rules and regiments, it’s so easy to forget that’s what they are. She knows—she sees—how often compassion takes a back seat to expediency.

Then a voice from behind her: “Hannah?”

She turns to see another teacher looking in from the door. He’s a bit disheveled, having fought the raging rapids of kids still funneling out of the school. He obviously hears the baby’s cries—how could he not?

“Is everything all right?” he asks.

“Yeah,” says Hannah, with more calm in her voice than she actually feels. “I’m taking care of it.”

The other teacher nods and leaves, probably glad not to share the burden of whatever this crying baby situation is.

Hannah now knows what the situation is, however—or at least she suspects.

Kids only have this kind of desperation in their eyes when they’re going to be unwound.

She holds out her hand to the frightened kids. “Come with me.” The kids are hesitant, so she says, “If they’re looking for you, they’ll find you once the building is empty. You can’t expect to hide here. If you want to get out, you have to leave with everyone else. C’mon, I’ll help you.”

Finally, they rise from behind the lab table, and she breathes a sigh of relief.

She can tell they still don’t trust her—but then, why should they? Unwinds exist in the constant shadow of betrayal. Well, they don’t need to trust her now, they just need to go with her. In this case, necessity is the mother of compliance, and that’s just fine.

“Don’t tell me your names,” she says to them. “Don’t tell me anything, so if they question me afterward, I won’t be lying when I say I don’t know.”

There are still crowds of kids pushing past in the hall, heading toward the nearest exit. She steps out of the room, making sure the two kids and their baby are right behind her. She will help them. Whoever they are, she will do her best to get them to safety. What kind of example would she be setting if she didn’t?

17. Risa

Police down the hall! Police at the exits! Risa knows this is Lev’s doing. He didn’t just run away, he turned them in. This teacher says she’s helping them, but what if she’s not? What if she’s just leading them to the police?

Don’t think about that now! Keep your eyes on the baby.

Policemen know panic when they see it. But if her eyes are turned to the baby, her panic might be read as concern for the baby’s tears.

“If I ever see Lev again,” says Connor, “I’ll tear him to pieces.”

“Shh,” says the teacher, leading them along with the crowd to the exit.

Risa can’t blame Connor for his anger. She blames herself for not seeing through Lev’s sham. How could she have been so naive to think he was truly on their side?

“We should have let the little creep be unwound,” grumbles Connor.

“Shut up,” says Risa. “Let’s just get out of this.”

As they near the door, another policeman comes into view standing just outside.

“Give me the baby,” the teacher orders, and Risa does as she’s told. She doesn’t yet realize why the woman asked for the baby, but it doesn’t matter. It’s wonderful to have someone leading the way who seems to know what they’re doing. Perhaps this woman isn’t the enemy after all. Perhaps she truly will get them through this.

“Let me go ahead,” the teacher says. “The two of you separate, and just walk out with the rest of the kids.”

Without the baby to look at, Risa knows she can’t hide the panic in her eyes, but suddenly she realizes that it might not matter—and now she understands why the woman took the baby. Yes, Lev turned them in. But if they’re lucky, these local police may only have a description of them to go by: a scruffy-haired boy and a dark-haired girl with a baby. Take away the baby, and that could be half the kids in this school.

The teacher—Hannah—passes the policeman a few yards ahead of them, and he gives her only a momentary glance. But then he looks toward Risa, and his eyes lock on her. Risa knows she’s just given herself away. Should she turn and race back into the school? Where’s Connor now? Is he behind her, in front of her?

She has no idea. She’s completely alone.

And then salvation arrives in a most unlikely form.

“Hi, Didi!”

It’s Alexis, the talkative girl from the school bus! She comes up beside her, with Chase gnawing at her shoulder. “People pull the alarms all the time,” she says. “Well, at least I got out of Math.”

Suddenly the policeman’s eyes shift to Alexis.

“Stop right there, miss.”

Alexis looks stunned. “Who, me?”

“Step aside. We’d like to ask you a few questions.”

Risa walks right on past, holding her breath for fear that her gasp of relief might draw the officer’s attention again. Risa no longer fits the profile of what they’re looking for . . . but Alexis does! Risa doesn’t look back; she just continues down the steps to the street.

In a few moments Connor catches up with her. “I saw what happened back there. Your friend may have just saved your life.”

“I’ll have to thank her later.”

Up ahead, Hannah reaches into her pocket with her free hand, pulls out her car keys, then turns left toward the faculty parking lot. It’s all going to be okay, Risa thinks. She’s going to get us out of here. Risa might just start believing in miracles, and angels. . . . And then she hears a familiar voice behind her.

“Wait! Stop!”

She turns to see Lev—he’s spotted them—and although he’s far away, he’s quickly working his way through the crowd toward them.

“Risa! Connor! Wait!”

It wasn’t enough to just turn them in, now he’s leading the cops directly to them—and he’s not the only one. Alexis still stands with the policeman at the school’s side entrance. From where she stands she can easily see Risa, and she points Risa out to the cop. The cop instantly pulls out his radio to inform the other officers.

“Connor, we’re in trouble.”

“I know—I see it too.”

“Wait!” screams Lev, still far away, but getting closer.

Risa looks for Hannah, but she’s vanished into the crowd of kids in the parking lot.

Connor looks at Risa, fear overwhelming the fury in his eyes. “Run.”

This time Risa doesn’t hesitate. She runs with him, breaking toward the street just as a fire truck bursts onto the scene, siren blaring. The truck stops right in their path. There’s nowhere to run. The fire alarm had mercifully been pulled at the perfect time, and it’s gotten them this far, but the commotion is fading. Kids are milling instead of moving, and cops in every direction zero in on the two of them.

What they need is a fresh commotion. Something even worse than a fire alarm.

The answer comes even before Risa can formulate the entire idea in her mind. She speaks without even knowing what she’s about to say.

“Start clapping!”

“What?”

“Start clapping. Trust me!”

A single nod from Connor makes it clear that he gets it, and he begins bringing his hands together, slowly at first, then more and more quickly. She does the same, both of them applauding as if they were at a concert cheering for their favorite band.

And beside them, a student drops his backpack and stares at them in utter horror.

“Clappers!” he screams.

In an instant the word is out.

ClappersClappersClappers . . .

It echoes in the kids around them. In an instant it reaches critical mass, and the entire crowd is in lull-blown panic.

“Clappers!” everyone screams, and the crowd becomes a stampede. Kids bolt, but no one is sure where to go. All they know is that they must get away from the school as quickly as possible.

Risa and Connor continue to clap, their hands red from the force of their duet of applause. With the mob racing in blind terror, the cops can’t get to them.

Lev has vanished, trampled by the panicked mob, and everything is made worse by the fire siren, which blares like it’s sounding out the end of the world.

They stop clapping and join the stampede, becoming a part of the running crowd.

That’s when someone comes up beside them. It’s Hannah. Her plans of driving them off campus are gone, so she quickly hands Risa the baby.

“There’s an antique shop on Fleming Street,” she tells them. “Ask for Sonia. She can help you.”

“We’re not clappers,” is all Risa can think to say.

“I know you’re not. Good luck.”

There’s no time to thank her. In a moment the wild crowd pulls them apart, taking Hannah in a different direction. Risa stumbles and realizes they’re in the middle of the street. Traffic has come to a halt as hundreds of kids race in a mad frenzy to escape the terrorists, wherever they are. The baby in Risa’s arms bawls, but its cries are nothing compared to the screams of the mob. In a moment they are across the street, and gone with the crowd.

18. Lev

This is the true meaning of alone: Lev Calder beneath the trampling feet of a stampeding crowd.

“Risa! Connor! Help!”

He should never have called out their names, but it’s too late to change that now. They ran from him when he called. They didn’t wait—they ran. They hate him. They know what he did. Now hundreds of feet race over Lev like he’s not there. His hand is stomped on, a boot comes down on his chest, and a kid springboards off of him to get greater speed.

Clappers. They’re all screaming about clappers, just because he pulled the stupid alarm.

He has to catch up with Risa and Connor. He has to explain, to tell them that he’s sorry—that he was wrong to turn them in and that he pulled the alarm to help them escape. He has to make them understand. They are his only friends now. They were. But not anymore. He’s ruined everything.

Finally, the stampede thins out enough for Lev to pick himself up. A knee of his jeans is torn. He tastes blood—he must have bitten his tongue. He tries to assess the situation. Most of the mob is off campus, in the street and beyond, disappearing down side streets. Only stragglers are left.

“Don’t just stand there,” says a kid hurrying past. “There are clappers on the roof!”

“No,” says another kid, “I heard they’re in the cafeteria.”

All around Lev, the bewildered cops pace with a false determination in their stride, as if they know exactly where to go, only to turn around and pace with the same determination in another direction.

Connor and Risa have left him.

He realizes that if he doesn’t leave now with the last of the stragglers, he’ll draw the attention of the police.

He runs away, feeling more helpless than a storked baby. He doesn’t know who to blame for this: Pastor Dan for cutting him loose? Himself for betraying the only two kids willing to help him? Or should he blame God for allowing his life to reach this bitter moment? You can be anyone you want to be now, Pastor Dan had said. But right now, Lev feels like no one.

This is the true meaning of alone: Levi Jedediah Calder suddenly realizing he no longer exists.

19. Connor

The antique shop is in an older part of town. Trees arch over the street, their branches cut into unnatural angular patterns by the profiles of passing trucks.

The street is full of yellow and brown leaves, but enough diehards still cling to the branches to make a shady canopy.

The baby is inconsolable, and Connor wants to complain to Risa about it, but knows that he can’t. If it hadn’t been for him, the baby wouldn’t even be part of the equation.

There aren’t all that many people on the street, but there are enough. Mostly it’s kids from the high school just knocking around, probably spreading more rumors about clappers trying to detonate themselves.

“I hear they’re anarchists.”

“I hear it’s some weird religion.”

“I hear they just do it to do it.”

The threat of clappers is so effective because no one knows what they really stand for.

“That was smart back there,” Connor tells Risa, as they approach the antique shop. “Pretending to be clappers, I mean. I would never have thought of that.”

“You thought quickly enough to take out that Juvey-cop the other day with his own tranq gun.”

Connor grins. “I go by instinct, you go by brains. I guess we make a pretty decent team.”

“Yeah. And we’re a bit less dysfunctional without Lev.”

At the mention of Lev, Connor feels a spike of anger. He rubs his sore arm where Lev bit him—but what Lev did today was much more painful than that.

“Forget about him. He’s history. We got away, so his squealing on us doesn’t matter. Now he’ll get unwound, just like he wants, and we won’t have to deal with him again.” And yet the thought of it brings Connor a pang of regret. He had risked his life for Lev. He had tried to save him, but had failed. Maybe if Connor were better with words, he could have said something that would have truly won him over. But who is he kidding? Lev was a tithe from the moment he was born.

You don’t undo thirteen years of brainwashing in two days.

The antique shop is old. White paint peels from the front door. Connor pushes open the door, and bells hanging high on the door jingle. Low-tech intruder alert. There’s one customer: a sour-faced man in a tweed coat. He looks up at them, disinterested and maybe disgusted by the baby, because he wanders deeper into the recesses of the cluttered store to get away.

The shop has things from perhaps every point in American history. A display of iPods and other little gadgets from his grandfather’s time cover an old chrome-rimmed dinner table. An old movie plays on an antique plasma-screen TV. The movie shows a crazy vision of a future that never came, with flying cars and a white-haired scientist.

“Can I help you?”

An old woman as hunched as a question mark comes out from behind the cash register. She walks with a cane, but she seems pretty surefooted in spite of it.

Risa bounces the baby to get its volume down. “We’re looking for Sonia.”

“You found her. What do you want?”

“We . . . uh . . . we need some help,” Risa says.

“Yeah,” Connor chimes in, “Someone told us to come here.”

The old woman looks at them suspiciously. “Does this have something to do with that fiasco over at the high school? Are you clappers?”

“Do we look like clappers to you?” says Connor.

The woman narrows her eyes at him. “Nobody looks like a clapper.”

Connor narrows his gaze to match hers, then goes over to the wall. He holds up his hand and jabs it forward with all his might, punching the wall hard enough to bruise his knuckles. A little painting of a fruit bowl falls off the wall. Connor catches it before it hits the ground and sets it on the counter.

“See?” he says. “My blood isn’t explosive. If I were a clapper, this whole shop would be gone.”

The old woman stares at him, and it’s a hard gaze for Connor to hold—there’s some sort of fire in those weary eyes. But Connor doesn’t look away. “See this hunch?” she asks them. “I got it from sticking my neck out for people like you.”

Connor still won’t break his gaze. “Guess we came to the wrong place, then.”

Glancing at Risa, he says, “Let’s get out of here.”

He turns to leave, and the old woman swings her cane sharply and painfully across his shins. “Not so fast. It just so happens that Hannah called me, so I knew you were coming.”

Risa, still bouncing the baby, lets out a frustrated breath. “You could have told us when we came in.”

“What fun would that be?”

By now the sour-faced customer has made his way closer again, picking up item after item, his expression showing instant disapproval of everything in the shop.

“I have some lovely infant items in the back room,” she tells them loud enough for the customer to hear. “Why don’t you go back there, and wait for me?”

Then she whispers, “And for God’s sake, feed that baby!”

The back room is through a doorway covered by what looks like an old shower curtain. If the front room was cluttered, this place is a disaster area.

Things like broken picture frames and rusty birdcages are piled all around—all the items that weren’t good enough to be displayed out front. The junk of the junk.

“And you’re telling me this old woman is going to help us?” says Connor. “It looks like she can’t even help herself!”

“Hannah said she would. I believe her.”

“How could you be raised in a state home and still trust people?”

Risa gives him a dirty look and says, “Hold this.” She puts the baby in Connor’s arms. It’s the first time she’s given it to him. It feels much lighter than he expected. Something so loud and demanding ought to be heavier. The baby’s cries have weakened now—it’s just about exhausted itself.

There’s nothing keeping them tied to this baby anymore. They could stork it again first thing in the morning. . . . And yet the thought makes Connor uncomfortable. They don’t owe this baby anything. It’s theirs by stupidity, not biology. He doesn’t want it, but he can’t stand the thought of someone getting the baby who wants it even less than he does. His frustration begins to ferment into anger. It’s the same kind of anger that always got him into trouble back home. It would cloud his judgment, making him lash out, getting into fights, cursing out teachers, or riding his skateboard wildly through busy intersections. “Why do you have to get wound so tight?” his father once asked, exasperated, and Connor had snapped back, “Maybe someone oughta unwind me.” At the time, he thought he was just being funny.

Risa opens a refrigerator, which is as cluttered as the rest of the back room.

She pulls out a container of milk, then finds a bowl, into which she pours the milk.

“It’s not a cat,” Connor says. “It won’t lick milk out of a bowl.”

“I know what I’m doing.”

Connor watches as she rummages around in drawers until finding a clean spoon. Then she takes the baby from him. Sitting down, she cradles the baby a bit more skillfully than Connor, then she dips the spoon into the milk and spills the spoonful into the baby’s mouth. The baby begins to gag on the milk, coughing and sputtering, but then Risa puts her index finger into its mouth. It sucks on her finger and closes its eyes, satisfied. In a few moments, she crooks her finger enough to leave a little space for her to spill in another spoonful of milk, then lets the baby suck on her finger again.

“Wow, that’s impressive,” says Connor.

“Sometimes I got to take care of babies at StaHo. You learn a few tricks. Let’s just hope it’s not lactose intolerant.”

With the baby quieted, it’s as if all the day’s tension has been suddenly released. Connor’s eyelids grow heavy, but he won’t allow himself to fall asleep.

They’re not safe yet. They may never be, and he can’t let his guard down now.

Still, his mind begins to drift off. He wonders if his parents are still looking for him, or if it’s just the police now. He thinks about Ariana. What would have happened to them if she had come along with him, as she had promised? They would have been caught on that first night—that’s what would have happened.

Ariana wasn’t street-smart like Risa. She wasn’t resourceful. Thoughts of Ariana bring a wave of sadness and longing, but it’s not as powerful a feeling as Connor thought it would be. How soon until she forgets him? How soon until everyone forgets him? Not long. That’s what happens with Unwinds. Connor had known other kids at school who disappeared over the past couple of years. One day they just didn’t turn up. Teachers would say that they were “gone” or “no longer enrolled.” Those were just code words, though. Everyone knew what they meant.

The kids who knew them would talk about how terrible it was, and gripe about it for a day or two, and then it became old news. Unwinds didn’t go out with a bang—they didn’t even go out with a whimper. They went out with the silence of a candle flame pinched between two fingers.

The customer finally leaves, and Sonia joins them in the back room. “So, you’re Unwinds and you want my help, is that it?”

“Maybe just some food,” says Connor, “a place to rest for a few hours. Then we’ll be on our way.”

“We don’t want to be any trouble,” says Risa.

The old woman laughs at that. “Yes, you do! You want to be trouble to everyone you meet.” She points her cane at Risa. “That’s what you are now. TROUBLE in caps-lock.” Then she puts her cane down, and softens a bit. “That’s not your fault, though. You didn’t ask to be born, and you didn’t ask to be unwound, either.” She looks back and forth between the two of them, then says to Risa just as bald-faced as can be: “If you really want to stay alive, honey, have him get you pregnant again. They won’t unwind an expectant mother, so that will buy you nine whole months.”

Risa drops her jaw, speechless, and Connor feels a flush come to his face.

“She . . . she wasn’t pregnant the first time. It’s not her baby. Or mine.”

Sonia considers this and takes a closer look at the baby. “Not yours, hmm? Well, that explains why you’re not breastfeeding.” She laughs suddenly and sharply. It makes Connor and the baby jump.

Risa isn’t startled, just annoyed. She gets the baby’s attention again with another spoonful of milk and her index finger. “Are you going to help us or not?”

Sonia lifts her cane and raps it against Connor’s arm, then points to a huge trunk covered with travel stickers. “Think you’re boeuf enough to bring that over here?”

Connor gets up, wondering what could possibly be of use to them in the trunk. He grabs on to it and struggles to push it across the faded Persian rug.

“Not much of a boeuf, are ya?”

“I never said I was.”

He inches the trunk across the floor until it’s right in front of her. Instead of opening it, she sits on top of it and begins to massage her ankles.

“So what’s in it?” Connor asks.

“Correspondence,” she says. “But it’s not what’s in it that matters. It’s what’s underneath.” Then with her cane she pushes away the rug where the trunk had been to reveal a trapdoor with a brass pull-ring.

“Go on,” says Sonia, pointing again with her cane. Connor sighs and grabs the ring, pulling open the trapdoor to reveal steep stone steps leading down into darkness. Risa puts down her bowl and, holding the baby over her shoulder in burping position, approaches the trapdoor, kneeling beside Connor.

“This is an old building,” Sonia tells them. “Way back in the early twentieth century, during the first Prohibition, they hid hooch down there.”

“Hooch?” asks Connor.

“Alcohol! I swear, this whole generation’s the same. Caps-lock IGNORANT!”

The steps down are steep and uneven. At first Connor thinks Sonia will send them down alone, but she insists on leading the way. She takes her time, and seems more surefooted on the steps than she does on level ground. Connor tries to hold her arm to give her support, but she shakes him off, and throws him a nasty gaze. “If I want your help, I’ll ask. Do I look feeble to you?”

“Actually, yes.”

“Looks are deceiving,” she says. “After all, when I saw you, I thought you looked reasonably intelligent.”

“Very funny.”

At the bottom, Sonia reaches toward the wall and throws a light switch.

Risa gasps, and Connor follows her gaze until he sees them. Three figures. A girl and two boys.

“Your little family has just grown,” Sonia tells them.

The kids don’t move. They appear to be close to Connor’s and Risa’s age.

Fellow Unwinds, for sure. They look wary and exhausted. Connor wonders if he looks as bad.

“For God’s sake, stop staring,” she says to them. “You look like a pack of rats.”

Sonia shuffles around the dusty cellar, pointing things out to Risa and Connor. “There are canned goods on these shelves, and a can opener around somewhere. Eat whatever you want, but don’t leave anything over or you really will see rats. Bathroom’s back there. Keep it clean. I’ll go out in a bit and get some formula and a baby bottle.” She glances at Connor. “Oh, and there’s a first-aid kit around here somewhere for the bite on your arm, whatever that’s all about.”

Connor suppresses a grin. Sonia doesn’t miss a thing.

“How much longer?” asks the oldest of the three cellar-rats, a muscular guy who looks at Connor with intense distrust, as if Connor might challenge his role as alpha male or something.

“What do you care?” says Sonia. “You got a pressing appointment?”

The kid doesn’t respond; he just glares at Sonia and crosses his arms, displaying a shark tattooed on his forearm. Ooh, thinks Connor with a smirk. Intimidating. Now I’m really scared.

Sonia sighs. “Four more days until I’m rid of you for good.”

“What happens in four days?” Risa asks.

“The ice cream man comes.” And with that, Sonia climbs up the stairs faster than Connor thought she’d be able to. The trapdoor bangs closed.

“Dear, sweet Dragon Lady won’t tell us what happens next,” says the second boy, a lanky blond kid with a faint smirk that seems permanently fixed on his face. He has braces on teeth that don’t appear to need them. Although his eyes tell of sleepless nights, his hair is perfect. Connor can tell that this kid, despite the rags he’s wearing, comes from money.

“We get sent to harvest camp and they cut us apart, that’s what happens next,” says the girl. She’s Asian, and looks almost as tough as the kid with the tattoo, with hair dyed a deep shade of pink and a spiked leather choker on her neck.

Shark Boy looks at her sharply. “Will you shut up with your end-of-the-world crap?” Connor notices that the kid has four parallel scratch marks on one side of his face, consistent with fingernails. The girl has a black eye.

“It’s not the end of the world,” she grumbles. “Just the end of us.”

“You’re beautiful when you’re nihilistic,” says the smirker.

“Shut up.”

“You’re only saying that because you don’t know what nihilistic means.”

Risa gives Connor a look, and he knows what she’s thinking. We have to suffer through four days with this crew? Still, she’s the first to hold out her hand to them and introduce herself. Reluctantly, Connor does the same.

Turns out, each of these kids, just like every Unwind, has a story that ranks a ten on the Kleenex scale.

The smirker is Hayden. As Connor predicted, he comes from a ridiculously wealthy family. When his parents got a divorce, there was a brutal custody battle over him. Two years and six court dates later, it still wasn’t resolved. In the end the only thing his mother and father could agree on was that each would rather see Hayden unwound than allow the other parent to have custody.

“If you could harness the energy of my parents’ spite,” Hayden tells them, “you could power a small city for several years.”

The girl is Mai. Her parents kept trying for a boy, until they finally got one—but not before having four girls first. Mai was the fourth. “It’s nothing new,” Mai tells them. “Back in China, in the days when they only allowed one kid per family, people were killing off their baby girls left and right.”

The big kid is Roland. He had dreams of being a military boeuf but apparently had too much testosterone, or steroids, or a combination of both, leaving him a little too scary even for the military. Like Connor, Roland got into fights at school—although Connor suspected Roland’s fights were much, much worse. That’s not what did him in, though. Roland had beaten up his stepfather for beating his mom. The mother took her husband’s side, and the stepfather got off with a warning. Roland, on the other hand, was sent to be unwound.

“That’s so unfair,” Risa tells him.

“Like what happened to you is any fairer?” says Connor.

Roland fixes his gaze on Connor. It’s emotional stone. “You keep talking to her in that tone of voice, maybe she’ll find herself a new boyfriend.”

Connor smiles with mocking warmth at him, and glances at the tattoo on his wrist. “I like your dolphin.”

Roland is not amused. “It’s a tiger shark, idiot.”

Connor makes a mental note never to turn his back on Roland.

Sharks, Connor once read, have a deadly form of claustrophobia. It’s not so much a fear of enclosed spaces as it is an inability to exist in them. No one knows why. Some say it’s the metal in aquariums that throws their equilibrium off. But whatever it is, big sharks don’t last long in captivity.

After a day in Sonia’s basement, Connor knows how they feel. Risa has the baby to keep her occupied. It requires a huge amount of attention, and although she gripes about the responsibility, Connor can tell she’s thankful simply to have something to help pass the hours. There’s a back room to the basement, and Roland insists that Risa have it for herself and the baby. He acts like he’s doing it to be kind, but it’s obvious that he’s doing it because he can’t stand the baby’s crying.

Mai reads. There’s a whole collection of dusty old books in the corner, and Mai always has one in her hand. Roland, having surrendered the back room to Risa, pulls out a shelving unit and sets up his own private residence behind it. He occupies the space like he’s had experience with being in a cell. When he’s not sitting in his little cell, he’s reorganizing the food in the basement into rations. “I take care of the food,” he announces. “Now that there’s five of us, I’ll redivide the rations, and decide who gets what and when.”

“I can decide what I want and when for myself,” Connor tells him.

“Not gonna work that way,” Roland says. “I had things under control before you got here. It’s gonna stay that way.” Then he hands Connor a can of Spam.

Connor looks at it in disgust. “You want better,” Roland says, “then you get with the program.”

Connor tries to weigh the wisdom of getting into a fight over this—but wisdom rarely arrives when Connor is ticked off. It’s Hayden who defuses the situation before it can escalate. Hayden grabs the can from Connor and pulls open the top.

“You snooze, you lose,” he says, and begins eating the Spam casually with his fingers. “Never had Spam till I came here—now I love it.” Then he grins. “God help me, I’m turning into trailer trash.”

Roland glares at Connor and Connor glares back. Then he says what he always says at moments like this.

“Nice socks.”

Although Roland doesn’t look down right away, it derails him just enough for him to back off. He doesn’t check to see if his socks match until he thinks Connor isn’t looking. And the moment he does, Connor snickers. Small victories are better than none.

Hayden is a bit of a riddle. Connor’s not sure whether he’s actually amused by everything that goes on around him or if it’s all just an act—a way of defending himself against a situation too painful to allow himself to feel. Usually Connor disliked rich, affected kids like Hayden, but there’s something about Hayden that simply makes it impossible not to like him.

Connor sits next to Hayden, who glances to make sure that Roland has gone behind his shelving unit.

“I like the ‘nice socks’ maneuver,” says Hayden. “Mind if I use that sometime?”

“Be my guest.”

Hayden pulls off a piece of Spam and offers it to Connor. Although it’s the last thing Connor wants right now, he takes it, because he knows it’s not about the meat—just as he knows Hayden didn’t take it because he wanted it.

The chunk of processed ham passes from Hayden to Connor, and something between them relaxes. An understanding is reached. I’m on your side, that piece of Spam says. I’ve got your back.

“Did you mean to have the baby?” Hayden asks.

Connor considers how he might answer. He figures the truth is the best way to begin even a tentative friendship. “It’s not mine.”

Hayden nods. “It’s cool that you’re hanging with her even though the kid’s not yours.”

“It’s not hers, either.”

Hayden smirks. He doesn’t ask how the baby came into their possession, because apparently the version he’s come up with in his mind is far more entertaining than anything Connor can offer. “Don’t tell Roland,” he says. “The only reason he’s being so nice to the two of you is because he believes in the sanctity of the nuclear family.” Connor can’t tell whether Hayden’s being serious or sarcastic. He suspects he’ll never figure that out.

Hayden chows down the last of the Spam, looks into the empty can, and sighs. “My life as a Morlock,” he says.

“Am I supposed to know what that is?”

“Light-sensitive underground frogmen, often portrayed in bad green-rubber costumes. Sadly, this is what we’ve become. Except for the green-rubber costume part.”

Connor glances at the food shelves. When he listens closely, he can hear the tinny beat of music coming from the antique MP3 player Roland must have stolen from upstairs when he first arrived.

“How long have you known Roland?”

“Three days longer than you,” Hayden says. “Word to the unwise—which I suspect you are—Roland is fine as long as he thinks he’s in charge. As long as you let him think that, we’re all one big, happy family.”

“What if I don’t want him to think that?”

Hayden tosses his can of Spam into the trash a few feet away. “The thing about Morlocks is that they’re known to be cannibals.”

Connor can’t sleep that first night. Between the discomfort of the basement and his distrust of Roland, all he can do is doze for moments at a time. He won’t sleep in the side room with Risa because the space is small, and he and Risa would have to sleep right up against each other. He tells himself the real reason is that he’s afraid of rolling over on the baby during the night. Mai and Hayden are also awake. It looks like Mai’s trying to sleep, but her eyes are open and her mind is somewhere else.

Hayden has lit a candle he found in the debris, making the basement smell like cinnamon over mildew. Hayden passes his hand back and forth over the flame. He doesn’t move slowly enough to burn himself, but he does move slowly enough to feel the heat. Hayden notices Connor watching him. “It’s funny how a flame can only burn your hand if you move too slow,” Hayden says. “You can tease it all you want and it never gets you, if you’re quick enough.”

“Are you a pyro?” Connor asks.

“You’re confusing boredom with obsession.”

Connor can sense, however, that there’s more to it.

“I’ve been thinking about kids that get unwound,” says Hayden.

“Why would you want to do that?” asks Connor.

“Because,” says Mai from across the room, “he’s a freak.”

“I’m not the one wearing a dog collar.”

Mai flips Hayden the finger, which he ignores. “I’ve been thinking about how harvest camps are like black holes. Nobody knows what goes on inside.”

“Everybody knows what goes on,” says Connor.

“No,” says Hayden. “Everybody knows the result, but nobody knows how unwinding works. I want to know how it happens. Does it happen right away, or do they keep you waiting? Do they treat you kindly, or coldly?”

“Well,” Mai sneers, “maybe if you’re lucky, you’ll get to find out firsthand.”

“You know what,” says Connor. “You think too much.”

“Well, somebody has to make up for the collective lack of brainpower down here.”

Now Connor finally begins to get it. Even though Hayden has put the candle down, all this talk of unwinding is just like passing his hand across the flame. He likes to linger at the edge of dangerous places. Dangerous thoughts. Connor thinks about his own favorite edge, behind the freeway road sign. In a way, they’re both alike.

“Fine,” Connor tells him. “Think about stuff until your head explodes. But the only thing I want to think about is surviving to eighteen.”

“I find your shallowness both refreshing and disappointing at the same time. Do you think that means I need therapy?”

“No, I think your parents deciding to unwind you just to spite each other means they need therapy.”

“Good point. You have a lot of insight for a Morlock.” Then Hayden gets quiet for a moment. The smirk on his face fades. “If I actually get unwound, I think it will bring my parents back together.”

Connor doesn’t have the heart to burst his fantasy, but Mai does. “Naah. If you get unwound, they’ll just blame each other for it, and hate each other even more.”

“Maybe,” says Hayden. “Or maybe they’ll finally see the light, and it will be Humphrey Dunfee all over again.”

“Who?” says Mai.

They both turn toward her. Hayden cracks a wide smile. “You mean you’ve never heard of Humphrey Dunfee?”

Mai looks around suspiciously. “Should I have?”

The smile never leaves Hayden’s face. “Mai, I’m truly amazed that you don’t know this. It’s your kind of story.” He reaches for the candle and pushes it out so that it sits between the three of them. “It’s not a campfire,” he says, “but it will have to do.” Hayden looks into the flame for a moment, then slowly, eerily turns his eyes toward Mai.

“Years ago there was this kid. His name wasn’t really Humphrey—it was probably Hal or Harry or something like that—but Humphrey kind of fits, considering. Anyway, one day his parents sign the order to have him unwound.”

“Why?” asks Mai.

“Why do any parents sign the order? They just did, and the Juvey-cops came for him bright and early one morning. They snatch him, ship him off, and it’s over for him.—He’s unwound without a hitch.”

“So that’s it?” asks Mai.

“No . . . because there is a hitch,” says Connor, picking up where Hayden left off. “See, the Dunfees, they’re not what you would call stable people. They were a little bit nuts to begin with, but after their kid is unwound, they lose it completely.”

Now Mai’s tough-girl exterior is all but gone. She truly is like a little kid listening wide-eyed to a campfire story. “What did they do?”

“They decided they didn’t want Humphrey unwound after all,” says Hayden.

“Wait a second,” says Mai. “You said they already unwound him.”

Hayden’s eyes look maniacal in the candlelight. “They did.”

Mai shudders.

“Here’s the thing,” says Hayden. “Like I said, everything about harvest camp is secret—even the records of who receives what, once the unwinding is done.”

“Yeah, so?”

“So the Dunfees found the records. The father, I think, worked for the government, so he was able to hack into the parts department.”

“The what?”

Hayden sighs. “The National Unwind Database.”

“Oh.”

“And he gets a printout of every single person who received a piece of Humphrey. Then the Dunfees go traveling around the world to find them . . . so they can kill them, take back the parts, and bit by bit make Humphrey whole. . . .”

“No way.”

“That’s why people call him Humphrey,” Connor adds. “’Cause ‘all the king’s horses and all the king’s men . . . couldn’t put Humphrey together again.’ ”

The thought hangs heavy in the air, until Hayden, leaning forward over the candle, suddenly throws his hands out toward Mai and shouts, “Boo!”

They all flinch in spite of themselves—Mai most of all.

Connor has to laugh. “Did you see that? She practically jumped out of her skin!”

“Better not do that, Mai,” says Hayden. “Jump out of your skin, and they’ll give it to someone else before you can get it back.”

“You can both just take a flying leap.” Mai tries to punch Hayden, but he easily evades her. That’s when Roland appears from behind his bookshelves.

“What’s going on here?”

“Nothing,” says Hayden. “Just telling ghost stories.”

Roland looks at the three of them, clearly irritated, and distrustful of any situation not involving him. “Yeah, well, get to bed. It’s late.”

Roland lumbers back to his corner, but Connor’s sure he’s monitoring the conversation now, probably paranoid that they’re plotting against him.

“That Humphrey Dunfee thing,” says Mai. “It’s just a story, right?”

Connor keeps his opinion to himself, but Hayden says, “I knew a kid who used to tell people he had Humphrey’s liver. Then one day he disappeared and was never seen again. People said he just got unwound, but then again . . . maybe the Dunfees got him.” Then Hayden blows out the candle, leaving them in darkness.

On Connor and Risa’s third day there, Sonia calls each of them upstairs—but one at a time, in the order they’d arrived.

“First the thieving ox,” she says, pointing down the stairs at Roland.

Apparently she knows about the stolen MP3 player.

“What do you suppose the Dragon Lady wants?” Hayden asks, after the trapdoor is closed.

“To drink your blood,” says Mai. “Beat you with her cane for a while. Stuff like that.”

“I wish you’d stop calling her the Dragon Lady,” Risa says. “She’s saving your ass—the least you could do is show some respect.” She turns toward Connor.

“You wanna take Didi? My arms are getting tired.” Connor takes the baby, cradling it a bit more skillfully than he had before. Mai looks at him with mild interest. He wonders if Hayden told her that they’re not really the baby’s parents.

Roland comes back from his appointment with Sonia half an hour later, and says nothing about it. Neither does Mai when she comes back. Hayden takes the longest, and when he returns, he’s closemouthed too—which is strange for him.

It’s unsettling.

Connor goes next. It’s night outside when he goes upstairs. He has no idea what time of night. Sonia sits with him in her little back room, putting him in an uncomfortable chair that wobbles whenever he moves.

“You’ll be leaving here tomorrow,” she tells him.

“Going where?”

She ignores the question and reaches into the drawer of an old rolltop desk.

“I’m hoping you’re at least semiliterate.”

“Why? What do you want me to read?”

“You don’t have to read anything.” Then she pulls out several sheets of blank paper. “I want you to write.”

“What, my last will and testament? Is that it?”

“A will implies you have something to pass on—which you don’t. What I want you to do is write a letter.” She hands him the paper, a pen, and an envelope. “Write a letter to someone you love. Make it as long as you want, or as short as you want; I don’t care. But fill it with everything you wished you could say, but never had the chance. Do you understand?”

“What if I don’t love anybody?”

She purses her lips and shakes her head slowly. “You Unwinds are all the same. You think that because no one loves you, then you can’t love anyone. All right, then, if there’s no one you love, then pick someone who needs to hear what you have to say. Say everything that’s in your heart—don’t hold back. And when you’re done, put it in the envelope and seal it. I’m not going to read it, so don’t worry about that.”

“What’s the point? Are you going to mail it?”

“Just do it and stop asking questions.” Then she takes a little ceramic dinner bell, and places it on the rolltop desk, next to the pen and paper. “Take all the time you need, and when you’re done, ring the bell.”

Then she leaves him alone.

It’s an odd request, and Connor actually finds himself a bit frightened by it.

There are places inside he simply doesn’t want to go. He thinks he might write to Ariana. That would be easiest. He had cared about her. She was closer to him than any other girl had ever been. Every girl except Risa—but then, Risa doesn’t really count. What he and Risa have isn’t a relationship; it’s just two people clinging to the same ledge hoping not to fall. After about three lines of his letter, Connor crumples the page. Writing to Ariana feels pointless. No matter how much he’s resisted, he knows who he needs to address this letter to.

He presses his pen to a fresh page and writes, Dear Mom and Dad. . . .

It’s five minutes before he can come up with another line, but once he does, the words start flowing—and in strange directions, too. At first it’s angry, as he knew it would be. How could you? Why did you? What kind of people could do this to their kid? Yet by the third page it mellows. It becomes about all the good things that happened in their lives together. At first he does it to hurt them, and to remind them exactly what they’ve thrown away when they signed the order to unwind him. But then it becomes all about remembering—or more to the point, getting them to remember, so that when he’s gone . . . if he’s gone, there will be a record of all the things he felt were worth keeping alive. When he started, he knew how the letter would end. I hate you for what you’ve done. And I’ll never forgive you. But when he finally reaches the tenth page, he finds himself writing, I love you. Your one-time son, Connor.

Even before he signs his name, he feels the tears welling up inside. They don’t seem to come from his eyes but from deep in his gut. It’s a heaving so powerful it hurts his stomach and his lungs. His eyes flood, and the pain inside is so great, he’s certain it will kill him right here, right now. But he doesn’t die, and in time the storm inside him passes, leaving him weak in every joint and muscle of his body. He feels like he needs Sonia’s cane just to walk again.

His tears have soaked into the pages, warping little craters in the paper but not smudging the ink. He folds the pages and slips them into the envelope, then seals and addresses it. He takes a few more minutes to make sure the storm won’t come back. Then he rings the little bell.

Sonia steps in moments later. She must have been waiting all this time just on the other side of that curtain. Connor knows she must have heard him bawling, but she doesn’t say a thing. She looks at his letter, hefts it in her hand to feel its weight, and raises her eyebrows, impressed. “Had a lot to say, did you?”

Connor only shrugs. She puts the envelope facedown on the table again.

“Now I want you to put a date on the back. Write down the date of your eighteenth birthday.”

Connor doesn’t question her anymore. He does as she asks. When he’s done, she takes the envelope from him. “I’m going to hold this letter for you,” she tells him. “If you survive to eighteen, you must promise that you’ll come back here to get it. Will you make me that promise?”

Connor nods. “I promise.”

She shakes the letter at him to help make her point. “I will keep this until a year after your eighteenth birthday. If you don’t come back, I’ll assume you didn’t make it. That you were unwound. In that case I’ll send the letter myself.”

Then she hands the letter back to him, stands, and goes over to the old trunk that had covered the trapdoor. She opens the latch and, although it must be heavy, heaves open the lid to reveal envelopes—hundreds of them, filling the trunk almost up to the top.

“Leave it here,” she says. “It will be safe. If I die before you come back, Hannah has promised to take care of the trunk.”

Connor thinks of all the kids Sonia must have helped to have this many letters in her trunk, and he feels another wave of emotion taking hold of his gut.

It doesn’t quite bring him to tears, but it makes him feel all soft inside. Soft enough to say, “You’ve done something wonderful here.”

Sonia waves her hand, swatting the thought away. “You think this makes me a saint? Let me tell you, I’ve had a considerably long life, and I’ve done some pretty awful things, too.”

“Well, I don’t care. No matter how many times you smack me with that cane, I think you’re decent.”

“Maybe, maybe not. One thing you learn when you’ve lived as long as I have—people aren’t all good, and people aren’t all bad. We move in and out of darkness and light all of our lives. Right now, I’m pleased to be in the light.”

On his way downstairs, she makes sure to smack him on the butt with her cane hard enough to sting, but it only makes him laugh.

He doesn’t tell Risa what’s in store for her. Somehow telling her would be stealing something from her. Let this be between her, Sonia, the pen, and the page, as it had been for him.

She leaves the baby with him as she goes up to face the old woman. It’s asleep, and right now, in this place and at this moment, there’s something so comforting about holding it in his arms, he’s thankful he saved it. And he thinks that if his soul had a form, this is what it would be. A baby sleeping in his arms.

20. Risa

The next time Sonia opens the trapdoor, Risa knows things are changing again. The time has come to leave the safety of Sonia’s basement.

Risa’s the first in line when Sonia calls them to come up. Roland would have been, but Connor threw an arm out like a turnstile to let Risa get to the stairs first.

With the sleeping baby crooked in her right arm, and her left hand on the rusty steel banister, Risa climbs the jagged stone steps. Risa assumes she’ll be climbing into daylight, but it’s night. The lights are out in the shop—just a few night-lights are on, carefully positioned so the kids can avoid the minefield of random antiques around them.

Sonia leads them to a back door that opens into an alley. There’s a truck waiting for them there. It’s a small delivery truck. On its side is a picture of an ice cream cone.

Sonia hadn’t lied. It is the ice cream man.

The driver stands beside the open back door of the truck. He’s a scruffy guy who looks like he’d more likely be delivering illegal drugs than kids. Roland, Hayden, and Mai head for the truck, but Sonia stops Risa and Connor.

“Not yet, you two.”

Then Risa notices a figure standing in the shadows. Risa’s neck hairs begin to bristle defensively, but when the figure steps forward, she realizes who it is. It’s Hannah, the teacher who saved them at the high school.

“Honey, the baby can’t go where you’re going,” Hannah says.

Reflexively, Risa holds the baby closer to her. She doesn’t even know why.

All she’s wanted to do since getting stuck with the thing is to get rid of it.

“It’s all right,” says Hannah. “I’ve talked it over with my husband. We’ll just say we were storked. It will be fine.”

Risa looks in Hannah’s eyes. She can’t see all that well in the dim light, but she knows the woman means what she says.

Connor, however, steps between them. “Do you want this baby?”

“She’s willing to take it,” says Risa. “That’s enough.”

“But does she want it?”

“Did you want it?”

That seems to give Connor pause for thought. Risa knows he didn’t want it, but he had been willing to take it when the alternative was a miserable life with a miserable family. Just as Hannah is willing to save it from an uncertain future right now. Finally Connor says, “It’s not an it. It’s a she.” Then he heads off toward the truck.

“We’ll give her a good home,” Hannah says. She takes a step closer, and Risa transfers the baby to her.

The moment the baby is out of her arms Risa feels a tremendous sense of relief, but also an indefinable sense of emptiness. It’s a feeling not quite intense enough to leave her in tears, but strong enough to leave her with a phantom sort of aching, the type of thing an amputee must feel after losing a limb. That is, before a new one is grafted on.

“You take care, now,” says Sonia, giving Risa an awkward hug. “It’s a long journey, but I know you can make it.”

“Journey to where?”

Sonia doesn’t answer.

“Hey,” says the driver, “I don’t got all night.”

Risa says good-bye to Sonia, nods to Hannah, and turns to join Connor, who’s waiting for her at the back of the truck. As Risa leaves, the baby starts to cry, but she doesn’t look back.

She’s surprised to find about a dozen other kids in the truck, all distrustful and scared. Roland’s still the biggest, and he solidifies his position by making another kid move, even though there’s plenty of other places to sit.

The delivery truck is a hard, cold, metal box. It once had a refrigeration unit to keep the ice cream cold, but that’s gone along with the ice cream. Still, it’s freezing in there, and it smells of spoiled dairy. The driver closes and locks the back doors, sealing out the sound of the baby, who Risa can still hear crying. Even after the door is closed, she thinks she can still hear it, although it’s probably just her imagination.

The ice cream truck bounces along the uneven streets. The way the truck sways, their backs are constantly smacked against the wall behind them.

Risa closes her eyes. It makes her furious that she actually misses the baby.

It was thrust upon her at the worst possible moment in her life—why should she have any regret about being rid of it? She thinks about the days before the Heartland War, when unwanted babies could just be unwanted pregnancies, quickly made to go away. Did the women who made that other choice feel the way she felt now? Relieved and freed from an unwelcome and often unfair responsibility . . . yet vaguely regretful?

In her days at the state home, when she was assigned to take care of the infants, she would often ponder such things. The infant wing had been massive and overflowing with identical cribs, each containing a baby that nobody had wanted, wards of a state that could barely feed them, much less nurture them.

“You can’t change laws without first changing human nature,” one of the nurses often said as she looked out over the crowd of crying infants. Her name was Greta. Whenever she said something like that, there was always another nurse within earshot who was far more accepting of the system and would counter with, “You can’t change human nature without first changing the law.” Nurse Greta wouldn’t argue; she’d just grunt and walk away.

Which was worse, Risa often wondered—to have tens of thousands of babies that no one wanted, or to silently make them go away before they were even born? On different days Risa had different answers.

Nurse Greta was old enough to remember the days before the war, but she rarely spoke of them. All her attention was given to her job, which was a formidable one, since there was only one nurse for every fifty babies. “In a place like this you have to practice triage,” she told Risa, referring to how, in an emergency, a nurse had to choose which patients would get medical attention.

“Love the ones you can,” Nurse Greta told her. “Pray for the rest.” Risa took the advice to heart, and selected a handful of favorites to give extra attention. These were the ones Risa named herself, instead of letting the randomizing computer name them. Risa liked to think she had been named by a human being instead of by a computer. After all, her name wasn’t all that common. “It’s short for sonrisa,” a Hispanic kid once told her. “That’s Spanish for ‘smile.’ ” Risa didn’t know if she had any Hispanic blood in her, but she liked to think she did. It connected her to her name.

“What are you thinking about?” Connor asks, tearing her out of her thoughts and bringing her back to the uneasy reality around them.

“None of your business.”

Connor doesn’t look at her—he seems to be focusing on a big rust spot on the wall, thinking. “You okay about the baby?” he asks.

“Of course.” Her tone is intentionally indignant, as if the question itself offended her.

“Hannah will give her a good home,” Connor says. “Better than us, that’s for sure, and better than that beady-eyed cow who got storked.” He hesitates for a moment, then says, “Taking that baby was a massive screwup, I know—but it ended okay for us, right? And it definitely ended better for the baby.”

“Don’t screw up like that again,” is all Risa says.

Roland, sitting toward the front, turns to the driver and asks, “Where are we going?”

“You’re asking the wrong guy,” the driver answers. “They give me an address. I go there, I look the other way, and I get paid.”

“This is how it works,” says another kid who had already been in the truck when it arrived at Sonia’s. “We get shuffled around. One safe house for a few days, then another, and then another. Each one is a little bit closer to where we’re going.”

“You gonna tell us where that is?” asks Roland.

The kid looks around, hoping someone else might answer for him, but no one comes to his aid. So he says, “Well, it’s only what I hear, but they say we end up in a place called . . . ‘the graveyard.’ ”

No response from the kids, just the rattling of the truck.

The graveyard. The thought of it makes Risa even colder. Even though she’s curled up knees to chest, arms wrapped tight around her like a straitjacket, she’s still freezing. Connor must hear the chattering of her teeth, because he puts his arm around her.

“I’m cold too,” he says. “Body heat, right?”

And although she has an urge to push him away, she finds herself leaning into him until she can feel his heartbeat in her ears.