Even before they begin, Lev speaks loudly enough to get everyone’s attention, stealing the floor from Cavenaugh before he has the chance to take it. “Why is the portrait of me back in the dining hall?” he asks. “It was already vandalized once—why put it back?” The question quiets everyone down and brings the room to order.
“I ordered it restored and returned,” says Cavenaugh. “The comfort and focus it provides the ex-tithes is invaluable.”
“I agree!” says one of the teachers. “I think it draws their focus toward the positive.” Then she punctuates her remark with a brownnosing nod toward Cavenaugh. “I, for one, like it and approve.”
“Well, I don’t like it, and I don’t approve,” Lev tells them, for the first time voicing his feelings out loud. “I shouldn’t be some sort of god-thing. I shouldn’t be put on a pedestal. I’m not and never have been this image you’re trying to make me.”
There’s silence around the room as everyone waits to see how Cavenaugh will react. He takes his time and finally says, “We all have our jobs here. Yours is very clear and very simple: to be an example for the other ex-tithes to follow. Have you noticed kids have been letting their hair grow? At first I thought your hair would be off-putting, but now they are modeling themselves on you. It’s what they need at this juncture.”
“I’m not a role model!” Lev yells. He stands up, not even realizing he’s come to his feet. “I was a clapper. A terrorist! I made awful decisions!”
But Cavenaugh remains calm. “It’s your good decisions we care about. Now sit down and let us get on with this meeting.”
Lev looks around the table but sees no support. If anything, he sees them all tallying this outburst as one of his bad decisions, best forgotten. He boils with the same kind of anger that once turned him into a clapper, but he bites it back, sits down, and remains silent for the rest of the meeting.
It’s only as the meeting breaks up that Cavenaugh takes his hand. Not to shake it, but to flip it over and scrutinize his fingers—or more specifically, to look under his fingernails.
“Best clean those a little better, Lev,” he says. “Spray paint comes out with turpentine, I think.”
28 - Risa
Risa does not have an Easter social. She can’t even be sure which day is Easter—she’s lost track of the days. In fact, she can’t even be sure where she is. At first she’s held by the Juvenile Authority in Tucson, then transferred in a windowless armored vehicle to another detention facility about two hours away—in Phoenix, she presumes. Here is where they send in interrogators to ask her questions.
“How many kids are in the Graveyard?”
“A bunch.”
“Who sends your supplies?”
“George Washington. Or is it Abraham Lincoln? I forget.”
“How often do you receive new arrivals?”
“About as often as you beat your wife.”
The interrogators are infuriated by her lack of cooperation, but she has no intention of telling them anything useful. Besides, she knows they’re asking her questions they already know the answers to. The questions are merely tests to see whether she’ll tell the truth or lie. She doesn’t do either. Instead she makes a mockery of each interrogation.
“Your cooperation might make things easier on you,” they tell her.
“I don’t want things easy,” she responds. “I’ve had a hard life. I’d rather stick with what’s familiar.”
They let her go hungry but don’t let her starve. They tell her they have Elvis Robert Mullard in custody and they’re cutting him a deal for information—but she knows they’re lying, because if they had him, they’d know it’s not Mullard at all, but Connor.
This is how it goes for two weeks. Then one day in walks a Juvey-cop. He aims a gun at her and unceremoniously tranqs her—not in the leg, where it would hurt the least, but right in the chest, where it stings until she loses consciousness.
She awakes in a different cell. A little newer and larger, perhaps, but still a cell. She has no idea where she has been transported this time, or why. This new cell is not at all designed for a paraplegic, and her captors have offered no help since she arrived. Not that she’d accept it if they did, but it’s as if they want her to struggle over the lip of the bathroom threshold, or onto her bed, which is abnormally high—just enough to make getting into it an ordeal.
She suffers a week of food brought in by a silent guard in a rent-a-cop uniform. She knows she’s no longer in the hands of the Juvenile Authority, but who her new captors are is a mystery. These new jailers ask no questions, and that concerns her the same way that Connor is always concerned by the fact that the Graveyard has never been taken out. Are they so unimportant in the grand scheme of things that the Juvenile Authority won’t even torture her to get the information they want? Have they been deluding themselves into thinking they’re making a difference?
All this time she’s forced out thoughts of Connor, because it simply hurt too much to think about him. How horrified he must have been when she turned herself in. Horrified and stunned. Well, fine, let him be; he’ll get over it. She did it for him just as much as she did it for the injured boy, because as painful as it is to admit, Risa knows she had become just a distraction to Connor. If he’s truly going to lead those kids in the Graveyard like the Admiral did, he can’t be giving Risa leg massages and worrying whether her emotional needs are being met. Maybe he does love her, but it’s obvious there’s no room in his life at this moment to pay it any more than lip service.
Risa has no idea what her future holds now. All she knows is that she must focus on that future and not on Connor, no matter how much that hurts.
- - -
A few days later Risa finally has an actual visitor: a well-dressed woman with an air of authority.
“Good morning, Risa. It’s a pleasure to finally meet the girl behind the hullabaloo. “
Risa immediately decides that anyone who uses the word “hullabaloo” cannot be her friend.
The woman sits down in the single chair in the cell. It’s a chair that has never been used, because it’s not exactly designed for a paraplegic. In fact, it seems specifically designed not to be accessible to Risa, like most everything else in her cell. “I trust they’ve been treating you well?”
“I haven’t been ‘treated’ at all. I’ve been ignored.”
“You haven’t been ignored,” the woman tells her. “You’ve just been allowed some time to settle. Some time alone, to think.”
“Somehow I doubt I’ve ever been alone. . . .” Risa throws a glance to a large wall mirror, through which she can occasionally see shadows. “So am I some sort of political prisoner?” She asks, getting right to the point. “If you’re not going to torture me, do you just plan to leave me here to rot? Or maybe you’re selling me to a parts pirate. At least the parts that work.”
“None of those things,” says the woman. “I’m here to help you. And you, my dear, are going to help us.”
“I doubt that.” Risa rolls away, although she can’t roll very far. The woman doesn’t get up from her chair. She doesn’t even move; she just sits there comfortably. Risa wanted to be in control of this situation, but this woman keeps control with her voice alone.
“My name is Roberta. I represent an organization called Proactive Citizenry. Our purpose, among other things, is to do good in this world. We seek to advance the causes of both science and freedom as well as to provide a sense of spiritual enlightenment.”
“And what does that have to do with me?”
Roberta smiles and pauses a moment, holding her smile before she speaks. “I’m going to have the charges against you dropped, Risa. But more importantly, I’m going to get you out of that wheelchair and give you a new spine.”
Risa turns to her, filled with more mixed emotions than she can sort right now. “No, you will not! It’s my right to refuse the spine of an Unwind.”
“Yes, it is,” Roberta says, way too calmly. “However, I firmly believe you will change your mind.”
Risa crosses her arms, her belief more firm than Roberta’s that she won’t.
- - -
She’s given the silent treatment again—but they must be getting impatient, because it’s only for two days this time instead of a week. Roberta returns and sits once more in the chair designed for people who can walk. This time she has a folder with her, although Risa can’t see what’s inside.
“Have you given any thought to my offer?” Roberta asks her.
“I don’t need to. I already gave you my answer.”
“It’s very noble to stand on principle and refuse an unwound spine,” Roberta says. “It does, however, represent a wrongful mind-set that is neither productive nor adaptive. It’s backward, actually, and it makes you part of the problem.”
“I plan to keep my ‘wrongful mind-set’ as well as my wheelchair.”
“Very well. I won’t deny you your choice.” Roberta shifts in her chair—perhaps a little irritated, or maybe just in anticipation. “There’s someone I’d like you to meet.” Then she stands and opens the door. Risa knows that whoever it is has been waiting in the other room, watching through the oneway mirror.
“You can come in now,” Roberta says cheerfully.
A boy steps in cautiously. He seems sixteen or so. He has multicolored skin and multicolored streaks in his hair. At first she assumes it’s some sort of extreme body modification, but she quickly realizes it’s more than that. There is something profoundly wrong about him.
“Hi,” he says, and smiles tentatively with perfect teeth. “I’m Cam. I’ve been looking forward to meeting you, Risa.”
Risa backs away, her wheelchair bumping the wall. Now it strikes her exactly what she’s seeing—exactly why this boy seems so “off.” She has seen a news report about this creation. Her flesh starts to crawl. If it could, it would crawl right through the air vents to escape what she’s seeing.
“Get that thing away from me! It’s disgusting! Get it away!”
His expression mirrors Risa’s horror. He backs away and hits the wall as well.
“It’s all right, Cam,” Roberta says. “You know people always have to get used to you. And she will.” Roberta offers him the chair, but suddenly Cam doesn’t want to be there, he wants to escape just as much as Risa does.
Risa looks to Roberta so she doesn’t have to look at Cam. “I said get it out of here.”
“I’m not an it,” Cam insists.
Risa shakes her head. “Yes, you are.” She still won’t look directly at him. “Now get it out of here, or I swear I will rip every stolen part out of its body with my bare hands.”
She tries not to catch his gaze, but she can’t stop herself. The thing has begun to cry tears from someone else’s stolen tear ducts, and it just makes her angry.
