UnSouled (14 page)

Since their plane crashed in the Salton Sea almost three weeks ago, things have not been easy for the Stork Club. Not at first anyway. Those first days, they hid out in the bare mountains above the Salton Sea, finding shallow caves and crevices to huddle in, so they couldn’t be seen by reconnaissance aircraft. Starkey knew a ground search would be mounted, which meant they had to get far away, but they could travel only at night and on foot.

He had not thought of how to provide food or shelter or first aid for the kids who were injured in the crash, and they resorted to ransacking roadside convenience stores, which kept giving away their position to the authorities.

It was a trial by fire for Starkey, but he came through the flames, and thanks to him they remained alive and uncaptured. He kept those kids safe in his fist, in spite of his shattered hand. His hand is now the kind of war wound that legends are made of and has brought him even greater respect, because if he was tough enough to break his own hand in order to save them, he’s tough enough to do anything.

In Palm Springs, they came across a hotel that had shut down but had not yet been demolished, and their fortune began to change. The place was isolated enough that they could hole up there and take the time to come up with a survival plan more effective than stripping 7-Elevens to the bone.

Starkey began to send kids out in small teams, choosing kids who didn’t have an innately suspicious look about them. They stole clothes from unattended laundry rooms and groceries right from supermarket loading docks.

They stayed there for almost a week, until some local kids spotted them. “I’m a stork, too,” one of the kids said. “We won’t tell on you; we swear.”

But Starkey has never trusted kids who come from loving families. He has a particular dislike of storks whose adoptive parents love them like their own flesh and blood. Starkey knows the basic statistics of unwinding. He knows that 99 percent of all storked kids are in warm loving homes, where unwinding would never be an issue. But when you’re in that remaining 1 percent, and you’re surrounded by other throwaway kids, those loving homes seem too distant to matter.

Then Jeevan came up with a stroke of genius. He tapped into the bank account of the Stork Clubs’ parents—because
quite a few of the kids either knew, or could figure out, their adoptive parents’ passwords. The operation went down all at once, with a few computer clicks—and by the time anyone knew what was going on, the Stork Club had amassed more than seventeen thousand dollars in an offshore account. Accessing it was as simple as linking a counterfeit ATM card.

“Somebody somewhere is investigating this,” Jeevan told Starkey. “In the end it won’t lead them to us, though. It will lead them to Raymond Harwood.”

“Who’s Raymond Harwood?” Starkey had asked.

“A kid who used to pick on me in middle school.”

That had made Starkey laugh. “Jeevan, have I ever told you that you’re a criminal genius?”

He hadn’t seemed too comfortable with the thought. “Well, I’ve been told I’m a genius . . . .”

Starkey often wonders why Jeevan’s parents would choose to unwind a kid so bright—but it’s an unspoken rule that you just don’t ask.

The money gave the storks a little bit of freedom, because money buys legitimacy. All they needed was a simple subterfuge—an illusion that no one would question—and if there’s one thing that Starkey knows as an amateur magician, it’s the art of illusion. Misdirection. Every magician knows that an audience will always follow the hand that moves and will always believe what is presented to the eye until there’s a reason not to.

Camp Red Heron was Starkey’s own brainstorm. All it took to make the illusion real was an order of 130 camp T-shirts, staff shirts, and a few matching hats as icing on the cake. As Camp Red Heron, they were able to travel on trains and even charter buses, because the illusion ran on the power of assumption. People saw a camp on a field trip, and it became part of their reality without a second thought. Ironically, the more boisterous, the more visible they were, the more powerfully
the illusion held. Even if people were watching a news report about the band of fugitive Unwinds, Camp Red Heron could march right past them, loud and obnoxious, and no one—not even law enforcement—would bat an eye. Who knew that hiding in plain sight could be so gratifying?

The first order of business was getting out of Southern California to a place where the authorities would not be searching for them. Having had enough desert for a lifetime, Starkey deemed that they take the Amtrak north to greener, lusher pastures. At their first campsite, near Monterey, they had no trouble whatsoever. Then they continued north, reserving their space at Redwood Bluff. All had gone well until today—but even so, today’s crisis was easily managed.

Bam finishes rinsing the bleaching solution out of Starkey’s hair, and the towel boy hurries to dry it.

“So, if the campground manager squeals, will you really hurt one of his kids?” Bam asks.

Starkey is annoyed that she’s asked such a question in front of the flashlights, the towel, and the water bucket.

“He won’t squeal,” Starkey says, tousling his hair.

“But if he does?”

He turns to the towel kid. He’s one of the younger groupies who’s always trying to win Starkey’s favor. “What do I always say?”

The kid takes on a terrified pop-quiz look. “Uh . . . smoke and mirrors?”

“Exactly! It’s all smoke and mirrors.”

That’s the only answer he gives Bam—and even the answer is a foggy deflection, a nonanswer that avoids the question. Would he hurt them? Although Starkey would rather not think about it, he knows he’ll do whatever is necessary to protect his storks. Even if it means making an example of someone.

“Speaking of mirrors, have a look,” Bam says, and hands
him a mirror that she tore off the side of someone’s car.

It’s hard to get a full view of himself—he keeps having to shift the mirror to catch the entire visual effect. “I like it,” he says.

“You look good as a platinum blond,” she tells him. “Very surfer dude.”

“Yeah, but surfer dude doesn’t exactly inspire trust from adults,” Starkey points out. “Cut it. Make it short and neat. I want to look like an Eagle Scout.”

“You’ll never be an Eagle Scout, Starkey,” she says with a grin, and some of the other kids laugh. It actually hurts, although he won’t show it. He first got interested in magic when he was younger because of its value as a Boy Scout merit badge. Funny how things change.

“Just do it, Bambi,” he says. Which makes her scowl, as he intended. The other kids know not to laugh at her actual given name, lest they face her formidable wrath.

When Bam is done, Starkey could pass for the boy next door when he smiles, or a Hitler Youth when he doesn’t. His scalp still stings from the bleaching solution, but it’s not a bad feeling. “You know, I’m not the only one who needs to change identities,” he tells Bam, after the other kids have left.

She laughs. “Nobody’s touching my hair.”

Bam has hair just short enough to be low maintenance. Her clothes are mannish, but only because she detests prissiness. Once and only once she made a pass at Starkey, but it was quickly deflected. Another girl might have folded and turned painfully awkward around him, but Bam took it in stride and carried on. Even if Starkey had been attracted to her, he knows acting on it would have been a bad idea. He’s not foolish enough to think that a relationship here in the relative wild will last, and adding that kind of complication to his relationship with his second in command would be foolhardy.
As for other girls, the fact that he can have any girl he wants is a perk of his position he knows he must apply with careful discretion. He gives the same eye contact, the same lingering smile to every girl—and even to the boys that he can tell have an interest. It’s all part of his subtle control. Keep them all thinking they’re special. That they can be more than just a face in the crowd. These little touches carry big weight. The illusion of hope, combined with a healthy fear of him, keeps all his storks in line.

“I don’t mean changing
your
identity, Bam,” Starkey says. “I mean our identity. This guy did figure out who we are. To be safe, we can’t be Camp Red Heron anymore.”

“We could be a school—that way it won’t just get us through the rest of the summer, but will work once the school year starts too.”

“Excellent idea. Let’s make it a private school. Something that sounds exclusive.” Starkey runs through his mind all the storklike species he knows. “We’ll call ourselves the ‘Egret Academy.’ ”

“I love that!”

“Get that artsy girl what’s-her-face to design the shirt again—but not so bright as the camp’s. The Egret Academy will be all about beige and forest green.”

“Can I come up with the school’s history?”

“Knock yourself out.”

There is a fine line between hiding in plain sight and flaunting their status as a fugitive band—Starkey knows how to ride the edge of illusion like a tightrope walker.

“Make it sound legit enough to fool the Juvies, if we come across any.”

“The Juvenile Authority is a pack of idiots.”

“No, they’re not,” Starkey tells her, “and that kind of thinking will get us caught. They’re smart, so we need to be
smarter. And when we do strike, we have to strike hard.”

Since their ill-fated flight, there have been no stork liberations. Starkey had rescued several storked kids about to be unwound back during their stay at the airplane graveyard, but Connor was the one with the lists of kids about to be rounded for unwinding. Without a list, there’s no way to know who needs to be rescued. But that’s all right—because while saving individual kids and burning their homes as a warning is fine and dandy, Starkey knows he is capable of far more effective measures.

He has a brochure for a harvest camp that he keeps in his pocket. He pulls it out when he needs reminding. Like all harvest camps brochures, it features pictures of beautiful bucolic scenery and teens that are, if not happy, at least at peace with their fate.

A bittersweet journey
, the brochure proclaims,
can touch many lives
.

“Finally giving up, Starkey?” Bam asks, when she catches him studying it later that night. “Ready to be unwound?”

He ignores the suggestion. “This harvest camp is in Nevada, north of Reno,” he tells her. “Nevada has the weakest Juvenile Authority in the nation. It also has the highest concentration of storks waiting to be unwound. But check this out: This particular harvest camp has a shortage of surgeons. The population is bursting, and they can’t unwind them fast enough.” Then he gives her the boy-next-door grin. He’s kept this to himself long enough. Time to start sowing the seeds of glorious purpose. He might as well begin with Bam.

“We’re not going to take down individual homes and liberate one stork at a time anymore,” Starkey proudly tells her. “We’re going to liberate an entire harvest camp.”

And God help anyone who gets in his way.

16 • Risa

HUMAN INTEREST NEWS CLIP

Today Eye-On-Art focuses on the provocative sculptures of Paulo Ribeiro, a Brazilian artist who works in a radical medium. As you can see from these images, his work is stunning, intriguing, and often disturbing. He calls himself an “Artist of Life,” because every piece of work is crafted from the unwound.

We caught up with Ribeiro at a recent exhibition in New York.

“It is not so unusual what I do. Europe is full of cathedrals adorned in human bones, and in the early twenty-first century, artists like Andrew Krasnow and Gunther Von Hagens were known for their work in flesh. I have simply taken this tradition a logical step further. I hope not just to inspire but to incite. To bring to art patrons an aesthetic state of unrest. My use of the unwound is a protest against unwinding.”

Pictured here is what Ribeiro considers to be his finest piece—both haunting, and intriguing, the piece is a working musical instrument he calls Orgão Orgânico, which now resides in a private collection.

“It is a shame that my greatest work should be privately owned, for it was meant to be heard and seen by the world. But like so many unwound, it now will never be.”

Risa dreams of the stony faces. Pale and gaunt, judgmental and soulless as they gaze at her—not from a distance this time—but so close she could touch them. However, she can’t touch them. She’s sitting at a piano, but it will not bring forth music
because Risa has no arms with which to play. The faces wait for a sonata that will never come—and only now does she realize that they are so close to one another they cannot possibly have bodies attached. They truly are disembodied. They are lined up in rows, and there are too many for her to count. She’s horrified, but can’t look away.

Risa can’t quite discern the difference between the dream and waking. She thinks she might have been sleeping with her eyes open. There’s a TV turned low, directly in her line of sight, that now shows an advertisement featuring a smiling woman who appears to be in love with her toilet bowl cleanser.

Risa rests on a comfortable bed in a comfortable place. It’s a place she’s never been, but that’s a good thing, because it can only be an improvement over the places she
has
been lately.

There’s a lanky umber kid in the room, who just now turns his gaze to her from the TV. It’s a kid she’s never met, but she knows his face from more serious television ads than the one on now.

“So you’re the real deal,” he says when he sees she’s awake. “And here I thought you were some crazy-ass crank call.” He looks older than he does in the commercials. Or maybe just wearier. She guesses he’s about eighteen—no older than her.

“You’ll live. That’s the good news,” the umber kid says. “Bad news is your right wrist is infected from that trap.”

She looks to see her right wrist puffy and purple and worries that she might lose it—perhaps the pain being the cause of her armlessness in the dream. She instantly thinks of Connor’s arm, or more accurately, Roland’s arm on Connor’s body.