UnSouled (31 page)

Una releases his hand and turns away, for fear that something in her face might give her away. “I’ll tell you about your friends, Mac—under one condition,” she says.

“Yes, anything.”

She grabs the guitar from the counter and holds it out to him. “That you play for me again.”

He smiles, takes the guitar, and sits down on the stool. “My pleasure!”

He begins, and the song grabs the thread of hope that Una so foolishly tugged at and sails away with it, rending Una down to her very essence. The song is haunting. It is beautiful. It is Wil’s music alive but in someone else. She lets the strains of melody and harmony caress her. Then she comes up behind him, kabongs him over the head with a heavy guitar so forcefully that it breaks, and he falls unconscious on the floor.

She listens to make sure there is no stirring from upstairs. She must not wake the others. Satisfied that no one has heard, she heaves “Mac” onto her shoulders like a sack of flour. Although she’s a small woman, she’s strong from working the lathe, plane, and sander. It tests the limit of her strength and endurance, but she manages to move through the night streets and finally into the woods.

Una knows the woods well. Wil was at home there, and
so she came to feel that way, as well. She carries him nearly a half mile through the forest with nothing to light her way but the moon, until she reaches the old sweat lodge—a place once used to begin the traditional vision quest for Arápache youth who were of age, before a more modern one was built.

Once inside, she tears off his jacket and shirt and uses them to string him up between two poles six feet apart. She knots the fabric so tightly only a knife could undo it. The rest of his unconscious body slumps on the ground, his arms outstretched above him in a supplicative
Y
.

This is how she leaves him for the night.

When she returns at dawn, she brings a chain saw.

38 • Cam

Cam knows this is not going to be a good day the moment he sees the chain saw.

His head hurts in so many places, he can’t begin to know where he was actually hit. It feels as if all the members of his internal community have taken up arms against one another and are slicing his brain to bits.

The young woman sitting beside the chain saw hefts a rock in one hand.

“Good, you’re awake,” she says. “I was running out of stones.”

He notices that there are rocks all around him. She’s been throwing them at him to wake him up. Smaller aches on his body attest to that—and throbbing in his shoulders attest to the fact that his arms are tied to poles on either side—strung up with his own clothes. He gets up on his knees to relieve the strain on his shoulders, surprised that his seams haven’t split—but then, Roberta always told him his seams were stronger than the flesh they held together.

He takes in his surroundings before speaking. He’s in a large dome-shaped structure made of stones and mud—or at least made to look that way. Morning sunlight spills through gaps in the stone. It’s far more primitive than anything else he’s seen on the reservation. There’s a washed-out pile of ashes in the middle, and on the other side of the ashes, sits the girl and her chain saw. The light pouring through the hole up above illuminates her face just enough for him to recognize her as the girl from the guitar shop.

His last memory was playing for her. And now he’s here. He can only guess what transpired in between.

“I guess you didn’t like my song.”

“It wasn’t
your
song at all,” she responds. He can feel her anger from across the room like a blast of radiation. “And by the look of you, that’s not the only thing that isn’t yours.” She gets up, grabs the chain saw, and steps over the pile of ashes toward him.

He struggles to get to his feet. She touches the silent chain saw to his bare chest. He can feel the cold steel of the dormant chain as it caresses his skin. She uses its curved tip to trace the seams.

“Up and down and around—those lines go everywhere, don’t they? Like an old shaman’s sand drawings.”

Cam says nothing as she moves the chain saw along his torso and then across his neck. “The shaman’s lines are meant to trace life and creation—is that what your lines are for too? Are you a creation? Are you alive?”

The question of questions. “You’ll have to decide that for yourself.”

“Are you that man-made man I’ve heard tell of? What is it they call you? ‘Sham Complete’?”

“Something like that.”

She takes a step back. “Well, you can keep all those other parts, Sham. But those hands deserve a proper funeral.” Then she starts the chain saw, and it roars to life, puffing forth acrid, hellish smoke and releasing an earsplitting report that makes Cam’s seams ache in alarm.

“Brakes! Red light! Brick wall!
Stop
!”

“Did you think I wouldn’t figure it out when you came last night?”

His eyes are fixed on the deadly blade, but he tears his gaze away to focus on her—to get through to her. “I was drawn here.
He
was drawn here—and if you take these hands, you’ll never hear him play again!”

It was the wrong thing to say. Her face contorts into a mask of sheer hatred. “I’d already gotten used to that. I’ll get used to it again.”

And she swings the blade toward his right arm.

Cam can do nothing but brace himself. He readies himself for the surge of pain, watching as the chain saw comes down—but then at the last instant, she twists her arm, aborting the attack, and the momentum veers sideways, cutting his knotted jacket, and setting his right arm free from the pole.

She hurls the chain saw across the room, screaming in frustration, and Cam thrusts his free arm toward her. He means to grab her by the neck and hurl her to the ground, but instead he finds his hand reaching behind her to the ribbon in her hair and pulling it free.

Her long dark hair flares out from behind her as the ribbon falls to the ground, and she backs away, staring at him in horrified disbelief.

“Why did you do that?” she demands.
“Why did you do that?”

And Cam suddenly understands. “Because he likes your
hair free. He always pulled out your hair ribbons, didn’t he?” He lets loose a sudden laugh, as the emotion of the memory hits him all at once like a sonic boom.

She stares at him—her face is hard to read. He doesn’t know whether she’s going to run in terror, or pick up the chain saw again. Instead she bends down to pick up her ribbon and rises, keeping her distance.

“What else do you know?” she asks.

“I know what I feel when I play his music. He was in love with someone. Deeply.”

That brings tears to her eyes, but Cam knows they are tears of anger.

“You’re a monster.”

“I know.”

“You should never have been made.”

“Not my fault.”

“You say you know he loved me—but do you even know my name?”

Cam searches his memory for her name, but there are neither words nor images in his personal piece of Wil Tashi’ne’s psyche. There is only music, gestures, and a disconnected history of touch. So instead of a name, he shares with her what he does know.

“There’s a birthmark on your back he would tickle when you danced,” Cam says. “He liked toying with an earring in the shape of a whale. The feel of his guitar-callused fingertips in the crook of your elbow made you tremble.”

“Enough!” she says, taking a step back. Then more quietly, “Enough.”

“I’m sorry. I just wanted you to see that he’s still here . . . in these hands.”

She’s silent for a moment, looking at his face, looking at his hands. Then she comes closer, pulls out a pocketknife,
and cuts the shirt that ties him to the other pole.

“Show me,” she says.

And so he reaches up, abandoning thought, and putting all trust in his fingertips the way he did when searching for the key to her shop. He touches the nape of her neck, moves a finger across her lips, and remembers the feel of them. He cups her cheek in his palm; then he brings the fingertips of his other hand drizzling down her wrist, over her forearm, to that singular spot in the crook of her elbow.

And she trembles.

Then she raises the heavy stone she’s been hiding in her other hand and smashes him in the side of the head, knocking him out cold again.

•   •   •

When he regains consciousness, he’s tied to the poles once more. And once again, he’s alone.

NEWS UPDATE

In Nevada today, a coordinated attack on a harvest camp has left 23 dead, dozens wounded, and hundreds of Unwinds unaccounted for.

It began at 11:14 local time, when communication lines were cut to and from Cold Springs Harvest Camp, and by the time communication was restored an hour later, it was all over. Staff were tied up and forced to lie facedown while the armed attackers set loose hundreds of violent adolescents designated for unwinding.

Early reports suggest that the camp director was murdered execution style. While the investigation is ongoing, it is believed that Connor Lassiter, also known as the Akron AWOL, is responsible for the attack.

39 • Starkey

In the claustrophobic confines of the abandoned mine where the storks are holing up, Starkey kicks the dark stone walls. He kicks the rotting beams. He kicks everything in sight, searching for something breakable. After all his effort and all his risk, every last measure of his victory has been stolen from him and attributed to Connor Lassiter!

“You’ll bring down the whole freaking mine if you keep kicking the beams like that,” yells Bam. Everyone else is smart enough to stay deeper in the mine and keep their distance from him, but she always has to shove herself into his business.

“So let it come down!”

“And bury us all—that will really help your cause, won’t it? All those storks you say you want to save, buried alive. Real smart, Starkey.”

Out of spite, he kicks a support beam one more time. It quivers, and flecks of dust rain down on them. It’s enough to make him stop.

“You heard them!” he yells. “It’s all about the Akron AWOL.” It should be
Starkey’s
face on the news.
He
should be the one the experts are profiling. They should be camping out at
his
family’s door, prying into what his private life was like before they cut him loose to be unwound. “I do all the work, and he gets all the credit.”

“You call it credit, but out there it’s called blame. You should be happy they’re looking elsewhere after that bloodbath!”

Starkey turns on her, wanting to grab her and shake some sense into her, but she’s taller than him, bigger than him, and he knows Bam is a girl who fights back. How would it look to
the others if she floored him? So instead he smacks her down with words.

“Don’t you dare accept their spin! I know you’re smarter than that. What we did was a liberation! We freed nearly four hundred Unwinds and added more than a hundred storks to our number.”

“And in the process more than twenty kids died—plus, we still don’t have an accurate count of how many were tranq’d and got left behind.”

“It couldn’t be helped!”

He looks farther down the low-roofed tunnel to see, lit by the dim hanging incandescents, a cluster of kids eavesdropping. He wants to yell at them, too, but he’s in control enough now to rein in that urge. He brings his voice down so only Bam can hear.

“We’re at war,” he reminds her. “There are always casualties in war.” He steels his eye contact, trying to make her look away, but she doesn’t. But she also doesn’t argue. He reaches out, putting a comforting hand on her shoulder, which she doesn’t shake off.

“The thing to remember, Bam, is that our plan worked.”

Now she finally looks away from him, signaling her acquiescence. “That valley was pretty isolated,” she says. “It was a long road out for those kids who went running through the gate. I don’t know if you heard the latest, but nearly half of them have already been captured.”

He moves his hand from her shoulder to her cheek and smiles. “Which means half of them got away. The glass is half-full, Bam. That’s what we need to remind everyone. You’re my second in command, and I need you to focus on the positive instead of the negative. Do you think you can do that?”

Bam hesitates; then her shoulders slump at his gentle touch, and she gives him a reluctant nod, as he’d known she would.

“Good. That’s what I like about you, Bam. You take me to task, as you should, but in the end, you always see reason.”

She turns to go, but before she leaves, she tosses him one more question. “Where do you see this ending, Starkey?”

He smiles at her even more broadly than before. “I don’t see it ending. That’s the beauty of it!”

40 • Bam

Bam moves through the tunnels and chambers of the mine, taking mental snapshots.

A kid in tears, mourning the death of a friend.

A terrified new arrival, calmed by an older stork.

A hapless fourteen-year-old “medic” trying to suture a leg wound using dental floss.

She sees scenes of hope and despair around her and doesn’t know which to give more credence.

She passes one kid sharing his ration of food with another, while beside them a young girl teaches an even younger girl how to use one of the automatic rifles they confiscated from Cold Springs.

And then there’s the boy who was forced to shoot the harvest camp director, sitting alone, staring off into nowhere. Bam would comfort him, but she’s not the comforting type.

“Starkey’s proud of all of you and happy with our victory today,” she tells them. “We took the battle to the enemy, and we made history!”

She primes them, but she holds back, because she knows she mustn’t steal Starkey’s thunder. She’s Bam the Baptist, preparing the way for the Savior of Storks.

“He’ll be gathering everyone before dinner. He’s got a lot to tell you.” Of course it’s really not about telling them anything;
it’s about rallying them and keeping them focused on the positive, just as he told Bam. He’ll have gentle words for the dead, but will move past it. Gloss over it. Direct the audience’s attention elsewhere. He’s so very good at that. It’s why they’ve gotten so far. Bam is in awe of the way Mason Starkey can work magic in the world around him. He’s kept their hoard virtually invisible for more than a month now, keeping them clothed and fed with money that no one can trace. Yes, she’s in awe of him, and she’s also a little more afraid of him every day. That’s normal, she decides. A good leader should be just a little bit frightening in the way he or she wields power.