UnWholly (18 page)

“There’s still a bullet in the chamber,” Connor reminds him.

Trace backs away, hands up. “Well played. I guess I’m rusty.” They stand there frozen for a moment, and Trace says, “If you’re going to kill me, do it now—because I
will
get the advantage again.” But Connor’s resolve is gone, and they both know it.

“Did you kill the other two?” asks Connor, looking at how the once-tough kids lay twisted and unconscious on the ground.

“Just knocked them out. Not much honor in killing the defenseless.”

Connor lowers the gun. Trace doesn’t rush him.

“I want you gone,” Connor tells him.

“Tossing me out will be a very bad move.”

Hearing that just makes Connor angry. “As far as I’m concerned, you’re the enemy. You work for
them
.”

“I also work for you.”

“You can’t have it both ways!”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” Trace says. “Playing both sides is a time-honored strategy.”

“I’m not your puppet!”

“No,” says Trace, “you’re my commanding officer. Act like it.”

Another kid comes clambering down the stairs to use the portable. He catches sight of Trace and Connor, and the two kids still rag-dolled on the ground. “What’s the deal?” the kid says as he takes in the situation.

“When it’s your business, I’ll tell you,” Connor says.

Then he sees the gun in Connor’s hand. “Yeah, sure, no problem,” he says, and goes back up the stairs.

Connor realizes the distraction would have given Trace plenty of time to turn the tables again, but he didn’t. It moves them one step closer to trust. Connor gestures to Trace with a wave of the gun. “Walk.” But at this point the gun is just a prop, and they both know it. They move farther from the main aisle and down an aisle of mothballed fighter jets. No Whollies here to eavesdrop on their conversation.

“If you work for them,” Connor asks, “then why did you tell me all the things you told me?”

“Because I’m their eyes and ears, but my brain is my own—and whether you believe it or not, I like what you’re doing here.”

“What have you told them about this place?”

Trace shrugs. “Mostly what they already know. That things are under control here. That a new shipment of AWOLs arrives every few weeks. I assure them that the place is not a threat, and no one’s planning to blow up any more harvest camps.” Then Trace stops walking and turns to Connor. “What’s more important are the things I
don’t
tell them.”

“Which are?”

“I don’t tell them about your rescue missions, I don’t tell them about your escape plan . . . and I don’t tell them that you’re still alive.”

“What?”

“As far as they know, this place is being run by Elvis Robert Mullard, a former security guard from Happy Jack—because if anyone knew that
you
were the one in charge, the Juvey-cops would raid this place in an instant. The Akron AWOL is too much of a threat for them to ignore. So I make this place sound like a nursery, and I make you sound like a nanny. It keeps them happy, and it keeps all these kids alive.”

Connor looks around them. They’re far from the main aisle now. If Trace wanted to, he could probably break Connor’s neck and bury him, and no one would ever know. Does that mean that Connor actually trusts Trace in spite of his obvious betrayal? He isn’t sure of anything anymore, not even his own motivations.

“None of this changes the fact that you’re working for the Juvey-cops.”

“Wrong again. I don’t work for the Juvies, I work for the people who own them.”

“No one owns the Juvenile Authority.”

“All right, then, maybe not own, but control. You want to talk about puppets? Every single Juvey-cop is on a string they don’t even know about. Of course I don’t know who’s pulling
the strings. All I know is that I got taken away from a promising future in the air force and got sent here.”

Connor grins in spite of himself. “Sorry to mess with your career track.”

“The point is, I don’t report to anyone in the air force; I report to civilians in suits, and that ticks me off. So I did a little research and found out that I work for a company called Proactive Citizenry.”

“Never heard of it.”

Then Trace drops his voice to a whisper. “I’m not surprised—they keep a low profile, and that provides a cover that gives the military plausible deniability. Think about it; if the brass don’t know who they’re actually working for, then if something goes wrong, the military can always claim ignorance, court-martial me, and come away clean.”

Now things are becoming a little clearer to Connor, or at least clearer as to why Trace decided to play both sides. They turn and begin walking back toward the main aisle.

“I’m disillusioned, Connor. The way I see it, you’ve been more fair and more trustworthy than whoever it is I work for. Character counts for a lot in this world, and when it comes to Proactive Citizenry, shady doesn’t even begin to describe them. So I’ll do my job for them, but I put my trust in you.”

“How do I know you’re not lying to me now?”

“You don’t. But so far you’ve survived because of your instincts. What do your instincts tell you right now?”

Connor thinks about it and realizes the answer is easy. “My instincts tell me that I’m screwed no matter what I do. But that’s normal for me.”

Trace accepts his answer. “We have more to talk about, but I think that’s enough for one day. You should probably put some ice on that shoulder. I wrenched it pretty hard.”

“I hadn’t noticed,” Connor lies.

Trace reaches out his hand to shake, and Connor considers what shaking that hand means. It could be the creation of their own secret society to battle Proactive Citizenry, whatever that is . . . or it could mean Connor has been entirely duped. In the end, he shakes Trace’s hand, wishing that just once, there could be a clear course of action.

“Before today you were just a pawn doing what
they
wanted you to do,” Trace tells him. “Deep down you knew it—you sensed it. I hope the truth has set you free.”

Before her shift begins each morning, Risa spends time beneath the wing of the Rec Jet, chatting with other kids who’ve become her friends. She has more friends here than she did back at the state home, but at the same time she feels more like an older sister than a friend. They revere her like some angel of mercy—not just because she’s the medical authority, but because she’s the legendary Risa Ward, the Akron AWOL’s partner in crime. She suspects they think, deep down, she can heal things that are broken inside.

She used to spend time at the Rec Jet in the evening, after her shift, but the Stork Club put an end to that. She has half a mind to demand equal time for the state wards, but knows that fueling a division of the Graveyard into factions won’t do anything but cause trouble. Thanks to Starkey, there’s enough of that going on without her help.

Farther away, she can see Connor step down from his jet. He walks along the main aisle, head down, hands in his pockets, deep in whatever dark cloud is troubling him today. Immediately he’s set upon by kids who need his attention for one reason or another. She wonders if he ever manages to find a
spare second for himself anymore. He certainly doesn’t have it for her.

He looks up and catches Risa’s gaze. She turns away, feeling guilty, as if she’s been spying on him, and chides herself for feeling that way. When she looks up again, he’s heading toward her. Behind her kids have begun to gather in front of the TV. Something on the news has caught their attention. She wonders whether Connor is coming to see what the commotion is about or coming to see her. She’s pleased when it turns out to be the latter, although she tries not to show it.

“Busy day ahead?” she asks him, offering him a slight smile, which he returns.

“Nah, just lying around watching TV and eating chips. I gotta get a life.”

He stands there with his hands in his pockets, looking around, although she knows his attention is on her. Finally he says, “The ADR says they’ll send those medical supplies you asked for in the next few days.”

“Should I believe it?”

“Probably not.”

She knows this is not the reason why he came over to her, but she doesn’t know how to coax things out of him anymore. She knows she has to do something before this distance between them gets ingrown.

“So what’s the problem of the week?” she asks.

He scratches his neck and looks off, so he doesn’t have to look her in the eye. “Sort of the same, and sort of you-don’t-want-to-know.”

“But,” says Risa, “it’s big enough for you to tell me that you can’t tell me.”

“Exactly.”

Risa sighs. It’s already getting hot, and she’s not looking forward to pushing her way to the infirmary jet in the heat. She
has no patience for Connor being enigmatic. She’s about to tell him to come back when he actually has something to say, but her attention is snagged by the grumble coming from the crowd around the TV, which has grown since she last looked. Both she and Connor are pulled closer by the gravity of the crowd.

The news report is an interview with a woman, rather severe-looking, and even more severe-talking. Coming in the middle, Risa can’t make heads or tails of what she’s talking about.

“Can you believe it?” someone says. “They’re calling this thing a new life form.”

“Calling what a new life form?” Connor asks.

Hayden is there and turns to both of them. He looks almost queasy. “They’ve finally built the perfect beast. The first composite human being.”

There are no pictures, but the woman is describing the process—how bits and pieces of almost a hundred different Unwinds were used to create it. Risa feels a shiver go as far down her spine as she can feel. Connor must have the same reaction, because he grasps her shoulder, and she reaches up to grasp his hand, not caring which hand it is.

“Why would they do such a thing?” she asks.

“Because they can,” Connor says bitterly.

Risa can feel the heaviness of the vibe around her, as if they’re all watching some awful global event unfolding before their eyes.

“We need to get the escape plan ready,” Connor says. Risa knows he’s talking more to himself than to her. “We can’t do a dry run, because the spy sats will pick it up, but everyone needs to know what to do.”

Risa feels the same blast of communal intuition. Suddenly getting the hell out of the Graveyard sounds like a very good idea. Even without a safe destination.

“Composite human . . . ,” someone grumbles. “I wonder what it looks like.”

“C’mon, haven’t you ever seen Mr. Potato Head?”

There’s a smattering of nervous laughter, but it doesn’t lighten the mood.

“Whatever it looks like,” Risa says, “I hope we never see it.”

With a finger he traces the lines of his face, down the side of his nose to his cheek. Left, then right. Out from the symmetrical starburst of flesh tones on his forehead, then beyond to the lines that spread beneath his hairline. He dips his finger into the graft-grade healing cream again and spreads it across the lines running down the nape of his neck, his shoulders, his chest, and every other place he can reach. He can feel the tingling as the engineered microorganisms in the cream do their job.

“Believe it or not, the stuff is actually related to yogurt,” the dermatologist told him. “Except, of course, that it eats scar tissue.” It also costs five thousand dollars a jar, but, as Roberta has told him, money is no object when it comes to Cam.

He’s been assured that when treatment is done, he’ll have no scars at all, just hairline seams where every little bit of himself meets.

His cream-spreading ritual takes half an hour, twice a day, and he’s come to enjoy the Zen-like nature of it. He only wishes there were something that would heal the scars in his mind, which he can still feel. He sees his mind now as an archipelago of islands that he labors to build bridges between—and while he’s had great success engineering the most spectacular of bridges, he suspects there are some islands he’ll never reach.

There’s a knock at his door. “Are you ready?” It’s Roberta.

“Reins in your fist,” he tells her.

A pause, and then, “Very funny. ‘Hold your horses.’ ”

Cam laughs. He no longer needs to speak in metaphors—he’s created enough bridges in his mind to bring some normality to his speech—but he enjoys teasing Roberta and trying to stump her.

He dresses in a tailored shirt and tie. The tie’s muted colors, yet bold, fractal pattern, were specifically chosen to project a sense of aesthetic composition; a subliminal suggestion that an artistic whole is always greater than the sum of its parts. He fumbles with the tie. While his brain knows how to tie it, his virtuoso fingers obviously had never learned to do a Windsor knot. He must focus and overcome the frustrating lack of muscle memory.

Roberta knocks again, a little more insistently now. “It’s time.”

He takes a moment to admire himself in the mirror. His hair is just about an inch long now. A virtual coat of many colors; streaks extending out from the focal point of multiple skin tones on his forehead. Blond runs down the middle, blending to amber on both the left and right. Shades of red and brown arc back from his temples, then give way to jet black above his ears, and tight, dark curls at his sideburns. “All the famous hairstylists will be trampling one another to get to you,” Roberta said.

Finally he opens the door before Roberta’s knocking becomes frantic. Her dress is a little more elegant than the slacks and blouse she usually wears, but still very understated. It’s all calculated to keep the focus on him. For a moment she seems annoyed at him, but now that she gets a good look at him, her irritation melts away.

“You look spectacular, Cam.” She smoothes out his shirt and straightens his tie. “You look like the shining star you are!”

“Let’s hope I don’t give birth to complex elements.”

She looks at him quizzically.

“Supernova,” he says. “If I’m a shining star, let’s hope I don’t blow up.” He wasn’t even trying to stump her. “Sorry—it’s just the way I think.”