Unwind (23 page)

“It's a long walk,” Amp says. “If anyone can't make it, let us know. Anyone who needs water now, raise your hand.”

Nearly every hand goes up.

“All right, line up here.”

Risa lines up along with the rest of them. There's buzzing
and whispering from the line of kids, but it's nowhere near as desperate as it had been in the weeks past. Now, it's more like the buzz of kids in a school lunch line.

As they're led off to be clothed and fed, the jet that brought them here is towed to its final resting place in the massive junkyard. Only now does Risa take a deep breath and release it, along with a month's worth of tension. Only now does she allow herself the wonderful luxury of hope.

More than a thousand miles away, Lev is about to arrive as well. The destination, however, is not his own: It's Cyrus Finch's. Joplin, Missouri. “Home of the Joplin High Eagles—reigning state champions in girls' basketball,” CyFi says.

“You know a lot about the place.”

“I don't know anything about it,” CyFi grumbles. “
He
knows. Or
knew
. Or whatever.”

Their journey has gotten no easier. Sure, they have money now, thanks to Lev's “deal” at that pawnshop, but the money's only good for buying food. It can't get them train tickets, or even bus tickets, because there's nothing more suspicious than underage kids paying their own fare.

For all intents and purposes, things between Lev and CyFi are the same, with one major, unspoken exception. CyFi might still be playing the role of leader, but it's Lev who is now in charge. There's a guilty pleasure in knowing that CyFi would fall apart if Lev weren't there to hold him together.

With Joplin only twenty miles away, Cy's twitching gets bad enough that even walking is difficult for him. It's more than just twitching now—it's a shuddering that wracks his body like a seizure, leaving him shivering. Lev offers him his
jacket, but Cy just swats him away. “I ain't cold! It's not about bein' cold! It's about being wrong. It's about there being oil and water in this brain of mine.”

Exactly what Cy must do when he gets to Joplin is a mystery to Lev—and now he realizes that Cy doesn't know either. Whatever this kid—or this
bit
of kid—in his head is compelling him to do, it's completely beyond Cy's understanding. Lev can only hope that it's something purposeful, and not something destructive . . . although Lev can't help but suspect that whatever the kid wants, it's bad. Really bad.

“Why are you still with me, Fry?” CyFi asks after one of his body-shaking seizures. “Any sane dude woulda taken off days ago.”

“Who says I'm sane?”

“Oh, you're sane, Fry. You're so sane, you scare me. You're so sane, it's
in
sane.”

Lev thinks for a while. He wants to give Cyrus a real answer, not just something that chases away the question. “I'm staying,” Lev says slowly, “because someone has to witness what happens in Joplin. Someone's got to understand why you did it. Whatever it is.”

“Yeah,” says CyFi. “I need a witness. That's it.”

“You're like a salmon swimming upstream,” Lev offers. “It's inside you to do it. And it's inside me to help you get there.”

“Salmon.” Cy looks thoughtful. “I once saw this poster about a salmon. It was jumping up this waterfall, see? But there was a bear at the top, and the fish, it was jumping right into the bear's mouth. The caption beneath—it was supposed to be funny—said, ‘The journey of a thousand miles sometimes ends very, very badly.'”

“There's no bear in Joplin,” Lev tells him. He doesn't try to cheer Cy up with any more analogies, because Cy's so smart, he can find a way to make anything sound bad. One hundred
and thirty IQ points all focused on cooking up doom. Lev can't hope to compete with that.

The days go by, mile by mile, town by town, until the afternoon they pass a sign that says,
NOW ENTERING JOPLIN. POPULATION 45,504.

There is no peace in CyFi's his head. The Fry doesn't know how bad it is. The Fry doesn't know how the feelings crash over him like storm-driven waves pounding a failing seawall. The wall is going to collapse soon, and when it does, Cy will lose it. He'll lose everything. His mind will spill out of his ears and down the drains of the streets of Joplin. He knows it.

Then he sees the sign.
NOW ENTERING JOPLIN.
His heart is his own, but it pounds in his chest, threatening to burst—and wouldn't that be a fine thing? They'd rush him to a hospital, give him someone else's ticker, and he'd have
that
kid to deal with too.

This boy in the corner of his head doesn't talk to him in words. He
feels
. He
emotes
. He doesn't understand that he's only a part of another kid. It's like how in a dream you know some things, and other things you should know, but you don't. This kid—he knows where he is, but he doesn't know he's not all here. He doesn't know he's part of someone else now. He keeps looking for things in Cyrus's head that just aren't there. Memories. Connections. He keeps looking for words, but Cyrus's brain codes words differently. And so the kid hurls out anger. Terror. Grief. Waves pounding the wall, and beneath it all, there's a current tugging Cy forward. Something must be done here. Only the kid knows what it is.

“Would it help to have a map?” asks the Fry. The question
gets Cy mad. “Map won't help me,” he says. “I need to see stuff. I need to
be
places. A map is just a map. It ain't
being
there.”

They stand at a corner on the outskirts of Joplin. It's like divining for water. Nothing looks familiar. “He doesn't know this place,” Cy says. “Let's try another street.”

Block after block, intersection after intersection, it's the same. Nothing. Joplin is a small town, but not so small that a person could know all of it. Then, at last they get to a main street. There are shops and restaurants up and down the road. It's just like any other town this size, but—

“Wait!”

“What is it?”

“He knows this street,” says Cy. “There! That ice cream shop. I can taste pumpkin ice cream. I hate pumpkin ice cream.”

“I'll bet
he
didn't.”

Cyrus nods. “It was his favorite. The loser.” He points a finger at the ice cream shop and slowly swings his arm to the left. “He comes walking from that direction. . . .” He swings his arm to the right. “And when he's done, he goes that way.”

“So, do we track where he comes from, or where he goes?”

Cy chooses to go left but finds himself at Joplin High, home of the Eagles. He gets an image of a sword, and instantly knows. “Fencing. The kid was on the fencing team here.”

“Swords are shiny,” the Fry notes. Cy would throw him a dirty look if he weren't right on target. Swords are, indeed, shiny. He wonders if the kid ever stole swords, and realizes that, yes, he probably did. Stealing the swords of opposing teams is a time-honored tradition of fencing.

“This way,” says the Fry, taking the lead. “He must have gone from school, to the ice cream shop, to home. Home is where we're going, right?”

The answer comes to Cy as an urge deep in his brain that shoots straight to his gut. Salmon? More like a swordfish twisting on a line, and that line is pulling him relentlessly toward . . . “Home,” says Cy. “Right.”

It's twilight now. Kids are out in the street; half the cars have headlights on. As far as anyone knows, they're just two neighborhood kids, headed wherever neighborhood kids go. No one seems to notice them. But there's a police car a block away. It was parked, but now it begins moving.

They pass the ice cream parlor, and as they do, Cyrus can feel the change inside him. It's in his walk, and in the way he holds himself. It's in all the tension points of his face: They're changing. His eyebrows lower, his jaw opens slightly.
I'm not myself. That other kid is taking over.
Should Cy let it happen, or should he fight it? But he knows it's already past the point of fighting. The only way to finish this is to let it happen.

“Cy,” says the kid next to him.

Cy looks at him, and although part of him knows it's just Lev, another part of him panics. He instantly knows why. He closes his eyes for a moment and tries to convince the kid in his head that the Fry is a friend, not a threat. The kid seems to get it, and his panic drops a notch.

Cy reaches a corner and turns left like he's done it a hundred times. The rest of him shudders as he tries to keep up with his determined temporal lobe. Now a feeling comes on him. Nervous, annoyed. He knows he must find a way to translate it into words.

“I'm gonna be late. They're gonna be so mad. They're always so mad.”

“Late for what?”

“Dinner. They gotta eat it right on time, or I get hell for it. They could eat it without me, but they won't. They don't. They just stew. And the food goes cold. And it's my fault, my fault,
always my fault. So I gotta sit there and they ask me how was my day? Fine. What did I learn? Nothing. What did I do wrong this time? Everything.” It's not his voice. It's his vocal chords, but it's not his voice coming out of them. Same tones, but different inflections. A different accent. Like the way he might have talked if he came from Joplin, home of the Eagles.

As they turn another corner, Cy catches sight of that cop car again. It's behind them, following slowly. No mistake about it: It's following. And that's not all. There's another police car up ahead, but that one's just waiting in front of a house. His house.
My house.
Cy is the salmon after all, and that police car is the bear. But even so, he can't stop. He's got to get to that house or die trying.

As he nears the front walk, two men get out of a familiar Toyota parked across the street. It's the dads. They look at him, relief in their faces, but also pain. So they knew where he was coming. They must have known all along.

“Cyrus,” one of them calls. He wants to run to them. He wants them to just take him home, but he stops himself. He can't go home. Not yet. They both stride toward him, getting in his path, but smart enough not to get in his face.

“I gotta do this,” he says in a voice he knows isn't his at all.

That's when the police leap from their cars and grab him. They're too strong for him to fight them off, so he looks at the dads. “I gotta do this,” he says again. “Don't be the bear.”

They look at each other, not understanding what he means—but then, maybe they do, because they step aside and say to the cops, “Let him go.”

“This is Lev,” Cyrus says, amazed that the Fry is willing to risk his own safety to stand by Cy now. “Nobody bothers him, either.” The dads take a brief moment to acknowledge the Fry, but quickly return their attention to Cyrus.

The cops frisk Cy to make sure he has no weapon, and,
satisfied, they let him go on toward the house. But there
is
a weapon. It's something sharp and heavy. Right now it's just in a corner of his mind, but in a few moments it won't be. And now Cy's scared, but he can't stop.

There's a police officer at the front door talking in hushed tones to a man and a woman standing at the threshold. They glance nervously at Cy.

The part of Cy that isn't Cy knows this middle-aged couple so well, he's hit by a lightning bolt of emotions so violent he feels like he'll incinerate.

As he walks toward the door, the flagstone path seems to undulate beneath his feet like a fun-house floor. Then finally he's standing before them. The couple look scared—horrified. Part of him is happy at that, part of him sad, and part of him wishes he could be anyplace else in the world, but he no longer knows which part is which.

He opens his mouth to speak, trying to translate the feelings into words.

“Give it!” he demands. “Give it to me, Mom. Give it to me, Dad.”

The woman covers her mouth and turns away. She presses out tears like she's a sponge in a fist.

“Tyler?” says the man. “Tyler, is that you?”

It's the first time Cyrus has a name to go with that part of him.
Tyler. Yes. I'm Cyrus, but I'm also Tyler. I'm Cy-Ty.

“Hurry!” Cy-Ty says. “Give it to me—I need it now!”

“What? Tyler,” says the woman through her tears, “What do you want from us?”

Cy-Ty tries to say it, but he can't get the word. He can't even get the image straight. It's a thing. A weapon. Still the image won't come, but the action does. He's miming something. He leans forward, puts one arm in front of the other. He's holding something long, angling it down. He thrusts both
arms lower. And now he knows it's not a weapon he seeks, it's a tool. Because he understands the action he's miming. He's digging.

“Shovel!” he says with a breath of relief. “I need the shovel.”

The man and woman look at each other. The policeman beside them nods, and the man says, “It's out in the shed.”

Cy-Ty makes a beeline through the house and out the back door with everyone following behind him: the couple, the cops, the dads, and the Fry. He heads straight for the shed, grabs the shovel—he knew exactly where it was—and heads toward a corner of the yard, where some twigs stick out of the ground.

The twigs have been tied to form lopsided crosses.

Cy-Ty knows this corner of the yard. He feels this place in his gut. This is where he buried his pets. He doesn't know their names, or even what kind of animals they were, but he suspects one of them was an Irish setter. He gets images of what happened to each of them. One met up with a pack of wild dogs. Another with a bus. The third, old age. He takes the shovel and thrusts it into the ground, but not near any of their graves. He'd never disturb them. Never. Instead, he presses his shovel into the soft earth two yards behind the graves.