“Are you wondering if it’ll bite you?” she once asked as he gazed at that shark. Startled, Connor went a little bit red, as if he had been caught doing something he shouldn’t. Then he just shrugged it off. “Nah, I was just wondering when and why Roland got this stupid tattoo. If I ever come across the person who got that particular brain cell, maybe I’ll ask.” Then he walked away from her, ending the conversation.
If it weren’t for those daily leg massages, Risa would think that Connor has forgotten about her completely. But even those massages aren’t the same. They feel perfunctory now. Like the only reason he’s there is because he made a promise to himself that he would be—not because he truly wants to be.
Thinking about Connor makes her miss a chord—the same damn chord she missed at her life-or-death recital that left her on a bus, speeding her off to be unwound. She growls, then takes her fingers off the keys and draws a deep breath. Her music carries, which means her frustration is being broadcast just as clearly as Radio Free Hayden.
What bothers her most is that she cares. Risa was always able to take care of herself, both physically and emotionally. At the state home, either you developed several layers of personal armor or you were eaten alive. When had that changed? Was it when she was forced to play music as kids were led into the building beneath her to be unwound? Was it when she made the choice to accept a shattered spine, rather than having it replaced by the healthy spine of an Unwind? Or maybe it was before that, when she realized that, against all sense and reason, she had fallen in love with Connor Lassiter?
Risa finishes the sonata, because no matter how she’s feeling, she cannot leave a piece of music uncompleted. Then, when she’s done, she fights the dry, craggy terrain beneath her wheels and rolls toward a certain private jet.
9 - Connor
Connor dozes in a chair that’s too comfortable to remain fully awake in, but not comfortable enough to be fully asleep. He’s jarred alert by a thud against the side of his jet. By the time the second one comes, he realizes it’s off to his left. By the time the third one hits, he realizes someone is throwing things at his plane.
He looks out of a window, but in the darkness he sees only his own reflection. Another thud. He cups his hands over his eyes, pressing his face against the glass. The first thing he sees are the curved blue streaks reflecting moonlight. A wheelchair. Then he sees Risa hurling another rock, which hits right above the window.
“What the hell?”
He opens the hatch, hoping she’ll stop the barrage. “What’s wrong? What’s happened?”
“Nothing,” she says. “I was just trying to get your attention.”
He chuckles, not yet getting her frame of mind. “There are better ways.”
“Not lately.”
She moves forward and backward a bit in her chair, crushing a dirt clod that had her tilted at a slight angle. “Not going to invite me in?”
“You’re invited. You’re always invited.”
“Well, then maybe you should have put up a ramp.”
And although he knows he’s going to regret saying it, he says it anyway. “Maybe you should let someone carry you.”
She rolls a bit closer but not enough to close the space between them—just enough to make it painfully awkward. “I’m not an idiot. I know what’s going on.”
Risa might want this talk right now, but Connor is in no mood. After firing Bam and John, he just wants to end this day and find dreamless sleep until whatever fresh hell awaits in the morning.
“What’s going on is that I’m trying to keep us all alive,” he says with a little too much irritation in his voice, “and I don’t see that as a problem.”
“Yes, you’re so busy keeping us alive. Even when you’re not busy, you’re busy—and when you do actually talk to me, it’s all about the ADR, and how hard it is for you, and the weight of the world on your shoulders.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Risa, you are not the kind of fragile girl who needs a guy’s attention to feel whole.”
Then the moon comes out from behind a cloud again, and he can see tears glistening on her face. “There’s a difference between needing attention and being intentionally ignored.”
He opens his mouth to say something, but his brain fails him. He could talk about their daily circulation massages, but she has already pointed out that even then, he’s mentally checked out.
“It’s the wheelchair, isn’t it?”
“No!” he tells her. “It has nothing to do with that.”
“So you admit there’s a reason.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“What then?”
He steps down from the jet. Three steps that separate his world from Risa’s. He kneels before her, trying to look into her eyes, but now they’re hidden in shadow. “Risa, I care about you as much as I ever did. You know that.”
“Care about me?”
“Love you, okay? I love you.” The words don’t come easy for Connor. They wouldn’t come at all if they weren’t true, so that’s how he knows they are. He does love her deeply—that’s not the problem. And the wheelchair isn’t the problem, and neither is his job of running the Graveyard.
“You don’t behave like a boy when he’s in love.”
“Maybe because I’m not a boy,” he tells her. “I haven’t been for a good long time now.”
She thinks about that, and quietly says, “Then show me how you feel the way a man does. And make me believe it.”
The challenge hangs heavy in the air. For a moment he imagines himself lifting her out of the chair and carrying her into his jet, all the way to his room at the back, and gently laying her down on his bed, being for her the man he claims to be.
But Risa will not be carried. Under any circumstances. Ever. And he wonders if maybe this is not entirely his fault. Maybe she’s partially to blame for this invisible rift between them.
With no other way to prove his feelings, he reaches forward with his own hand, pushes the hair back from her face, then leans in, giving her a powerful kiss. He puts the whole weight of their relationship and all their built-up frustration into that single superheroic kiss. It should be enough to say everything he can’t . . . but when he pulls away, he feels her tears on his cheek, and she says:
“If you wanted me with you, you would have built a ramp.”
- - -
Back inside, Connor lies on his bed in the dark, the moonlight painting cold bars of light across his bed. He’s angry. Not at Risa, because she’s right. It would have been nothing to build a ramp to his jet. He could have done it in half a day.
But what if he had?
What if Risa really could be with him in every possible way—and what if the shark on his arm truly did have a mind of its own? Roland attacked her—he tried to force himself on her, and she must have been looking at that damned shark when he did it. She said it didn’t bother her, but it bothers Connor enough to keep him awake night after night. Because what if when they were alone together, in the heat of that passionate moment they both wanted—what if he lost control? What if that hand held her too tight, tugged her too hard—what if it hit her, and hit her again, and again, and wouldn’t stop? And how could he ever truly be there with her if all he could think about were all the things that arm had done, and all the things it still might do?
Better not to let it happen.
Better to make sure she’s never that close.
So you don’t build a ramp. You don’t visit her in her jet, and when you do have physical contact, it’s out in the open where it’s safe. And when she rolls away from you in tears, you let her go, thinking whatever she wants to think, because that’s better than admitting to her that you’re too weak to feel safe with your own arm. Then, alone in the dark of a private jet, you smash your fist furiously against a wall until your knuckles are raw and bloody, but you don’t care, because even though you can feel the pain, you know they’re not your knuckles at all.
10 - Starkey
Starkey spends his days working his particular brand of magic—and he knows that the best magic tricks take practice, patience, and very careful misdirection. Undetectable sleight of hand. For more than a month he has not betrayed his ambitions. To have done so would have made Connor suspicious. Instead he networked among the Whollies, studying the alliances, the friendships, and the power structure—and at last, through careful planning, Starkey has inserted himself in the right place at the right time to gain Connor’s favor without him ever knowing that it was all part of Starkey’s long-term plan.
Now he’s in the highest echelon of the Graveyard, and although it’s only food service, it keeps him in direct contact with all seven hundred kids. He has more power, more access, and he begins to do things that previously might be thought of as suspicious, but now come with the territory of being one of the Holy of Whollies.
One afternoon Starkey wanders innocently into the Com-Bom, the Graveyard’s computer and communications center, which Hayden runs. Its radio equipment was initially designed to pull in and decode enemy frequencies—which it still does, although now the enemy is the National Juvenile Authority. At any given time it’s manned by half a dozen Whollies, who have been handpicked by Hayden for their computer skills.
“I’m not the tech geek everyone makes me out to be,” Hayden tells him. “I’m just very good at taking credit for other people’s work. I think I get it from my father—he was uniquely skilled at stomping on fingers as he climbed the corporate ladder.” Hayden studies Starkey for a moment, and Starkey just smiles back.
“Something wrong?”
“No,” Hayden says. “I was just wondering if you’re thinking of stealing my position. Not that I care. I wouldn’t mind working food service for a while, but it would help me to know what your intentions are.”
“I just want to know how stuff works around here, that’s all.”
“Oh,” says Hayden, “you’re one of those.” Starkey doesn’t know what kind of “those” he’s talking about, but he doesn’t care as long as Hayden tells him what he wants to know.
“I have an ethnically diverse team here,” Hayden tells him proudly, going around the room. “Tad is Japanese, Hailey is umber, Jeevan is Indian—and Esme is half-Hispanic. I think her other half must be extraterrestrial, because she’s too damn smart to be all human.” Esme preens proudly for a moment, then gets back to work cracking coded communications. “We have Nasim, who’s Muslim, working side by side with Lizbeth, who’s Jewish, and guess what? They’re in love.”
“Bite me,” says Nasim, then Lizbeth punches him just hard enough to make it clear that it’s true.
Hayden points out the various monitoring consoles. “There’s a communications monitoring program running on this one. It can pull keywords out of anything from e-mails to phone conversations. It can warn us if the Juvey-cops are up to something major. Kind of an early warning system originally developed to fight terrorism, but isn’t it nice to know we can now use it for civilian purposes?”