- - -
True to her word, the nurse tells him that Marcus is in room 408, and so after dark, when all the questioning is over and the halls have quieted, Lev ventures out of his room, ignoring the aches that fill most of his body. Just outside his door, he sees that the cop assigned to guard him is down the hall, flirting with one of the younger nurses. Lev quietly slips away to visit Marcus.
As he pushes open the door to room 408, the first thing he sees is his mother sitting in a chair, her eyes fixed on Marcus, who is unconscious and intubated, and connected to a hissing breathing machine. His father is there too, his hair looking a little grayer than it did a year ago. Lev feels tears threatening to rise, but he wills them away, sucking his emotions in and locking them tight.
His mother sees him first. She reaches over to get his father’s attention. They look at each other for a moment, sharing whatever pseudo-telepathy married couples have. Then his mother stands, crosses to Lev, and never once looking at him, hugs him awkwardly, then leaves the room.
His father doesn’t look at him either. Not at first anyway. He just looks to Marcus, watching his chest rise and fall in a slow, steady, machine-regulated rhythm.
“How is he?” Lev asks.
“He’s in an induced coma. They said they’ll keep him like this for three days, so the nanos can speed the healing.”
Lev has heard that the pain of nano-healing is unbearable. It’s best that Marcus sleeps through it. Lev is certain that his parents gave Marcus all tithed organs. The most expensive. He knows this, but he won’t ask.
Finally his father looks at him. “Are you satisfied now? Are you happy with the results of your actions?”
Lev has imagined this conversation between him and his father a hundred times. In each of those mental confrontations, Lev has always been the one making accusations, not the other way around. How dare he? How dare he? Lev wants to lash out, but he refuses to take the bait. He says nothing.
“Do you have any idea what you’ve put this family through?” his father says. “The shame? The ridicule?”
Lev can’t maintain his silence. “Then maybe you shouldn’t surround yourself with people as judgmental as you.”
His father looks to Marcus again. “Your brother will come home with us,” he decrees. And since any guts that Marcus now has have been paid for by their father’s money, he won’t have much of a choice.
“And me?”
Again, his father won’t look at him. “My son was tithed a year ago,” he says. “That’s the son I choose to remember. As for you, you can do as you please. It’s not my concern.” And he says no more.
“When Marcus wakes up, tell him I forgive him,” Lev says.
“Forgive him for what?”
“He’ll know.”
And Lev leaves without saying good-bye.
Farther down the hallway, he spots his mother again, and other members of his family, in the fourth-floor waiting room. A brother, two sisters, and their husbands. In the end, they came for Marcus. None of them are there for him. He hesitates, wondering if he should go in there. Will they behave like his father, bitter, rigid, and cold—or like his mother, offering a pained hug, yet refusing to look at him?
Then, in that moment of indecision, he sees one of his sisters bend down and pick up a baby. It’s a new nephew Lev never even knew he had.
And the baby is dressed all in white.
Lev races back to his room, but even before he gets there, he feels the eruption begin. It starts deep in his gut, sobs rising with such unexpected fury, his abdomen locks in a cramp. He must struggle the last few feet to his room doubled over, barely able to catch his breath as the tears burst from his eyes.
Somewhere deep, deep down in the most irrational corner of Lev’s mind—perhaps the place where childhood dreams go—he held out a secret hope that he might actually be taken back. That he might one day be welcomed home. Marcus had told him to forget about it—that it would never happen, but nothing could wipe out that stubborn hope that hid within him. Until today.
He climbs into his hospital bed and forces his face into his pillow as the sobs crescendo into wails. A full year’s worth of suppressed heartache pours forth from his soul like Niagara, and he doesn’t care if he drowns in the killing whiteness of its churning waters.
- - -
Lev wakes without ever remembering having slept. He knows he must have, because there’s morning light streaming into the room.
“Good morning, Lev.”
He turns his head toward the voice a little too sharply, and the room spins around him. An aftereffect of the explosion. His ears are still ringing, but at least the flutter in his left ear has settled down.
Sitting in a chair near the foot of his bed is a woman a little too well-dressed to be part of the hospital staff.
“Are you FBI? Homeland Security? Are you here to ask me more questions? Because I don’t have any more answers.”
The woman chuckles slightly. “I’m not with any government agency. I represent the Cavenaugh Trust. Have you heard of it?”
Lev shakes his head. “Should I have?”
She hands him a colorful brochure, and as he looks at it, he gets a shiver.
“It looks like a harvest camp brochure.”
“Hardly,” she says, clearly insulted. The right response, as far as Lev is concerned. “To put it simply,” she tells him, “the Cavenaugh trust is a whole lot of money, set aside by what was once a very wealthy family to help wayward youth. And we can think of few youth as wayward as you.”
She gives him a twisted little smile, thinking herself funny. She’s not.
“Be that as it may,” she says, “we understand you have no place to go once you’re released, and rather than leave you at the mercy of Child Protective Services, who certainly cannot protect you from any future clapper attacks, we are prepared to offer you a place to live—with the full approval of the Juvenile Authority, of course—in exchange for your services.”
Lev pulls his knees up beneath his covers and shrinks away from her. He doesn’t trust well-dressed people who make offers with strings attached. “What kind of services?”
She smiles at him warmly. “Just your presence, Mr. Calder. Your presence and your winning personality.”
And although he can’t think of anything that his personality has won, he says, “Sure, why not?” Because he realizes he has absolutely nothing left to lose. He thinks back to the days after he left CyFi, and before he arrived at the Graveyard. Dark days, to be sure, but punctuated by a bit of light when he found himself on a reservation, taken in by People of Chance. The Chance folk had taught him that when you have nothing to lose, there’s no such thing as a bad roll of the dice. And then something occurs to him. Something that has been in the back of his mind for a while, but today has risen to the forefront.
“One thing, though,” Lev says.
“Yes?”
“I want to have my last name legally changed. Can you do that?”
She raises her eyebrows. “Of course, if that’s what you want. May I ask what you would like to change it to?”
“It doesn’t matter,” he tells her. “Just as long as it’s not Calder.”
22 - Trust
There’s a home on a street in northern Detroit. It is now the official legal residence of one Levi Jedediah Garrity. It’s a small home, but adequate, and comes through the generosity of the Cavenaugh trust, dedicated to helping wayward youth. There is a full-time valet to take care of Lev’s needs, and a new tutor to take care of his lessons. The trust has even planted a permanent rent-a-cop out front to deter any unwanted guests and suspicious solicitors. No clappers are getting anywhere near the front door here.
It would be a perfect situation for Lev, except for the fact that he doesn’t actually live there. True, there’s that subcutaneous tracking chip embedded in his neck that swears he does, but the chip was easily compromised. Now the chip can ping out a signal from wherever they want Lev to appear to be.
No one knows he’s being brought to the Cavenaugh mansion, almost forty miles away.
The Cavenaugh mansion is a behemoth of a building resting on seventy-five secluded acres in Lake Orion, Michigan. It was designed to look like Versailles and was built with motor money in the days before the American automotive industry had done its own version of clapping and applauded itself into nonexistence.
Most people don’t know the mansion is still there. They’re mostly right, because it’s barely there at all. Exposure to the elements all these years has left it one storm short of surrender.
The mansion served as the Midwest headquarters for the Choice Brigade during the Heartland War, until it was captured and became headquarters for the Life Army. Apparently both the Lifers and Choicers saw great value in having their own personal Versailles.
The place was under attack constantly until the day the Unwind Accord ended all battles, putting forth the worst possible compromise and yet the only one both sides could agree to: sanctity of life from conception to thirteen, with the option of unwinding teenagers whose lives were deemed to have been a mistake.
For many years after the war, the Cavenaugh mansion lay crumbling, too expensive to repair yet too large to tear down, until Charles Cavenaugh Jr., to assuage his guilt at still having old money in new times, donated the mansion to a trust fund, which was owned by another trust fund, which was laundered through yet another trust fund, which was owned by the Anti-Divisional Resistance.
23 - Lev
Charles Cavenaugh Jr. meets Lev personally at the entrance of the crumbling mansion. He’s dressed like he’s too rich to worry about how he’s dressed. Even with the Cavenaugh family fortune long gone, Lev figures there must be enough residual wealth to keep at least his generation living elite. The only thing that betrays his allegiance to the resistance is his thinning hair. Nowadays the rich don’t have thinning hair. If they do, they just replace it with someone else’s.
“Lev, it’s an honor to meet you!” He grasps Lev’s hand with both of his, shaking it firmly and maintaining a steady eye contact that Lev finds awkward.
“Thanks. Same here.” Lev isn’t sure what else to say.
“I was so sorry to hear about the loss of your friend and your brother’s injuries. I can’t help but think if we had approached you earlier, the tragedy never would have happened.”
Lev looks up at the mansion. Barely a window is intact. Birds fly through the jagged, broken panes.
“Don’t let it fool you,” Cavenaugh says. “She still has some life in her—and the way she appears is actually an asset. It’s camouflage for anyone who tries to look too closely.”
Lev can’t imagine anyone looking too closely. The place is on seventy-five fenced-in acres, in the middle of a weedy field that was once a lawn, which is surrounded on all sides by dense woods. The only way to even see the mansion would be from above.
Cavenaugh pushes open a rotted door and leads Lev into what was once a grand foyer. Now the foyer has no roof. Two sets of stairs climb to the second floor, but most of the wood on the stairs has caved in, and weeds grow through cracks in the floor, pushing up the marble tiles, making it randomly uneven.