“What do you want me to do? Just go on like it never happened? Like she never existed?”
The Admiral holds a steady demeanor, in spite of Connor’s frustration. “I hadn’t pegged you as the kind of young man who wastes his time feeling sorry for himself.”
“I’m not feeling sorry! I’m angry!”
“Anger is only our friend when we know its caliber and how to aim it.”
That makes Connor give out a sudden guffaw that’s loud enough for the driver to glance back. “Good one! Someone oughta quote you.”
“Someone did. It’s on page ninety-three of the Military Academy Freshman Ordinance Manual, fifth edition.” The Admiral turns to look out of the tinted windows at the activity of the Graveyard. “The problem with all you AWOLs is that you use your anger like a grenade, half the time blowing off your own hands.” Then he looks at Connor’s arm. “No offense.”
“None taken.”
But now that the Admiral’s attention has been drawn to the arm, he looks at it more closely. “Do I know that tattoo?” Then he snaps his fingers. “Roland. Wasn’t that his name? A real pain in the ass.”
“That’s the one.”
The admiral ponders the shark a moment more. “I don’t suppose it was your choice to get his arm.”
“It wasn’t my choice to get any unwound arm,” Connor tells him. “If I had a choice, I would have refused it, the same way you refused an unwound heart. The same way Risa refused a new spine.” Connor feels goose bumps rise on the arm from the near-arctic chill of the air conditioner. “But now I’ve got it, and it’s not like I’m gonna hack it off.”
“And well you should keep it!” the Admiral says. “Roland may have been a miscreant, but he was a human miscreant, and deserved better. I’m sure he’d be satisfied to know that his arm is ruling the Graveyard with an iron fist.”
Connor has to laugh. Leave it to the Admiral to make sense of the senseless. Then the man gets quiet. Serious. “Listen here,” he says. “This business about Risa—for everyone’s sake, you’ve got to let it go.”
But there are some things Connor just can’t let go. “I should never have let her make that trip to the hospital.”
“If she hadn’t, from what I understand an innocent boy would have been unwound.”
“So? Let him be unwound!”
The Admiral quietly bristles. “I’m going to forget you said that.”
Connor sighs. “You should never have put me in charge. You wanted the Akron AWOL running this place, but he doesn’t exist. He never did. He’s just a legend.”
“I stand behind my decision. You see yourself as failing—but that’s not what I see. Sure, when you’re in the midst of your own suffering, it’s easy to convince yourself that you’re no good—but we are all tested in this life, Connor. The measure of a man is not how much he suffers in the test, but how he comes out at the end.”
Connor lets his words sink in, wondering when this particular “test” will be over and how many undiscovered layers it might still have. It makes him think about all the things Trace has told him.
“Admiral, have you heard of something called Proactive Citizenry?”
The Admiral thinks about it. “Sounds somewhat familiar. Don’t they fund some of those blasted pro-unwinding advertisements?” He shakes his head in disgust. “They remind me of the old ‘terror generation’ ads.”
That catches Connor like a barbed hook. “Terror generation?”
“You know—the Teen Uprisings? The Feral Flash riots?”
“I’m drawing a total blank.”
The Admiral looks at him like he’s an idiot. “Good God—don’t they teach you anything in those poor excuses for schools anymore?” Then he calms down, but only a little. “No, I suppose they wouldn’t. History is written by the victors—and when there are no victors, it all winds up in corporate shredders.” He looks out the window with the sad resignation of a man who knows he’s too old to change the world.
“You must educate yourself, Mr. Lassiter,” he says. “They may not teach it, but they can’t blot it out entirely. It’s the very reason why people were so willing to accept the Unwind Accord. The very reason for our twisted way of life.”
“Sorry to be so ignorant,” Connor says.
“Don’t be sorry. Just do something about it. And if you’re curious about this Proactive Citizenry, educate yourself on that, too. What is it you’ve heard about them?”
Connor considers telling him everything he learned from Trace but realizes it couldn’t be good for the man’s heart. The Admiral is retired, and while he can be called on to give Connor a swift and necessary boot, it would be wrong of Connor to involve him in things now.
“Nothing,” Connor tells him. “Rumors.”
“Then leave it to those who have nothing better to do than gossip,” the Admiral tells him. “Now man up, get the hell out of my limo, and save these kids’ lives.”
- - -
Once the Admiral is gone, Trace respectfully requests a private meeting with Connor. In spite of his admission that he’s working for the Juvies and Proactive Citizenry, he still treats Connor with the full respect of a commanding officer. Connor doesn’t know what to make of this. He can’t tell whether it’s a scam or if Trace is being sincere. Although Connor can’t stomach being a pawn for the Juvies by maintaining their vault of Unwinds, he can’t deny that receiving privileged information from Trace makes him feel that he’s the one pulling the wool over the eyes of the Juvenile Authority, and not the other way around. The truth hasn’t set Connor free, as Trace has suggested, but at least it has given him a sense of power over his captors.
They ride down one of the eastern aisles, past rows of fighter jets so dusty the cockpit windows don’t even look like glass. They’re far enough away from any activity in the Graveyard that their meeting is very private.
“You need to know that things are brewing,” Trace tells him.
“What kinds of things?”
“From what intelligence I’ve been able to gather, there’s dissent in the Juvenile Authority. There are some who want to take this place out—they just need a reason.”
“If they want to take us out, the fact that we’re here is reason enough.”
“I said some want to take us out. The suits I work for don’t—and as long as everything stays smooth here, they can keep the Juvies muzzled. I’ve been a good little stool pigeon and continue to tell them that Elvis Robert Mullard is running a tight ship.”
Connor laughs. “They still have no clue that Elvis has left the building?”
“None whatsoever—and I’ve given them no reason to doubt my word.” Trace pauses for a moment. “Did you tell the Admiral about me?”
“No,” Connor tells him. “I haven’t told anyone.”
“Good. A leader should know things no one else does, and spoon out information on a need-to-know basis.”
“Spare me the military classroom,” Connor tells him. “So is that all you wanted to talk about?”
“There’s more.”
They reach the end of the aisle, and Trace stops before turning into the next one. He pulls out a slip of paper from his pocket and hands it to Connor. There’s a name on it, scrawled by hand. Janson Rheinschild.
“Is this someone I’m supposed to know?” Connor asks.
“No. He’s someone nobody’s supposed to know.”
Connor has little patience for this. “Don’t waste my time with riddles.”
“That’s the point,” Trace says. “He is a riddle.” He puts the Jeep in gear, and they turn down the next aisle.
“Do you remember the other week when I went up to Phoenix to get components for the Dreamliner’s electrical system?”
“You didn’t go to Phoenix,” Connor says. “You went to meet with your bosses at Proactive Citizenry. Don’t you think I know that?”
Trace seems a bit surprised, then a bit pleased. “I didn’t tell you because I didn’t know whether you trusted me.”
“I don’t.”
“Fair enough. Anyway, it was different this time. They didn’t just meet with me, they flew me out to their main headquarters in Chicago. They had me give a full report to a packed conference room. Of course I left out some key things, like our escape plan. I told them the Dreamliner is a new dormitory jet, and that the cockpit was dismantled and sold.”
“Oh, so it’s not just me that you lie to?”
“They’re not lies. It’s disinformation,” Trace says. “After the meeting, I did some snooping. There was a marble wall in the lobby commemorating former presidents of the organization—some names you’d probably recognize—giants of business both before and after the war . . . but there was one name missing. It had been gouged right out of the marble, with no attempt to patch it up. And then again, out in the garden there was a sculpture of the founders. Five of them, but clearly the pedestal was built for six. There were still rust stains from where that sixth statue had once been.”
“Janson what’s-his-face?”
“Rheinschild.”
Connor tries to work it out but can’t. “It doesn’t make sense. If they wanted to disappear him, why not patch the marble? Why not get a smaller pedestal?”
“Because,” says Trace. “They didn’t just want to disappear him . . . they wanted to make sure their members never forgot that they disappeared him.”
Connor gets a chill in spite of the desert heat. “So what does all this have to do with us?”
“Before they flew me back, a couple of the friendlier suits took me to their private club—a place that served the kind of alcohol you can’t even get on the black market. Real Russian vodka. Tequila from before the agave extinction. Stuff that must cost thousands of dollars a shot, and they were guzzling it like water. When they were fairly wasted, I asked about the missing statue. One of them blurted out the name Janson Rheinschild, then became worried that he had said it. After that, they changed the subject, and I thought it was over. . . .” Then Trace stops the Jeep so he can look Connor dead in the eye as he speaks. “But then, as I was leaving, one of them said something to me that I still haven’t been able to get out of my mind. He clapped me on the shoulder, called me his ‘friend,’ and told me that unwinding is more than just a medical process, it’s at the very core of our way of life. ‘Proactive Citizenry is dedicated to protecting that way of life,’ he said, ‘and if you know what’s good for you, you’ll forget you ever heard his name.’ ”
37 - Risa
PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT
“I was a ward of the state about to be unwound, so I went AWOL. That means I shouldn’t be here right now. You might think I’m lucky . . . but because I stayed whole, fourteen-year-old Morena Sandoval, an honor student with a bright future, died because she was denied the liver I would have provided. Jerrin Stein, a father of three, died of a fatal heart attack because my heart wasn’t available when he desperately needed it. And firefighter Davis Macy lost his life to pulmonary asphyxiation because my lungs weren’t there to replace his burned ones.