He snaps his eyes to her, wondering if Lev told her about the ostrich—but nothing in her expression gives away whether she said it intentionally or if it’s only a coincidence. He can’t say anything about it, though, because if he did, she’d probably insist that there are no coincidences.

“He feels safe here,” insists Una. “Protected. He needs that.”

“If you’re his protector,” Connor asks, “where were you when he was turning himself into a bomb?”

Una looks away, and Connor realizes he’s gone too far. “I’m sorry,” he says. “But what we’re doing . . . it’s important.”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” says Una, still stinging from his jab. “Your legend might be larger than life, but you’re no bigger than the rest of us.” Then she storms off so quickly, Connor can feel a breeze in her wake.

•   •   •

That night he lay in bed, his thoughts and associations spilling into one another, a product of his exhaustion. The small stone room feels more like a cell, in spite of how comfortable the bed is.

Perhaps it’s just because he’s an outsider, but to Connor, the Arápache live a life of contradiction. Their homes are austere and yet punctuated by pointed opulence. A plush bed in an undecorated room. A simple wood-burning fire pit in the great room that’s not so simple because logs are fed and temperature maintained by an automatic system so that it never goes out. With one hand they rebuke creature comforts, but with the other they embrace it—as if they are in a never-ending battle between spiritualism and materialism. It must have been going on so long, they seem blind to their own ambivalence, as if it’s just become a part of their culture.

It makes Connor think of his own world and its own oxymoronic nature. A polite, genteel society that claims compassion and decency as its watch cry, and yet at the same time embraces unwinding. He could call it hypocrisy, but it’s more complex than that. It’s as if everyone’s made an unspoken pact to overlook it. It’s not that the emperor has no clothes. It’s that everyone’s placed him in their blind spot.

So what will it take to make everyone turn and look?

Connor knows he’s an idiot to think he can do anything to change the massive inertia of a world hurtling off its axis. Una’s right—he’s no bigger than anyone else. Smaller really—so small that the world doesn’t even know he exists anymore, so how can he hope to make a difference? He tried—and where did that get him? The hundreds of kids he’d tried to save at the Graveyard are now in harvest camps being unwound, and Risa, the one good thing in his life, has gone as far off the radar as him.

With the impossible weight of the world on their shoulders, how tempting it must be for Lev to imagine disappearing here. But not for Connor. It’s not in his nature to be one with nature. The sound of a crackling fire doesn’t calm him, only bores him. The serenity of a babbling brook is his version of water torture.

“You’re an excitable boy,” his father used to say when he was little. It was a parent’s euphemism for a kid out of control. A kid uncomfortable in his own skin. Eventually his parents weren’t comfortable keeping him in his skin either and signed the dread unwind order.

He wonders when they truly made the decision to unwind him. When did they stop loving him? Or was lack of love not the issue? Were they conned by the many advertisements that said things like “Unwinding—when you love them enough to let them go,” or “Corporeal division; the kindest thing you can do for a child with disunification disorder.”

That’s what they call it. “Disunification disorder,” a term probably coined by Proactive Citizenry to describe a teen who feels like they want to be anywhere else but where they are and in anyone else’s shoes. But who doesn’t feel like that now and then? Granted, some kids feel it more than others. Connor knows he did. But it’s a feeling you learn to live with, and eventually you harness it into ambition, into drive, and finally into achievement if you’re lucky. Who were his parents to deny him that chance?

Connor shifts positions in his bed and punches his swan-down pillow with his left fist, but switches, realizing it’s far more satisfying when he uses Roland’s hand for punching. Connor has built up his left arm so that it’s almost a match to his right, but when it comes to sheer physical expression, Roland’s arm is the one that makes his brain release endorphins when violently used.

He can’t imagine what it would be like to have an entire body wired to wish damage on everyone and everything around it. Sure, Connor had a little bit of that in him all along, but it only came in fits and starts. Roland, however, was a bashing junkie.

Sometimes, when he knows no one’s watching or listening, Connor will say things to his surgically grafted limb. He calls it “talking to the hand.”

“You’re a basket case, you know that?” he’ll say, when the hand won’t stop clenching. Occasionally he’ll give himself the finger and laugh. He knows the impetus for the gesture is his, but imagining that it’s Roland’s is both satisfying and troublesome at the same time, like an itch that gets worse with each scratch.

Once, at the Graveyard, Hayden had slipped Connor some medicinal chocolate to get him to mellow out a bit. Pharmacologically compounded, genetically engineered cannabis, Connor learned, packs a hallucinogenic wallop much more severe than smoking tranq. The shark on his arm spoke to him that night, and in Roland’s voice, no less. Mostly it spat out strings of cleverly conceived profanities—but it did say a few things of note.

“Make me whole again, so I can beat the crap out of you,” it said, and, “Bust a few noses; it’ll make you feel better,” and “Spank the monkey with your own damn hand.”

But the one that keeps coming back is “Make it mean something, Akron.”

What exactly did the shark mean by “it”? Did it mean Roland’s unwinding? Roland’s life? Connor’s life? The shark was maddeningly vague, as hallucinations often are. Connor never told anyone about it. He never even acknowledged to Hayden that the chocolate had any effect on him. After that, the shark, its jaw fixed in a predatory snarl, never spoke to Connor again, but its enigmatic request for meaning still echoes across the synapses between Roland’s motor neurons and his own.

Roland’s fury at his parents had been far more directed than Connor’s. A nasty triangle of pain there. Roland’s stepfather beat his mother, so Roland pummeled the man senseless for it—and then his mother chose the man who beat her over the son who tried to help her, sending Roland off to be unwound.

Make it mean something . . . .

The fury that Connor feels against his own parents burns like the ever-burning fire pit in the great room, but unlike Roland’s, Connor’s fury is as random as leaping flames in search of purchase. His fire isn’t fueled by their choice to unwind him, but by the unanswered questions surrounding that choice.

Why did they do it?

How did they make the decision?

And most important: What would they say to him now if they knew he was alive . . . and what would he say back?

He’s rushing to Ohio to find Sonia, but in the back of his mind, Connor knows that it also brings him painfully close to home. He wonders if, beneath everything, that’s the real reason he’s making this trip.

So he furiously tosses and turns in a luxurious bed, in a Spartan room, emotionally unwinding himself with his own ambivalence.

26 • Lev

Lev knows staying on the rez ticks off Connor—but hasn’t he earned the right to be selfish just this once?

“You can stay as long as you want to,” Elina had told him.

Pivane, on the other hand, was a little more practical. “You can stay as long as you need.” So the question is—how much of Lev’s desire to stay is need, and how much is want?