The Rheinschilds

Dr. Janson Rheinschild sits in a chair, in a room, in the dark, alone. His wife has gone to bed, but he cannot. After spending so many hours in bed, for so many weeks, he’s plagued by crushing insomnia, an unyielding headache, and a hollowness in his soul that he cannot describe.

Were he more shallow, he could be a very happy man—after all, he’s got millions in his bank account. He and Sonia could go anywhere they want and live out their lives in extravagant luxury . . . . But what would be the point? And where can they go that they won’t be reminded of the darkness they leave behind?

Unwinding is spreading. China was the first to jump on the bandwagon, then Belgium and the Netherlands and the rest of the European Union. The Russians claimed to have come up with the idea themselves, as if it were something worth claiming, and in third-world nations, where laws change as quickly as governments, the black-market trade in human organs has grown into a major industry.

And what of his attempt to change all that? What of his “life’s work that would end unwinding”? After one final attempt to get some answers out of BioDynix Medical Instruments, he was slapped with a cease-and-desist lawsuit and a restraining order that prevents him from coming within one hundred yards of any BioDynix employee.

Every day, the very existence of their basement reminds him that Austin—whom Janson and Sonia had come to care about like a son—is gone, and as if this cake needed any further icing, both he and Sonia have been virtually unwound themselves. Before Janson had been ousted from Proactive Citizenry for actually wanting to do some good in the world, they were working on digital footprint removal. It was supposed to be a way to protect one’s privacy on the web by removing unwanted and unauthorized references and pictures of oneself.

But like everything else, Proactive Citizenry found a way to weaponize it.

Now any and all references to Janson or Sonia Rheinschild have been eliminated from the digital memory of the world. Not only don’t they exist, but according to public records, they never existed. Those who know them will eventually forget them, and even if they don’t, those people will eventually die. Janson’s and Sonia’s footprints on this earth will be washed as clean as a beach at high tide.

And so Janson Rheinschild sits alone in his chair, turning all of his anger, his disillusionment, and his disappointment inward, until finally he feels his heart seize in his chest, knotting in the lethal cramp of cardiac arrest.

And he’s glad for it. He’s grateful that at last the universe has chosen to show him some mercy.

58 • Connor

The sign on the highway reads WELCOME TO AKRON, THE RUBBER CAPITAL OF THE WORLD. The dark, threatening skies feel anything but welcoming. Connor finds himself white-knuckling the steering wheel and has to loosen his grip. Calm down. Calm down. It’s only a sign.

“The scene of the crime,” comments Cam from behind Connor, and then softens it by adding, “Of course, that depends on your definition of ‘crime.’ ”

Grace, still beside Cam in the backseat, is content to decipher personalized license plates and analyze them. “SSADAB. Dumbass spelled backward. ‘♥&SEOUL.’ Some Korean guy who got an Unwind’s heart.” Grace seems immune to the heightened level of tension in the car until they approach a highway patrol car parked on the shoulder.

“Go slow! Go slow! Go slow!” she says.

“Don’t worry, Grace,” Connor tells her. “I’m right at the speed limit.” How stupid if they get caught for speeding and captured at this point.

The woods are now broken by suburban subdevelopments, and as the road rolls by, Connor tries to find the spot where his, Risa’s, and Lev’s lives converged. He doesn’t even know if this is the same freeway. It feels like something not just from another life, but from another world entirely. A world into which he’s just initiated reentry. He feels like Frodo at the gates of Mordor. Who would have guessed that Ohio could hold such dark portent?

“Do you know what you’re looking for?” asks Cam from the backseat. “Akron’s a big town.”

“Not so big,” is Connor’s only response.

Connor knows that Cam’s presence on this journey is a necessary evil, but he wishes Cam were not sitting right behind him where Connor can’t see him, except for suspicious glances in the rearview mirror. Cam’s offerings of information have not won Connor over. There’s something fundamentally underhanded and opaque about the Rewind, or at least about his intentions. Giving him the benefit of the doubt could damn them all.

“I imagine you must know Akron pretty well.”

“Not at all,” Connor tells him. “I’ve been here only once.”

That makes Cam laugh. “And yet they call you the Akron AWOL.”

“Yeah, funny how that works.” Connor is actually from a suburb of Columbus, hours away, but Akron is where he turned the tranq on Nelson. Akron is where he became notorious. He didn’t even know where he was at the time. He only knew it had been Akron once they gave him the irritating “Akron AWOL” label.

“Center-North!” Connor blurts.

“Center-north what?” Grace asks.

“That’s the name of the school. Center-North High. I knew I’d remember it eventually.”

“We’re going to a school?”

“That’s ground zero. We’re looking for an antique shop near the school. I’ll know it when I see it.”

“You sure about that?” asks Cam. “Memory’s a funny thing.”

“Only yours,” says Connor. He punches the name of the school into the GPS and a gentle voice directs them with confident, if somewhat soulless, purpose. In fifteen minutes, they’re on the east side of town. They turn a corner and things look troublingly familiar to Connor.

The school looks exactly the same. Three stories of institutional redbrick that somehow looks as intimidating to him as the Texas School Book Depository had when Connor’s family traveled to Dallas and took a tour of the infamous building where Oswald shot Kennedy. Connor takes a deep, shuddering breath.

It’s midmorning on a Tuesday, so school is in session. It’s just about the same time of day that the fire alarm went off and all hell broke loose. Connor rolls them slowly past. Across the street are homes, but up ahead is a main commercial street.

“Anything specific we should be looking for?” asks Cam. “Any defining characteristics of this antique shop?”

“Yeah,” Connor says, “old stuff,” which makes Grace laugh.

He wonders what Sonia will do when she sees him. Then a horrible thought crosses Connor’s mind: What if she’s dead? Or what if she was caught and arrested for harboring Unwinds? He doesn’t voice his concerns, because if he doesn’t speak them aloud, maybe they won’t be true.

Connor slams the brakes, nearly running a red light. A pedestrian crosses the street glaring at them.

“Not much of a driver, are ya?” says Grace, then turns to Cam. “Did you know he almost killed Lev?”

“My driving’s fine,” Connor insists, “but this place is eating my brain.” He looks around, waiting for the light to change. “I don’t recognize any of this, but I know the shop can’t be more than a block or two away.”

“So drive around the school in a spiral that gets bigger,” suggests Grace. And then she adds, “Although since the streets ain’t round, it’s kinda a square spiral.”

“That’s called an Ulam spiral, by the way,” Cam says. “A way of graphing prime numbers. Not that you would know that.”

Connor gives him a disgusted look in the rearview mirror. “Is everyone in your internal community an ass?” Connor asks. It shuts Cam up.