“Or,” suggests Risa, “maybe he sees the bright side of it.”
“Do you?” Connor asks.
Risa sighs. “Sometimes.”
Cap-17 should have been a good thing, but in time, it became clear that it was not. Sure it was a victorious morning that next day, when the news showed thousands of seventeen-year-olds being released from harvest camps. It was a triumph of human compassion, and a great victory for those against unwinding, but that same feeling of victory allowed people to turn a blind eye again to the whole problem. Unwinding was still there, but people could now look the other way, believing their consciences were clean.
And then came the media blitz, a flood of advertisements designed to “remind” people how much “better” things were since the Unwind Accord. “Unwinding: the natural solution,” the ads said, or “Troubled teen? Love them enough to let them go,” and, of course, Risa’s favorite, “Experience a world outside of yourself: Embrace the divided state.”
The sad truth about humanity, Risa was quick to realize, is that people believe what they’re told. Maybe not the first time, but by the hundredth time, the craziest of ideas just becomes a given.
Which brings her back to Connor’s question. With a major shortage of Unwinds in the system after Cap-17, and a public accustomed to getting all the parts they want whenever they want them, why hasn’t the Graveyard been raided? Why are they still here?
“We’re here,” Risa tells him, “because we are. And we should just be thankful for that while it lasts.” Then she gently touches his shoulder, signaling it’s time to end the massage. “I’d better get back to the infirmary jet. I’m sure there are plenty of scrapes, black eyes, and fevers to take care of. Thank you, Connor.” As many times as he does this for her, she’s always embarrassed that she needs it.
He rolls down the loose-fitting legs of her khaki pants and puts her feet back on the wheelchair’s footrests. “Never thank a guy for putting his hands all over you.”
“Not all over,” Risa says coyly.
Connor throws her a sly little grin, letting it carry the weight of anything he might have said to that.
“I think I’d like our times together even more,” she tells him, “if you were actually here.”
Connor reaches up to touch her face—but he stops himself, switches hands, and touches her with the left instead of the right. The one he was born with. “I’m sorry, it’s just—”
“—your brain making up for lost time. I know. But I do look forward to a day we can be together and not be filled with all these dark thoughts. Then we’ll know we’ve won.”
Then she pushes off toward the infirmary jet, maneuvering over the rugged ground on her own, as always, refusing to be pushed by anyone, ever.
7 • Connor
A representative from the Anti-Divisional Resistance shows up the next afternoon—three days late for his scheduled meeting with Connor. He’s disheveled, paunchy, and drenched in sweat.
“And it’s not even summer,” Connor says—hoping to make the point that the sweltering Arizona summer is just a few months away. The ADR had better get their act together, or there are going to be a lot of angry AWOLs. That is, the ones who survive the heat.
They meet in the retired Air Force One, which used to be the Admiral’s personal quarters but now serves only as a conference room. The man introduces himself as Joe Rincon, “But call me Joe. No formalities in the ADR.” He sits at the conference table and pulls out a pad and pen to take notes. He’s already glancing at his watch, as if there’s somewhere else he would rather be.
Connor has a whole list of gripes from every corner of the Graveyard. Why are the food shipments so few and far between? Where are the medical supplies they requested? How about air conditioner and generator parts? Why are they not being warned when planes show up with new arrivals—and for that matter, why are the numbers coming in so light? Five or ten at a time, when the planes used to come in with fifty or more. With food supply being a constant issue, Connor doesn’t mind the low numbers, but it troubles him. If fewer AWOLs are being found by the resistance, that means the Juvies—or worse, the so-called parts pirates—must be finding them first.
“What’s wrong with you people? Why does the ADR keep ignoring all our requests?”
“There’s really nothing to worry about,” Rincon says, which sends up a red flag for Connor, because he never said anything about being worried. “Things are still being reorganized.”
“Still? No one ever told us things were being reorganized at all. And what do you mean by reorganized?”
Rincon blots his sweaty forehead with his shirtsleeve. “Really, there’s nothing to worry about.”
Over the course of a year, Connor has come to understand the Anti-Divisional Resistance better than he wanted to. When he was just an AWOL, he had no choice but to trust that the ADR was a well-oiled rescue machine—but it was nothing of the sort. The only thing that ran smoothly was the Graveyard—the Admiral had made sure of that, and Connor, following in his footsteps, keeps it that way.
He should have realized things with the ADR were not as they appeared as soon as they accepted the Admiral’s suggestion that Connor be the one to run the place, rather than installing a more experienced adult. If they were so willing to let a teenager manage their AWOL sanctuary, something was wrong somewhere.
There was a crazy time when kids were coming in every few days. The Graveyard boasted more than two thousand kids, and the ADR sent shipments of everything they needed on a regular basis. Then, when Cap-17 passed, Connor was ordered to immediately release all the seventeen-year-olds—who were a large percentage of the Graveyard population—but he made a command judgment to do it slowly, releasing them in increments, so they didn’t flood the city of Tucson with more than nine hundred homeless teenagers. The fact that they wanted him to just let all those kids go at once should have been another sign that the ADR leadership was faltering.
Connor had released them over a period of two months, but the ADR cut their supplies immediately, as if those kids had suddenly ceased to be their problem. Between the released seventeen-year-olds, kids sent out on work programs that had been set in place by the Admiral, and kids who deserted when there wasn’t enough food, the Graveyard population had dropped to about seven hundred.
“I see you’ve planted yourself quite a garden—and you’re raising chickens as well, yes?” Rincon says. “You must be fully sustainable by now.”
“Not even close. The Green Aisle produces only about one-third of the food that we need, and with the ADR flaking on our food shipments, we’ve had to resort to raiding market delivery trucks in Tucson.”
“Oh dear,” says Rincon. That’s all, just “Oh dear,” and he starts to gnaw on the end of his pen.
Connor, whose patience has been frayed since day one, is tired of beating around the bush. “Are you going to tell me something useful, or are you just here to waste my time?”
Rincon sighs. “It comes down to this, Connor: We believe the Graveyard has been compromised.”
Connor cannot believe what this fool is telling him. “Of course it’s been compromised! I’m the one who told you it was compromised! The Juvies know about us, and since the day I took over, I’ve been saying we need to relocate!”
“Yes, we’re working on that, but in the meantime we can’t keep pouring valuable resources into a facility that could be taken out by the Juvies at any moment.”
“So you’re just going to let us rot here?”
“I didn’t say that. You seem to have everything under control. With any luck, the Juvies will never find a need to invade—”
“With any luck?” Connor stands and storms from the table. “The resistance should be about action, not luck. But do you take action? No! I send you my plans to infiltrate harvest camps, and ideas on how to free kids in nonviolent ways that won’t piss people off and create a backlash—but all I hear from the ADR is ‘we’re working on it, Connor,’ or ‘we’ll take it under advisement, Connor.’ And now you’re telling me to rely on luck for our survival? What the hell is the ADR good for?”