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Starkey sets Bam to do a head count, and she comes back with 128. They lost forty-one in the crash. Around him the survivors try to tally exactly who is missing, which just makes Starkey angry. Sitting here will do nothing but get them captured. He knows he’s cunning enough to make it on his own; somehow he’s got to extend his survival smarts to all of them.
“Everybody up! We can’t waste our time licking our wounds and mourning the dead. We’ve got to get out of here. ”
“Where do you suggest we go?” asks Bam.
“Right now, anywhere but here. ”
Starkey knows he needs to give these kids direction and purpose. Now that they’re free from the holding pen of the Graveyard, their priorities need to change. Connor might have been happy to just keep kids alive, but Starkey has to make this about more than just survival. Under his leadership, his storks can be a force to be reckoned with.
He goes to the nearest kids nursing their exhaustion and lifts them to their feet by their collars. “Let’s move! We’ll rest when we’re safe. ”
“When will we ever be safe?” someone asks. Starkey doesn’t answer, because he knows they’ll probably never be. But that’s all right. They’ve been complacent for too long. Being on the edge will keep them sharp and focused.
As the storks all gather their strength for an uncertain journey on foot, Starkey searches through them until he finds Jeevan, relieved that he’s one of the survivors.
“Jeeves, we’ll need the same type of setup you had in the ComBom, but mobile. I need you to be our eyes and ears and gather all the intelligence you can from the Juvenile Authority. ”
Jeevan just shakes his head in panicked disbelief. “That was all high-end military software. We don’t have it anymore. We don’t even have a computer!”
“We’ll commandeer as many computers as you need,” Starkey tells him. “And you’ll make it work. ”
Jeevan nods nervously. “Yes, sir. ”
Even before they leave the shore, Starkey’s grand plan begins to take shape. He will step up the campaign of vengeance he began in Tucson—only this time it won’t just be a handful of avenging storks, it will be all of them: a guerrilla army 128 strong, heaping punishment on anyone who would unwind a stork. Their numbers will grow with every stork they rescue. He doesn’t doubt that in time they could take down entire harvest camps. And then the Akron AWOL will be nothing but a sorry footnote beneath his own legacy.
Drawing strength from his powerful vision, Starkey leads them into the mountains east of the Salton Sea. His first trick will be to make them all disappear, but that’s only the beginning. From this moment on, there will be no end to the magic.
80 - Miracolina
Miracolina’s head is spinning as she awakes. That’s how she knows she’s been tranq’d. This is the fourth time she’s been tranq’d—she knows the drill by now. Memories of the events leading up to it come back, but slowly and not in order. She suppresses the nausea and sets to the task of determining her current circumstances and defragging her mind.
She’s moving. She’s in a vehicle. She was traveling with Lev. Is she in the back of a pickup? No. Is she in the baggage compartment of a bus? No.
It’s night. She’s in the backseat of a car. Is Lev with her? No.
They weren’t in a vehicle at the end, were they? They were walking. By a fence. Toward an old air force base. Is there more? There must be, but try as she might, she can’t remember anything after walking toward the gate.
Although she knows it will makes her feel as if her brain wants to escape through her ears, she sits up. There’s a thick glass barrier between her and the front seat. A police car? Yes—two Juvey-cops are in the front seat. This should be good news for her. It means that she’s finally surfaced out of the underworld that Lev has dragged her through. It doesn’t feel good at all, though, and it’s more than just the tranqs. That she’s in a squad car doesn’t bode well for Lev, and she can no longer deny that she cares about what happens to him in spite of herself.
The Juvey-cop at the wheel glances in his rearview mirror, catching her gaze. “Well, look who’s awake,” he says pleasantly.
“Can you tell me what happened?” The sound of her own voice makes her head pound.
“Police action at the aircraft salvage yard,” he says. “But you already know that, don’t you?”
“No. I was tranq’d outside the gate. ” And then she adds, “I was out for a walk,” which is a stupid thing to say, considering how isolated that road is.
“We know who you are, Miracolina,” the cop riding shotgun says. The news makes her have to lie back down on the sticky leather of the backseat, but she leans the wrong way and ends up slumped against the door.
“He told you?” she asks. She can’t imagine Lev voluntarily giving her name to the Juvies.
“No one told us,” he says, and holds up a small electronic device. “DNA tester. Standard issue for Juvey-cops since Happy Jack. ”
“I’d like to know what ‘he’ she’s talking about,” says the cop driving.
Well, if they don’t know, she’s not going to tell them. If Lev hasn’t been caught, then he wasn’t with her when she was. But would he just leave her? Lev is such a mixed bag of contradicting ethics, she can’t be sure. But no—that’s a lie—the kind of lie she used to tell herself just to demonize him. Deep down she knows he wouldn’t leave her voluntarily. If he did, he had no choice. Still, there’s no telling whether he’s free or has been captured.
“What I want to know,” asks the cop riding shotgun, “is how you wound up outside the gate and not inside like the rest of them. ”
Miracolina decides to tell them an edited version of the truth, since they’re not going to believe it anyway. “I escaped from a parts pirate with a friend,” she tells them. “We were looking for a place of safety. ”
The two cops look to each other. “So you had no idea that the airplane graveyard was an AWOL stronghold. ”
“We were just told to go there—that we would be safe from the parts pirates. ”
“Who told you?”
“Some guy,” she says, which sounds like something any kid would say, and effectively throws a wet rag over the question.
“How did you get tranq’d?”
When she doesn’t answer, the driver looks at his partner and says, “Prolly a trigger-happy rookie. ” His partner just shrugs.
“Well, you’re here, and you’re safe. Was your friend a tithe too?”
Miracolina has to suppress a smile. “Yes,” she says, “he was. ” She’s pleased she can lie to them in complete honesty, because after all it is the best policy.
“Well, no tithes turned themselves in,” Shotgun says. “Perhaps he got hauled off with the rest. ”
“The rest?”
“Like we said, police action. Rounded up a huge nest of AWOLs. A few hundred at least. ”
Again, something that once would have been good news for Miracolina—justice prevailing, order restored—now brings her nothing but melancholy.
“Any bigwigs brought in?” she asks, knowing that if Lev or his friend, the Akron AWOL, were caught, it would be big news—they’d all know.
“No such thing as a bigwig AWOL, sweetie. They’re all nonentities. Otherwise they wouldn’t be where they are. ”
Again she sighs in relief, and the cops assume her sigh is exhaustion from the tranquilizers. “Lie back down, honey. You’ve got nothing to worry about. The parts pirates can’t get you now. ” But she stays upright, not wanting to slip into a post-tranq stupor. There’s something off about the way they’re treating her. After all, she is an Unwind with a questionable story—and even though she’s a tithe, she’s never known Juvies to be so nice to kids about to be unwound. As they said, they see Unwinds as nonentities. You don’t call nonentities “honey” and “sweetie. ”
As they pull into the local Juvey headquarters, she begins to wonder what the proc
ess is now. “I was supposed to go to Wood Hollow Harvest Camp,” she tells them. “Will I still go there, or to a camp in Arizona?”
“Neither,” the driver says.
“Excuse me?”
He parks the car and turns to her. “From what I understand, your parents never actually signed the unwind order. ”
That leaves Miracolina speechless.
They never signed it. Now she remembers them telling her that as she stood at the door—but she told them it was her choice to go, and she got into the van anyway.
“Even if you had made it to Wood Hollow, you would have just been sent home once they double-checked the paperwork. Can’t unwind without an order. ”
She laughs at the irony of it. All this time fighting to finally be tithed, and not only won’t it happen, but it was never going to happen. She wants to be angry—but how can she fault her parents for loving her too much to let her go? She wonders how things would have been different if she had known. Would she still have taken the journey west with Lev after escaping from the parts pirate? Would she have stayed with him long enough to forgive him, granting him that absolution he so desperately needed?
To her amazement, the answer is no.
Had she known she’d never be tithed, that call she made to her parents wouldn’t have just been a message that she was alive—it would have been a plea to come and get her. She would have let Lev finish his journey alone—solitary and unforgiven.
“I know how tithes are,” says the shotgun cop sympathetically. “If it’s what you really want, you can take it up with your parents when they get here. ”
And although it is what she wants, she’s coming to terms with the disappointment of staying whole.
“Thank you,” she says. “Thank you so much. ” But it’s not them she’s thanking.
Either things happen for a reason, or they happen for no reason at all. Either one’s life is a thread in a glorious tapestry or humanity is just a hopelessly tangled knot. Miracolina has always believed in the tapestry, and now she feels blessed to have had a glimpse of its smallest corner. Now she knows her desire to be tithed was not there to leave her in a divided state—it was there to propel her into the right place at the right time to have a hand in the redemption of the boy who would blow himself up.
Who would have thought that the singular whole of her forgiveness was a more valuable gift than a hundred of her parts?
So she will return into the arms of her wildly emotional parents and will live the life they dream for her until she can find her own dream. She had no tithing party, but right now, she resolves that she will have herself a grand celebration someday. Perhaps a sweet sixteen. And she will find Lev, wherever in the world he is, ask him to attend, and refuse to take no for an answer. And then, finally, she will dance with him.
81 - Hayden
To the best of Hayden’s knowledge, they’re the last ones left. There are fourteen others in the ComBom with him, all kids from the various communication shifts, who put more faith in him than in anyone else—which shocks Hayden. He had no idea there was anyone who looked up to him. One kid is noticeably absent. Before power was cut to the cameras, Hayden saw Jeevan getting into the Dreamliner with the other storks, his arms packed with pilfered weapons.
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