UnBound

by Neal Shusterman

  “Ride . . . into the sunset,” he says. “Dirk. Dirk doesn’t know. He doesn’t know!”

  And Cam gets it. “Dirk doesn’t know we’re on an island!”

  Keaton smiles. “On the nose! Dirk doesn’t know!”

  Cam has become pretty familiar with the roads on Molokai. For Dirk, taking off into his metaphorical “sunset,” couldn’t have been west, or he’d have passed right through the most populated part of town. He would have headed east, away from the populated areas. He’ll be on Kamehameha V Highway, which wraps around the eastern tip of the island and doubles back along the north shore.

  “How could he not know this is an island?” the sheriff asks.

  “His mind hasn’t integrated as well as the others,” Cam explains. “He probably can’t think clearly enough to figure it out. The moon has already set, so he’ll have no way to gauge his direction, and it’s a slow curve going around the eastern tip, so he’ll think he’s going straight. We just have to cross a few miles to the north shore, and we’ll catch him as he loops back.”

  “And if you’re wrong?” the sheriff asks.

  “I’m not,” Cam says, then looks to Keaton. “We’re not.” But just to be sure, Cam sends a fleet of jeeps down Kamehameha V Highway in pursuit. Then he and the bulk of his forces cross the narrow width of the island to the north shore and wait for Dirk to arrive.

  14 • Dirk

  Me. Wheels. Road. Squint. Face. Wind. Vroom-vroom. Ocean on the right. Ocean on the right. Smarter than them. Faster than them. Vroom-vroom. Ocean on the right. “Born to be Wild.” Steppenwolf. Lone wolf. No one catches a lone wolf. Stupid people. Killing Keaton. Stupid Keaton. Saw them do it. Saw them tie him. Rope, rope, rope, rope. Car, car, truck, van. Stretch Armstrong. Couldn’t watch. Took Harley. No one saw. Stupid people.

  Parts of me know how. Clutch. Accelerator. Vrooom-vrooom. Parts don’t know how. Make ’em learn fast. Almost fall. Learn quick or die.

  Me. Me. Me. Not like other rewinds. Know that. Hate that. Think they’re better than me. Better than them. Hate them. Keaton dead. Hate all the rest. Make them pay.

  Still night. Still of the night. Morning soon. Let freedom ring. Far from here. Vroom-vroom. Ocean on the right. Heading south? North? Doesn’t matter. Free either way. Find something pretty. Curvy. Prom night. Make her like it. Win the bet. Make them all like it. Smarter than them. Stronger. Stupid girl. Find her someday. Kill her for hurting me. But not now. Later. Later than you think. Dawn. Horizon. Ocean on the right. And ahead? And ahead?

  No!

  Can’t be! Jeeps and police and boeufs. Roadblock. And Camus Comprix. Can’t be faster than me. How are they here? How?

  And Keaton.

  Dead? Not dead? Ghosts. All ghosts. Are they?

  Bird at my ear.

  Not a bird. A tranq.

  Missed.

  Nowhere to go.

  Pffft. Missed again.

  Ocean to the right. And a pier. Nowhere else to go. Vroom-vroom. Road, road, then wood. Wheels on rattling wood. A shack at the end of the pier. Nowhere else to go.

  15 • Keaton

  The sharpshooters aren’t all that sharp. “It’s the tranqs,” they complain. “They don’t behave like standard bullets. It’s not our fault we missed him.” No one wants to take responsibility for Dirk.

  No one but Cam. Keaton can see the torment in Cam’s face. He wishes he could ease it. All Cam did was try to give them some dignity. It worked for Keaton. It worked for all the others. But not for Dirk. Because Dirk is different. Dirk is missing the spark. Which means there’s nothing holding him together but stitches.

  There’s a small burger joint at the end of the pier. This is where Dirk goes to take refuge. The motorcycle skids out from under him as he nears it. He gets up limping. The sharpshooters try to tranq him again. They take down a seagull. It would be funny if things weren’t so dire. One tranq shatters a window, saving Dirk the trouble of having to do it himself. He shoots back once with his stolen pistol—a wild shot that disappears into the dawn, then he climbs in through the broken window to escape the barrage of tranqs. Does he understand what happened? Keaton wonders. Has it finally occurred to his fragmented mind that they’re on an island? That all things here come full circle?

  “He’s cornered,” Cam says.

  “He’s armed,” Una warns.

  “He could jump,” suggests the sheriff. “Swim to shore and escape.”

  Keaton shakes his head. “Davy Jones,” he says. “Sink. Drown. Rewinds can’t swim. Not yet. Must learn again. Harder than motorcycle.”

  One of Cam’s military officers suggests they take the whole building out. “A single mortar shell could do it.”

  “That pier is a landmark,” the sheriff points out.

  The officer shrugs. “Doesn’t a landmark need to be on land?”

  “We’re not blowing anything up,” Cam announces. “Can we get close enough to shoot a canister of tear gas inside? Smoke him out?”

  They throw ideas back and forth. Keaton has one of his own, but he’s not going to tell them. They’ll just dismiss him.

  Keaton begins to walk down the pier.

  “What the hell is he doing?” shouts the sheriff. “Get back here!”

  Keaton ignores him. Let them tackle him or tranq him. That will be the only way to stop him. He knows what he needs to do. Hand of my hand. He and Dirk are, in some twisted way, family, and family takes care of its own. Cam must understand this, because Keaton hears him say, “Let him go.”

  Dawn evolves into sunrise in the minute it takes to reach the shack at the end of the pier. There’s blood on the motorcycle lying on the wooden slats of the pier. Blood on the windowsill Dirk climbed over. Behind him military boeufs take position on the pier, weapons drawn, but keeping their distance. Keaton glances back at them once. Then climbs through the window.

  Dirk sits in a corner. His pants are ripped, and his leg is torn open from when he flew off the bike, right along one of his rewound seams.

  “Dead!” Dirk shouts, waving the gun carelessly “Saw you! Dead!”

  “Almost dead,” Keaton says calmly. “They let me go. Knew it was you, not me.”

  “Stupid people.”

  Keaton sits beside him. Says nothing. He waits to see what Dirk will do. He wonders if Dirk will shoot him. Or maybe, realizing there’s no way out, shoot himself. But then it occurs to Keaton that Dirk would never do that. It’s a choice that Dirk is incapable of making. You have to be alive to kill yourself. A wave of pity suddenly washes over Keaton. What must it be like to go through the motions of life, yet not be alive? Keaton knows he himself lives, because he has compassion for this poor unfortunate creature before him. A creature that is doomed to be nothing more than a collection of parts.

  Dirk suddenly grabs his hand. “Hand of my hand. Die with me? Butch and Sundance?”

  As one stray memory in Keaton’s internal community recalls, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid died in a hopeless shootout. Keaton has no desire to re-create that scene. “No,” says Keaton, and instead says, “George and Lenny.”

  Dirk looks at him questioningly. He doesn’t get the reference. Just as well.

  “Give me the gun, Dirk.” It is perhaps the first complete self-motivated sentence he’s said.

  Dirk’s dead eyes narrow. “Why?”

  “Because I asked.”

  “Why?”

  Dirk holds the gun tighter. He aims it toward Keaton, and Keaton studies his eyes for a hint of anything. But no. There is no torment, no remorse, no fear, or even resignation. He could shoot Keaton. But he doesn’t. Instead he hands the gun to him.

  “I shoot bad,” Dirk says. “You better. Talk better, think better, shoot better.”

  “Probably,” admits Keaton.

  “You go shoot them. Shoot them all. Is what we have to do. Take no prisoners.”

  Keaton looks at the gun in his hand. His umber hand doesn’t know how to hold it, but his sienna one does. In fact it feels
almost familiar. He wonders what that’s about, but then decides he’d rather not know.

  “No prisoners, Dirk.”

  16 • Cam

  This was a mistake. He knows it. Just one more in a whole series of mistakes. He should have gone in there himself. Yet he knows if he had, Dirk would have shot him dead in an instant. Keaton was the only one who stood a chance. But how do you reason with a creation that knows no reason? Not even its own reason to be?

  “We can still take out the structure,” suggests his mortar-happy officer. “If all else fails.”

  Then a single gunshot splits the morning, sending the gulls flapping from the pier like a release of doves. Cam holds his breath.

  The front door of the burger shack opens, and Keaton steps out. The gun is in his hand by his side. All weapons on the pier are trained on him.

  “Lower your weapons,” Cam orders.

  They obey. Keaton walks down the pier toward Cam and puts the gun in Cam’s hand.

  “Done” is all Keaton says. Then he climbs into the passenger seat of the nearest jeep and closes his eyes, waiting for whatever’s coming next.

  • • •

  There’s an old leper cemetery by a rustic white church on a western Molokai bluff. Dirk is buried with a small ceremony by a military pastor. No one else is in attendance but Cam and Una. The pastor says his litany by rote. Words about God’s mercy, everlasting life, and how Dirk’s soul is now remanded to the Almighty. It makes Cam grimace, feeling himself a hypocrite to be party to the travesty. But then who is he to decide if Dirk truly was soulless? Better to err on the side of grace.

  The whole incident of Dirk’s escape and subsequent death is reported to Cam’s superiors in Washington. Dr. Pettigrew writes a scathing indictment of how Cam handled it—but it is balanced by the account of the sheriff, who, to Cam’s surprise, commends Cam for his leadership in the crisis.

  In the end there is no official inquest or investigation. Not even the obligatory slap on the wrist.

  “Are you disappointed?” Una asks him once things slip back into a shade of normality around the compound.

  “Actually, yeah. A little.” The truth is, the whole Molokai compound is an albatross around the neck of the military, and the rewinds are so unloved as to be completely ignored. Now Cam realizes that he’s no different. He was once the military’s shining star, now he’s the reminder of their unchecked hubris. Clearly they’d rather not be reminded.

  “Being ignored has its advantages,” Una is quick to point out. “Dignity doesn’t grow under a microscope.”

  • • •

  Three weeks after the incident there is a day of rejoicing. A new milestone in the lives of the rewinds. Six of them—three boys, three girls—the six most well-integrated—will begin attending Molokai High School. Tenth grade—arbitrary since their internal communities range from thirteen to seventeen, but it seemed unnecessarily cruel to make them freshman. To Cam’s surprise the suggestion of allowing the rewinds to attend Molokai High came from the local population—perhaps as a response to the hatemongers. Sometimes prejudice can be slapped upside the head by tolerance. Especially now that people in town have come to see Keaton Shelton as a sort of folk hero.

  The night before their big day Cam and Una hold a dinner for the six school-bound rewinds in the formal dining room where Proactive Citizenry once wined, dined, and bribed the movers and shakers of the world. No longer are these rewinds wearing drab convalescent scrubs. The boys are in jeans, with comfortable shirts, and Una made a trip to Honolulu to find the latest fashions for the girls.

  Dinner conversation is upbeat and only a little bit disjointed and stilted. After dessert the half dozen rewinds cajole Cam and Una to play guitar for them, an impromptu duet that ends the evening. It took the rewinds themselves to convince Una to play in front of an audience—something Cam could never do on his own.

  Then the evening concludes, but as the others board golf carts that will take them back to the rewind ward, Keaton lingers. He comes up to Cam and points at his own temple.

  “Someone here played guitar, but badly.” Then he holds up his umber hand. “This hand played drums, I think, but no memory of it.” He sighs.

  “How are you feeling about tomorrow?” Cam asks him.

  Keaton smiles. “Got butterflies. But they’re good.” Then he thinks for a moment. “Hardest part . . . is that I don’t know what I don’t know.”

  Cam gets that. Every one codes and stores memories differently. When it comes to education, a rewind’s mind can be like swiss cheese. Keaton might know the history of the world but have no concept of the order of it all.

  “You’ll figure it out,” Cam tells him. “Be patient.”

  Keaton accepts the advice. “Left a present for you,” he says, and nods toward the living room. Then he turns and boards a golf cart with two of the rewind girls, who laugh and talk with giddy anticipation about tomorrow’s reentry into the human race.

  Cam can’t help but smile as they ride off.

  “Look at you,” Una says, taking his hand. “The proud papa.”

  “Nah,” he says. “Just an older brother.”

  Una goes upstairs. It’ll be an early, and eventful, day for all of them tomorrow. A momentous day. Best to get a good night’s sleep. But before heading upstairs for the night, Cam detours through the living room. At first he doesn’t see Keaton’s gift, because it’s just sitting on a coffee table, masquerading as a paperweight. When he finally notices it, he laughs with pleasant surprise.

  Sometimes the most meaningful gifts are the ones that come back to you. And for Camus Comprix, no gift could be more meaningful than an old Rubik’s Cube, perfectly solved.

  Unknown Quantity

  1 • Argent

  Argent Skinner could not keep the right half of his face.

  He had desperately wanted to. He had watched through the UNIS machine’s little window as Nelson was unwound. He found himself unmoved by the man’s screams and found he had no pity whatsoever for Nelson. Argent wondered if that made him a bad person. Well, who cares. He saved Connor Lassiter, who has since been rewound and is kicking ass in Washington. That made Argent a hero even if no one ever knew—and every hero should be allowed to enjoy at least one moment of revenge.

  The plane was already in the air by the time UNIS was done with Nelson—but Argent had then realized his dilemma. If Argent brought the biostasis container holding the right half of his face to Divan, Divan would know what he had done. Divan Umarov, king of the Western world’s organ black market, believed Argent to be too dimwitted to even conceive of doing something so brash. It was a perception that worked in Argent’s favor, allowing him to get away with many things . . . such as relabeling all of Connor’s crates.

  Little did Divan know that the parts his buyers paid millions for weren’t Connor’s parts at all. They belonged to some random AWOL whose name Argent couldn’t remember.

  If Divan knew what Argent had done to Nelson, Argent would become an unknown quantity in Divan’s eyes. That would be a problem. Divan had allies and enemies; anyone who fell somewhere in between could end up dead. Ever since the day that Risa escaped with most of Divan’s Unwinds, the man had been ordering the death of anyone he had questions about.

  So Argent denied himself his ultimate victory and sat back as all of Jasper T. Nelson was sold off piece by piece to greedy buyers. Divan never even knew that lot 4833 wasn’t one of his AWOLs.

  That was months ago. Now Argent bides his time, serving as Divan’s valet to the best of his ability, waiting for the day the man keeps his promise to Argent and allows him to choose a new face—a whole one—to replace the scarred half of his own and the biobandage that covers his right half like a mask. Argent has no doubt that his employer will keep his promise. Divan Umarov is many things, some of them unthinkable, but Argent knows that above all else, Divan is a man of his word.

  2 • Divan

  Business could not be better. With the United State
s government caving to the conscience of its people, leading to the temporary halting of all unwinding, the call for parts worldwide has been great. Prices have tripled, and Divan finds he cannot keep up with the demand. If the ban on unwinding becomes permanent, and spreads to other nations, he and the Burmese Dah Zey will be the sole sources of quality parts. And since the Dah Zey does not deal in brain tissue, he will have a distinct advantage.

  The Dah Zey knows this and wants him taken out of play more than ever before.

  For this reason Divan has been forced to purge his ranks of anyone he does not trust and to keep himself at a level of paranoia that, considering the circumstances, could save his life.

  Today Divan watches a news clip over and over in the vaulted “great room” of Lady Lucrezia, an Antonov AN-255—the largest aircraft ever built. All the comforts of home, at thirty-seven thousand feet. His valet comes in with a carafe of coffee.

  “Skinner,” Divan says, pointing at the news clip, “have you seen this?”

  On-screen is a talk show. Featured guests are none other than “Connor Lassiter” and Risa Ward. Divan notes the way Skinner’s hands shake when he sees it. The coffee cup on the platter chatters like teeth on a cold night. The reason is obvious. Skinner knows that any business involving the Akron AWOL and Risa Ward usually sends Divan into a rage. He’s probably waiting for it—but today Divan has no reason to lose his temper. “This was broadcast live earlier this morning,” Divan explains. “Watch what happens next.”

  Just as the host is about to start the interview, shots ring out, the host’s chest practically explodes, and the camera skews wildly. More shots. Risa and Connor can be seen hurried backstage by security guards, to the gasps and screams of the studio audience.

  Skinner drops the coffee carafe and immediately goes down to clean it up, apologizing profusely. It is of little concern to Divan. Skinner will clean it up and get more coffee. In spite of his occasional clumsiness, he’s an excellent valet.