UnSouled

The front door is unlocked—careless of her to leave it that way. But a moment later, as he crosses from the foyer into the living room, he learns in no uncertain terms that it wasn’t her doing. He’s hit in the head with one of his wife’s heavier knickknacks and falls to the ground. Dazed, but still conscious, he looks up to see the face of his attacker.

It’s just a kid of maybe sixteen. One of the “ferals” the news and neighbors keep complaining about. The lawless, vicious by-product of modern civilization. He’s gangly and malnourished, with an anger in his eyes that was only partially relieved by smashing a stranger in the head.

“Where’s the money?” he demands. “Where’s the safe?”

Even in pain, Janson can almost laugh. “There is no safe.”

“Don’t lie to me! A house like this always has a safe!”

He marvels at how the boy can be so dangerous and so naive at once. But then again, ignorance and blind cruelty have been known to go hand in hand. On a dark whim, Rheinschild reaches into his coat pocket and tosses the kid his medal.

“Take it. It’s gold,” he says. “I have no use for it anymore.”

The kid catches the medal in a hand that’s missing two fingers. “You’re lying. This ain’t gold.”

“Fine,” says Rheinschild. “So kill me.”

The kid turns the medallion over in his hands a few times. “The Nobel Prize? I don’t think so. It’s fake.”

“Fine,” says Rheinschild again. “So kill me.”

“Shut up! I didn’t say anything about killing you, did I?” The teen hefts it, feeling its weight. Rheinschild pulls himself up to a sitting position, still feeling his head spin from the blow. He may have a concussion. He doesn’t care.

The kid then looks around the living room, which is filled with awards and citations that Janson and Sonia received for their groundbreaking work. “If this is real, whad’ya win it for?”

“We invented unwinding,” Rheinschild says. “Although we didn’t know it at the time.”

The kid lets loose a bitter, disbelieving guffaw. “Yeah, right.”

The young burglar could leave with his prize, but he doesn’t. Instead he lingers. So Rheinschild asks, “What happened to your fingers?”

The kid’s distrustful gaze notches toward anger again. “Why is that your business?”

“Was it frostbite?”

His attacker is taken aback, surprised by Rheinschild’s guess. “Yeah, it was. Most people think it was fireworks or something stupid like that. But it was frostbite last winter.”

Rheinschild pulls himself up into a chair.

“Who said you could move?” But they both know the kid’s posturing is now all for show.

Rheinschild takes a good look at him. It appears he hasn’t been introduced to a shower in this lifetime. Rheinschild can’t even tell the color of his hair. “What is it that you need?” Rheinschild asks him.

“Your money,” he says, looking down his nose at him.

“I didn’t ask you what you want. I asked you what you need.”

“Your money!” he says again, a little more forcefully. Then he adds a bit more gently: “And food. And clothes. And a job.”

“What if I gave you one of the three?”

“What if I bashed your head in a little deeper than I already did?”

Rheinschild reaches into his pocket, pulls out his wallet, intentionally revealing that there are a few bills in there, but instead of the bills he tosses the boy his business card.

“Come to that address at ten on Monday. I’ll put you to work and pay you a livable wage. If you want to buy food and clothes with it, that’s fine with me. If you want to squander it, that’s fine with me too. Just as long as you show up every day, five days a week. And you take a shower before you do.”

The kid sneers at him. “And you’ll have the Juvey-cops waiting there for me. Do you think I’m stupid?”

“There’s not enough empirical evidence to make that judgment.”

The kid shifts his weight from one foot to another. “So what kind of work is it?”

“Biological. Medical. I’m working on something that could end unwinding, but I need a research assistant. Someone who isn’t secretly on Proactive Citizenry’s payroll.”

“Proactive Who?”

“Good answer. As long as you can say that, you’ll have job security.”

The kid considers it, then looks at the medallion in his three-fingered hand. He tosses it back to Rheinschild. “You shouldn’t walk around with this. You should frame it or something.”

Then he leaves with nothing more than he had when he broke in, except for a business card.

Rheinschild is sure he’ll never see the kid again. He finds himself pleasantly surprised when the boy shows up at his research office on Monday morning, wearing the same filthy clothes, but freshly showered beneath them.

12 • Risa

She cannot believe the position she’s put herself in.

All this time surviving against overwhelming odds and now, thanks to her own stupidity, she’s going to die.

She blames her own arrogance for her downfall. She was so certain she was too clever, too observant, to be snagged by a parts pirate—as if somehow she existed on a higher plane.

A crumbling barn on a marginally functional farm in Cheyenne, Wyoming. She had found it in the midst of a storm and had gone in to take shelter from the rain. In one stall there was a shelf stocked with food.

Stupid, stupid, stupid! What was food doing in a deserted barn? If she had been thinking, she would have run and risked the lightning, but she was tired and hungry. Her guard was down. She reached for a bag of chips, hit a trip wire, and a spring-loaded steel cable wrapped around her wrist. She was caught like a rabbit. She tried to tug free, but the slipknot cable was designed to ratchet tighter and tighter the more she pulled.

The parts pirate had been careless enough to leave various farm tools within her reach, but none of them were of the type to cut a steel cable. After an hour of struggling, Risa realized there was nothing to do but wait—and envy wild animals who had the good sense to gnaw off their own limbs to escape from traps.

That was last night. Now as morning comes, Risa, having not slept at all, must face a fresh hell. The parts pirate comes an hour after sunrise. He’s a middle-aged man with a bad scalp job. His mop of boyish blond hair doesn’t make him look boyish, just creepy. He practically dances a jig when he sees that his trap has done the job.

“Been there for months and nothing,” he tells Risa. “I was ready to give up—but good things come to those who wait.”

Risa seethes and thinks of Connor. She wishes she could have been more like him last night. Connor would never be so foolish as to allow himself to be captured by an imbecile.

Clearly this guy’s an amateur, but as long as he’s got the goods, the black-market harvesters won’t turn him away. He doesn’t recognize her. That’s good. The black market pays more for the infamous—and she doesn’t want this man to get paid what she’s worth. Of course that assumes he gets that far. Risa has had all night to come up with a plan of action.

“Selling you might just get the banks off my back,” he tells her jovially. “Or at least get me a decent car.”

“You have to cut me loose first before you can sell me.”

“Indeed I do!”

He looks at her a little too long, his grin a little too wide, and it occurs to Risa that selling her to a black-market harvester is only at the end of his list of planned activities. But whatever his plans, he’s the type who has to have everything just right. He goes around the stall and begins cleaning up the mess Risa made in her frustrated attempts to escape.

“You sure were busy last night,” he says. “Hope you got it out of your system.”

Now Risa begins to taunt him. She knows what sorts of things will push this man’s buttons—but she begins with some easy, glancing blows. She begins with slights against his intelligence.

“I hate to kill the dream,” she says, “but the black market won’t deal with morons. I mean, you have to know how to read if you’re going to sign a contract.”

“Very funny.”

“Seriously, maybe you should have gotten some brains to go along with that hair.”

It only makes him chuckle. “Bad-mouth me all you want, girlie. It’s not gonna change a thing.”

Risa thought there was no way she could possibly hate this man more . . . but calling her “girlie” opens up a whole new level of loathing. She begins her next round of attacks—this time against his family. His gene pool. His mother.

“So did they slaughter the cow that gave birth to you, or did it die of natural causes?”

He continues his stall tidying, but his focus is gone. Risa can tell he’s getting rankled. “You shut up. I don’t gotta take crap like that from a dirty Unwind bitch!”

Good. Let him curse at her. Because the angrier he gets, the more it plays in Risa’s favor. Now she delivers her final salvo. A series of cruel assertions about the man’s anatomy. Assertions of severe inadequacy. At least some of them must be true, because he loses it, getting red in the face.

“When I’m done with you,” he growls, “you ain’t gonna be worth what you are now—that’s for sure!”

He lunges for her, his big hands out in front of him—and as he throws himself forward, Risa raises the pitchfork that she’s concealed in the hay. She doesn’t have to do any more than that: just hold the thing up. His weight and momentum do all the work.

The amateur parts pirate thoroughly impales himself and pulls back, taking the pitchfork with him.

“Whad’ya do to me! Whad’ya do!”

The pitchfork flails back and forth like an appendage in his chest as he curses and screams. Risa knows it’s hit some vital organ because of all the blood and the speed at which he goes down. In less than ten seconds, he collapses against the far wall of the stall and dies with his eyes open and staring not quite at her, but off to her left, as if maybe in his last moments he saw an angel over her shoulder, or Satan, or whatever a man like him sees when he dies.

Risa considers herself a compassionate human being, but she feels no remorse for this man. She does, however, begin to feel a deepening sense of regret. Because her hand is still caught in the cable. And the only human being who knows she’s here is now lying across the stall, dead.

And Risa cannot believe the situation she’s put herself in. Again.

* * *

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“You wonder who I am? Yeah, sometimes I do too. My name is Cyrus Finch. My name is also Tyler Walker. At least one-eighth of me is. See, it’s like that when you get jacked up on some other dude’s gray matter, dig? Now I don’t feel like me or him, but less than both of us. Less than whole.

“If you’ve gotten yourself an unwound part and regret it, you’re not alone. That’s why I started the Tyler Walker Foundation. Call us at 800-555-1010. We don’t want your money; we don’t want your vote—we just want to fix what’s broken. That’s 800-555-1010. We’ll help you make peace with your piece.”