UnSouled

—Sponsored by the Tyler Walker Foundation.

* * *

The parts pirate, who had no intention of dying, had left the barn door open. A coyote comes to visit that night. When Risa first sees it, she yells at it, throws hay, and heaves a garden hoe. The hoe hits it on the nose hard enough to make it yelp and leave in a hurry. Risa knows nothing of wild animals, their natures, or habits. She does know that coyotes are carnivorous but she’s not sure if they hunt alone or in packs. If it returns with its mangy brethren, she’s done for.

It comes back an hour later, alone. It takes little interest in her, other than to note whether or not she’s still in a throwing mood. The point is moot, since there’s nothing left in her reach to throw. She yells at it, but it ignores her, focusing all of its attention on the parts pirate, who isn’t putting up any resistance.

The coyote dines on the man, who is already beginning to grow rancid in the summer heat. Risa knows the stench will only get worse until, in a day’s time, maybe two, the stench of her own flesh will join his. Perhaps the coyote is smart enough to know that she will eventually die as well and is prioritizing. As far as the coyote is concerned, her continued life is better than refrigeration. It can make several meals of the parts pirate, knowing that, when all is said and done, fresh meat will be waiting.

Watching the coyote eat eventually desensitizes her to the horror of it. She finds herself objective, almost as if watching from a safe distance. She idly wonders which is crueler, man or nature. She determines it must be man. Nature has no remorse, but neither does it have malice. Plants take in the light of the sun and give off oxygen with the same life-affirming need that a tiger tears into a toddler. Or a scavenger devours a lowlife.

The coyote leaves. Dawn breaks. Dehydration begins to take its toll on Risa, and she hopes the thirst will kill her before the coyote finds her alive but too weak to fend off its advances. She slips in and out of consciousness, and her life begins to scroll before her eyes.

The flashing of one’s life, Risa finds, is by no means complete; nor does it take into account the value of memories. It is as random as the stuff of dreams, just a little more connected to what once was.

The Cafeteria Fight

She’s seven years old and fighting another girl who insists that Risa stole her clothes. It’s a ridiculous assertion, because everyone in the state home wears the same basic utilitarian uniforms. Risa’s too young at the time to know that it’s not about clothes but about dominance. Social position. The girl is larger than her, meaner than her—but when the girl pins her to the ground, Risa gouges the girl’s eyes, flips her, and spits in her face—which is what the girl was trying to do when she pinned Risa. The girl cries foul when the teachers pull them apart, claiming Risa started it and that she fights dirty. But no adult really cares who started it as long as it ends, and as far as they’re concerned, all fights among state home orphans are dirty. The interpretation among the kids, however, is much different. What matters to them is that Risa won. Few people pick fights with her after that. But the other girl gets no peace from her peers.

A Practice Room

She’s twelve and playing piano in a small acoustic-tiled room of Ohio State Home 23. The piano is out of tune, but she’s used to that. Risa plays the Baroque piece flawlessly. In the audience, disembodied faces observe, stony and impassionate, in spite of the passion with which she plays. This time she does fine. It’s only when it matters four years later that she chokes.

The Harvest Camp Bus

The administration has decided that the best way to deal with budget cuts is to unwind one-tenth of the home’s teen population. They call it forced downsizing. The glitches and clunkers in Risa’s pivotal piano recital leave her firmly placed within that 10 percent. Sitting next to her on the bus is a mealy boy by the name of Samson Ward. An odd name for a scrawny kid, but since all state home orphans are, by law, given the last name of Ward, first names tend to be, if not entirely unique, at least fairly uncommon and often ironic because they’re not chosen by loving parents, but by bureaucrats. The kind who might think giving a sickly premature baby the name “Samson” is droll.

“I’d rather be partly great than entirely useless,” Samson says. This memory has the perspective of hindsight. Samson, she discovered much later, had a secret crush on her, which expressed itself in the person of Camus Comprix. Cam had received the part of Samson’s brain that did algebra and apparently also had fantasies about unattainable girls. Samson was a math genius—but not enough of one to keep him out of the unlucky 10 percent.

Looking at Stars

Risa and Cam lying on the grass on a bluff on a Hawaiian island that had once been a leper colony. Cam announces the names of the stars and constellations, his accent suddenly tweaking New England as he engages the piece of the person in his head who knows everything about stars. Cam loves her. At first she despised him. Then she endured him. Then she came to appreciate the individual he was becoming—the spirit that was exerting itself above and beyond the sum of his parts. She knows she will never feel for him what he feels for her, though. How could she when she is still so in love with Connor?

Connor.

Months before that stargazing night in Molokai. He’s massaging her legs as she sits in a wheelchair in the shade of a stealth bomber in the Arizona desert. She cannot feel her legs. She doesn’t know that in a few short months her spine will be replaced and she’ll walk again. All she knows in the moment is that Connor can’t truly be with her the way she wants him to be. His mind is too full of responsibilities. Too full of the hordes of kids he’s hiding and protecting in the airplane graveyard.

The Graveyard.

Now true to its name. Violently emptied of its occupants as thoroughly as a World War II ghetto. All those kids were either killed or sent off to harvest camps to their eventual unwinding—or “summary division,” as the paperwork officially calls it. And where is Connor? She knows he must have gotten away, because if he had been caught or killed, the Juvenile Authority would have had a field day with it in the media. It would be a death blow to the Anti-Divisional Resistance—which has become as effective as a flyswatter against a dragon.

And it is dusk once more in the barn. The coyote comes back again, this time with a mate to share in the feast. Risa yells so as to not appear weak and to remind them that she still has some strength left, although it’s waning quickly. They don’t bother with her. Instead they tear cruelly at the dead man, and as they do, Risa realizes something. From where she’s caught—even when she stretched herself as far as she could—she was still two feet away from the dead man.

But the coyotes have pulled him away from the wall.

With all the energy that she has left, she stretches herself across the ground toward him. Reaching with her left hand, she manages to snag the cuff of his pant leg with her forefinger.

She begins to tug him closer, and as he begins to move, the coyotes realize that tomorrow’s meal has become a threat to today’s. They bare their teeth and growl at her. She doesn’t stop. She pulls on him again. This time one of the animals bites her arm, clamping down. She screams and uses her old trick of gouging its eye. The animal is hurt enough to loosen its grip, and Risa breaks free long enough to pull the dead man closer. She can reach the edge of his pocket—but the other coyote leaps for her. She has only a second. She reaches into the dead man’s pocket hoping, for once, that luck is in her favor, and she finds what she’s looking for just as the second coyote grabs on to her upper arm. But the pain is only secondary to her now. Because she has his phone.

Risa pulls away and withdraws into the corner. The coyotes yap and snarl angry warnings. She stands on shaky legs and they back off, still intimidated by her height. Soon they’ll realize that there’s no fight to this foe and they’ll do to her what they’ve done to the parts pirate. Her time is limited.

She turns on the phone to find it has only a tiny bit of battery life left, which means her life now depends on the capricious whim of a lithium battery.

Who does a fugitive call? There’s no one she personally knows who would take such a call, and the standard emergency numbers will rescue her right into a world worse than death. There is one number she knows, however. It’s a number she thinks she can trust, even though she’s never called it before. She dials. The battery holds out for one ring . . . two rings. Then a man answers on the other end.

“The Tyler Walker Foundation. Can I help you?”

A deep breath of relief. “This is Risa Ward,” she says. Then she speaks the three words she despises above all others. “I need help.”

13 • Cam

There are many Mirandas.

An endless glut of girls, all bored with the dull familiarity of ordinary boys, hurl themselves at Cam as if they’re hurling themselves off a cliff. They all expect his strong rewound arms to catch them. Sometimes he does.

They want to run their fingers along the symmetrical lines of his face. They want to lose themselves in the depths of his soulful blue eyes—and knowing the eyes really aren’t his at all makes them want to lose themselves even more.

Cam has very few events as fancy as the Washington gala, so a tuxedo is rarely required. Mostly it’s speaking engagements. He wears a tailored sports coat and tie, with slacks that are just casual enough to keep him from looking too corporate. Too much like the creation of Proactive Citizenry—who silently bankrolls everything he does.

Cam and Roberta are on a tour on the university lecture circuit. Fairly small events since most universities are quiet in the summer—but the upper faculty still have their research to oversee, and it’s those highly esteemed academics on whom they are focusing.

“We need the scientific community to see you as a worthwhile endeavor,” Roberta has told him. “You’ve already won the hearts and sympathy of the public. Now you must be respected on a professional level.”

The speaking events always begin with Roberta and her flashy multimedia presentation laying out in fine academic fashion the nuts and bolts of how Cam was created—although she doesn’t call it that. Proactive Citizenry’s spin doctors have decided that Cam was not created; he was “gleaned.” And his rewound bits and pieces are all part of his “internal community.”

“The gleaning of Camus Comprix took many months,” Roberta tells their audiences. “We first had to identify the high-level qualities we wanted his internal community to have. Then we had to find those qualities within the population of Unwinds awaiting division . . . .”

Like the opening act at a concert, Roberta primes the audience for the main event, and then—“Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the culmination of all of our medical and scientific efforts: Camus Comprix!”

A spotlight appears, and he steps into it to the sound of applause—or snapping in the places where public applause has been banned due to clapper attacks.

At the podium Cam delivers his prepared speech, written by a former presidential speech writer. It is thoughtful, intelligent, and memorized word for word. Then comes the Q and A—and although both he and Roberta are on stage to receive questions, most are directed at Cam.