UnSouled

“Hey, you’re the one who said go to New Orleans, not me,” will be Argent’s response, but Nelson will still hold him responsible. So Argent needs a peace offering. One that will open Nelson’s eyes to Argent’s true value.

Instead of going back to their Ramada, which smells like disinfectant and burnt hair, Argent looks for trouble. And finds it. And befriends it. And betrays it.

• • •

Day five: Nelson sleeps off a binge of the alcohol and painkillers he doused himself in when his search for Connor Lassiter came up short. Argent, out all night, returns to the Ramada at dawn, to wake him.

“I got something for you. Something you’re gonna like. You gotta come now.”

“Get the hell out of here.” Nelson is not cooperative. Argent didn’t expect he would be.

“It won’t keep for long, Jasper,” Argent says. “Trust me on this one.”

Nelson burns him a killer gaze. “Call me that again, and I’ll slit your throat.” He sits up, only slightly successful in his battle with gravity.

“Sorry. What should I call you?”

“Don’t call me anything.”

After pumping a pot of hotel room coffee into the man, Argent brings Nelson to an old burned-out bar in a crumbling neighborhood that looks postapocalyptic. Probably hasn’t been inhabited by legitimate folk since the levies last failed.

Inside are two AWOLs, bound and gagged. A boy and a girl.

“Made friends with them while you were dead to the world,” Argent proudly tells Nelson. “Convinced them I was one of them. Then I used my choke hold on them. Same hold I used on you-know-who.”

The two AWOLs have since regained consciousness. They can’t speak through their gags, but their eyes are a study in terror. “They’re prime,” Argent tells Nelson. “Gotta be worth good money, you think?”

Nelson regards them with hangover-subdued interest. “You captured them yourself?”

“Yep. Coulda got more if I’d found more. Whatever you get for them, keep the money. They’re my gift to you.”

And Nelson says, “Let them go.”

“What?”

“We’re too far from my black-market contact, and I’m not going to haul them all around creation.”

Argent can’t believe it. “I put them right into your lap and you’re just gonna throw good money away?”

Nelson looks at Argent and sighs. “You get an A for effort. It’s good work, but we’re after a bigger catch.” Then Nelson just walks out.

Furious, Argent spews vitriol at the gagged kids, who can’t answer back. “I oughta just leave you here to rot, is what I oughta do.” But he doesn’t. He doesn’t free them either. Instead he makes an anonymous call to the Juvies to come pick them up, giving away his first payday as parts pirate for free. His only consolation is that Nelson was maybe a little bit impressed by the catch.

He heads back to the Ramada, all the while scheming up the next leg of their wild-goose chase and ways to make Nelson think that he’s driving it. There are plenty of places besides New Orleans that Argent would like to go. Plenty of places Nelson will take him, as long as Argent is skillful in dropping bread crumbs.

25 • Connor

He does not want to be on the reservation. He has nothing against the Tashi’ne family; they seem accommodating enough, if somewhat cool toward him—and they genuinely care for Lev—but the rez should have been nothing more than a quick pit stop on the way to their destination. The days here, as slow as they seem to pass, also pass at an alarming speed somehow. Their pit stop has stretched to two weeks. Yes, Lev needed a lot of healing time, but he’s well enough to be on the road now. Just because things on the rez don’t change, that doesn’t mean the rest of the world stops spinning. The harvest camps keep unwinding, Proactive Citizenry continues lobbying for stricter laws against Unwinds. Every day they remain here is another day for things to get worse out there.

The solution, or at least part of it, has to lie with Janson Rheinschild. Trace, Connor’s right-hand man at the Graveyard, was convinced of it, and Trace was right about so many things. Since the moment Connor learned that Rheinschild had been Sonia’s husband, the man sat heavy in Connor’s gut like bad meat. The sooner they get to Sonia, the sooner he can purge it.

“What’s so important about getting to Ohio anyway?” Grace asks him as she snacks on Arápache fry bread. “Argent says it’s nothing but cold and full of fat people.”

“You wouldn’t understand,” Connor tells her.

“Why? Because I’m stupid?”

Connor grimaces. He hadn’t meant it that way, but he knows that’s how it came out. “No,” he tells her, “it’s because you’re not an AWOL. You’ve never had to face unwinding and until you have, you’ll never understand why it’s worth risking everything to stop it.”

“I might not be an Unwind, but I’m AWOL, sure enough. AWOL from my brother, who’ll kill me soon as look at me if he ever finds me.”

Connor tries to dismiss that, but can’t entirely. Clearly Argent has hit her quite a lot in the past—beaten her, maybe—but is Argent a killer? Maybe not an intentional one, but Connor can imagine him beating Grace to death in blind fury. And even if he’s not capable of that, it’s a very real threat in Grace’s mind. Like him and Lev, she’s a fugitive, but for a different reason.

“We’ll never let him hurt you again,” Connor tells her.

“Ever?”

Connor nods. “Ever.” Although he knows it’s a promise with no teeth, because he and Lev won’t be in her life forever.

“So who is this guy you’re chasing after?”

Connor considers giving her a “just some guy,” sort of response, but instead decides to give her the kind of respect she’s never gotten before. He tells her what he knows. Or, more accurately, what he doesn’t know.

“Janson Rheinschild developed the neural-grafting technology that made unwinding possible. He founded an organization called Proactive Citizenry.”

“I heard of them,” Grace says. “They save poor children in India and stuff.”

“Yeah, probably so they can harvest their organs. The thing is, Rheinschild didn’t intend his work to be used for unwinding. In fact, he set up Proactive Citizenry as a watchdog organization to prevent any abuse of his technology. But in the end, other people took control, and it became just the opposite. Now it promotes unwinding, it manipulates the media—and there are rumors that it even controls the Juvenile Authority.”

“That sucks,” Grace says with a mouth full of food.

“Right—and what sucks even more is that they vanished Rheinschild off the face of the earth.”

“Killed him?”

“Who knows? All we know is that he’s been deleted from history. We were able to find him only because one article misspelled his name. Anyway, Lev and I figure an organization like that wouldn’t make the man disappear for just speaking out against them. We think he knew something so dangerous, he had to be snuffed. And anything dangerous to Proactive Citizenry is a weapon for us. Which is why we have to get to his wife, Sonia, who’s been living in secret all these years.”

Grace licks grease from her fingers. “I knew a Sonia once back in Heartsdale. She had a mean temper and a thing on her face the size of dog turd. She went in to have it removed, but had a heart attack on the table and died before they could get her a replacement heart. Argent says he was surprised she even had a heart to begin with. Made me sad, though. It’s stupid to die because of a turd growing on your face.”

Connor has to smile. “Truer words were never spoken.” As far as he’s concerned, Proactive Citizenry is like a turd on the face of humanity. But whether or not it can be excised without killing the patient, only time will tell.

“So who’s in charge of Proactive Citizenry now?” Grace asks.

Connor shrugs. “Damned if I know.”

“Well, tell me when you find out. ’Cause that’s someone I’d love to play in Stratego.”

• • •

The dynamic between Connor and Lev has changed. Before, they were a team, single-minded in purpose, but now their relationship is strained. Any talk of moving on is met by Lev’s thinly veiled impatience, or a quick exit from the room.

“After all he’s been through, he deserves a little bit of peace,” Una tells him after one such exit. Connor likes Una. She reminds him of Risa—if not in appearance, then in the way she won’t take crap from anyone. Risa, however, would be urging Lev to get on with it rather than planning his vacation.

“We don’t deserve peace until we’ve earned it,” Connor tells her.

She smirks. “Did you read that on a war memorial somewhere?”

He glares at her, but says nothing because, actually, he did. The Heartland War Memorial. Sixth-grade field trip. He knows he’s going to need a better argument than granite-carved clichés if he’s going to stand toe-to-toe with Una.

“From what I understand,” says Una, “he saved your life, and you came pretty close to ending his when you hit him with that cop car. At the very least, you could cut him enough slack to recover from his wounds.”

“He threw himself in front of the car!” says Connor, beginning to lose his temper. “Do you honestly think I meant to hit him?”

“Race headlong and blind, and you’re bound to hit something. Tell me, was nearly killing your only friend the first obstacle in your journey, or were there more?”

Connor pounds the wall with Roland’s hand. He holds a clenched fist, and although he doesn’t release it, he forces the fist down to his side. “Every journey has obstacles.”

“If the universe is telling you to slow down, maybe you should listen instead of putting your head in the ground like an ostrich.”

He snaps his eyes to her, wondering if Lev told her about the ostrich—but nothing in her expression gives away whether she said it intentionally or if it’s only a coincidence. He can’t say anything about it, though, because if he did, she’d probably insist that there are no coincidences.

“He feels safe here,” insists Una. “Protected. He needs that.”

“If you’re his protector,” Connor asks, “where were you when he was turning himself into a bomb?”

Una looks away, and Connor realizes he’s gone too far. “I’m sorry,” he says. “But what we’re doing . . . it’s important.”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” says Una, still stinging from his jab. “Your legend might be larger than life, but you’re no bigger than the rest of us.” Then she storms off so quickly, Connor can feel a breeze in her wake.

• • •

That night he lay in bed, his thoughts and associations spilling into one another, a product of his exhaustion. The small stone room feels more like a cell, in spite of how comfortable the bed is.