UnSouled

Lev is still hemming and hawing, building up the fortitude it will take to leave Connor behind, when a visitor arrives. Lev does not have the option of hiding—he’s spotted the second the car pulls up and the woman steps out. Rather than running, Lev calmly goes inside the old trailer and looks through the drawers until he finds a knife large enough to do damage but small enough to conceal.

Lev has never stabbed anyone. He had once, in a moment of sheer fury, threatened to beat a man and woman with a baseball bat. They had unwound their son—and a part of their son’s brain had come back in another kid’s body, begging their forgiveness.

This is different though, Lev tells himself. This isn’t about righteous rage; it’s about survival. He resolves he will use the knife only in self-defense.

Lev comes out of the trailer but stands on the lip of the doorway because he knows it makes him look taller. His visitor stands ten feet away, shifting weight from one leg to the other and back again. She’s in her early twenties by the look of it. Tall and just a little pudgy. Her face is reddened from the sun, probably from driving around in the convertible—a T-Bird in a condition too poor for the car to be considered classic. There’s an off-center bruise on her forehead.

“This is private property,” Lev says with as much authority as he can muster.

“Not yours, though,” says his visitor. “It’s Woody Beeman’s—but Woody’s been dead for two years now.”

Lev pulls a fiction out of thin air. “I’m his cousin. We inherited the place. Right now my dad’s in town renting a forklift to get rid of all this junk and clean the place up.”

But then the visitor says: “Connor didn’t tell me it would be you. He just said a friend was here. He shoulda told me it was you.”

All of Lev’s spontaneous lies evaporate. “Connor sent you? Where is he? What’s happened?”

“Connor says he wants you to go on without him. He’s staying with us here in Heartsdale. I won’t tell no one you were here. So you can go.”

The fact that Connor has managed to get Lev a message gives Lev a wave of intense relief. But the message itself makes no sense. Clearly it’s a distress signal. Connor is in trouble.

“Who’s ‘us’?” Lev asks.

The visitor shakes her head and kicks the ground almost like a child might. “Can’t tell you that.” She looks at Lev and squints against the rising sun. “Can you still blow up?” she asks.

“No.”

The woman shrugs. “Right. Anyway, I promised I’d tell you what I told you, and I did. Now I gotta go before my brother finds out I’m gone. Nice to meet you, Lev. It is Lev, right? Lev Calder?”

“Garrity. I changed my name.”

She nods approvingly. “Figures. Guess you wanted no part of a family that would raise you to want your own unwinding.” Then she turns and lumbers back to the car.

Lev considers going after her—telling her he wants to stay in Heartsdale too—but even if she falls for it, getting in that car would be a bad idea. Whatever trouble Connor is in, it would be folly to volunteer for more of the same.

Instead Lev hurries to the old crumbling school bus and climbs to the hood and then to the roof, avoiding patches that have rusted all the way through. From his high vantage point, he watches the T-Bird kick up dust on the dirt road until it turns left onto a paved road. Lev tracks it as long as he can until it disappears into Heartsdale. Now that he knows the general direction the T-Bird has gone, he can wander the streets until he finds it again.

Maybe Connor wants Lev to go on without him, but Connor knows Lev better than that.

* * *

FOLLOWING IS A PAID POLITICAL ADVERTISEMENT

“My Grandma won’t talk about it, but she remembers a time when cars burned in the street and bars on windows weren’t enough to keep the danger out. She remembers when feral teens terrorized our neighborhood and no one felt safe.

“Well, it’s happening again. The Cap-17 law let thousands of seventeen-year-old incorrigibles back into the streets and severely limits the age for which parents can choose unwinding.

“Last week a boy on my block was stabbed by one of them on his way to school, and I’m afraid I’ll be next.

“Call or write your congressperson today. Tell them you want the Cap-17 law repealed. Let’s make the streets safe again for kids like me!”

—Sponsored by Mothers Against Bad Behavior

* * *

Lev heads out into the scorching day on his reconnaissance mission. He keeps his head low but his eyes wide open. The T-Bird, Lev had observed, was dirty enough to suggest it was left out in the elements instead of in a garage—but Heartsdale is a rat’s warren rather than a grid, and a systematic search of the streets proves difficult.

By two in the afternoon, he’s desperate enough to risk contact with the citizens of the town. He prepares himself by buying a Chevron baseball cap at a gas station and a pack of gum. He wears the cap to further hide his face and chews several sticks of gum until the sugar is blanched out. Then he spreads half of the gum wad in his upper gums above his front teeth and the other half in his lower gums. It’s just enough to change the shape of his mouth without making him look too weird. Maybe his paranoia that he will be recognized is a little extreme, but as AWOL Unwinds are fond of saying, “Better safe than severed.”

There’s a Sonic that he had passed that morning, where pretty servers on roller skates bring food to parked cars, as they have done since the beginning of recorded fast-food history. If anyone knows the cars of this town, it will be the Sonic servers.

Lev goes to the walk-up window and orders a burger and a slushy, faking an accent that sounds way too deep-South drawly to be from Kansas, but it’s the best he can do.

After he gets his food, he sits at one of the outdoor tables and zeroes in on one of the roller girls who sits at the next table, texting between orders.

“Hey,” says Lev.

“Hey,” she says back. “Hot enough for ya?”

“Five more degrees, you can fry an egg on my forearm.”

That makes her smile and look over at him. He can practically read her mind in her facial expressions. He’s not a regular. He’s cute. He’s too young. Back to texting.

“Maybe you can help me,” Lev says. “There was this car with a ‘for sale’ sign parked by the side of the road the other day, but now I can’t find it.”

“Maybe it sold,” she suggests.

“Hope not. See, I’m gettin’ my license in a couple of months. I was really hoping for that T-Bird. It’s a green convertible. Do you know it?”

She continues texting for a moment, then says, “Only green convertible around here belongs to Argent Skinner. If he’s selling it, he must be having a harder time than usual.”

“Or maybe he’s buying somethin’ better.”

She gives a dubious chuckle, and Lev gives her a winning smile with slightly puffy lips. She takes a moment to reassess, decides even with a driver’s license he’s still too young for her attention, and says, “He’s on Saguaro Street, two blocks up from the Dairy Queen.”

Lev thanks her and heads off with his burger and slushy. If he appears overeager, it’ll just play into his cover story.

Having passed the DQ earlier that morning, he knows exactly where to go—but as he reaches the corner, he hears something that sounds out of place in a town like Heartsdale. The rhythmic chop of an approaching helicopter.

Even before it arrives, a series of police cars pull onto the street. Their sirens are off, but their speed speaks of urgency. There are more than a dozen vehicles. There are Juvey squad cars, black-and-whites, and unmarked cars as well. The helicopter, now overhead, begins to circle the neighborhood, and Lev gets a sick feeling deep in the pit of his gut.

Rather than following the cars, he comes at the scene from an adjacent street, cutting through a few backyards, so as not to be seen. Finally he finds himself peering through the slats of a wooden fence at an unkempt ranch-style house that is in the process of being surrounded.

A house with a green convertible T-Bird parked on the driveway.

6 • Connor

That same morning, Argent comes down with a TV and plugs it into the outlet attached to the single dangling light fixture.

“All the comforts of home,” he happily tells Connor.

Argent, who must watch bad TV and infomercials all night long, didn’t wake up until after Grace had been gone and back, delivering her message to Lev. “Mum’s the word,” she had said. Connor has never known anyone else who actually used that expression. Now, as she enters behind Argent, she gives Connor a surreptitious zipped-mouth gesture.

The little TV pulls in a weak wireless signal from the house that makes everything painful to watch.

“I’ll figure out how to make it work better,” Grace tells Conner.

“Thanks, Grace. I’d appreciate that.” Not that Connor has any interest in watching TV, but showing Grace more appreciation than Argent shows her is key.

“No worries,” Argent says. “We don’t need a signal or cable to watch videos.”

By Connor’s reckoning, he’s been in captivity for about twenty-four hours now. Lev better have gone on without him. An antique shop near the high school in Akron where they first got separated. That should be enough for Lev to find it.

Argent, who called in sick at the supermarket, spends the morning playing his favorite videos, his favorite music, his favorite everything for Connor.

“You’ve been out of circulation for a while,” Argent tells him. “Gotta reeducate you on what’s cutting-edge in the world,” as if he thinks Conner was literally hiding under a rock for two years.

Argent’s theatrical tastes lean toward violent. Argent’s musical tastes lean toward dissonant. Connor’s seen enough real violence not to be entertained by it much anymore. And as for music, knowing Risa has broadened his horizons.

“Once you let me out of this cellar,” Connor tells Argent, “I’ll take you to see bands that will blow you away.”

Argent doesn’t respond to that right away. Since yesterday, Connor’s been mentioning things that they might do together. As buds. Connor suspects that whatever time frame Argent has in his head for Connor’s conversion, the turning point has not yet been reached. Until it is, anything Connor says will be suspect.

Argent leaves Connor with Grace to run some errands, and she is quick to bring out a plastic chessboard, setting up the pieces. “You can play, right? Just tell me your move, and I’ll make it for you,” Grace tells him.

Connor knows the game but never had patience to learn strategy. He won’t deny Grace the game, though, so he plays.

“Classic Kasparov opening,” she says after four moves, suddenly not sounding low-cortical at all. “But it’s no good against a Sicilian Defense.”

Connor sighs. “Don’t tell me you have a NeuroWeave.”

“Hell no!” says Grace proudly. “The brain’s all mine, such as it is. I just do good at games.” And then she proceeds to trounce Connor with embarrassing speed.