UnSouled Read online

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  “Excellent idea. Let’s make it a private school. Something that sounds exclusive. ” Starkey runs through his mind all the storklike species he knows. “We’ll call ourselves the ‘Egret Academy. ’?”

  “I love that!”

  “Get that artsy girl what’s-her-face to design the shirt again—but not so bright as the camp’s. The Egret Academy will be all about beige and forest green. ”

  “Can I come up with the school’s history?”

  “Knock yourself out. ”

  There is a fine line between hiding in plain sight and flaunting their status as a fugitive band—Starkey knows how to ride the edge of illusion like a tightrope walker.

  “Make it sound legit enough to fool the Juvies, if we come across any. ”

  “The Juvenile Authority is a pack of idiots. ”

  “No, they’re not,” Starkey tells her, “and that kind of thinking will get us caught. They’re smart, so we need to be smarter. And when we do strike, we have to strike hard. ”

  Since their ill-fated flight, there have been no stork liberations. Starkey had rescued several storked kids about to be unwound back during their stay at the airplane graveyard, but Connor was the one with the lists of kids about to be rounded for unwinding. Without a list, there’s no way to know who needs to be rescued. But that’s all right—because while saving individual kids and burning their homes as a warning is fine and dandy, Starkey knows he is capable of far more effective measures.

  He has a brochure for a harvest camp that he keeps in his pocket. He pulls it out when he needs reminding. Like all harvest camps brochures, it features pictures of beautiful bucolic scenery and teens that are, if not happy, at least at peace with their fate.

  A bittersweet journey, the brochure proclaims, can touch many lives.

  “Finally giving up, Starkey?” Bam asks, when she catches him studying it later that night. “Ready to be unwound?”

  He ignores the suggestion. “This harvest camp is in Nevada, north of Reno,” he tells her. “Nevada has the weakest Juvenile Authority in the nation. It also has the highest concentration of storks waiting to be unwound. But check this out: This particular harvest camp has a shortage of surgeons. The population is bursting, and they can’t unwind them fast enough. ” Then he gives her the boy-next-door grin. He’s kept this to himself long enough. Time to start sowing the seeds of glorious purpose. He might as well begin with Bam.

  “We’re not going to take down individual homes and liberate one stork at a time anymore,” Starkey proudly tells her. “We’re going to liberate an entire harvest camp. ”

  And God help anyone who gets in his way.

  16 • Risa

  * * *

  HUMAN INTEREST NEWS CLIP

  Today Eye-On-Art focuses on the provocative sculptures of Paulo Ribeiro, a Brazilian artist who works in a radical medium. As you can see from these images, his work is stunning, intriguing, and often disturbing. He calls himself an “Artist of Life,” because every piece of work is crafted from the unwound.

  We caught up with Ribeiro at a recent exhibition in New York.

  “It is not so unusual what I do. Europe is full of cathedrals adorned in human bones, and in the early twenty-first century, artists like Andrew Krasnow and Gunther Von Hagens were known for their work in flesh. I have simply taken this tradition a logical step further. I hope not just to inspire but to incite. To bring to art patrons an aesthetic state of unrest. My use of the unwound is a protest against unwinding. ”

  Pictured here is what Ribeiro considers to be his finest piece—both haunting, and intriguing, the piece is a working musical instrument he calls Orgão Orgânico, which now resides in a private collection.

  “It is a shame that my greatest work should be privately owned, for it was meant to be heard and seen by the world. But like so many unwound, it now will never be. ”

  * * *

  Risa dreams of the stony faces. Pale and gaunt, judgmental and soulless as they gaze at her—not from a distance this time—but so close she could touch them. However, she can’t touch them. She’s sitting at a piano, but it will not bring forth music because Risa has no arms with which to play. The faces wait for a sonata that will never come—and only now does she realize that they are so close to one another they cannot possibly have bodies attached. They truly are disembodied. They are lined up in rows, and there are too many for her to count. She’s horrified, but can’t look away.

  Risa can’t quite discern the difference between the dream and waking. She thinks she might have been sleeping with her eyes open. There’s a TV turned low, directly in her line of sight, that now shows an advertisement featuring a smiling woman who appears to be in love with her toilet bowl cleanser.

  Risa rests on a comfortable bed in a comfortable place. It’s a place she’s never been, but that’s a good thing, because it can only be an improvement over the places she has been lately.

  There’s a lanky umber kid in the room, who just now turns his gaze to her from the TV. It’s a kid she’s never met, but she knows his face from more serious television ads than the one on now.

  “So you’re the real deal,” he says when he sees she’s awake. “And here I thought you were some crazy-ass crank call. ” He looks older than he does in the commercials. Or maybe just wearier. She guesses he’s about eighteen—no older than her.

  “You’ll live. That’s the good news,” the umber kid says. “Bad news is your right wrist is infected from that trap. ”

  She looks to see her right wrist puffy and purple and worries that she might lose it—perhaps the pain being the cause of her armlessness in the dream. She instantly thinks of Connor’s arm, or more accurately, Roland’s arm on Connor’s body.

  “Give me someone else’s hand, and I’ll brain you,” she says.

  He laughs and points to his right temple and the faintest of surgical scars. “I already got brained, thank you very much. ”

  Risa looks to her other arm, which also has a bandage. She can’t remember why.

  “We also gotta test you for rabies because of that bite. What was it, a dog?”

  Right. Now she remembers. “Coyote. ”

  “Not exactly man’s best friend. ”

  The bedroom around her is decorated in gaudy glitz. There’s a mirror in a faux-gold frame. Light fixtures with shimmering chains. Shiny things. Lots and lots of shiny things.

  “Where are we?” she asks. “Las Vegas?”

  “Close,” her host says. “Nebraska. ” Then he laughs again.

  Risa closes her eyes for a moment and tries to mentally collate the events that led her here.

  After she made the call, two men had come for her in the barn. They arrived after the coyotes had left and before they came back. She was semiconscious, so the details are hazy. They spoke to her, but she can’t remember what they said and what she said back. They gave her water, which she threw up. Then they gave her lukewarm soup from a thermos, which she kept down. They put her in the backseat of a comfortable car and drove away, leaving the coyotes to find their next meal somewhere else. One of the men sat in the backseat with her, letting her lean against him. He spoke in calming tones. She didn’t know who they were, but she believed them when they said she was safe.

  “We got a pair of lungs with a doctor attached, it you get my meaning,” the umber kid tells her. “He says your hand’s not as bad as it looks—but you might lose a finger or two. No big thing—just means cheaper manicures. ”

  Risa laughs at that. She’s never had a manicure in her life, but she finds the thought of being charged by the finger darkly funny.

  “From what I hear, you really did a number on that parts pirate. ”

  Risa pulls herself up on her elbows. “I just took him out; it was nature that wolfed him down. ”

  “Yeah, nature’s a bitch. ” He holds out his hand for her to shake. “Cyrus Finch,” he says, “But I go by CyFi. ”

 
“I know who you are,” she tells him, shaking his hand awkwardly with her left.

  Suddenly his face seems to change a bit, and so does his voice. It becomes harsher and loses all of its smooth style. “You don’t know me, so don’t pretend you do. ”

  Risa, thrown for a bit of a loop, is about to apologize, but CyFi puts his hand up to stop her before she does.

  “Don’t mind my lips flapping: That’s Tyler talking,” he says. “Tyler don’t trust folks far as he can throw ’em—and he can’t throw no one, as his throwing arm has left the building; get me?”

  It’s a little too much for Risa to process, but the cadence of his forced old-umber speech is soothing. She can’t help but smile. “You always talk like that?”

  “When I’m me and not him,” CyFi says with a shrug. “I choose to talk how I choose. It pays respect to my heritage, back in the day, when we were ‘black,’ and not ‘umber. ’?”

  Her only knowledge of Cyrus Finch, aside from the TV commercial, is from what little she saw of his testimony to Congress—back when it was all about limiting the age of unwinding to under seventeen, instead of eighteen. Cyrus helped push the Cap-17 law over the top. His chilling testimony involved Tyler Walker describing his own unwinding. That is to say, the part of Tyler that had been transplanted into Cyrus’s head.

  “I gotta admit I was surprised to get your call,” CyFi tells her. “Big shots with the Anti-Divisional Resistance don’t usually give us the time a’ day, as we just deal with folks after the unwinding’s done, not before. ”

  “The ADR doesn’t give anyone the time of day anymore,” Risa tells him. “I haven’t been in touch with them for months. To be honest, I don’t know if they still exist. Not the way they used to. ”

  “Hmm. Sorry to hear it. ”

  “I keep hoping they’ll reorganize, but all I see in the news are more and more resistance workers getting arrested for ‘obstructing justice. ’?”

  CyFi shakes his head sadly. “Sometimes justice needs obstructing when it ain’t just. ”

  “So where exactly in Nebraska are we, Cyrus?”

  “Private residence,” he tells her. “More of a compound, actually. ”

  She doesn’t quite know what he means by that, but she’s willing to go with it. Her lids are heavy, and she’s not up for too much talk right now. She thanks CyFi and asks if she can get something to eat.

  “I’ll have the dads bring you something,” he says. “They’ll be happy to see you’ve got your appetite back. ”

  * * *

  FOLLOWING IS A PAID POLITICAL ADVERTISEMENT

  “Hi, I’m Vanessa Valbon—you probably know me from daytime TV, but what you might not know is that my brother is serving a life sentence for a violent crime. He has put himself on a list for voluntary cranial shelling, which will happen only if Initiative 11 is passed this November.

  “There’s been a lot of talk about shelling—what it is and what it isn’t, so I had to educate myself, and this is what I learned. Shelling is painless. Shelling would be a matter of choice for any violent offender. And shelling will compensate the victim’s family, and the offender’s family, by paying them full market value for every single body part not discarded in the shelling process.