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  The more he speaks, the more Starkey’s heart sinks, and he comes to realize the truth of it. This is the Akron AWOL—and he’s not larger than life at all. In fact, he barely lives up to reality.

  “The bad news is that the Juvenile Authority knows about us. They know where we are and what we’re doing—but so far they’ve left us alone. ”

  Starkey marvels at the unfairness of it all. How could this be? How is it possible that the great champion of runaway Unwinds is just some ordinary kid?

  “Some of you just want to survive to seventeen, and I don’t blame you,” Connor says. “But I know that many of you would risk everything to end unwinding forever. ”

  “Yeah!” Starkey shouts out, making sure it’s loud enough to draw everyone’s attention away from Connor, and he starts pumping his fist in the air. “Happy Jack! Happy Jack! Happy Jack!” He gets a whole chant going in the crowd. “We’ll blow up every last harvest camp!” Starkey shouts. Yet even though he’s riled them up, one look from Connor throws a wet blanket over the whole crowd, silencing them.

  “There’s one in every crowd,” says Hayden, shaking his head.

  “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but we will not be blowing up Chop Shops,” Connor says, looking right at Starkey. “They already see us as violent, and the Juvies use public fear to justify unwinding. We can’t feed into that. We’re not clappers. We will not commit random acts of violence. We will think before we act. . . . ”

  Starkey does not take the reprimand well. Who is this guy to shut him down? He keeps talking, but Starkey’s not listening anymore, because Connor has nothing to say to him. But the others listen, and that makes Starkey burn.

  Now, as he stands there, waiting for the so-called Akron AWOL to shut up, a seed starts to take root in Starkey’s mind. He has killed two Juvey-cops. His legend is already set, and unlike Connor, he didn’t have to pretend to die to become legendary. Starkey has to smile. This airplane salvage yard is filled with hundreds of Unwinds, but in the end, it’s no different from the safe houses—and like those safe houses, here is just one more beta male waiting for an alpha like Starkey to put him in his place.

  2 - Miracolina

  The girl has known since before she can remember that her body has been sanctified to God.

  She has always been aware that on her thirteenth birthday she would be tithed and would experience the glorious mystery of having a divided body and a networked soul. Not networked in the computer sense—for the pouring of one’s soul into hardware happens only in the movies, and never to good results. No, this would be a true networking within living flesh. A stretching of her spirit among the dozens of people touched by her divided body. There are people who say it’s death, but she believes it to be something else—something mystical, and she believes it with every ounce of her soul.

  “I suppose one cannot know what such division is like until one experiences it,” her priest once told her. It struck her as odd that the priest, who was always so confident in church dogma, spoke of uncertainty whenever he talked about tithing.

  “The Vatican has yet to take a position on unwinding,” he pointed out, “and so until it is either condoned or condemned, I can be as uncertain about it as I please. ”

  It always made her bristle when he called tithing unwinding, as if they were the same thing. They’re not. The way she sees it, the cursed and unwanted are unwound—but the blessed and the loved are tithed. The process might be the same, but the intent is different, and in this world, intent is everything.

  Her name is Miracolina—from the Italian word for “miracle. ” She was named this because she was conceived to save her brother’s life. Her brother, Matteo, was diagnosed with leukemia when he was ten. The family had moved from Rome to Chicago for his treatment, but even with harvest banks all over the nation, a marrow match could not be found for his rare blood type. The only way to save him was to create a match—and so that’s exactly what his parents did. Nine months later Miracolina was born, doctors took marrow from her hip and gave it to Matteo, and her brother was saved. Easy as that. Now he’s twenty-four and in graduate school, all thanks to Miracolina.

  Even before she understood what it meant to be a tithe, she knew she was 10 percent of a larger whole. “We had ten embryos in vitro,” her mother once told her. “Only one was a match for Matteo, and that was you. You were no accident, mi carina. We chose you. ”

  The law was very specific when it came to the other nine embryos. Her family had to pay nine women to carry them to term. After that, the surrogates could do as they pleased—either raise the babies or stork them to a good home. “But whatever it cost, it was worth it,” her parents had told her, “to have both Matteo and you. ”

  Now, as her tithing approaches, it comforts Miracolina to know that she has nine fraternal twins out there—and who knows? Maybe a part of her divided self will go to help one of these unknown twins.

  As to why she is being tithed, it has nothing to do with percentages.

  “We made a pact with God,” her parents told her when she was young, “that if you were born, and Matteo was saved, we would show our gratitude by gifting you back to God through tithing. ” Miracolina understood, even at an early age, that such a powerful pact was not easily broken.

  Lately, however, her parents have become more and more emotional at the thought of it. “Forgive us,” they begged her over and over again—quite often in tears. “Please forgive us for this thing we’ve done. ” And she would always forgive them, even though the request baffled her. Miracolina always felt blessed to be a tithe—to know, without question, her destiny and her purpose. Why should her parents feel sorry for giving her a purpose?

  Perhaps the guilt they feel is for not throwing her a big party—but then, that had been her own choice. “First of all,” she told her parents, “a tithing should be solemn, not loud. Secondly, who’s going to come?”

  They couldn’t dispute her logic. While most tithes come from rich communities, and belong to the kinds of churches that expect tithing, theirs is a working-class neighborhood that’s not exactly tithe-friendly. When you’re like those rich families, surrounding yourself with like-minded people, there are plenty of friends to support you at a tithing party—enough to offset the guests who find it uncomfortable. But if Miracolina had a party, everyone there would feel awkward. That’s not how she wanted to spend her last night with her family.

  So there’s no party. Instead she spends the evening in front of the fireplace, sitting between her parents and clicking through favorite scenes from favorite movies. Her mom even prepares her favorite meal, rigatoni Amatriciana. “Bold and spicy,” her mom says, “just like you. ”

  She sleeps that night, having no unpleasant dreams, or at least none she can remember, and in the morning she rises early, dresses in her simple daily whites, and tells her parents that she’s going to school. “The van doesn’t come for me until four this afternoon, so why waste the day?”

  Although her parents would prefer she stay home with them, her wishes come first on this day.

  At school, she sits through classes, already feeling a dreamy distance from it all. At the end of each class, the teacher awkwardly hands her all her collected classwork and grades, calculated early.

  “Well then, I guess that’s that,” each teacher says in one way or another. Most of them can’t wait for her to get out of their room. Her science teacher is the kindest, though, taking some extra time with her.

  “My nephew was tithed a few years ago,” he tells her. “A wonderful boy. I miss him terribly. ” He pauses, seeming to go far away in his thoughts. “I was told his heart went to a firefighter who saved a dozen people from a burning building. I don’t know if it’s true, but I’d like to believe it is. ”

  Miracolina would like to believe it too.

  Throughout the day, her classmates are just as awkward as her teachers. Some kids make a point to say good-bye. Some even g
ive her uncomfortable hugs, but the rest say their farewells from a safe distance, as if tithing is somehow contagious.

  And then there are the other ones. The cruel ones.

  “See you here and there,” a boy says behind her back during lunch, and the kids around him snicker. Miracolina turns, and the boy tries to hide behind his gaggle of friends, thinking he’s safe within that cloud of rank middle-school perspiration—but she recognized his voice and knows exactly who it is. She pushes through his friends to coldly face him.

  “Oh, you won’t see me, Zach Rasmussen . . . but if any part of me sees you, I will definitely let you know. ”

  Zach’s face goes a little green. “Get lost,” he says. “Go get tithed. ” But still there’s that look of uneasy fear beneath his idiotic bravado.

  Good, thinks Miracolina, I hope I’ve given him a few nightmares.

  Her school is a huge one, so even though tithes aren’t common in her neighborhood, there are four others, all dressed in white like her. There used to be six, but the oldest two are already gone. These remaining tithes are her true friends. These are the ones to whom she feels a need to say one last good-bye. Oddly, they’re all from different backgrounds and faiths. Each is a member of a splinter sect of their particular religion—a sect that takes its commitment to self-sacrifice very seriously. Funny, Miracolina thinks, how these same religions fought over their differences for thousands of years, and yet in tithing, they all come together as one.

  “We are all asked to give of ourselves—to be charitable and selfless,” says Nestor, her tithe friend closest to her in age, only a month short of his own tithing. He clasps her hands, giving Miracolina a warm good-bye. “If technology allows us a new way to give, how could it be wrong?”

  Except there are people who do say that it’s wrong. More and more people these days. There’s even that ex-tithe out there—the one who became a clapper, who people hold up as an example. Well, how stable can he be? After all, he became a clapper, for goodness’ sake. The way Miracolina sees it, if someone would rather blow themselves up than be tithed, well, that’s like stealing from the collection plate, isn’t it? It’s just plain wrong.

  When the school day ends, she walks home just like on any other day. As she comes onto her street, she sees her brother’s car in the driveway. She’s surprised at first—he goes to school five hours away—but she’s happy Matteo’s come to see her off.

  It’s three o’clock, an hour until the van comes, and her parents are already crying. She wishes they weren’t, that they could take this as stoically as she, or even Matteo, who spends his time chatting about only the good memories.

  “Remember that time we went to Rome, and you wanted to play hide-and-seek in the Vatican Museum?”

  Miracolina smiles at the memory. She had tried to hide in Nero’s bathtub—this huge maroon stone bowl that could practically fit an elephant. “The security guards had a fit! I thought they’d take me to the pope, and he’d spank me—so I ran. ”