Double crap. “Don’t be a moron! The Akron AWOL is hiding with the Hopi. Haven’t you been watching the news?”
“Well, you’re here, so the news is wrong. You’re from around here, aren’t you? They call you the Akron AWOL, but you lived in Columbus!”
What, does everyone in Columbus know that? Is his house like a freaking landmark now? “Shut the hell up, or I swear . . .” Connor considers knocking the guy out. He could certainly do it, but he waits to see how this unfolds before he takes such a drastic move.
The lab tech just looks at him, breathing uneasily, keeping his eyes locked on Connor. No movement on either of their parts. Then the man says, “You don’t want those specimens—they’re already differentiated. You want the ones at the far end.”
Connor wasn’t expecting this. “How do you know what I want?”
“There’s only one thing the Akron AWOL would be looking for here,” he says. “Pluripotent cells. To build organs. It won’t make a difference, though. Organ-building technology was a total bust; all the research led nowhere.”
Connor says nothing—but his silence telegraphs the truth.
“You know something, don’t you?” the lab tech asks, and dares to take a step closer, excitement trumping caution. “You know something, or you wouldn’t be here!”
Connor won’t answer him or let on how troubled he is that his intentions are so transparent. “The door at the far end?”
He nods. Connor makes his way to the far end of the lab, keeping one eye on the lab tech as he removes the containers in his bag and refills it with containers pulled from the last cooler.
“One problem,” the lab tech says. “Our biomaterial is monitored. If any of it goes missing, it gets reported. Our funding will probably get pulled.”
Connor looks to the mess of broken glass by the front door. “What was in those?”
The tech looks over to the broken vials. “Biomatter.” Then he nods and grins at Connor, catching on to his train of thought. “A whole lot of biomatter. I’ll get hell for dropping that . . . and forgetting to measure how much was lost before I disposed of it.”
“Yeah,” says Connor, “too bad about that.” And he finishes filling the bag. When he’s done, he sees the lab tech has taken a position by the door, peering out of the little window like he’s Connor’s lookout.
“So,” says Connor, “I was never here, right?”
The tech nods his agreement. “It’s our secret . . . on one condition.”
Connor doesn’t like the sound that. He braces for some impossible request. “What?”
Then the tech timidly asks, “Can I . . . shake your hand?”
Connor laughs, so unexpected is the request. He’s seen starstruck kids, but this guy is at least thirty. Then he sees that his laughter has embarrassed the man.
“Naah, forget it,” the guy says. “It was stupid of me to ask.”
“No, no, it’s okay.” Cautiously Connor approaches him, and holds out his hand. He shakes Connor’s hand with his cold, damp one.
“A lot of folks don’t like unwinding, but no one knows how to stop it, so they don’t even try,” the man says. And then he whispers, “But if you’ve got an idea—there are people ready to listen. Not everyone—but maybe enough.”
“Thanks,” Connor says, glad that he didn’t tranq the guy—although he’s still furious at Beau for switching guns.
Connor slips out, and the tech gets to cleaning the mess of broken vials on the floor, happily whistling to himself.
“A lot of people want to stop unwinding,” the lab tech said. It’s not the first time Connor has heard that. Maybe if he hears it enough, he might begin to believe it.
21 • Risa
The ride home from the hospital is a triumphant one. They play music that makes them feel cocooned in normality. Even though it’s an illusion, Risa’s happy for a respite from being “the one and only Risa Ward.”
Connor tells her and Beau about the fanboy lab tech. Connor seems to preen a bit in the light of it, but Risa has always found herself painfully out of her element when faced with such adulation. She never wanted to be some sort of counterculture heroine. All she wanted was to survive. She would have been happy to stay at Ohio State Home 23 playing piano, graduating with unremarkable grades, and then being dumped at eighteen into the grand mosh pit of mediocre mankind, like all other state wards. Maybe she could have gotten herself into community college, working her way through with some service job. She could have eventually become a concert pianist, or, more realistically, a keyboardist in some bar band. It wouldn’t be ideal, but at least it would be a life. She could have eventually married the unremarkable guitar player and had some unremarkable kids, whom she would love dearly and would never even think of storking. But her unwind order severed all ties Risa had to the hope of a normal future.
Thoughts of a guitar player bring her musings around to Cam. Where is he now that Proactive Citizenry has him in their clutches again? Does she care? Should she care? What a mixed bag of connections she has. . . . It’s as if her whole life has been rewound with the strangest bits and pieces of humanity, from Connor, to Cam, to Sonia, to Grace and all the odd acquaintances in between.
There’s no telling what her life will be like a day from now, much less a year from now. That’s the best argument for living in the moment, but how can you live in the moment when all you want is for the moment to end?
“You look sad,” Connor comments. “You should be happy—for once we did something right.”
Risa smiles. “We do a lot right,” she tells him. “Why else would random people want to shake our hands?” Or, she thinks, kiss us, and she throws a chilly glance back to Beau in the backseat, who plays the air drums, completely oblivious. Connor hasn’t asked about Beau’s black eye. Either he doesn’t care, or he doesn’t want to know. Risa wonders how many girls have thrown themselves at Connor in a similar way, and finds herself pleasantly jealous at the very idea. Pleasantly, because Risa has what those nameless girls could only grasp at: the Akron AWOL all to herself.
Maybe this is better than her dream of normal. Living a high-octane, on-the-edge sort of life has its perks. Namely, Connor.
“Hey, you know that Upchurch dude, right?” Beau asks between drum solos.
“Who?” asks Risa, having no clue what he’s talking about.
“You know—Hayden Upchurch. The guy who gave the news a mouthful when he got caught at the Graveyard.”
“Oh,” says Risa. “Hayden.” She had never known his last name—and by the look on Connor’s face, he never had either. A lot of Unwinds tried to erase their last name in defiance of parents who tried to unwind them. In Hayden’s case, he probably avoided it because it was so easily made fun of.
“What about him? Risa asks, looking nervously to Connor. “Did something happen to him?”
“No—he’s just shooting off his mouth again.”
The next song starts, and Connor turns the volume down. “How do you know that?”
“Back in the basement, Jake was fiddling with that old computer Sonia lets us use down there, and he says there was something up on the Web. He tried to find it again to show me, but it was gone. He said Upchurch was calling for a teen uprising, like he did when he got caught. I’m thinking it might happen.” Beau considers it for a moment more. “If it does, I know a whole lot of kids—not just the kids at Sonia’s, but kids back home, too—who’d follow me into battle.”
“More likely off a cliff, like lemmings,” Connor says.
“Careful,” Beau warns, and he pulls out the pistol he had taken from Connor, “or I might tranq you with your own gun, like you did to that Nelson guy.”
Risa sees Connor’s face go stony, and his knuckles whiten on the steering wheel. She touches Connor’s leg to get him to relax. To remind him it’s not worth it.