“That doesn’t mean you give up trying. Now what are you doing? Nothing but indulging the childish whims of a troubled unwound kid.”
“Watch yourself, Risa,” CyFi warns. “People have given up a lot to indulge that troubled kid.”
“Well, then, maybe Tyler needs someone to tell him to man up.”
“And that person is you, I suppose?”
“I don’t see anyone else doing it. You’re all fixated on what Tyler was and what he wanted before he got himself unwound. Why don’t you start thinking about what he’d want three years later?”
For once, CyFi has no wisecrack answer. But Tyler does.
“You suck,” Tyler says out of CyFi’s mouth. “But yeah, I’ll think about it.”
FOLLOWING IS A PAID POLITICAL ADVERTISEMENT
“My name is Captain Lance Reitano, and I’m a decorated firefighter. Let me tell you why I’m voting yes on Initiative 11. By the voluntary shelling and unwinding of violent offenders, Initiative 11 provides crucial tissues and organs—and the initiative has a provision allowing burn victims to receive them for free. When you’ve been in the field as long as I have, you know how important that is.
“Opponents of Initiative 11 claim some sort of ‘moral high ground’—but you want to know the truth? They’re the ones with an unethical agenda. They, and the Juvenile Authority, want Initiative 11 to fail, because they want to repeal the Cap-17 law instead. Not only that, but these same self-serving billionaires are fighting for a constitutional amendment that would bump the legal age of unwinding all the way up to 19, allowing even more kids to be unwound—which would increase their profits and their stranglehold on the organ industry.
“I don’t know about you, but I’d rather see a killer unwound than the kid next door. Vote yes on Initiative 11!”
—Sponsored by Patriots for Sensible Shelling
Although Risa had resolved to stay a second week, her antsiness, and desire to do something becomes overwhelming. On her eighth day, she decides to leave.
“Where will you go?” CyFi asks as he escorts her to the main road. “If the ADR is the full-on mess you say it is, do you even have a place to go?”
“No,” she admits, “but I’ll take my chances out there. There’s got to be someone left in the ADR. If not, I’ll start my own Anti-Divisional Resistance.”
“Sounds pretty iffy to me.”
“My whole life’s been iffy—why should this be any different?”
“All right, then,” says CyFi. “You take care of yourself, Risa, and if you happen to run into Lev, tell him to come on by. I’ll cook some nice old-fashioned smorgasbash.” CyFi smiles. “He’ll know what it means.”
17 • Argent
Argent Skinner’s left cheek is torn. Not beyond repair, but beyond any repair he can afford. Three jagged rifts, now stitched together like a baseball, spread out from beneath his eye to below his ear. Another inch and it would have cut his carotid artery. Maybe he wishes it had. Maybe he wishes his hero had taken his life, because then, in some twisted way, Argent and Connor Lassiter would be connected forever. Then he would not have to face the fallout from what should have been the greatest event of his meager existence.
The idea of Grace on the run with Connor is something he just can’t wrap his mind around. The two of them taking off like some ridiculous Bonnie and Clyde would make Argent laugh if he weren’t so lethally pissed off. He had the Akron AWOL in his damn cellar! For just a moment he had the world at his feet—or at least in kicking distance. Now what does he have?
When he showed up for his shift the next morning, half his face in a bandage, customers and coworkers all feigned to care.
“Oh my, what happened?” they all asked.
“Gardening accident,” he told them, because he couldn’t come up with anything better at the time.
“Wow, musta been one nasty hedge.”
At home he stews, he curses, then stews some more, for what else can he do? Argent knows he can’t tell the police the truth of what happened. He can’t tell anyone, because his fool friends have bigger mouths than he does. The Juvenile Authority and FBI have dismissed him as a dumbass yokel who concocted a lie and almost made it stick. They see him as a joke. Even his own half-wit sister managed to turn him into a joke of a man, and all because of Connor Lassiter.
Can you despise your personal hero?
Can you long to share in his light and at the same time want to slit his throat the way he almost slit yours?
Argent’s only consolation is that Grace is no longer his problem. He doesn’t have to feed her; he doesn’t have to scold her and make her mind. He doesn’t have to worry about her leaving the water running, or the gas on, or the freaking back door open for the raccoons. He can have his own life. But what is that life, really?
Argent knows that these thoughts will fill his head for months to come as he mindlessly scans canned corn and pocket-damp coupons. “Did you find everything okay?” his mouth will say. “Have a good one!” But his heart will be wishing them worms in their meat, disease in their produce, and swollen, rancid canned goods. Anything that will inflict upon them a small fraction of the misery that now resides within him.
• • •
A week after Connor’s escape, a visitor shows up at Argent’s door just before he’s about to leave for his morning shift.
“Hello,” the man says. His voice is a little bit ragged and his smile suspiciously broad. “Would you happen to be Argent Skinner?”
“Depends on who’s asking.” Argent figures this might be one of the feds, come to tie up loose ends. He wonders if he’s going to be arrested after all. He wonders if he cares.
“May I come in?”
The man steps forward a bit, and now Argent can see something that was hidden by the oblique morning light. There’s something wrong with the right half of the man’s face. It’s peeling and infected.
“What’s the deal with your face?” Argent asks, point-blank.
“I could ask the same of you,” he answers.
“Gardening accident,” Argent volunteers.
“Sunburn,” the man counters—although to Argent it looks more like a radiation burn. A person would have to lie beneath an unforgiving sky for hours to get a burn that bad.
“You oughta take care of that,” Argent says, not even trying to mask his disgust.
“I will when time allows.” The man steps forward again. “May I come in? There’s something I need to discuss with you. Something of mutual interest and benefit.”
Argent is not so stupid as to let a stranger into his house at the crack of dawn—especially one who looks as wrong as this man does. He blocks the threshold and takes a stance that would resist any attempt for the man to barge his way in. “State your business right there,” Argent tells him.
“Very well.” The man smiles again, but his smile seems like a silent curse. Like the smile Argent gives people in the ten-items-or-less line who violate the limit. The smile he gives them while wiping just a little bit of snot on their apples.
“I happened to catch that picture you posted of you and Connor Lassiter.”
Argent sighs. “It was a fake, all right? I already told the police.” Argent steps back to close the door, but the man moves forward, planting his foot in just the right spot to keep the door from budging.
“The authorities may have fallen for your story—mainly because they truly believe that Lassiter is dead—but I know better.”
Argent doesn’t know what to make of this. Half of him wants to run, but the other half wants to know what this guy is all about.
“Yeah?” he says.
“Just like you, I caught him, yet he managed to slither away. And just like you, I want to make him pay for what he’s done.”
“Yeah?” Now Argent begins to get the slightest glimmer of hope. Maybe his life won’t be all about ringing up groceries in this town.