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“Because I’m such an awful writer, it’s best no one sees it—not even me.”
She steps into the pool of darkness to find it’s not all that dark after all. It just seems that way when coming from the lighter edge. He doesn’t stand up to greet her; he just continues writing.
“So what is it?”
“I’m keeping a journal of my time here. That way, when it’s our turn to hang for the things we’re doing, there’ll be a record of what really happened. I’m calling it ‘Starkey’s Inferno,’ although I’m not quite sure which level of hell this is.”
“They don’t hang people anymore,” Bam points out. Then she thinks of Starkey’s lynchings. “Or at least they don’t hang people officially.”
“True. I suppose they’ll just shell us. Or at least they will if those shelling laws pass.” He closes the notebook and looks up at her for the first time. “The Egyptians were the first to think of shelling. Did you know that? They mummified their leaders to preserve their bodies for the afterlife—but before they sent them on their unmerry way, they sucked their brains out of their heads.” He pauses to consider it. “Geniuses, those Egyptians. They knew the last thing a pharaoh needs is a brain of his own, or he might do some real damage.”
Finally he stands to face her. “So what are you doing here, Bam? What do you want?”
“We need you to show Jeevan how to break through firewalls. You don’t have to do any of the breaking; you just need to show him.”
“Jeevan knows how to defeat firewalls—he did it all the time at the Graveyard. If he’s not doing it, it’s because he doesn’t want to but he’s afraid to tell the Stork Lord.”
“The Stork Lord—is that what the media’s calling him now?
r views some of the ads the communications seem to indicate. If Connor is piecing it all together correctly, then Proactive Citizenry, under different nonprofit names, is behind all the political adds in support of teenage unwinding. That’s no surprise—in fact, Connor had already suspected that. What surprises him is that Proactive Citizenry is also behind the ads against the unwinding of teenagers but in favor of shelling prisoners and the voluntary unwinding of adults.
“Eye-opening, isn’t it? Even if one of those eyes isn’t yours.”
Connor turns to see Cam sitting up in bed, watching him wade through the material. “And this is just the opening of the rabbit hole,” Cam says. “I guarantee you there’s darker, scarier stuff to find, the deeper we go.”
“I don’t get it.” Connor points to the various windows of political ads on the desktop, ads that blast the Juvenile Authority and call the unwinding of kids unethical. “Why would Proactive Citizenry play both sides?”
“Two-headed coin,” Cam says. Then he asks the strangest question. “Tell me, Connor, is this the first time you’ve been pregnant?”
“What?”
“Just answer the question, yes or no.”
“Yes. I mean no! Shut up! What kind of stupid-ass question is that?”
Cam smiles. “You see? You’re damned no matter how you answer. By playing both sides, Proactive Citizenry keeps people focused on choosing between two different kinds of unwinding, making people forget that the real question . . .”
“Is whether or not anyone should be unwound at all.”
“Nail on the head,” says Cam.
Now it makes perfect sense. Connor thinks back to all the things Trace Neuhauser had told him back in the Graveyard about the shrewd, insidious nature of Proactive Citizenry’s dealings. Their subtle manipulation of the Juvenile Authority. The way they used the Admiral to warehouse Unwinds for them, all the while the Admiral—and then Connor—truly believing they were giving safe sanctuary to those kids.
“So whichever side wins, it keeps the status quo,” Connor says. “People get unwound and the Unwinding Consortium still gets rich.”
“The Unwinding Consortium?”
“It’s what a friend once called all the people who make their money from unwinding. The companies who own the harvest camps, hospitals who do the transplants, the Juvenile Authority . . .”
Cam considers it with a single raised eyebrow that throws the symmetrical seams on his forehead out of balance and says. “All roads lead to Rome. Unwinding is the single most profitable industry in America—maybe even the world. An economic engine like that protects itself. We’ll have to be smarter than they are to break it down.” And then Cam smiles. “But they made one big mistake.”
“What’s that?”
“They built someone who’s smarter than they are.”
• • •
Cam and Connor pore over the information for another hour. But there’s so much, it’s hard to pull out what’s important and what’s not.
