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A car passes, slows a hundred yards up, and makes a U-turn across the dirt median. As it makes the turn, another car’s headlights illuminate its black-and-white coloring. A highway patrol car. Maybe the officer saw them—or maybe he just saw the ostriches, but either way, their options have suddenly been cut short.
“Run!” says Connor.
“He’ll see us!”
“Not until he shines his spotlight. Run!”
The patrol car pulls to a stop by the side of the road, and Lev doesn’t argue anymore. He turns to run, but Connor grabs his arm. “No, this way.”
“Toward the ostriches?”
“Trust me!”
The spotlight comes on, but it fixes on one of the birds nearing the road and not on them. Connor and Lev reach the breach in the fence. Birds scatter around them, creating more moving targets for the patrolman’s spotlight.
One
* * *
Flightless
“Surely this new medical technology will free us rather than enslave us, for it is my firm belief that human compassion outweighs human greed. To that end, I hereby found Proactive Citizenry to be a stalwart watchdog over the ethical use of neurografting. I am confident that abuses will be the exception rather than the rule.”
—Janson Rheinschild
“I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
—J. Robert Oppenheimer
The Rheinschilds
“They signed it. The Heartland War is over.”
Janson Rheinschild closes the front door, throws his coat on the sofa, and collapses into an armchair, as if all his joints have become internally undone. As if he’s been unwound from the inside out.
“You can’t be serious,” Sonia says. “No one in their right mind would sign that hideous Unwind Accord.”
He looks at her with a bitterness that isn’t meant for her, but it has nowhere else to go. “Who,” he asks, “has been in their right mind for the past nine years?”
She sits on the arm of the sofa as close to him as she can get and takes his hand. He grasps it with a sort of desperation, as if her hand is the only thing keeping him from the abyss.
“The new chairman of Proactive Citizenry, that narcissistic weasel Dandrich, called me before they made any official announcement, to let me know the accord was signed. He said that I should know first ‘out of respect.’ But you know as well as I do, he did it to gloat.”
“There’s no sense torturing yourself, Janson. It’s not your fault, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
He pulls his hand away from her and glares. “You’re right—it’s not my fault. It’s our fault. We did this together, Sonia.”
She reacts as if he’s slapped her across the face. She doesn’t just turn away from him. She gets up and moves away, beginning to pace the room. Good, thinks Janson. She needs to feel a little bit of what I feel.
“I did nothing wrong,” she insists, “and neither did you!”
“We made it possible! Unwinding is based on our technology! Our research!”
“And it was stolen from us!”
Janson gets up from his chair, unable to bear even one sedentary moment. Sitting feels like acceptance. It feels like admitting failure. Next he’ll be lost in that armchair with a drink in his hands, swirling the ice to hear it clink, feeling the alcohol numbing him into submission. No, that’s not him. It will never be him.
There’s some shouting in the street. He looks out the living room window to see some neighborhood kids being rowdy with one another. “Ferals,” the news now calls them. Feral teens. “Something must be done about the feral teens this war has created,” the politicians bleat from their legislative pens. Well, what did they expect when educational funding was diverted to the war? How could they not know public education would fail? With no schools, no jobs, and nothing but time on their hands, what did they think these kids would do other than make trouble?
