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He has to run it through his mind again to make sure he heard her right.
What wedding? Lev writes.
“Mine,” Una tells him, with a smile that speaks as much of sadness as it does of joy. “I’m marrying Wil.”
74 • Co/nn/or
In another hospital bed a thousand miles away, Connor lies awake. He has no memory of waking, he just is. And he knows something is off. Not exactly wrong, just different. Very different.
A face looms before him, inspecting him. It’s a face he knows. Old. Wizened. Stern. Perfect teeth. The admiral.
“About time you came out of it,” the admiral says. “I was ready to tear the surgeons a new one for rewinding you into a vegetable.”
It all goes in one ear, but doesn’t exactly come out the other—it just gets tangled inside. He knows what the admiral said, but has trouble grasping it again once he’s done speaking.
“Can you talk?” the admiral asks. “Or did the cat get your tongue?” And he laughs at his own gallows humor.
Connor opens his mouth to speak, but it’s as if his mouth is on upside down. He knows it’s not—it couldn’t be—but it feels that way. Where am I? Connor wants to ask, but his mind can’t find the words. He closes his eyes, reaching through his mind, but all that comes to him is the image of a globe he remembers from his elementary school library. The name of the company that manufactured it was written in bold black letters across the Pacific Ocean. Where am I? Connor wants to ask, but what comes out instead is—
“Rand? McNally? Rand McNally?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” the admiral says.
“Rand McNally!” He shuts his mouth, and grunts in frustration, shutting his eyes, trying to grasp what’s happening to him. Another image comes to mind.
“Zoo . . . ,” he says. Caged animals in a zoo. These are his thoughts and memories. All still there, but locked away from one another.
“You’re babbling, boy.”
“Babbling,” he says. Well, at least he can mimic.
The admiral seems a bit troubled by Connor’s responses, and that troubles Connor. “Damn it,” the admiral yells to a nurse Connor didn’t see in the room a moment ago. “I want the doctors in here. Now!”
One doctor comes in, then another. Connor doesn’t see them, but hears them. Connor only processes part of what they say. Something about “a severe insult to his brain.” And “nanites working internal repairs.” And the word “patience” repeated several times. Connor wonders how a person’s brain can be insulted.
When the admiral returns to Connor’s bedside, he seems placated. “Well, if nothing else, you’re certainly building up identities.”
Connor gives him what he hopes is a questioning look. It must work, because the admiral explains.
“First, you were the Akron AWOL, then you were Robert Elvis Mullard at the Graveyard, and now you’re Bryce Barlow.” He pauses, clearly intending to confuse Connor, and further confusion is definitely not something he needs.
“That was the name on all forty-six of the boxes you came in. Bryce Barlow was the boy we purchased at auction, before your friend Argent played the old shell game, and switched all the labels.”
Now it all comes back to Connor. He lets the understanding flow through him.
His own unwinding.
The cheery voice of UNIS.
And the plan. The crazy, harebrained, desperate plan.
Connor honestly didn’t have much faith in it, because it had too many moving parts. Far too many things could go wrong. First, Risa had to contact the admiral—the only person they knew with money enough to actually enter Divan’s auction. Then Argent had to find a way to get him into the auction with various false identities without arousing Divan’s suspicion. Then the admiral had to win the bids on every piece of some other poor kid who’d just been unwound. As if all that wasn’t difficult enough, Argent—who was not the sharpest tool in the shed—had to be counted on to switch the labels, which wasn’t just a matter of changing tags; the stasis containers were all digitally coded. Lot 4832 had to be switched with lot 4831. Every single box.
And even if all that came together, there was no telling if Connor would. No one had ever tried to physically reassemble an Unwind from his own parts. Connor would become the real-life “Humphrey Dunfee,” in a way Harlan Dunfee never had.
“We had help, of course,” the admiral explains. “I put together a top-notch surgical team that could make Connor out of Connor stew.”
“To
