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He spreads his hands once more, and, like a bird beating its wings against the wind, he swings them together again, and again. People are screaming now, climbing over one another. They can’t get away fast enough.
He keeps swinging his hands together—but nothing happens. Because there is nothing in his blood but blood. No chemicals, no explosives. He does not explode—but that doesn’t stop the security forces from taking action, just as he knew they would.
The first gunshot blasts out from one of the Juvey-cops protecting the island. The ceramic bullet rips through the right side of Lev’s chest, spinning him around. He doesn’t know who fires the second and third shots, because they both hit him in the back. His knees buckle beneath him. He goes down. A fourth bullet hits him in the gut, and a fifth whizzes past his ear, missing, but that’s all right, because the first four have done the job.
The world will know what happened here today. That an unarmed boy was shot in broad daylight before hundreds of witnesses. And when they learn who that boy was, it will stop everyone in their tracks for a long painful moment.
WHY, LEV, WHY? the headlines will read once more—only this time people will know the answer, and the answer shall be the names written on his flesh. Then people’s fury will turn on the ones who shot him beneath the unblinking eyes of liberty. And his sacrifice will change the world.
With blood pouring from his wounds, he lies on his back, eyes wide from the pain, looking up at the sky. High above him, the torch of the great statue points toward the moon, a pale specter almost directly overhead.
He reaches for it, his fingers sticky with blood. It seems to swell as he focuses his fading attention on it.
And Lev is happy . . . because he knows he’s finally grabbed the moon, and has pulled it from the sky.
60 • Mail
2162 letters were in Sonia’s trunk. 751 of them were lost in the fire, but 1411 were stamped and mailed by Grace Skinner, then delivered dutifully by the postal service from coast to coast—because the AWOLs who passed through Sonia’s basement over the years hailed from everywhere.
• • •
A woman in Astoria, Oregon, opens the letter with no return address, not recognizing the handwriting because it’s been almost three years since her daughter found the unwind order and went AWOL.
She begins to read, and from the very first line, the woman knows who wrote it. As much as she wants to run from the room, she is glued to her kitchen chair, unable to stop reading. When she’s done, she sits there in silence, not sure what to do next, but knowing she must do something.
• • •
A man in Montpelier, Vermont, arrives home before his wife today. He scans through the various bills and solicitations, until coming across a curious envelope, and he recognizes his son’s handwriting—a son who was sent off for unwinding almost five years ago. Although the Juvenile Authority wouldn’t officially admit it, the man and his wife found out that he escaped before arriving at his assigned harvest camp.
The man stands the envelope up against a vase in the dining room, and sits there staring at it a full ten minutes before summoning the nerve to open it.
When he first begins to read, he thinks the letter was written recently—but no, there’s a date written on the first page. His son wrote this m
ore than three years ago. He’s still out there somewhere. Maybe. Afraid to come home? Refusing to come home? Or did they catch him after all? For a time, the man and his family had considered moving for fear that he’d return and exact retribution on them. How ashamed he now feels for even thinking that.
His wife will be home from work any minute now. Should he show her the letter? Should he show his daughter when she’s home from swim practice? He doesn’t even know if she remembers her brother.
Although there’s no one in the room but the dog, he covers his eyes as he cries, shedding grief he’s denied since the day they came to take his son away.
• • •
A couple in Iowa City sits by the fireplace, and the two share the task of opening mail that accumulated while they were traveling. The man comes across a seemingly innocuous letter. He opens it, begins reading, then suddenly stops, folds the letter, and puts it back in the envelope.
“What is it?” asks his wife, having seen the way he’s suddenly gone pale.
“Nothing,” he says. “Junk mail.”
But she reads the truth in his face as clearly as if she had opened the letter herself. She knows there’s only one thing to be done. “Throw it into the fire,” she says.
And so he does, ending the matter once and for all.
• • •
In Indianapolis, the letter arrives on the very day a woman’s divorce is final. She reads it, her hands unable to keep from shaking. She signed the unwind order after her son’s awful fight with her husband—his stepfather. It took nearly two years for her to realize she had taken the wrong side of that fight. But this letter gives her hope. It means her son might still be whole, and out there somewhere. If he is, she’d welcome him back in a heartbeat, shark tattoo and all.
• • •
Of the various people touched by the 1411 letters, some remain coldhearted, or just in adamant denial—but more than a thousand find reading the words of their lost son or daughter to be a life-changing event. In a population of hundreds of millions, such a small number of people is a mere drop in the bucket . . . but enough drops can make any bucket overflow.
