UnStrung

by Neal Shusterman

  It’s not anything close to what Wil truly wants, but he tries to cling to the knowledge that his gift of music will somehow survive his unwinding.

  “My guitar,” he manages through chattering teeth, ignoring the fact that he can no longer feel his toes.

  “It’s safe,” Roberta says quickly. “I have it.”

  “Send it home.”

  She hesitates, and then nods.

  Wil’s unwinding proceeds at an alarming rate. All too soon a wave of darkness crashes over him. He can no longer hear Roberta. He can no longer see her.

  Then, in the void, he senses someone lean close to him. Someone familiar.

  “Grandfather?” he hazards to say. He cannot hear himself speak.

  “Yes, Chowilawu.”

  “Are we are going to the Lower World?”

  “We will see, Chowilawu,” his grandfather says. “We will see.”

  But whatever happens now, it doesn’t matter to Wil. Because someone finally came.

  11 • Una

  Not through smoke signals.

  Not through the intricate legal investigations of the Council.

  Not through the tribal nations’ security task force, put in place after the parts pirates took him.

  In the end, the rez finds out Wil is no more when his guitar is delivered with no note and no return address.

  Una cradles the guitar in her arms and remembers: Wil building mountains for her in a sandbox when they were five. The quiet delight in his eyes when she asked him to marry her, when they were six. His grief as Tocho died, while she and Lev sat watching on the hospital floor. The touch of Wil’s hand on her arm when he said good-bye.

  In every memory is his music, and she hears it again every day, playing in the wind through the trees to tease and torment her. Or maybe to comfort her and remind her that nothing and no one is ever truly lost.

  Una tries to hold on to that as she lays Wil’s guitar on the workshop table. There is no body; there is only the guitar. So she gently, lovingly, unstrings it and prepares it for the funeral pyre in the morning.

  And she tells no one of the strange hope she cradles in her heart, that somehow she will hear Wil’s music again, loud and pure, calling forth her soul.

  THE END

  NEAL SHUSTERMAN is the author of many novels for young adults, including Unwind, which was an ALA Best Book for Young Adults and a Quick Pick for Reluctant Young Readers and has won more than thirty other awards; the highly acclaimed Skinjacker Trilogy (Everlost, Everwild, and Everfound), and Full Tilt, which has received twenty awards and honors. He also writes screenplays for motion pictures and television shows, including Goosebumps and the Disney Channel original movie Pixel Perfect. Currently he is adapting Unwind as a feature film. The father of four children, Neal lives in Southern California. Visit him at StoryMan.com

  MICHELLE KNOWLDEN has published fourteen stories with Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, most featuring hypochondriac detective Micky Cardex. The story “No, Thank You, John” was nominated for a Shamus Award. Many of Ms. Knowlden’s stories have been included in anthologies and translated in multiple languages, including “Where Old Kings Gather” for Tor Books’ More Amazing Stories anthology. This is Michelle Knowlden’s second collaboration with Neal Shusterman. The first was the X-Files young adult novel Dark Matter for HarperCollins in 1999, under the name Easton Royce.

  1 • Connor

  “There are places you can go,” Ariana tells him, “and a guy as smart as you has a decent chance of surviving to eighteen.”

  Connor isn’t so sure, but looking into Ariana’s eyes makes his doubts go away, if only for a moment. Her eyes are sweet violet with streaks of gray. She’s such a slave to fashion—always getting the newest pigment injection the second it’s in style. Connor was never into that. He’s always kept his eyes the color they came in. Brown. He never even got tattoos, like so many kids get these days when they’re little. The only color on his skin is the tan it takes during the summer, but now, in November, that tan has long faded. He tries not to think about the fact that he’ll never see the summer again. At least not as Connor Lassiter. He still can’t believe that his life is being stolen from him at sixteen.

  Ariana’s violet eyes begin to shine as they fill with tears that flow down her cheeks when she blinks. “Connor, I’m so sorry.” She holds him, and for a moment it seems as if everything is okay, as if they are the only two people on Earth. For that instant, Connor feels invincible, untouchable . . . but she lets go, the moment passes, and the world around him returns. Once more he can feel the rumble of the freeway beneath them, as cars pass by, not knowing or caring that he’s here. Once more he is just a marked kid, a week short of unwinding.

  The soft, hopeful things Ariana tells him don’t help now. He can barely hear her over the rush of traffic. This place where they hide from the world is one of those dangerous places that make adults shake their heads, grateful that their own kids aren’t stupid enough to hang out on the ledge of a freeway overpass. For Connor it’s not about stupidity, or even rebellion—it’s about feeling life. Sitting on this ledge, hidden behind an exit sign is where he feels most comfortable. Sure, one false step and he’s roadkill. Yet for Connor, life on the edge is home.

  There have been no other girls he’s brought here, although he hasn’t told Ariana that. He closes his eyes, feeling the vibration of the traffic as if it’s pulsing through his veins, a part of him. This has always been a good place to get away from fights with his parents, or when he just feels generally boiled. But now Connor’s beyond boiled—even beyond fighting with his mom and dad. There’s nothing more to fight about. His parents signed the order—it’s a done deal.

  “We should run away,” Ariana says. “I’m fed up with everything, too. My family, school, everything. I could kick-AWOL, and never look back.”

  Connor hangs on the thought. The idea of kicking-AWOL by himself terrifies him. He might put up a tough front, he might act like the bad boy at school—but running away on his own? He doesn’t even know if he has the guts. But if Ariana comes, that’s different. That’s not alone. “Do you mean it?”

  Ariana looks at him with her magical eyes. “Sure. Sure I do. I could leave here. If you asked me.”

  Connor knows this is major. Running away with an Unwind—that’s commitment. The fact that she would do it moves him beyond words. He kisses her, and in spite of everything going on in his life Connor suddenly feels like the luckiest guy in the world. He holds her—maybe a little too tightly, because she starts to squirm. It just makes him want to hold her even more tightly, but he fights that urge and lets go. She smiles at him.

  “AWOL . . .” she says. “What does that mean, anyway?”

  “It’s an old military term or something,” Connor says. “It means ‘absent without leave.’”

  Ariana thinks about it, and grins. “Hmm. More like ‘alive without lectures.’”

  Connor takes her hand, trying hard not to squeeze it too tightly. She said she’d go if he asked her. Only now does he realize he hasn’t actually asked yet.

  “Will you come with me, Ariana?”

  Ariana smiles and nods. “Sure,” she says. “Sure I will.”

  •

  Ariana’s parents don’t like Connor. “We always knew he’d be an Unwind,” he can just hear them saying. “You should have stayed away from that Lassiter boy.” He was never “Connor” to them. He was always “that Lassiter boy.” They think that just because he’s been in and out of disciplinary school they have a right to judge him.

  Still, when he walks her home that afternoon, he stops short of her door, hiding behind a tree as she goes inside. Before he heads home, he thinks how hiding is now going to be a way of life for both of them.

  •

  Home.

  Connor wonders how he can call the place he lives home, when he’s about to be evicted—not just from the place he sleeps, but from the hearts of those who are supposed to love him.


  His father sits in a chair, watching the news as Connor enters.

  “Hi, Dad.”

  His father points at some random carnage on the news. “Clappers again.”

  “What did they hit this time?”

  “They blew up an Old Navy in the North Akron mall.”

  “Hmm,” says Connor. “You’d think they’d have better taste.”

  “I don’t find that funny.”

  Connor’s parents don’t know that Connor knows he’s being unwound. He wasn’t supposed to find out, but Connor has always been good at ferreting out secrets. Three weeks ago, while looking for a stapler in his dad’s home office, he found airplane tickets to the Bahamas. They were going on a family vacation over Thanksgiving. One problem, though: There were only three tickets. His mother, his father, his younger brother. No ticket for him. At first he just figured the ticket was somewhere else, but the more he thought about it, the more it seemed wrong. So Connor went looking a little deeper when his parents were out, and he found it. The Unwind order. It had been signed in old-fashioned triplicate. The white copy was already gone—off with the authorities. The yellow copy would accompany Connor to his end, and the pink would stay with his parents, as evidence of what they’d done. Perhaps they would frame it and hang it alongside his first-grade picture.

  The date on the order was the day before the Bahamas trip. He was going off to be unwound, and they were going on vacation to make themselves feel better about it. The unfairness of it had made Connor want to break something. It had made him want to break a lot of things—but he hadn’t. For once he had held his temper, and aside from a few fights in school that weren’t his fault, he kept his emotions hidden. He kept what he knew to himself. Everyone knew that an unwind order was irreversible, so screaming and fighting wouldn’t change a thing. Besides, he found a certain power in knowing his parents’ secret. Now the blows he could deal them were so much more effective. Like the day he brought flowers home for his mother and she cried for hours. Like the B-plus he brought home on a science test. Best grade he ever got in science. He handed it to his father, who looked at it, the color draining from his face. “See, Dad, my grades are getting better. I could even bring my science grade up to an A by the end of the semester.” An hour later his father was sitting in a chair, still clutching the test in his hand, and staring blankly at the wall.

  Connor’s motivation was simple: Make them suffer. Let them know for the rest of their lives what a horrible mistake they made.

  But there was no sweetness to this revenge, and now, three weeks of rubbing it in their faces has made him feel no better. In spite of himself he’s starting to feel bad for his parents, and he hates that he feels that way.

  “Did I miss dinner?”

  His father doesn’t look away from the TV. “Your mother left a plate for you.”

  Connor heads off toward the kitchen, but halfway there he hears:

  “Connor?”

  He turns to see his father looking at him. Not just looking, but staring. He’s going to tell me now, Connor thinks. He’s going to tell me they’re unwinding me, and then break down in tears, going on and on about how sorry sorry sorry he is about it all. If he does, Connor just might accept the apology. He might even forgive him, and then tell him that he doesn’t plan to be here when the Juvey-cops come to take him away. But in the end all his father says is, “Did you lock the door when you came in?”

  “I’ll do it now.”

  Connor locks the door, then goes to his room, no longer hungry for whatever it is his mother saved for him.

  * * *

  At two in the morning Connor dresses in black and fills a backpack with the things that really matter to him. He still has room for three changes of clothes. He finds it amazing, when it comes down to it, how few things are worth taking. Memories, mostly. Reminders of a time before things went so wrong between him and his parents. Between him and the rest of the world.

  Connor peeks in on his brother, thinks about waking him to say good-bye, then decides it’s not a good idea. He silently slips out into the night. He can’t take his bike, because he had installed an antitheft tracking device. Connor never considered that he might be the one stealing it. Ariana has bikes for both of them though.

  Ariana’s house is a twenty-minute walk, if you take the conventional route. Suburban Ohio neighborhoods never have streets that go in straight lines, so instead he takes the more direct route, through the woods, and makes it there in ten.

  The lights in Ariana’s house are off. He expected this. It would have been suspicious if she had stayed awake all night. Better to pretend she’s sleeping, so she won’t alert any suspicion. He keeps his distance from the house. Ariana’s yard and front porch are equipped with motion-sensor lights that come on whenever anything moves into range. They’re meant to scare off wild animals and criminals. Ariana’s parents are convinced that Connor is both.

  He pulls out his phone and dials the familiar number. From where he stands in the shadows at the edge of the backyard he can hear it ring in her room upstairs. Connor disconnects quickly and ducks farther back into the shadows, for fear that Ariana’s parents might be looking out from their windows. What is she thinking? Ariana was supposed to leave her phone on vibrate.

  He makes a wide arc around the edge of the backyard, wide enough not to set off the lights, and although a light comes on when he steps onto the front porch, only Ariana’s bedroom faces that way. She comes to the door a few moments later, opening it not quite wide enough for her to come out or for him to go in.

  “Hi, are you ready?” asks Connor. Clearly she’s not; she wears a robe over satin pajamas. “You didn’t forget, did you?”

  “No, no, I didn’t forget. . . .”

  “So hurry up! The sooner we get out of here, the more of a lead we’ll get before anyone knows we’re gone.”

  “Connor,” she says, “here’s the thing . . .”

  And the truth is right there in her voice, in the way it’s such a strain for her to even say his name, the quiver of apology lingering in the air like an echo. She doesn’t have to say anything after that, because he knows, but he lets her say it anyway. Because he sees how hard it is for her, and he wants it to be. He wants it to be the hardest thing she’s ever done in her life.

  “Connor, I really want to go, I do . . . but it’s just a really bad time for me. My sister’s getting married, and you know she picked me to be the maid of honor. And then there’s school.”

  “You hate school. You said you’d be dropping out when you turn sixteen.”

  “Testing out,” she says. “There’s a difference.”

  “So you’re not coming?”

  “I want to, I really, really want to . . . but I can’t.”

  “So everything we talked about was just a lie.”

  “No,” says Ariana. “It was a dream. Reality got in the way, that’s all. And running away doesn’t solve anything.”

  “Running away is the only way to save my life,” Connor hisses. “I’m about to be unwound, in case you forgot.”

  She gently touches his face. “I know,” she says. “But I’m not.”

  Then a light comes on at the top of the stairs, and reflexively Ariana closes the door a few inches.

  “Ari?” Connor hears her mother say. “What is it? What are you doing at the door?”

  Connor backs up out of view, and Ariana turns to look up the stairs. “Nothing, Mom. I thought I saw a coyote from my window and I just wanted to make sure the cats weren’t out.”

  “The cats are upstairs, honey. Close the door and go back to bed.”

  “So, I’m a coyote,” says Connor.

  “Shush,” says Ariana, closing the door until there’s just a tiny slit and all he can see is the edge of her face and a single violet eye. “You’ll get away, I know you will. Call me once you’re somewhere safe.” Then she closes the door.

  Connor stands there for the longest time, until the motion sensor light goe
s out. Being alone had not been part of his plan, but he realizes it should have been. From the moment his parents signed those papers, Connor was alone.

  He can’t take a train; he can’t take a bus. Sure, he has enough money, but nothing’s leaving until morning, and by then they’ll be looking for him in all the obvious places. Unwinds on the run are so common these days, they have whole teams of Juvey-cops dedicated to finding them. The police have it down to an art.

  He knows he’d be able to disappear in a city, because there are so many faces, you never see the same one twice. He knows he can also disappear in the country, where people are so few and far between; he could set up house in an old barn and no one would think to look. But then, Connor figures the police probably thought of that. They probably have every old barn set up to spring like a rat trap, snaring kids like him. Or maybe he’s just being paranoid. No, Connor knows his situation calls for justified caution—not just tonight, but for the next two years. Then once he turns eighteen, he’s home free. After that, sure, they can throw him in jail, they can put him on trial—but they can’t unwind him. Surviving that long is the trick.

  Down by the interstate there’s a rest stop where truckers pull off the road for the night. This is where Connor goes. He figures he can slip in the back of an eighteen-wheeler, but he quickly learns that truckers keep their cargo locked. He curses himself for not having forethought enough to consider that. Thinking ahead has never been one of Connor’s strong points. If it was, he might not have gotten into the various situations that have plagued him over these past few years. Situations that got him labels like “troubled” and “at risk,” and finally this last label, “unwind.”

  There are about twenty parked trucks, and a brightly lit diner where half a dozen truckers eat. It’s 3:30 in the morning. Apparently truckers have their own biological clocks. Connor watches and waits. Then, at about a quarter to four, a police cruiser pulls silently into the truck stop. No lights, no siren. It slowly circles the lot like a shark. Connor thinks he can hide, until he sees a second police car pulling in. There are too many lights over the lot for Connor to hide in shadows, and he can’t bolt without being seen in the bright moonlight. A patrol car comes around the far end of the lot. In a second its headlights will be on him, so he rolls beneath a truck and prays the cops haven’t seen him.