Anissa hesitates. “And in return, I go free?”
“I had nothing else to bargain for. They won’t let me go. They only let me come down here because it’s near suicide. They don’t care if we burn up down here—but if I can bring you back, at least you’ll have a future.”
“Not much of one.” Anissa flinches. “My hand’s infected; it’s getting worse.”
“Cut it off,” he says. “They’ll replace it for you.”
Anissa stands stock-still, processing what she’s heard. She remembers Heath’s brother, who was sold to organ harvesters to save him, an act so revolting that it defined his life forever. What would make him betray everything he believes in, just to save a fleeing AWOL who he doesn’t even seem to like much?
“You’re afraid of me,” she says. “Afraid of what I may know.”
“You know nothing.”
“But you can’t be sure of that—because you’re not Heath.”
Anissa shuts off the transceiver, pushing herself harder than before, determined to escape despite her failing health. Her pursuer—the man impersonating Heath—seems to be getting closer, though it’s hard to be sure. The only thing she knows for certain is that he’s got a more advanced heatsuit that can, among other things, mimic voices.
Heath has been captured or more likely killed; she knows that. They must have swooped into the wreckage of Centralia and started capturing AWOLs, rounding up survivors like ducks in a pond. Until they realized that the mine had blown open, the heatsuit was missing, and someone had escaped, right out from under them, into the burning maze under Centralia. And they sent someone in after her—with orders to make sure that no one escapes.
The words “sepsis detected” seem to pulse with a life of their own, like an attention-grabbing headline. The outside temperature has dropped to a balmy 619.
She wants to break into a run, but the heatsuit isn’t built for that—she can only keep walking, at maximum speed, through this surreal landscape. If she slows or stops, he’ll catch her. If she succumbs to the spreading infection, making her dizzy and weak and sick, he may not even have to catch her. She can feel her strength draining away, the pathogens in her bloodstream spreading, her world turning gray at the edges.
“You can’t escape,” says a soft voice.
Not Heath’s voice, it’s coarser and lower pitched, because the man behind her isn’t pretending anymore—he’s become brutally candid.
“I turned you off,” Anissa says.
“I’m on an alternate frequency. We know you’re Anissa Pruitt. It’s time to stop running.”
“Why, what’s the alternative? Is there a reward for giving up?”
“A painless end,” he says. “A chance to live, divided.”
Gosh, thanks, Anissa thinks but says nothing. Her pursuer doesn’t wait for an answer and elaborates on his proposal.
“I know you’re hurt, Anissa. I know how badly you’re hurt, because our suits automatically share information. You’re in a lot of pain right now, but you don’t have to be. Give yourself up, and I’ll adjust your anesthetic feeds to end your pain. Then I’ll get you out of here. You’ll be taken to a harvest camp, and your organs will help others keep living. You’ll keep living, through them. Isn’t that better than this pointless suicide?”
“Shut off all frequencies,” she says.
The voice cuts off, leaving a strained silence. He’s still there, a red blip on her readout, mute but relentless.
Anissa steels herself. The mine stretches impossibly before her. Her feet are heavy, hard to lift, and the heatsuit’s getting uncomfortable. She’s in a race she can’t win, burdened by infection, unwilling to surrender.
A part of her wants to amputate the hand and be done with it. It makes sense, because it would neutralize the infection. Amputation wouldn’t cure her—the sepsis in her blood would have to heal gradually, over a period of time. But surgical intervention would help to kick-start her body’s own recovery system.
There’s just one problem: She can’t bring herself to do it.
My dad wouldn’t, and I won’t either, she thinks, gritting her teeth. These suits were designed for firefighters ready and willing to receive unwound parts. Accepting amputation would make her complicit. This is the line she won’t cross, the very thing she won’t do, even if it means she’ll die in this awful mine. Her one consolation is that they can’t harvest her if she’s dead. By the time they drag her body out of here, it’ll be in no shape for organ donation.
So she keeps walking. She’ll walk until she keels over from septic shock. This is where I die, in a tunnel of fire that feels like damnation.
Then an idea dawns.
A stupid idea, something she’d never have the nerve to try under any other circumstances. She’s not sure she has the nerve to do it now. But her options are narrowing. It’s either give in and let the machine amputate . . . or this.
She breaks the seal on her left-hand glove. Peels back the reinforced fabric, exposing her flesh. It’s sickly red-raw, sticky and oozing, and the superheated air strikes her nerve endings, making her cry out in pain. But the worst is yet to come.
“If this doesn’t work, Dad,” she says, “I’m sorry.”
And she jams her bare hand palm-first against the red-hot wall of the mine.
OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD
Don’t faint, she thinks. If you faint, you won’t get up again. But the ground is unsteady, lurching and heaving like a ship at sea, and the shock threatens to claim her because OH MY GOD IT HURTS, worse than anything she’s ever imagined. She wants to curl up and die, wants it badly, but that merciful surrender is something Anissa can’t afford and won’t permit herself; she has to keep going.
The flesh of her hand is seared, but she tries not to register that. She pulls her glove back on over the ruined flesh, nearly screaming as the pain reignites, refusing to stop until the hand is covered again.
Her faceplate reads THIRD-DEGREE BURN and SEVERE TISSUE DAMAGE and, once again, AMPUTATION RECOMMENDED. But the “sepsis” message flickers and fades. Because I burned it out of me, like putting a torch to an open wound. She hasn’t cured herself, not entirely; her blood is still tainted. But she’s removed the primary source of infection and begun the process of healing. Her immune system will do the rest.
“Amputation refused,” she says.
She takes a step forward. Then another. And another.
• • •
Two miles later she’s still going. So is her pursuer.
With the nerve endings in her hand burned away, the pain has settled to a powerful, but manageable, throb. Her pursuer is getting closer, gaining ground. She realizes there’s one last chance to lose him. Up ahead is an overhanging rock shelf, slicing across the tunnel at a place where it narrows to near impassability. Probably from a cave-in, where the support beams were burned through and couldn’t carry their load. Whatever the reason, it gives Anissa the advantage. The man behind is larger and stronger, normally an asset, but here it works against him—he’ll never get past this obstacle.
But can she?
She crouches, gauging the dimensions of the opening, planning her approach. The trick is not to touch the walls, because of their furnace heat—something she knows all too well. The heatsuit can survive the heat of the mine, but not if it’s pressed against the near-molten stone. Anissa sidles forward awkwardly, crouching to clear the overhang. Her balance wavers and she nearly topples but manages to keep her footing. Her injured hand brushes the wall just once, with a sunburst of pain, but she bites her lip and keeps going.
She’s clear. The obstruction is past. Her pursuer can’t follow.
• • •
Some impossible time later, after an interval she can’t clearly measure, Anissa emerges from the burning hell of the Centralia mine into a bright spring afternoon, many miles from the ruined AWOL camp. She’s near a stand of gnarled-limb oak trees and rolling hills of grass and thistle and windblown dandelion. S
he peels off her heatsuit, like a prisoner escaping from bondage, and breathes in a lungful of air that’s neither superheated nor caustic. She can almost forget the throbbing pain in her ruined hand.
They’ll be looking for her; she has to keep moving. Anissa has ample time—she hopes—to find help, someone to clean and dress her wound and help her escape from the Juvenile Authority. Plenty of locals are sympathetic to AWOLs. She gives herself an even chance of getting away clean.
She turns to leave—but then hears a voice behind her.
“Help me. . . .”
A stooped figure emerges from the mine, tearing at a badly damaged heatsuit. He’s a boeuf—someone Anissa’s never seen, blond and buzz-cut and clearly in pain. The suit is crumpled and torn on the left-hand side, perhaps because he was too large to wriggle through that tight passage but somehow did it anyway. His left arm, Anissa notes, has been severed by the suit, just above the elbow.
He tumbles to the ground and lies still.
She checks his pulse. He’s still got one. The smart move would be to forget about him, hoping he’ll die, maybe even speeding the process. She admits it’s tempting. Ignoring him would make her escape much easier. Getting help for him will call attention and risk her own safety. She could find a roundabout way to do it—get a backwoods hunter to say he found the man, perhaps, making no mention of Anissa. But anything she tries will increase her chance of getting caught.
Should she run, or risk helping another?
Anissa smiles. She is not, nor will she ever be, like the people who want to unwind her. She is her father’s daughter.
Which means her choice is obvious.
UnStrung
Co-authored with Michelle Knowlden
1 • Lev
“Do it for him,” a woman says, her voice quiet but steeped in authority.
Mired in a numbing gray fog, Lev feels her cool fingers on his neck, taking his pulse. His throat hurts, his tongue feels like chewed leather, his left wrist aches, and he can’t open his eyes.
“Not yet, Ma.”
Like his eyes, Lev’s lips won’t open. Who is it who just spoke? Maybe one of his brothers. Marcus, perhaps? No, the voice is wrong. And no one in his family is so informal as to call their mother “Ma.”
“All right,” he hears the woman say. “You decide when he’s ready. And don’t forget your guitar.”
The sound of footsteps recedes, and Lev slips back into darkness.
• • •
When he wakes again, his eyes open, but only a sliver. He’s alone in a large bedroom with blinding-white walls. A red, woven blanket covers him. Beneath him he can feel a smooth and expensive cotton sheet, like the ones he once knew. He’s on a bed that’s low to the ground, and beyond its foot he sees the fur of a mountain lion on the slate floor. He shudders at the sight of it. An oak bureau faces him. It has no mirror, and for the moment he’s glad.
Forcing his eyes wider, he sees unshuttered windows on the far wall, the light beyond them weakening to dusk. Or is it strengthening to dawn? There is a nightstand next to him. A stethoscope is coiled there, and for a brief, devastating moment he thinks that he’s been discovered and taken to a harvest camp. Despair presses him against the cotton sheet, and he sinks into the fog that fills his head, confusing dreams with delirium and making a mockery of time. He drifts through the fog until he hears—
“When he wakes, get his name.” It’s a different voice. Deeper. “The council can’t give him sanctuary without a name.”
Cool fingers touch his wrist again. “I’ll keep that in mind.” He senses the woman leaning over him. He can hear her breathing. She smells of sage and smoky cottonwood. It’s comforting. “Now leave us be.”
He feels a prick in his upper arm, like a tranq dart, but not. The world goes hazy—but not like the fog. This is a different kind of sleep.
Suddenly he’s standing in a yard, near a briefcase covered in mud that lies halfway down a hole. Outside the picket fence police are sidling toward him. No, it’s not him they’re interested in—it’s the skinny umber kid with him. CyFi’s hands overflow with gold chains and glittering stones of every color. He’s pleading with the sienna-colored man and woman, who clutch each other, staring at the kid in terror.
“Please don’t unwind me.” CyFi’s words are hoarse and choked with sobs. “Please don’t unwind me. . . .”
A cool hand touches Lev’s cheek, and the memory is sucked in like a mental gasp. He left CyFi days ago. He’s somewhere else now.
“You’re safe, child,” the woman’s reassuring voice says. “Open your eyes.”
When he does, he sees her pleasant face smiling at him. Square jaw, black hair tied back, and bronze skin, she’s a—“SlotMonger!” he blurts, and feels his skin flush red. “I’m sorry . . . I didn’t mean . . . It just came out. . . .”
She chuckles. “Old words die hard,” she tells him with patient understanding. “We were called Indians long after it was obvious we weren’t from India. And ‘Native American’ was always a bit too condescending for my taste.”
“ChanceFolk,” Lev says, hoping the offensiveness of his previous slur will quickly be forgotten.
“Yes,” the woman says. “People of Chance. Of course the casinos are long gone, but I suppose the name was evocative enough to stick.”
He sees the stethoscope around her neck—the one he had at first incorrectly thought belonged to a harvest camp surgeon.
“You’re a doctor?”
“A Woman of Medicine, yes—and as such I can tell you that your cuts and bruises are healing, and the swelling of your wrist is much reduced. Leave the brace on till I give you leave to shed it. You need to gain a few pounds, but once you taste my husband’s cooking, that shouldn’t be a problem.”
Lev watches warily as she sits on the edge of his bed and studies him.
“But your spirit, child, is a vastly different matter.”
He withdraws, and her lips purse ruefully.
“Healing takes time; for some more time than for others. Tell me one thing, and I’ll leave you to rest.”
He stiffens, reflexively on his guard. “What?”
“What is your name?”
“Lev Calder,” he says, and regrets it immediately. It’s been almost three weeks since he was dragged by Connor from his limo, but the powers that be are still looking for him. It was one thing to be traveling with CyFi, but to give a doctor his name—what if she turns him over to the Juvenile Authority? He thinks of his parents and the destiny he left behind. How could he have wanted to be unwound? How could his parents have made him want it? It fills him with an unrelenting fury at everyone and everything. He’s not a tithe anymore. He’s an AWOL now. He’d better start thinking like one.
“Well, Lev, we’re petitioning the Tribal Council to allow you to stay. You don’t have to tell me all you’ve been through—I’m sure it was horrible.” And then her eyes brighten. “But we People of Chance do believe in people of second chance.”
2 • Wil
He stands in the doorway, watching the boy sleep. His guitar hangs down his back, warm from the sun, strings still humming.
He doesn’t mind being here, though he was sorry to have to leave the forest. His time accompanying the sounds of shivering leaves, whirling dust devils, and powerful Chinook winds is always special to him. There’s calming joy in transposing nature to music. Adapting the chords of yellow-shouldered blackbirds, prairie dogs, and wild pigs. Bringing their voices into each movement he plays.
Wil brought Dad’s leftover blackberry crumble to the forest with him. Una brought some elk jerky and a thermos of cinnamon-spiced chocolate. She sat with him beneath a spreading oak while he played, although she left before he finished, as it was her turn to clean the workshop.
His guitar always sounds a little melancholy when Una leaves.
The AWOL boy that his mother has taken into their home has been awake for a day now, but he hasn’t come down for anything, even meals. Dad of
fered to carry him, but Ma said he needed more time.
“Can’t fret over AWOLs,” his father told her. “They never stay long, and they’re too desperate to be grateful.” But Ma just ignores him. She’s taken the boy under her protection, and that is that.
Wil wonders how the boy can sleep when the sun blasts through the windows over his head, and the roar of tribal construction in town echoes down the ravine. The boy’s chest rises and falls, and then his legs churn beneath the sheets as if he’s running. Wil is not surprised: AWOLs know much about running. Sometimes he thinks that’s all they know.
Wil is confident the boy will be calmed. Wild animals, rattlesnakes, and feral teenagers go quiet in Wil’s presence. Even when his guitar hangs silent on his back, his presence calms them—perhaps in anticipation of what he’ll deliver. Although Wil’s just a teenager himself, he’s got old-soul style, a storyteller vibe that he got from his grandfather—
But he doesn’t want to think about his grandfather now.
While he considers what music may reach this AWOL, the boy wakes. His wide pupils constrict, revealing pale blue eyes that focus on Wil standing in the doorway.
Wil takes a few steps into the room and sits on the mountain lion skin, swinging his guitar into his lap in a single, practiced movement.
“My name’s Chowilawu,” he tells the boy, “but everyone calls me Wil.”
The boy stares at him guardedly. “I heard you talking yesterday. The medicine woman is your mom?”
He nods. The kid looks about thirteen—three years younger than Wil—but something about his eyes makes him seem like he’s going on one hundred. More old-soul style, but of the world-weary kind. Life has done a number on this AWOL.
“Okay if I play my guitar here?” Wil asks, his voice as gentle as he can make it.
The boy squints suspiciously. “Why?”
Wil shrugs. “It’s easier for me than talking.”
The boy hesitates, chewing on his lip. “Sure, okay.”
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