UnBound

by Neal Shusterman

  Goat Face ties Lev alone to the tree near where Pivane lies, leaving Lev struggling against the tight ropes.

  As he winds the rope around the tree, securing Lev’s legs, he watches Wil warily as if he expects to be attacked.

  “Let me say my good-byes,” Wil asks the leader.

  The man sits on the log where Wil played his guitar, waving his tranq pistol as a warning. Apparently Wil is now too valuable to shoot with real bullets. “Make it quick.”

  “Wil, what are you doing?” Lev whispers. “These guys are for real. You don’t come back from a Chop Shop.”

  “My choice, Lev. It’s your job now to take care of these kids. Calm them. Reassure them. Pivane will wake up in a few hours. You’ll all be fine.”

  Lev swallows and nods, accepting the responsibility.

  Wil summons a wry smile for Lev before the parts pirates take him and his guitar away. “Thanks for the applause, Little Brother.”

  9 • Lev

  In the village three hours later Lev leans against Pivane’s dusty truck, only half listening as Pivane tells the sheriff what happened. He watches the kids rushed to their cars and taken home. Only Kele looks back and waves good-bye to Lev.

  The sheriff returns to his car to relay the report and then heads back up the mountain to retrieve Bobby, the dead parts pirate—probably wishing it was one of them who took him out, and not one of his own gang.

  Lev can’t help but notice the cold glare that the policemen throw at him before they leave.

  • • •

  “Your petition to join the tribe has been denied,” Wil’s ma tells him, the pain in her voice partly for him and partly for her son who will never return. “I’m sorry, Lev.”

  Lev accepts the news with a stoic nod. He knew this would be the decision. He knew because of the looks everyone has given him since he returned from the vision quest. Those who know him see him as a walking gravestone with Wil’s name etched on his sienna face. Those who don’t know him see only a harbinger of the world that so cruelly took Chowilawu away. Wil’s music—his spirit—cannot be replaced by any musician on the rez. The wound will be raw for a very long time. And there’s no one they can blame for it. No one but Lev. Even if they allow him to stay, Lev knows the rez can no longer be his sanctuary.

  Pivane volunteers to drive him to the reservation’s northern entrance: immense bronze gates bookended by towers of green glass. Lev leans forward to see the bells in the towers and the rearing, life-size, bronze mustang suspended above the gate. Wil told him that fine, nearly invisible wires and a clear glass bridge support the mustang. When Chinook winds blow through the valley, children gather, hoping to see the horse escape its fetters and fly away.

  “Where will I go?” Lev asks simply.

  “That is for you to decide.” Pivane leans across him and retrieves his wallet from the glove compartment. Then he hands Lev a huge wad of cash.

  “Too much,” Lev manages, but Pivane shakes his head.

  “By accepting this gift, you will honor me . . . and you will honor him,” Pivane says. “The children told me how you offered yourself to the pirates before Wil did. It was not your fault they chose him over you.”

  Lev obediently shoves the money into his pocket. He shakes Pivane’s hand as he gets out of the car.

  “I hope your spirit guide takes you to a place of safety. A place you can call home,” Pivane says.

  Lev closes the door, and in a plume of dust the truck disappears down the street. Only then does it occur to Lev that he has no spirit guide. He never completed his vision quest. There is nothing and no one to guide him through this dim, foggy future.

  A security guard nods as he exits the pedestrian gate, and Lev heads for a bus stop a hundred feet away. He sees nothing else but a barren plateau, spotted with sage, which stretches to the horizon, not quite as barren as he feels inside.

  He counts the money Pivane gave him, and it will carry him far indeed, but not far enough, because there is nowhere far enough away from all the things he’s experienced since the day he was sent off to be tithed.

  Wil healed him with music, taught him the way of his people, and saved him from the pirates by sacrificing his own life.

  All he was able to give Wil was applause.

  The bus schedule shows the next departure is in thirty minutes. He doesn’t bother checking the destination. Lev knows that wherever it leads, his path ahead is dark. He has nothing left to lose. A burning fills his emptiness. A powerful need for revenge drives him now.

  As he looks at his hands, he begins to see a purpose for his applause. It’s a powerful purpose that will make his anger known . . . and tear the world to shreds.

  10 • Wil

  Like a crow Wil has flown over the rez wall, but not as he imagined. Deep down, he still expects his Tribal Council—or even the American Tribal Congress to somehow rescue him.

  But no one comes.

  The pirates drive him not to a Chop Shop but to a private hospital. In this upscale, designer clinic of glass walls, soft lights, and wall-size murals of cascading color, he sees no patients. He is treated like a rock star by an extensive staff and is provided any food he’d like, but he’s not hungry. He’s offered any music, the latest movies, games, books, or television, but nothing distracts him. He only watches the door.

  On his third day a neurologist, a surgeon, and a severe-looking blond woman come in and graciously ask him to play his guitar. Despite heartache, Wil plays flawlessly, and they are duly impressed. He still expects that somehow his playing will open their hearts and set him free. He still expects someone from the tribe to come to his door with good news. But no one comes.

  On the fourth day, at dawn, he’s put in restraints. A nurse gives him a shot, and he feels woozy. They roll him into an operating room: bright lights, white walls, monitors bleeping, sterile, cold. Nothing like the surgical lodge at home.

  He feels numb despair. He is being unwound. And he comes to his end alone.

  Then he sees a face in the operating room he recognizes. Although her hair is hidden by surgical scrubs, she doesn’t wear a mask like the others. It’s as if his seeing her face is more important than the sterile environment. He’s not surprised to see her again. He played his guitar for this woman. She never told him her name, although he heard the others call her Roberta.

  “Do you remember me, Chowilawu?” she asks with the hint of a British accent almost Americanized. “We met yesterday.” She pronounces his name flawlessly. It pleases him yet troubles him at the same time.

  “Why are you doing this?” he asks. “Why me?”

  “We have been searching for the right Person of Chance for a very long time. You will be part of a spectacular experiment. One that will change the future.”

  “Will you tell my parents what happened to me? Please?”

  “I’m sorry, Wil. No one can know.”

  This shakes him worse than death. His parents, Pivane, Una, the whole tribe grieving his absence, never knowing his fate.

  She takes his hand in hers. “I want you to know that your talent will not be lost. These hands and the neuron bundles that hold every bit of your musical memory will be kept together. Intact. Because I, too, treasure that which means the most to you.”

  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.”

  11 • Una

  There is never anything official.

  No communication confirming Wil’s unwinding, because kids taken by parts pirates simply disappear.

  In the end, however, the rez does receive evidence of Wil’s demise. His guitar is delivered home 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. 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.

  Unnatural Selection

  Co-authored with Brendan Shusterman

  1 • Colton

  The deep, resonant clang of a Buddhist ghanta snaps Colton to attention, the heavy sound of the bell echoing through the marketplace. Before this he was just drifting, lonely, like a jellyfish at sea, through the vendors and crowds. Every so often a soldier passes him, but more often than not, he sees only tourists and locals. It doesn’t matter that three days ago there had been a coup here in Thailand. It doesn’t matter that Myanmar, formerly Burma, formerly Myanmar, formerly Burma, is (big surprise) Burma again, and the current regime has been threatening to drop bombs on Bangkok for harboring enemies of the state. It is, as Colton has already surmised, business as usual.

  Like the Burmese, Colton isn’t quite sure who he is anymore. He’s halfway between one thing and another. Neither here nor there, fish nor fowl. Who he was and who he will be are connected only by the fine, nearly invisible thread of who he is now. He can’t yet decide whether to be terrified or energized by the spectrum of personal possibilities before him.

  The sweet smell of lychees brings Colton to a vendor who smiles wide and sells him four for what would have been pocket change back home. Colton puts his hands together before his face as if in prayer—a common thank-you in this part of the world—and the vendor returns the gesture.

  There is a reason Colton is in Thailand and why he’s decided he isn’t leaving. Thailand has outlawed unwinding. In fact, they were one of the first countries to speak out against it and sign the Florence Agreement—a plea that was ignored completely by the United States, as if it were written by her enemies. Colton knows the name of every country that retracted their statements and turned to unwinding—which was most of them—but Thailand held firm. Now Thailand is somewhat of a haven for AWOLs from China and Russia. But just next door is Burma. The heart of darkness.

  Colton heard stories about the Burmese Dah Zey, or “Flesh Market.” Everyone had. How they would keep you alive during a week-long unwinding process, taking part after part while you suffered in a cell, slowly losing more and more of yourself to buyers across Asia. The Dah Zey became the stuff of horror stories around AWOL campfires, but the scariest part was that no one knew truth from fiction. Colton does know that they are so powerful they now run Burma from the shadows, pulling the strings while they pull their parts. But that’s not why he’s here, and he has to keep reminding himself of that. As much as he’d like to stop the Dah Zey, he has no means to do so. It’s not David versus Goliath, he tells himself. It’s David versus a hostile universe that was constructed in the wake of the Heartland War.

  Colton shifts his backpack and tries to make it sit right. It won’t, though it only holds his clothes—nothing sharp or bulky. He packed light when he ran away.

  As far as he’s concerned, his parents are monsters as bad as the Dah Zey. How they could have signed his little brother’s unwind order is a question he asks himself over and over each day as he sits at cafés and restaurants, in tuk-tuks and temples. He looks for an answer. He never finds it.

  His brother never saw it coming, and Colton never really found out how it went down. Colton came home from school one day, and Ryan was gone. His parents told him he’d been sent to his aunt’s—to get him away from the bad influences at school—although other parents would say that Ryan was the bad influence. Colton kept calling his aunt, wanting to talk to his brother, but she never answered or returned his call. That’s when Colton began to worry.

  He denied the possibility. Yes, Ryan was more defiant than Colton had ever been—but is that enough reason for a divisional solution? He finally got through to his aunt. At first she tried to sound normal, making excuses as to why Ryan couldn’t come to the phone. Then she finally broke down and told him the truth.

  A week later Colton pawned everything he could find of value in the house, got himself a false passport, and left for good. He never said good-bye or left any sort of explanation. Let them wonder, he thought. Let them wonder why their straight-A, college-bound son disappeared. Let them cry the tears they should have cried for Ryan.

  He told no one he was leaving—not even his friends. He was there one day, and the next he was on the other side of the planet. He suspected his brother had a similar problem, only more divided.

  That was a month ago. Now he wanders the streets of Bangkok, in that dizzying place between possible futures.

  He peels one of the lychees and takes a bite, its sweet flavor unlike anything he could get in the West. Looking around, he takes notice of how many obvious AWOLs he sees in this part of town. Many of them are adults now. He wonders how many would still be unwound by their parents today, if they had it to do over again. One of these former AWOL kids shouts at him for blocking the road and throws a half-eaten hamburger at his head. As it bounces off him, he figures that at least one of these kids still would be unwound.

  At the sound of a girl’s laughter, he turns to a small restaurant where stray cats wind through patrons’ feet. A blond girl with a wide smile laughs at the cat rubbing up against her leg. She’s maybe sixteen and covered in tattoos from head to toe. Angels, demons, tigers, and clowns fill out a veritable circus of ink. A nose ring pierces her septum. She’d look like a bull ready to charge if she weren’t still smiling. He sits at an adjacent table, and then makes his move.

  “So how long you been on the run?” he asks.

  “What makes you think I’m running?” she responds in a thick Cockney accent.

  Britain, Colton thinks. Just another country that reneged and made unwinding a legal and acceptable practice. In fact, they were the first ones to come up with the term “feral teens.”

  He smirks. “It’s written all over you.” Then he adds, “Like a dare.”

  She puts out a cigarette that he just notices; so much about her draws attention, the cigarette was the least of it. She says, “You’re right. Been AWOL for two months now. How about you?”

  “A month or so,” he tells her. It’s a half-truth. He chooses not to tell her that he isn’t an AWOL—that he left of his own free will. There’s a sort of triumph in taking on the role that he wishes his brother could have had.

  She looks him over, reading him far too well, and narrows her already suspicious eyes. “You’re lying.” Then she gets up to leave.

  This girl is a strange one, he thinks. There’s something off about her, more so than most AWOLs. He finds it intriguing. Alluring. As she tries to slip away, he instinctively stands in her way, trying to think of something witty to say that might keep her there. Nothing comes out, but they make eye contact. She stops and stares into his eye
s.

  “Hazel eyes, yeah?”

  “Yeah,” he says.

  “Nice.”

  “Listen—us AWOLs gotta stick together,” he says. “I’m sure you know how dangerous it can be out on these streets. You could get arrested for vagrancy. Or worse—sold to the Dah Zey.”

  She smiles, showing yellow-stained teeth that Colton finds oddly alluring, and says, “You don’t know a thing about danger, Hazel.”

  • • •

  Her name is Karissa. She doesn’t give her last name, even though he asks for it. She tells him that she left it in England with her bloody parents. He gets that. At first he tells her that he left because he found his own unwind order. Like the Akron AWOL. But eventually he tells her the whole story about his brother and the real reason why he left home. In turn she tells him her story, emptying her broken life out onto him like he’s a shrink. It’s a lot to take in.

  He finds out she has a place. They talk till nearly midnight, and by then, she’s ready to take him back to it. They stroll through the streets and get into a tuk-tuk, a small, three-wheeled taxi. When he looks to his left, she’s gotten out on the other side. She winks at him and hurries off as the tuk-tuk takes him away without her.

  “American?” asks the tuk-tuk driver in an uninterested tone.

  “Yeah,” he says, equally uninterested and shocked he’s just been ditched by the girl.

  “I’ll take you home now,” he says. Colton gives the driver the address, but he doesn’t seem to be listening. “Yeah, yeah, take you home . . .”

  • • •

  Exhausted, Colton dozes, waking up every time they hit a rough patch of road—which is every few seconds. After a particularly bad bump, Colton opens his eyes to see he’s in a part of town he’s never seen before. It’s impoverished, so unpleasant that not even brothels will open up shop here.

  “Yo, man—this is not where I live,” says Colton, irritated.