UnDivided (24 page)

“If you free me, I can supply you with Unwinds to sell to the Dah Zey. They're AWOL storks marked for unwinding, so no one will miss them.”

Starkey finds he can't contain his anger. He thrashes, making his broken ribs resonate in pain. He practically dislocates his shoulders trying to pull out of the bonds. “You
bitch
! You made me say that. You made me make the deal!”

And yet Bam holds her Teflon calm. “No one made you do anything, Mason. We just gave you the rope; you're the one who hung yourself with it.”

Jeevan laughs at that. “Good one,” he says. “Hung himself.”

“If you ever surface again anywhere,” Bam says, “we'll play that recording for the storks. Not just our storks, but publicly for every stork out there. You'll go from being their savior to being seen as the self-serving egomaniac that you are.”

“Self-serving? I did all of this for them! All of it.” Starkey
would kill them right now if he could. The traitors! He would execute them without the slightest hesitation. Can't they see what they're doing? They're killing a dream larger than all of them. How can storks ever hope to change their plight in the world without their leader?

He wants to scream with a wordless fury, but knows he must try as best he can to match Bam's detachment. He forces down his anger and says, “It's the small minds in this world that destroy everything. Don't be a small mind, Bam. You're smarter than that. You're
better
than that.”

Bam smiles, and Starkey thinks that maybe she's finally beginning to see the wisdom of his words. Until she says, “You're so smooth, Mason. You can slide your way into getting what you want, and then convince everyone around you that it's what they want too. That was your best magic trick. You made everyone believe you were doing this for them—when it was all for the fame and fortune of Mason Michael Starkey.”

“That's not true!”

“See how good the illusion is?” Bam says. “Even you believe it.”

Starkey will not entertain this accusation. He cannot doubt himself, because doubt is his enemy. So he'll let Bam go on with her mindless lecture. Let her think what she wants to think. She's just jealous that she can never be him, or have him, or be in the same league as him. He is Mason Michael Starkey, the avenger of storks. No matter how hard Bam tries to take that away, the world will reward him for all the good he's done. He didn't do it for the fame, but he certainly deserves it.

“I'll never be a great leader,” Bam tells him. “But knowing that already makes me a better leader than you. I just wish I could have figured that out sooner.”

Starkey is exhausted struggling against his bonds. They're
looser now. He will escape. Not this moment, but soon. Ten minutes, twenty. The question is, will he go after Bam and Jeevan, or will he cave to their blackmail and go into hiding forever?

“You've heard our demands, and you know what will happen if you don't follow them,” Bam says. “On the other hand, if you get with the program, we'll keep that recording to ourselves. I know how important it is for you to be seen as the hero. You get to keep that. It's more than you deserve. We'll tell the storks you were captured while scouting out Mousetail, and that will make you an instant martyr. What could be better?”

Mason has no strength to argue anymore. He feels sick to his stomach, and he knows it's not just from the tranqs. “Someone's going to make you pay for this.”

“Maybe, but it won't be you.” Then she turns to Jeevan, who pulls out a tranq gun—one of the nice ones the clappers provided. Probably the same one they tranq'd him with the first time.

“We can't take a chance you'll break free too soon,” Bam tells him. “And once you do free yourself, if you're tempted to look for us at the power plant, don't bother. We'll all be gone from there long before you wake up.”

Jeevan comes close to Starkey, aims, but he doesn't shoot just yet. Instead he suddenly spits in Starkey's face. “That's for all the people who died because of me,” says Jeevan. “The people who died because of the things you made me do!”

Starkey smiles at him, and repeats what Bam said just a few moments ago. “I didn't make you do anything, Jeevan. I just gave you the rope.”

Jeevan's response is a tranq blast right into the space between his broken ribs.

The waiting is unbearable, but Hayden cannot let it show, or it would arouse suspicion. He wanted to go with Bam and Jeevan—not that he doesn't trust them, but he knows that Starkey is a difficult force to overcome. He was crafty enough to get this far, mesmerizing hundreds of kids long past the point when they should have done their own reality checks. Who's to say if he might not Houdini his way out of the trap they've set for him?

Hayden still finds it amazing that Starkey managed to carve himself a cult, with few tools beyond communal anger and a fistful of personal magnetism. But on the other hand, there are plenty of historical precedents.

It's morning in the abandoned plant that's not so abandoned anymore now that it's home to almost seven hundred storks. Breakfast is in full swing. The kids eat in three shifts in the plant's basement, using folding chairs and tables that were here for them when they arrived—as were comfortable bed rolls—all courtesy of the “applause department.” Very organized, this society of randomized violence. They've vowed to keep the storks safe, although Hayden suspects they're only safe until the applause department decides it's time to sacrifice them, just as they sacrifice all the other angry kids they recruit to serve the cause of mayhem. The storks won't blow themselves up, of course, but in the end, following Starkey off a cliff isn't all that different.

Everyone knows their next mission. Starkey made an announcement, and rallied the troops. He hasn't told them yet that their ultimate objective is the extermination of the Mousetail tithes. They may never know. The only reason Hayden knows is because Bam shared it with him. Hayden suspects Starkey
has selected an elite team to do the dirty deed once the harvest camp has been taken down. Or maybe he plans on herding the tithes into a single building and doing it himself with a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher. They certainly have bunker busters that can do it in one fell swoop.

But that's tomorrow. It doesn't explain why Starkey isn't here today. Hayden knows why. After all, it was his plan. The storks, however, can't know the truth.

“He went with a special team to do some reconnaissance,” Hayden tells the masses when people begin to question Starkey's absence. Most of the kids accept it, and are relieved because maybe it pushes their imminent attack on Mousetail back a day or two. Of course, there are some kids who are suspicious. Garson DeGrutte is full of questions.

“Why didn't he tell us? Why didn't the clappers do reconnaissance for us, isn't that their job?” And, of course, the question that's most on his mind, “Why didn't he take me?”

Hayden plays it cool with a shrug. “Who can read the mind of the master?” Hayden tells him. “And maybe he left you here because he wanted to give you more quality time with Abigail.” And then, for the second half of his one-two punch, Hayden gets quiet and whispers. “You know, with Starkey off-site, that office he likes to hang out in is empty . . . and very private. . . .”

With that suggestion, all the blood leaves Garson's brain and goes other places, leaving him with no further questions. Hayden then quickly finds Abigail and assigns her to shuck the thousand ears of corn that showed up in their last shipment, ensuring that she'll have no time for Garson. Even when Garson joins her, frantically shucking corn to speed up the process, Hayden knows it will take all day. He suspects that Abigail would rather shuck Hayden's corn in the kitchen than Garson's in the office.

Hayden walks the floor all morning, taking in the conversations, or lack thereof, trying to get a bead on today's mood. A
mob, he knows, can be as dysfunctional as a family, given a bad enough parent—and Starkey is as dysfunctional as they come. Perhaps that's part of the reason why so many of these kids have been willing to follow Starkey: He reminds them of home.

“These waffles suck,” says a malcontent stork who said the same thing when they were getting watery powdered eggs that actually did suck. Now the applause department supplies them a much higher quality of food than they could get for themselves. But there are always the complainers.

“Sorry,” Hayden tells him. “The seafood breakfast buffet is tomorrow. I'll make sure they save you some crab legs and caviar.”

He gives Hayden the finger and continues to scarf down his waffle. Since arriving at the plant two weeks ago, Hayden has not only been in charge of inventory, he's overseeing food preparation as well, due to the fact that the former kid in charge of the kitchen died in the Horse Creek Harvest Camp attack. It seems all of Hayden's jobs of late have been the result of terminal vacation of post.

With each harvest camp takedown, the mood among the storks has become progressively more somber and volatile. There have been more threatening glares, more fights over nothing, more issues among kids who had plenty of issues already. The last attack brought a numbness and an indefinable throbbing like the ache of a phantom limb. There is a vacuum left behind by the dead that can't be filled by the new faces added to their numbers, and there's no way to predict the names and numbers of the casualties yet to come from their next mission.

Starkey still has his die-hard believers who try to compensate for the plunging morale by screaming and cheering the loudest when he tries to rally them to the fever pitch he feeds on, but their efforts are less and less effective.

“Where are they, Hayden?”

He turns to see a girl loudly dropping her plate into the bus bin next to her table with an angry clatter as the punctuation to her question—although clearly it's an accusation. This is one of the girls liberated from Cold Springs Harvest Camp, where the director convinced everyone that Hayden was working for the Juvies. Those kids still cling to the belief that Hayden is a traitor. The one saving grace of the haters is that they keep him on his toes, never allowing him to get too complacent or comfortable.

“Where are what?” asks Hayden. “The sausages, you mean? They're gone, but there's still plenty of bacon.”

“Don't play dumb. You said Starkey went with a team, but I've been checking around, and the only ones not here are Starkey, Bam, and Jeevan. That's not the kind of team Starkey would take. If you ask me, I think you have something to do with their disappearance.”

A few other kids have taken notice of this little confrontation. One kid meets eyes with Hayden, rolling his as if to say
I'm on your side—these Cold Springs kids are nuts.
As more and more are added to their numbers, the voices of the Cold Springs haters mean less and less. In spite of them, Hayden knows he can be a leader here if he wants to. Good thing he doesn't want to.

“Anyone with half a brain could see that Starkey needs an assault team leader to scope the place out, and a hacker to figure out how to foil the security system,” Hayden tells her, “otherwise more of us could die in the attack.” Hayden makes sure to emphasize the word “die.” Which has the desired affect. Everyone at the accusational girl's table becomes uncomfortable, as if spiders have just crawled into their laps from beneath the table.

“Why do we have to attack another harvest camp?” asks
Elias Dean, one of the mouthier kids. “Haven't we done enough already?”

Hayden smiles. The fact that kids are voicing their reservations out loud is a very good sign. “Starkey says we'll keep it up until either the harvest camps are all gone, or
we're
all gone.”

More spiders, at more tables. The kind that bite.

“One of these days they'll be ready for us,” someone else mumbles, “and take us all out before we even get through the gate.”

“Starkey's a genius and all,” Elias says, “but it's a little much, don't you think?”

“Not my job to think, although I occasionally do,” Hayden says. “I'm glad that you do too.” And that's as far as Hayden will take it. God forbid he be accused of fomenting dissent.

•  •  •

The “reconnaissance team” returns at noon.

“They're back,” announces a guard running in from his lookout at the rusty front gate of the plant. At first Hayden thinks the plan must have failed—or that maybe Bam and Jeevan scrubbed it, unable to go through with it. Maybe their accomplice, the gardener, never showed to make the capture feel authentic. But when Bam and Jeevan enter, Starkey is not with them—a fact that the lookout was not observant enough to notice.

“Where's Starkey?” comes the obvious question—not just from one stork, but from many, whispering the question to one another, not daring to ask Bam or Jeevan. The storks are afraid. They're hopeful. They're angry. They are filled with too many emotions to sort.

Hayden approaches Bam and Jeevan with caution, knowing he's being watched, knowing that all three of them are being measured in the moment.

“Don't tell me—you got stranded in a mountain pass, and
had to do like the Donner party,” Hayden says. “If you ate Starkey, I hope you saved me some breast meat.”

“You're not funny,” Bam says, loudly enough for Hayden to know it's for show. “We were ambushed by parts pirates. We're lucky we're still in one piece.” She hesitates as more kids drift into hearing range, drawn by the curious gravity of tragedy. “They recognized Starkey, so they tranq'd Jeevan and me, and left us there. When we came to, Starkey was gone. They took him.”

No gasps, no cries, just silence. Jeevan tries to slip away, not wanting to be within this little center of attention, but Bam holds him tightly by the shoulder, preventing him from leaving.