UnSouled (20 page)

“Unless that scientist works for Proactive Citizenry,” Cam points out. “I want to know how creating me serves them.”

Roberta waves her hand dismissively. “As long as they allow me to do my work, their money is far more important to me than their motives.”

It’s the first time Roberta has referred to Proactive Citizenry as “they” instead of “we.” Cam begins to wonder if the whole debacle with Risa has put Roberta in the organization’s dog house. He wonders how far she’ll go to get back into their good graces.

Roberta goes upstairs, leaving Cam to finish his workout, but his heart is no longer in it. He does take a moment, though, to examine his physique in the mirrored wall.

There were no mirrors when Cam was first rewound—when the scars were thick ropy lines all over his body and horrible to look at. Those scars are now gone, leaving behind smooth seams. And now there can never be enough mirrors for
him. His guiltiest pleasure is how much he enjoys looking at himself and this body they’ve given him. He loves his body, yet that still falls short of loving himself.

If Risa loved me—truly and without coercion—then I could bridge that gap and feel it myself.

He knows what he has to do to make that happen—and now that Roberta will be five thousand miles away, he can begin the work necessary to bring this about without fear of her persistent scrutiny of everything he does. He’s been stalling for much too long.

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Who are we? We are the two steps forward for every one step back. The silence between the beats of your father’s new heart and the breeze that dries a troubled child’s tears. We are the hammer that shatters the glass ceiling of longevity and the nail in the coffin of deadly disease. In a sea of uncertainty, we are the voice of reason, and while others are doomed to relive the past, we challenge ourselves to prelive the future. We are the dawn’s early light. We are the silky blue behind the stars. We are Proactive Citizenry. And if you’ve never heard of us, well, that’s all right. It just means we’re doing our job.

As soon as the limo spirits Roberta off the following morning, Cam gets to work on the computer in his room, moving his hands across the large screen as if casting a spell. He creates a nontraceable identity on the public nimbus—the global cloud so dense it would plunge the world into eternal darkness were it real instead of just virtual. He knows all his activity is monitored, so he piggybacks on an obsessive gamer somewhere in Norway. Anyone monitoring him will think he’s developed an interest in Viking raids on drug-dealing trolls.

Then, obscured within the nimbus, he tweaks and strokes the firewall of Proactive Citizenry’s server until it opens for him, giving him access to all sorts of coded information. But for Cam, making sense of the random and disjoint is a way of life. He was able to create order within the fragmented chaos of his rewound brain, so pulling order out of Proactive Citizenry’s protective scramble will be a walk in the park.

22 • Risa

Omaha. Arguably the geographic center of the American heartland. But Risa does not feel very centered. She needs to be elsewhere, but has no destination, no plan. More than once she has felt that leaving the protection of CyFi’s little commune was a mistake—but she was an outsider among the people of Tyler. Now Risa must live in the shadows. She sees no way out of it. She sees no future that doesn’t involve hiding.

She keeps hoping she’ll see signs of the Anti-Divisional Resistance—but the ADR has fallen apart.
Today
, she keeps thinking.
Today I’ll find a path to follow. Today I’ll be hit by a revelation and I’ll know exactly what I need to do.
But revelation has become a scarce commodity in Risa’s solitary existence. And beside her, she hears:

“It’s a birthday gift, Rachel—one that your father and I will be paying a pretty penny for. At the very least you could be grateful.”

“But it’s not what I asked for!”

Risa has come to realize that train stations like this one have two layers that don’t mix. They don’t even touch. The upper layer are the wealthy travelers like the mother and daughter down the bench from her, taking high-speed trains with every amenity to get them from one exclusive place to
another. The lower layer are the dregs who have nowhere else but the station to hang their hat.

“I said I wanted to
learn
violin, Mom. You could have gotten me lessons.”

Risa knows she cannot board any of these trains. There’s too much security, and too many people know her face. She would be met at the next stop by a phalanx of federal officers who would be thrilled to take her into custody. The train, just like any other legitimate mode of transportation, is nothing but a dream for Risa.

“No one wants to
learn
an instrument, Rachel. It’s grueling repetition—and besides, you’re too old to start. Concert violinists who learn the traditional way begin when they’re six or seven.”

Risa can’t help but listen to the irritating conversation between the well-dressed woman and her fashionably disheveled teenaged daughter.

“It’s bad enough they’d be messing in my brain and giving me a NeuroWeave,” the girl whines. “But do I have to have the hands, too? I like my hands!”

The mother laughs. “Honey, you’ve got your father’s stubby, chubby little fingers. Trading up will only do you good in life, and it’s common knowledge that a musical NeuroWeave requires muscle memory to complete the brain-body connection.”

“There
are
no muscles in our fingers!” the girl announces triumphantly. “I learned that in school.”

The mother gives her a long-suffering sigh.

The most troubling thing about this conversation is that it’s not an isolated incident. It’s becoming more and more common for people to get vanity transplants. You want a new skill? Buy it instead of learn it. Can’t do a thing with your hair? Get a new scalp. Operators are standing by.

“Think of them like a pair of gloves, Rachel. Fancy silk gloves, like a princess wears.”

Risa can’t stand it anymore. Making sure her hood is low enough so that her face can’t be seen, she gets up, and as she walks past them, she says, “You’ll have someone else’s fingerprints.”

Princess Rachel looks horrified. “Ew! That’s it! I’m not doing it.”

Leaving the train station, Risa goes out into the steamy August evening. She knows she has to look like she’s occupied. Like she’s going somewhere with purpose. Looking indolent will make her a target for Juvies and parts pirates—and after her last run-in with a parts pirate, she does not want to repeat the experience.

She has a pink backpack she stole from a school playground, featuring hearts and pandas, slung over her shoulder. A police officer is coming down the street in her direction, so she pulls out a phone that doesn’t actually work and makes fake conversation into it as she walks.

“I know. Isn’t he just the cutest! Oh, I would die to sit next to him in math.”

She must appear to have a place to go and vapid people to talk to about her vapid life. She knows the look of an AWOL and has to give the impression of anything but.

“Ugh! I know! I hate her—she is such a loser!”

The officer passes and doesn’t even glance at Risa. She’s got this illusion down to a science. It’s exhausting though—and as the night ticks away, it will be too late for any respectable girl to be on a downtown Omaha street. No matter what image she tries to push forth, she’ll draw suspicion.

The train station was good for about an hour, but it’s a classic hangout for kids on the run. She knew she couldn’t stay very long. Now she reviews her options. There are some older
landmark office buildings with old-fashioned fire escapes. She could climb up and find an unlocked window. She’s done that before and has always managed to avoid the nighttime cleaning staff. The risk is being spotted while breaking in.

There are plenty of parks, but while older vagrants can get away with sleeping on park benches, a young fugitive can’t. Unless she can break into a maintenance shed, she wouldn’t risk staying in a park. Usually she’ll scope out such places earlier in the day. When the shed is open, she’d replace the lock with one that she has the key to. Then when the groundskeeper locks up, he’ll have no idea he’s only locked himself out. But she was lazy today. Tired. She didn’t do her due diligence, and now she’s paying for it.

There’s a theater on the next street playing a revival of
Cats
, which mankind will likely have to suffer through for the rest of eternity. If she can pickpocket a single ticket, she can get in, and once inside, she can find a place to hide. Hidden space high above the flies. Basement crannies filled with props.

She cuts through a back alley to get to the theater. Mistake. Halfway down the alley, she encounters three boys. They look to be eighteen or so. She pegs them right away as either AWOLs who lived long enough to outgrow the threat of unwinding, or maybe they were among the thousands of seventeen-year-olds set free from harvest camps when the Cap-17 law passed. Sadly most of those kids were just hurled out into the streets with nowhere to go. So they got angry. Rotten, like fruit left too long on the vine.

“Well, well, what do we have here?” says the tallest of the three.

“Really?” says Risa, disgusted. “ ‘What do we have here?’ Is that your best line? If you’re going to attack a defenseless girl in an alley, at least try not to be cliché about it.”

Her attitude has the desired effect. It catches them off guard and makes the leader—a prime douche, if ever there was one—take a step back. Risa makes a move to push past, but a beefy kid, fat enough to block her way, eclipses her view of the end of the alley. Damn. She really hoped this didn’t have to get messy.

“Porterhouse don’t like uppity girls,” says the Prime Douche. He smiles, showing two of his front teeth are broken.

The fat kid, who must be Porterhouse, frowns and solidifies his mass like a nightclub bouncer. “That’s right,” he says.

It’s kids like these
, thinks Risa,
that made people think unwinding was a good idea
.

The third kid lingers, saying nothing, looking a little bit worried. Risa marks him as her possible escape route. None of them have recognized her yet. If they do, their motives will instantly compound. Rather than trying to have their way with her, then leaving her there in the alley, they’ll have their way, then turn her in for the reward.

“Let’s not get off on the wrong foot, now,” Prime Douche says. “We could be of service to you.”

“Yeah,” says Porterhouse. “If you’re of ‘service’ to us.”

Sleaze number three snickers at that and moves forward, joining the other two. So much for an escape route. Prime Douche takes a bold step toward her. “We’re the kind a’ friends a girl like you needs. To protect you and such.”

Risa locks eyes with him. “Touch any part of me, and I break a part of you.”

She knows that a guy like this, with more bravado than brain, will take that as a dare—which he does. He grabs her wrist—then braces himself for whatever she might try to do.

She smiles at him, lifts her foot, and jams her heel into Porterhouse’s knee instead. Porterhouse’s kneecap breaks with
an audible crunch, and he goes down, screaming and writhing in pain. It’s enough to shock Prime Douche into loosening his grip. Risa twists free and elbows him in the nose. She’s not sure if she’s broken it, but it does start gushing blood.

“YOU THTINKING BITH!!” he yells. Porterhouse is in such agony, he can only wail wordlessly. Sleaze number three takes this as his cue to exit, running off down the alley, knowing he’ll be next if he doesn’t.

Then Prime Douche produces more bad news. He pulls out a knife and starts swinging at Risa, trying to cut any part of her he can. His sweeping slashes are wild, but deadly.

She uses her backpack to block, and he slices it open. He swings again, coming dangerously close to her face. Then suddenly she hears—

“In here! Hurry!”

There’s a woman poking her head out of the back door of a shop. Risa doesn’t hesitate. She lurches into the open door, and the woman tries to close it behind her. She almost gets it closed, but Prime Douche gets his hand in, stopping it—so the woman slams the door on his hand. He screams on the other side of the door. Risa throws her shoulder against the door, slamming it on his fingers again. He screams even louder. She releases the tension just enough for him to pull his swelling fingers back, then pushes the door fully closed while the woman locks it.

They endure the furious barrage of bile—a vitriolic burst of curses that sound increasingly impotent, until the douche and Porterhouse stumble off, vowing vengeance.

Only now does Risa look at the woman. Middle-aged, wrinkles she tries to hide with makeup. Big hair. Kind eyes.

“You all right, hon?”

“Fine. My backpack might not pull through though.”

The woman throws a quick glance at the backpack.
“Pandas and hearts? Hon, that thing needed to be put out of its misery.”

Risa grins, and the woman holds her gaze just a moment too long. Risa can clock the exact moment of recognition. The woman knows who she is—although she doesn’t let on right away.

“You can stay here until we’re sure they’re gone for good.”

“Thanks.”

A pause, then the woman drops all pretenses. “I suppose I should ask you for your autograph.”

Risa sighs. “Please don’t.”

The woman gives her a sly grin. “Well, being that I’m not turning you in for the reward money, I figured I could sell the signature someday. It might be worth something.”

Risa returns the grin. “You mean after I’m dead.”

“Well, if it was good enough for van Gogh . . .”

Risa laughs, and her laughter begins to chase away the anxiety of just a few moments ago. She still feels adrenaline making her fingers tingle. It will take longer for her physiology to recognize safety.

“Are you sure all the doors are locked?”

“Hon, those boys are long gone, licking their wounds and icing their bruised egos. But yes. Even if they came back, they couldn’t get in.”