Unwind

CyFi says.

“You know a lot about the place.”

“I don’t know anything about it,” CyFi grumbles. “He knows. Or knew. Or whatever.”

Their journey has gotten no easier. Sure, they have money now, thanks to Lev’s “deal” at that pawnshop, but the money’s only good for buying food. It can’t get them train tickets, or even bus tickets, because there’s nothing more suspicious than underage kids paying their own fare.

For all intents and purposes, things between Lev and CyFi are the same, with one major, unspoken exception. CyFi might still be playing the role of leader, but it’s Lev who is now in charge. There’s a guilty pleasure in knowing that CyFi would fall apart if Lev weren’t there to hold him together.

With Joplin only twenty miles away, Cy’s twitching gets bad enough that even walking is difficult for him. It’s more than just twitching now—it’s a shuddering that wracks his body like a seizure, leaving him shivering. Lev offers him his jacket, but Cy just swats him away. “I ain’t cold! It’s not about bein’ cold! It’s about being wrong. It’s about there being oil and water in this brain of mine.”

Exactly what Cy must do when he gets to Joplin is a mystery to Lev—and now he realizes that Cy doesn’t know either. Whatever this kid—or this bit of kid—in his head is compelling him to do, it’s completely beyond Cy’s understanding.

Lev can only hope that it’s something purposeful, and not something destructive . . . although Lev can’t help but suspect that whatever the kid wants, it’s bad. Really bad.

“Why are you still with me, Fry?” CyFi asks after one of his body-shaking seizures. “Any sane dude woulda taken off days ago.”

“Who says I’m sane?”

“Oh, you’re sane, Fry. You’re so sane, you scare me. You’re so sane, it’s insane.”

Lev thinks for a while. He wants to give Cyrus a real answer, not just something that chases away the question. “I’m staying,” Lev says slowly, “because someone has to witness what happens in Joplin. Someone’s got to understand why you did it. Whatever it is.”

“Yeah,” says CyFi. “I need a witness. That’s it.”

“You’re like a salmon swimming upstream,” Lev offers. “It’s inside you to do it. And it’s inside me to help you get there.”

“Salmon.” Cy looks thoughtful. “I once saw this poster about a salmon. It was jumping up this waterfall, see? But there was a bear at the top, and the fish, it was jumping right into the bear’s mouth. The caption beneath—it was supposed to be funny—said, “The journey of a thousand miles sometimes ends very, very badly. ”

“There’s no bear in Joplin,” Lev tells him. He doesn’t try to cheer Cy up with any more analogies, because Cy’s so smart, he can find a way to make anything sound bad. One hundred and thirty IQ points all focused on cooking up doom.

Lev can’t hope to compete with that.

The days go by, mile by mile, town by town, until the afternoon they pass a sign that says,

NOW ENTERING JOPLIN

POPULATION 45,504.

30. Cy-Ty

There is no peace in CyFi’s his head. The Fry doesn’t know how bad it is.

The Fry doesn’t know how the feelings crash over him like storm-driven waves pounding a failing seawall. The wall is going to collapse soon, and when it does, Cy will lose it. He’ll lose everything. His mind will spill out of his ears and down the drains of the streets of Joplin. He knows it.

Then he sees the sign. NOW ENTERING JOPLIN. His heart is his own, but it pounds in his chest, threatening to burst—and wouldn’t that be a fine thing?

They’d rush him to a hospital, give him someone else’s ticker, and he’d have that kid to deal with too.

This boy in the corner of his head doesn’t talk to him in words. He feels. He emotes. He doesn’t understand that he’s only a part of another kid. It’s like how in a dream you know some things, and other things you should know, but you don’t.

This kid—he knows where he is, but he doesn’t know he’s not all here. He doesn’t know he’s part of someone else now. He keeps looking for things in Cyrus’s head that just aren’t there. Memories. Connections. He keeps looking for words, but Cyrus’s brain codes words differently. And so the kid hurls out anger. Terror.

Grief. Waves pounding the wall, and beneath it all, there’s a current tugging Cy forward. Something must be done here. Only the kid knows what it is.

“Would it help to have a map?” asks the Fry. The question gets Cy mad.

“Map won’t help me,” he says. “I need to see stuff. I need to be places. A map is just a map. It ain’t being there.”

They stand at a corner on the outskirts of Joplin. It’s like divining for water.

Nothing looks familiar. “He doesn’t know this place,” Cy says. “Let’s try another street.”

Block after block, intersection after intersection, it’s the same. Nothing.

Joplin is a small town, but not so small that a person could know all of it. Then, at last they get to a main street. There are shops and restaurants up and down the road. It’s just like any other town this size, but—

“Wait!”

“What is it?”

“He knows this street,” says Cy. “There! That ice cream shop. I can taste pumpkin ice cream. I hate pumpkin ice cream.”

“I’ll bet he didn’t.”

Cyrus nods. “It was his favorite. The loser.” He points a finger at the ice cream shop and slowly swings his arm to the left. “He comes walking from that direction. . . .” He swings his arm to the right. “And when he’s done, he goes that way.”

“So, do we track where he comes from, or where he goes?”

Cy chooses to go left but finds himself at Joplin High, home of the Eagles.

He gets an image of a sword, and instantly knows. “Fencing. The kid was on the fencing team here.”

“Swords are shiny,” the Fry notes. Cy would throw him a dirty look if he weren’t right on target. Swords are, indeed, shiny. He wonders if the kid ever stole swords, and realizes that, yes, he probably did. Stealing the swords of opposing teams is a time-honored tradition of fencing.

“This way,” says the Fry, taking the lead. “He must have gone from school, to the ice cream shop, to home. Home is where we’re going, right?”

The answer comes to Cy as an urge deep in his brain that shoots straight to his gut. Salmon? More like a swordfish twisting on a line, and that line is pulling him relentlessly toward . . . “Home,” says Cy. “Right.”

It’s twilight now. Kids are out in the street; half the cars have headlights on.

As far as anyone knows, they’re just two neighborhood kids, headed wherever neighborhood kids go. No one seems to notice them. But there’s a police car a block away. It was parked, but now it begins moving.

They pass the ice cream parlor, and as they do, Cyrus can feel the change inside him. It’s in his walk, and in the way he holds himself. It’s in all the tension points of his face: They’re changing. His eyebrows lower, his jaw opens slightly.

I’m not myself. That other kid is taking over. Should Cy let it happen, or should he fight it? But he knows it’s already past the point of fighting. The only way to finish this is to let it happen.

“Cy,” says the kid next to him.

Cy looks at him, and although part of him knows it’s just Lev, another part of him panics. He instantly knows