jets, sort parts, and get them ready for sale. It’s just like any other junkyard, but on a larger scale. Not all the jets get stripped.
Some remain untouched, if the Admiral thinks he can resell them whole. Some are retooled as living quarters for the kids who are, both literally and figuratively, under his wing.
#7) TEENAGE REBELLION IS FOR SUBURBAN SCHOOLCHILDREN. GET OVER IT.
The kids are grouped in teams best suited for their jobs, their ages, and their personal needs. A lifetime of experience molding military boeufs into a coherent fighting force has prepared the Admiral for creating a functional society out of angry, troubled kids.
#8) HORMONES WILL NOT RULE MY DESERT.
Girls are never grouped with boys.
#9) AT EIGHTEEN YOU CEASE TO BE MY CONCERN.
The Admiral has a list of his ten supreme rules, posted in each and every plane where kids live and work. The kids call them “The Ten Demandments.” He doesn’t care what they call them, as long as each and every one of them knows the list by heart.
#10) MAKE SOMETHING OF YOURSELF. THIS IS AN ORDER.
It’s a challenge keeping almost four hundred kids healthy, hidden, and whole. But the Admiral has never walked away from a challenge. And his motivation for doing this, like his name, is something he prefers to keep to himself.
33. Risa
For Risa, the first days in the Graveyard are harsh and seem to last forever.
Her residency begins with an exercise in humility.
Every new arrival is required to face a tribunal: three seventeen-year-olds sitting behind a desk in the gutted shell of a wide-bodied jet. Two boys and a girl.
These three, together with Amp and Jeeves, who Risa met when she first stepped off the plane, make up the elite group of five everyone calls “the Goldens.” They’re the Admiral’s five most trusted kids—and therefore the ones in charge.
By the time they get to Risa, they’ve already processed forty kids.
“Tell us about yourself,” says the boy on the right. Starboard Boy, she calls him, since, after all, they’re in a vessel. “What do you know, and what can you do?”
The last tribunal Risa faced was back at StaHo, when she was sentenced to be unwound. She can tell these three are bored and don’t care what she says, just as long as they can get on to the next one. She finds herself hating them, just as she hated the headmaster that day he tried to explain why her membership in the human race had been revoked.
The girl, who sits in the middle, must read her feelings, because she smiles and says, “Don’t worry, this isn’t a test—we just want to help you find where you’ll fit in here.” It’s an odd thing to say, since not fitting in is every Unwind’s problem.
Risa takes a deep breath. “I was a music student at StaHo,” she says, then immediately regrets telling them she’s from a state home. Even among Unwinds there’s prejudice and pecking orders. Sure enough, Starboard leans back, crossing his arms in clear disapproval, but the port-side boy says: “I’m a Ward too. Florida StaHo 18.”
“Ohio 23.”
“What instrument do you play?” the girl asks.
“Classical piano.”
“Sorry,” says Starboard. “We’ve got enough musicians, and none of the planes came with a piano.”
“ ‘Survival has earned me the right to be respected,’ ” Risa says. “Isn’t that one of the Admiral’s rules? I don’t think he’d like your attitude.”
Starboard squirms. “Can we just get on with this?”
The girl offers an apologetic grin. “As much as I hate to admit it, in the here and now, there are other things we need before a virtuoso. What else can you do?”
“Just give me a job and I’ll do it,” Risa says, trying to get this over with. “That’s what you’re going to do anyway, right?”
“Well, they always need help in the galley,” says Starboard. “Especially after meals.”
The girl gives Risa a long, pleading look, perhaps hoping that Risa will come up with something better for herself, but all Risa says is “Fine. Dishwasher. Am I done here?”
She turns to leave, doing her best to douse her disgust. The next kid comes in as she’s heading out. He looks awful. His nose is swollen and purple. His shirt is caked with dried blood, and both his nostrils have started bleeding fresh.
“What happened to you?”
He looks at her, sees who it is, and says, “Your boyfriend—that’s what happened to me. And he’s gonna pay.”
Risa could ask him a dozen questions about that, but the kid’s bleeding all over his shirt, and the first priority is to stop it. He tips his head back.
“No,” Risa tells him. “Lean forward, otherwise you’ll gag on your own blood.”
The kid listens. The tribunal of three come out from behind their desk to see what they can do, but Risa has it under control.
“Pinch it like this,” she tells him. “You need to be patient with this kind of thing.” She shows the kid exactly how to pinch his nose to stem the flow of blood.
Then, once the bleeding stops, Port-side comes over to her and says, “Nice work.”
She’s immediately promoted from dishwasher to medic. Funny, but it’s indirectly Connor’s doing, since he’s the one who broke that kid’s nose in the first place.
As for the kid with the bloody nose, he gets assigned to dish washing.
The first few days, actually trying to act like a medic without any real training is terrifying. There are other kids in the medical jet who seem to know a lot more, but she quickly comes to realize they were thrown into this just like she was, when they first arrived.
“You’ll do fine. You’re a natural,” the senior medic, who is all of seventeen, tells her. He’s right. Once she gets used to the idea, handling first aid, standard illnesses, and even suturing simple wounds becomes as familiar to her as playing the piano. The days begin to pass quickly, and before she realizes it, she’s been there a month. Each day that goes by adds to her sense of security. The Admiral was an odd bird, but he’d done something no one else had been able to do for her since she’d left StaHo. He’d given her back her right to exist.
34. Connor
Like Risa, Connor finds his niche by accident. Connor never considered himself mechanically capable, but there are few things he can stand less than a bunch of morons standing around looking at something that doesn’t work and wondering who’s going to fix it. During that first week, while Risa’s off learning how to be an exceptionally good fake doctor, Connor decides to figure out the workings of a fried air-conditioning unit, then find replacement parts from one of the junk piles and get it working again.
He soon comes to realize it’s the same way with every other broken thing he comes across. Sure, it began with trial and error, but the errors become fewer and fewer as the days go by. There are plenty of other kids who claim to be mechanics, and are really good at explaining why things won’t work. Connor, on the other hand, actually fixes them.
It quickly gets him reassigned from trash duty to the repair crew, and since there are endless things to repair, it keeps his mind off of other things . . . such as how little he gets to see Risa in the Admiral’s tightly
