Unwind

'I know it's a lot to get used to,' says the nurse.

For the first time Connor looks at his new hand. There are bandages padding his shoulder, and his arm is in a sling. He flexes the fingers. They flex.

He twists his wrist. It twists. The fingernails need clipping, and the knuckles are thicker than his own. He runs his thumb across the pads of his fingertips. The sense of touch is just as it ever was. Then he rotates his wrist a bit farther, and stops. He feels a wave of panic surge through him, one that resolves into a knot deep in his gut.

The nurse grins as she looks at the arm. 'Parts often come with their own personalities,' she says. 'Nothing to worry about. You must be hungry. I'll get you some lunch.'

'Yeah,' says Connor. 'Lunch. That's good.'

She leaves him alone with the arm. His arm. An arm that bears the unmistakable tattoo of a tiger shark.

67. Risa

Risa's life as she knew it ended the day the clappers blew up the Chop Shop —and everyone eventually did learn that it was clappers, not Connor. The evidence was indisputable. Especially after the confession of the clapper who survived.

Unlike Connor, Risa never lost consciousness. Even though she was pinned beneath a steel I beam, she stayed wide awake. As she lay there in the wreckage, some of the pain she felt when the I beam came down on her was gone. She didn't know whether that was a good sign, or bad. Dalton was in lots of pain though. He was terrified. Risa calmed him down. She talked to him, telling him it was all right—that everything would be fine. She kept telling him that right up until the moment he died. The guitar player had been luckier. He was able to wrestle himself out from under the debris, but he couldn't free Risa, so he left, promising her he'd send back help. He must have kept his promise, because help finally did come. It took three people to lift the beam, but only one to carry her out.

Now she rests in a hospital room, trussed up in a contraption that looks more like a torture device than a bed. She is riddled with steel pins like a human voodoo doll. The pins are held in precise place by rigid scaffolding. She can see her toes, but she can't feel them. From now on, seeing them will have to be enough.

'You have a visitor.'

A nurse stands at the door, and when she steps aside, Connor is standing in the doorway. He's bruised and bandaged, but very much alive. Her eyes instantly fill with tears, but she knows she can't let herself sob. It still hurts too much to sob. 'I knew they were lying,' she says. 'They said you died in the explosion—that you were trapped in the building—but I saw you outside. I knew they were lying.'

'I probably would have died,' Connor said, 'but Lev stopped the bleeding. He saved me.'

'He saved me, too,' Risa tells him. 'He carried me out of the building.'

Connor smiles. 'Not bad for a lousy little tithe.'

By the look on his face, Risa can tell he doesn't know that Lev was one of the clappers—the one who didn't go off. She decides not to tell him. It's still all over the news; he'll know soon enough.

Connor tells her of his coma, and about his new identity. Risa tells him how few of Happy Jack's AWOLs have been caught—how the kids stormed the gates and escaped. She glances at his sling as they speak. The fingers sticking out of that arm sling are definitely not Connor's. She knows what must have happened, and she can tell he's self-conscious about it.

'So, what do they say?' Connor asks. 'About your injuries, I mean. You're going to be okay, right?'

Risa considers how she might tell him, then just decides to be quick about it.

'They tell me I'm paralyzed from the waist down.'

Connor waits for more, but that's all she has to give him. 'Well . . . that's not so bad, right? They can fix that—they're always fixing that.'

'Yes,' says Risa. 'They fix it by replacing a severed spine with the spine of an Unwind. That's why I refused the operation.'

He looks at her in disbelief, and she in turn points at his arm. 'You would have done the same thing if they'd given you a choice. Well, I had a choice, and I made it.'

'I'm so sorry, Risa.'

'Don't be!' The one thing she doesn't want from Connor is pity. 'They can't unwind me now—there are laws against unwinding the disabled—but if I got the operation, they'd unwind me the moment I was healed. This way I get to stay whole.' She smiles at him triumphantly. 'So you're not the only one who beat the system!'

He smiles at her and rolls his bandaged shoulder. The sling shifts, exposing more of his new arm—enough to reveal the tattoo. He tries to hide it, but it's too late. She sees it. She knows it. And when she meets Connor's eye, he looks away in shame.

Connor . . . ?'

'I promise,'' he says. 'I promise I will never touch you with this hand.'

Risa knows this is a crucial moment for both of them. That arm—the same one that held her back against a bathroom wall. How could she look at it now with anything but disgust? Those fingers that threatened unspeakable things.

How can they make her feel anything but revulsion? But when she looks at Connor, all that fades away. There's only him.

'Let me see it,' she says.

Connor hesitates, so she reaches out and gently slips it from the sling. 'Does it hurt?'

'A little.'

She brushes her fingers across the back of his hand. 'Can you feel that?'

Connor nods.

Then she gently lifts the hand to her face, pressing the palm to her cheek.

She holds it there for a moment, then lets go, letting Connor take over. He moves his hand across her cheek, wiping away a tear with his finger. He softly strokes her neck, and she closes her eyes. She feels as he moves his fingertips across her lips before he takes his hand away. Risa opens her eyes and takes the hand in hers, clasping it tightly.

'I know this is your hand now,' she tells him. 'Roland would never have touched me like that.'' Connor smiles, and Risa takes a moment to look down at the shark on his wrist. It holds no fear for her now, because the shark has been tamed by the soul of a boy. No—the soul of a man.

68. Lev

Not far away, in a high-security federal detention center, Levi Jedediah Calder is held in a cell designed for his very specific needs. The cell is padded.

There is a steel blast door three inches thick. The room is kept at a constant forty-five degrees Fahrenheit to keep Lev's body temperature from rising too high. Lev is not cold, though—in fact he's hot. He's hot because he's wrapped in layer after layer of fire-resistant insulation. He looks like a mummy, suspended in midair—but unlike a mummy, his hands aren't crossed over his chest, they're held out to each side and lashed to a crossbeam so he cannot bring his hands together. The way Lev sees it, they didn't know whether to crucify him or mummify him, so they did both. This way, he can't clap, he can't fall, he can't inadvertently detonate himself—and if for some reason he does, the cell is designed to withstand the blast.

They've given him four transfusions. They won't tell him how many more he'll need until the explosive is out of his system. They won't tell him anything.