UnBound - Neal Shusterman Page 0,101

shoulda been put together in the first place.”

Engines rev. He feels vibrations in the ropes. They pull just taut enough to make his joints ache. He can hear people in the crowd talking to one another. Some are entirely on Todd’s side and wait for this horrible circus to commence. But there are other voices too. “This is going too far,” he hears a woman say. “Someone should stop this.”

Someone. Not her. The faint voices of protest aren’t really interested in stopping this, Keaton realizes. All they want is to assuage their own guilt, so after it happens, they can say to themselves, Well I wanted to put an end to it, but nobody listened. Which makes them just as complicit as the others.

Engines rev again. He closes his eyes and tenses his muscles, but he knows that he is no match for the horsepower in those four vehicles.

Then he hears a girl’s voice. She’s cursing. She’s yelling at people to get out of her way. He opens his eyes to see her pushing through the crowd. Her eyes are red from crying. Her jaw is hardened in resolve—but as she looks at him, her expression changes. Her head tilts a bit. She suddenly looks confused. Troubled, but in a different way than she was just a moment ago. Keaton recognizes her, too. This is the girl who came up to him at the fence. The one who was kind to him. Keliana. He resolves to hold eye contact with her for as long as he can, until the cars throw their transmissions into gear, which will be any second now.

“This isn’t him!” she says. Quietly at first, then again, more loudly. “This isn’t him!”

Todd storms to her like he might strike her but doesn’t. “What do you mean it isn’t him? Of course it is!” He tries to move her away from Keaton. “You let us take care of this! He’s hurt you enough.”

“No!” She shakes him off and comes closer to Keaton. “You can’t do this!”

Todd ignores her and raises his hand, signaling the drivers.

Then a shotgun blast rings out. It brings everyone to silence.

Another man—a police officer, maybe the sheriff—comes forward, holding the shotgun he has just fired into the air.

“She says you have the wrong rewind. You want to go to prison, Todd? Not just for murder, but for killing the wrong man?”

“It’s not a man!” screeches Todd.

“That’s right,” says the sheriff calmly. “It’s a boy. Now cut him loose.”

That’s when Cam and Una arrive on his other side.

“Untie him, or I swear to you, every one of you will be held accountable!” the sheriff warns. The spirit of the mob seems to melt into the ground. It’s no longer a mob but a bewildered group of people, sheepish and ashamed. Now people crowd around Keaton, untying him. It’s Cam who takes the gag from his mouth, and Keaton coughs, choking on his own saliva.

“It’s all right, Keaton,” Cam says. “It’s all right.”

He tries to stand, but his joints ache from the strain, as if he’d been on a medieval rack. Una helps him to his feet. He turns and finds Keliana, who is still there, but keeping her distance. He holds up his umber hand to show her. “Not me!” he says. “Left hand, not right!”

“I know,” she says.

Then the sheriff calls out to the crowd. “Everyone better get yourselves home before I remember who was here tonight.”

People begin to meander away, then, from the edge of the crowd, someone says, “Hey—where the hell is my Harley?”

13 • Cam

Cam’s brain has begun to feel disjointed. Fragmented. It always does when stress starts to overwhelm him. He can’t let it happen. Not now. Lockdown, he says to himself, and clamps down on his panic. The crew of his own personal submarine must not mutiny.

The first clue to Dirk’s whereabouts is the missing motorcycle. While the mob was focused on lynching Keaton, Dirk must have snuck in right behind them and, masked by the mob’s frenzy, taken off. Now he’s loose to do whatever damage he intends to do. Cam suspects the attack on the girl will not be an isolated incident. Unless they can catch him, it’s going to be a rampage, and there’s no telling how bad it will be.

A part of Cam wants to run, just like Dirk trying to escape the mob’s judgment. But he can’t. He won’t. He looks at Una, and, as always, her presence stabilizes him.

“You didn’t make him,” Una