UnBound - Neal Shusterman Page 0,33

and Jobe is left alone again in the examining room. He stares out the window, watching the others prepare for a procedure he won’t receive—because he’s not even worth the trouble of dismantling.

2 • Heath

“We’ve got another one, Heath.”

Heath Calderon sighs. He’s sitting in an office in the Centralia fire station—what used to be the fire station—with a sweeping view of the town below. But now Centralia’s a ghost town. It was abandoned when a fire erupted in the coal-bearing caves under the city, spewing toxic gas from dozens of boreholes. It was deemed unsafe to live here. The entire town was condemned by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, uprooting whole families, leaving a landscape blighted with rubble and ruin.

The perfect place for AWOLs to hide, because no one gives a crap what happens here.

“Who’s the new guy?” Heath asks.

His assistant—an overachiever named Sebastian—checks a hand-scribbled notebook. “Jobe something, age fourteen. He’s sick. Bad. They kicked him off the unwind list because his parts weren’t worth harvesting. We found him at Wilkes-Barre General Hospital.”

“How’d you get him past the guard?”

“There wasn’t one. Why would they guard the worthless?”

Heath nods. “Good job, Sebastian. I think we can use him.”

Sebastian beams. That boy takes pride in his work, Heath thinks. Even if the work involves tracking down unwinds near the end of their natural lives and bringing them here to this backwoods hideaway. Heath has a plan for how to use them, something he hesitates to talk about, except with his most trusted allies. Not even Anissa knows his plan.

The cost of leadership, he thinks sourly. He likes Anissa a lot and wishes he could share what he’s doing with her. She’s the smartest AWOL he knows. Pretty, too. But Heath’s plan is secret, on a strictly need-to-know basis. Anissa—like everyone else—will find out soon enough . . .

. . . because he’s about to strike back at the Juvenile Authority—in a way they’ll never see coming.

3 • Anissa

“You won’t have to lose the leg, after all,” Anissa says, examining Brent Lynch’s below-the-knee wound with a practiced eye. “The swelling’s gone down, so has the fever, and the skin tone looks a lot better. The antibiotics are doing their job.”

“Thanks, Anissa,” says Brent, flipping his long hair out of his eyes. He’s been confined to bed rest in this Centralia farmhouse for three days now, in a not-too-drafty bedroom, on a mattress that’s mildewy but does the job. Anissa made sure he had clean sheets, fresh water, and the right black market medication—because he needed them after being infected with a tainted tranq dart.

Stupid to contaminate the organs they want to harvest, Anissa thinks, adding that to the catalog of things she hates about the Juvies.

She smiles, rebandaging the wound. “You may not ever be a track star, Brent, but you should be able to make the choice between ‘walk’ and ‘don’t walk.’ ” Then she adds, with a note of strong caution, “If you don’t try to do too much too soon. Give your body time to heal. You’re no good to anyone otherwise.”

Brent nods, swiping at his hair. “Understood. I’m just glad you were here to help me. Were you, like, a med student, before . . . ?”

“Picked it up from my dad,” she says.

“Was he a doctor?”

“No.” Anissa smiles at the memory. “He was a firefighter.”

4 • Jobe

Jobe sleeps with a little more peace than before, now that he’s been rescued by this group of AWOLs. He’s glad for the haven Centralia provides but not sure how to repay them, if he ever can. Each passing day saps his strength a little further, like a junker car with the gas gauge heading toward E. He knows he’s dying, knows he’s got only weeks to live, if he’s lucky—something he’d rather not think about. He can’t fathom why he’s been shanghaied from Wilkes-Barre General Hospital to this remote, befouled wasteland.

They expect nothing from him. Just like at the hospital, he’s given regular meals—whatever the others have managed to steal or barter from outlying neighborhoods—and otherwise left alone. His room is small and barren, with cracked plaster and a boarded-up window, but the vibe here is different from at the hospital. There, his care was obligatory. He was unwanted—but here he’s clearly valued, for reasons he can’t guess . . .

. . . until Heath Calderon, the leader of the group, pays him a visit.

He’s charismatic, and Jobe could tell from the moment they met that Heath was in charge. It’s how