UnBound - Neal Shusterman Page 0,34

he holds himself. There’s confidence in his body language even before he speaks.

“How you feeling?” Heath asks.

“Like the sun at sundown,” Jobe mutters.

Heath pulls a chair around to face him. “I know you’re not well. Hell, I know you’re dying.” He shakes his head. “Your parents may not have known that—or didn’t want to know it. Some people have a willful blindness about things they can’t deal with. It was easier to sign the unwind order than to deal with a nasty, incurable disease.”

“My dad said I was weak,” Jobe says.

“He’s wrong. Your issue is a medical problem. In fact, you’re in a special class—what the Juvies call unclean. We’ve been looking for people like you.”

“Why?”

Heath smiles. “How would you like to be a part of something really important?”

5 • Anissa

Anissa Pruitt feels oddly at home in this dried-up town. She helped Heath choose Centralia as the location of their camp since it was long-forgotten and seldom visited. The place reeks of despair, but it’s their best hope of survival—a haven that seems to reflect their angry struggle. She keeps thinking of the mine fire still raging under their feet, the pulsing heart of Centralia, a fire that can’t be extinguished and will probably burn for a hundred years.

My dad would hate that, she thinks for the thousandth time.

She’s meeting Heath at the graveyard, a place others would find gloomy, but which, like most of Centralia, is starkly appealing to Anissa—a reminder that she’s still among the living. Every bronze plaque, each weathered headstone tells a tale that’s forever lost. She wonders whether Centralia’s ghosts can feel the heat of the earth below, warming up their resting places, like a sneak preview of the netherworld they’d rather avoid.

“Enjoying the scenery?” asks Heath, coming to join her.

“I usually do. You’re late.”

“I had business,” he says cryptically.

She shrugs. Their walks together have become a daily ritual, even though he’s often late and won’t explain why. It’s not romantic, not exactly, but she likes his company, even if he doesn’t talk much and hardly ever reveals anything. Heath has secrets, a trait that’s both frustrating and oddly attractive.

They set off down Locust Avenue, the main street of Centralia, where most of the AWOLs have made their home. Weeds sprout from cracks in the asphalt, engulfing old, rusted-out cars. The houses have fallen into disrepair, many uninhabitable, some stripped to the bare foundation. The air smells of sulphur—like rotten eggs—because of gas from the burning mine. Not many would find this beautiful, but Anissa does. It was a family trait, after all, to find hope in the heart of disaster and plunge into it head-on.

“You’re thinking about your father again, aren’t you?”

Anissa smiles. From the beginning Heath could always read her. “This all reminds me of him, Heath.”

“Because he was a firefighter?”

“Because he was a good one. He never gave up on anything, no matter how terrible it seemed. He’d walk right into a burning building, like he was strolling through the park. He said a fire wasn’t made that he couldn’t beat.”

“Even this one?”

She grins. “Dad once said he’d like to go to the mouth of the Centralia mine, take a deep breath, and just blow it out, like a birthday candle. He was like the Paul Bunyan of firefighters; you’d almost believe he could.”

“But in the end, the fire beat him.”

Anissa looks away. She appreciates Heath’s frankness, most of the time, but doesn’t like to be reminded of the day her father died. It was years ago, almost a decade, but the memory still troubles her.

Martin Pruitt died on the job, battling a four-alarm blaze in a seedy Harrisburg warehouse. He went in wearing a heatsuit, a computer-controlled outfit designed to make any fire survivable. The suit could keep its wearer cool and comfortable, even if the outside temperature rose past broiling. But its greatest benefit—inspired by unwind technology—was that it could amputate injured limbs, if necessary.

He was trapped in a burning basement, and his heatsuit recommended severing his limbs, one at a time, to conserve lifesaving oxygen. It would buy him precious minutes, time enough to be rescued—and as a firefighter, he’d be in a prime position to receive replacement body parts. But he refused, knowing the parts might come from a troubled teen who’d been forcibly taken and unwound.

“My dad could have survived,” Anissa says bitterly. “But he didn’t want unwound limbs. He wanted to save lives, not use others to save his own.”

There’s an awkward pause. A raven perches