UnBound - Neal Shusterman Page 0,42
can’t follow.
• • •
Some impossible time later, after an interval she can’t clearly measure, Anissa emerges from the burning hell of the Centralia mine into a bright spring afternoon, many miles from the ruined AWOL camp. She’s near a stand of gnarled-limb oak trees and rolling hills of grass and thistle and windblown dandelion. She peels off her heatsuit, like a prisoner escaping from bondage, and breathes in a lungful of air that’s neither superheated nor caustic. She can almost forget the throbbing pain in her ruined hand.
They’ll be looking for her; she has to keep moving. Anissa has ample time—she hopes—to find help, someone to clean and dress her wound and help her escape from the Juvenile Authority. Plenty of locals are sympathetic to AWOLs. She gives herself an even chance of getting away clean.
She turns to leave—but then hears a voice behind her.
“Help me. . . .”
A stooped figure emerges from the mine, tearing at a badly damaged heatsuit. He’s a boeuf—someone Anissa’s never seen, blond and buzz-cut and clearly in pain. The suit is crumpled and torn on the left-hand side, perhaps because he was too large to wriggle through that tight passage but somehow did it anyway. His left arm, Anissa notes, has been severed by the suit, just above the elbow.
He tumbles to the ground and lies still.
She checks his pulse. He’s still got one. The smart move would be to forget about him, hoping he’ll die, maybe even speeding the process. She admits it’s tempting. Ignoring him would make her escape much easier. Getting help for him will call attention and risk her own safety. She could find a roundabout way to do it—get a backwoods hunter to say he found the man, perhaps, making no mention of Anissa. But anything she tries will increase her chance of getting caught.
Should she run, or risk helping another?
Anissa smiles. She is not, nor will she ever be, like the people who want to unwind her. She is her father’s daughter.
Which means her choice is obvious.
UnStrung
Co-authored with Michelle Knowlden
1 • Lev
“Do it for him,” a woman says, her voice quiet but steeped in authority.
Mired in a numbing gray fog, Lev feels her cool fingers on his neck, taking his pulse. His throat hurts, his tongue feels like chewed leather, his left wrist aches, and he can’t open his eyes.
“Not yet, Ma.”
Like his eyes, Lev’s lips won’t open. Who is it who just spoke? Maybe one of his brothers. Marcus, perhaps? No, the voice is wrong. And no one in his family is so informal as to call their mother “Ma.”
“All right,” he hears the woman say. “You decide when he’s ready. And don’t forget your guitar.”
The sound of footsteps recedes, and Lev slips back into darkness.
• • •
When he wakes again, his eyes open, but only a sliver. He’s alone in a large bedroom with blinding-white walls. A red, woven blanket covers him. Beneath him he can feel a smooth and expensive cotton sheet, like the ones he once knew. He’s on a bed that’s low to the ground, and beyond its foot he sees the fur of a mountain lion on the slate floor. He shudders at the sight of it. An oak bureau faces him. It has no mirror, and for the moment he’s glad.
Forcing his eyes wider, he sees unshuttered windows on the far wall, the light beyond them weakening to dusk. Or is it strengthening to dawn? There is a nightstand next to him. A stethoscope is coiled there, and for a brief, devastating moment he thinks that he’s been discovered and taken to a harvest camp. Despair presses him against the cotton sheet, and he sinks into the fog that fills his head, confusing dreams with delirium and making a mockery of time. He drifts through the fog until he hears—
“When he wakes, get his name.” It’s a different voice. Deeper. “The council can’t give him sanctuary without a name.”
Cool fingers touch his wrist again. “I’ll keep that in mind.” He senses the woman leaning over him. He can hear her breathing. She smells of sage and smoky cottonwood. It’s comforting. “Now leave us be.”
He feels a prick in his upper arm, like a tranq dart, but not. The world goes hazy—but not like the fog. This is a different kind of sleep.
Suddenly he’s standing in a yard, near a briefcase covered in mud that lies halfway down a hole. Outside the picket fence police are sidling toward him. No, it’s not