UnBound - Neal Shusterman Page 0,62
of martyr. The reluctant one. In the grand scheme of things, it is an envious position.” Then he picks up his phone and makes a call. “Yes, Sonthi. I have him now. Just what you were looking for. Yes, hazel eyes. I’ll send him to you now.” He ends the call with “Laeo phop gan mai krap.” A standard Thai good-bye.
That’s when Colton realizes . . . hazel eyes . . . it was the AWOL girl who noticed that. How could he have been so stupid?
Colton tries to plead for his life again, but the man raises his voice and cuts him off.
“They’ll take you now. And you needn’t worry—the Dah Zey is not what the American media makes it out to be. Well, maybe it was back when Thuang was running it, but things have become more civilized since then. You will be treated well.”
“Yeah, your Juvey-cops treated me real well too. This is illegal, you know. You’re finished if the Thai government finds out about this.”
“That is why you must be unwound . . . ,” he says, his face growing serious. “And your brain discarded.”
Colton didn’t think he could be any more horrified than he already was. “Shelled? I’m being shelled?”
“The Dah Zey doesn’t deal in gray matter. Too unpredictable. You know too much. Who’s to say all those brain bits won’t exert some of your will over the recipients? The last thing the Dah Zey needs is a piece of your mind turning up in the wrong place.”
“No!” shouts Colton, realizing that there is an alternative even worse than just unwinding. “My brain will stay quiet. I swear! Even divided! Just don’t shell me.”
The man smiles sympathetically. “Just think of yourself as the humanitarian aid America never gave us.” And he gestures to the guard waiting at the door to take him.
• • •
The truck rumbles down the highway with Colton bound and gagged in the back. He knows he’s headed to Burma now. If he’s lucky, a military convoy might stop them and open the back of the truck—but he knows that such a thing is very unlikely. They’re probably taking an unregulated road or one where the soldiers have been paid off. His head throbs, and he curses the girl who turned him over.
After what seems like days with scant rations of food and water, they pull him to his feet and drag him out like a corpse into the mud of a Dah Zey harvest camp.
2 • Kunal
“Come, Kunal! Must I wait for you? The truck is already here.”
“Yes, Doctor. Coming, sir.”
Kunal hates that the doctor forces him to take the long walk to the front entrance of the camp. He thinks he’s doing Kunal a kindness by allowing him out of the Green Manor to witness the deliveries, but Kunal would much rather stay within the manor’s gates. These long walks do nothing but make his ankles ache.
The truck stops in the muddy expanse between the infirmary and the Eastern Refinery. This place used to be an opium farm, before unwound parts became more valuable than heroin. They don’t call them Unwinds here, though. The Burmese phrase for it is a htwat “harvest.” That’s all the AWOLs are to them. The cinder-block buildings that used to be opium refineries have long since been subdivided into cells for the Unwinds who move through here at a steady pace.
The doctor watches every delivery with a pair of binoculars, keeping his distance. He brings Kunal along to hold his binoculars, because apparently they’re too heavy for the doctor to wear around his neck.
There are guards everywhere. A show of force for kids who are too frightened, weak, and sleep deprived to fight back, even if they tried. The Dah Zey love overkill. That’s why there are three outer gates before reaching the camp. They are a box within a box within a box.
A Burmese man in military camo approaches. Sonthi. He’s an imposing figure. Kunal is convinced that he was once part of one military junta or another that ran the country for its fifteen minutes of power. If this place is a factory, then Sonthi is the floor manager.
“Mixed bag today,” Sonthi tells the doctor. “Many interesting eyes.”
“Injected?”
“Natural,” Sonthi says.
“All the better.”
About a dozen kids are manhandled, stumbling in the mud as they’re herded toward the infirmary. Kunal wonders how much they know about this place. How much they’ve been told about what will be done to them. Do they know about the