UnBound - Neal Shusterman Page 0,64
he speaks English. The other is Kemo. Won’t hear a peep outta him. Kemo was planning to join a Buddhist monastery, but his parents sold him to the Dah Zey to pay for his father’s gambling debts instead. And Gamon was sold to pay for his brother’s wedding.” Then Jenson kicks Gamon—not hard enough to hurt, but hard enough to display dominance. “Stop your bawling!” Jenson orders. Gamon’s sobs settle to whimpers. “He acts up each time someone new shows up—like he wants to prove he’s the most pathetic AWOL in the world.” Then Jenson takes a good look at Colton. “You’re not gonna be a problem, are you? I’m tired of problem AWOLs.”
“Sounds like you’ve been here awhile,” Colton says.
Jenson gets a bit uncomfortable. “Yeah, well three weeks feels like forever when you’re a guest of the Dah Zey.”
As for the girl, she doesn’t introduce herself, just curses at Colton when he says hello. According to Jenson, she’s a Russian AWOL who claims to be a political prisoner. “She says she’s a pravda—a Russian clapper—and that she’s killed seventy Dah Zey members.”
“Is true!” she insists. “I will kill you if you say is not.”
Colton suspects she’s delusional. After all, a clapper in this environment would have detonated long before getting hurled into this room, but he knows her delusions are what get her through the day. In a way she’s not really lying, because she actually believes it—and she believes that the Russian government will pay for her release so they can extradite her for trial. “Pravda” can’t be older than fourteen.
Jenson’s story is the same as Colton’s, without the girl. He got in the back of the wrong tuk-tuk, and it took him to the gray building. Jenson had heard stories about it from other AWOLs and started to run as soon as he saw where he was, but they tranq’d him. He admits he was being foolhardy, but no one had bothered him in the months he’d been hiding. He fell into a state of ease. When they passed the Cap-17 law in America, he thought he’d be safer. But Asia’s different.
“That’s crazy about the girl, eh,” says Jenson, when Colton tells him about Karissa. “She’ll get what’s coming to her, though.”
“I hope so,” says Colton, smiling for the first time since he’s gotten there. “I just wish I could be the one to dish it out to her.”
The camp is full of groups of kids in small rooms. Every morning they’re flushed out, squinting into the light as guards line them up and inspect them. Kids are pulled out of the line to be unwound. After that everyone else breathes easy. The guards count them, feed them watery protein paste of an origin Colton does not want to consider. They’re checked for injuries, rashes, and new diseases. The kids with issues are sent to the infirmary, where Dr. Rodín will have a look at them. The rest are sent back to their rooms.
The old TV, to Colton’s amazement, actually does work. At lineup that morning Jenson traded discs with some other kids for a pair of fresh movies. They’re all old films that nobody has seen or cared about since before the Heartland War, but it’s better than staring at the cinder-block walls. Or at each other.
Apparently it’s Jenson’s ritual to put on a movie after morning inspection. Today’s features an invisible alien in a jungle not unlike the one around them. As if they now need something invisible to worry about.
“Why does the Dah Zey bother to keep us entertained?” Colton wonders out loud.
“Who knows?” says Jenson. “Maybe it makes them feel better about themselves. Their watered-down version of mercy.”
At a particularly suspenseful part of the movie some new misery must occur to Gamon, because he begins sobbing again, louder than the TV’s tiny distorted speaker. That’s when Jenson snaps and begins whaling on Gamon, brutally beating him, swearing and cursing—probably the very type of loose-cannon behavior that got him on an Unwind list to begin with. “I TOLD! YOU! TO SHUT! THE HELL UP!”
“Jenson! Enough!” Colton struggles to pull Jenson off the poor kid, who doesn’t even defend himself. Jenson looks at Colton as if coming out of a trance. “He . . . he was asking for it,” Jenson says weakly. “He was ruining the movie. . . . He had it coming. . . .” But not even Jenson buys his own argument. Gamon is a bruised, bloody mess. He pulls himself