UnBound - Neal Shusterman Page 0,67
but he doesn’t cry. Pravda just huddles alone, picking at the skin of her elbows until they’re raw and bleeding. Colton wonders if the Dah Zey will punish her for damaging their property.
Apparently the question is moot, because the following day, she’s taken at inspection for unwinding. She screams and protests as they all do, cursing in half a dozen languages, but it changes nothing. In the end she’s led off to one of the other windowless buildings—the one where the actual unwinding is done. He hopes for her sake that it’s quick.
It’s just before they are sent back inside that Colton catches sight of Rodín, lurking in the background, holding a pair of binoculars. When he takes the binoculars away, Colton can tell that he’s not surveying the scene; he’s staring right at him. The boy with the eyes. He smiles at Colton. Yesterday that smile made Colton look away, but this time he refuses to let Rodín intimidate him. Colton holds the doctor’s gaze, without smiling back.
In their cell no one speaks of Pravda. To do so would be bad luck, and they need all the luck they can get.
“Whose fate is worse?” Kemo ponders aloud. “To be shelled and unwound, or to be an experiment?”
It’s not the question that bothers Colton but the calm way in which Kemo asks it—as if it’s a hypothetical and not the reality they’re facing. “How can you even compare them?”
“I can’t,” says Kemo. “Not really. A shelled unwinding is different from a regular unwinding. Without a brain there’s no question that one is dead, even if one’s flesh lives. And with death come the mysteries of what lies beyond. Death I am ready for. But to become one of Rodín’s . . . things?” Kemo shivers. “And yet as a thing, one lives on, presumably with one’s own brain.” Then Kemo looks through Colton with a question that rings with the solemnity of a ghanta bell. “Are you tempted?”
“No!” says Colton. “Absolutely not! I’d rather be shelled.”
But Kemo grins because he knows that Colton isn’t entirely sure.
• • •
The day after Pravda is taken they are given a new cell mate. The door to their holding tank bursts open, and the guards drag in a girl. A girl who’s covered head to toe in animal tattoos.
“You can’t do this, you bastards!” shouts Karissa, flinging her arms as the guards struggle to hold her still. “How can you do this to me?”
They throw her to the ground and leave. Colton is the first to approach her, taking great pleasure in her newfound misery. “Let me be the first to welcome you.”
“Oh crap!” The fight seems to drop right out of her when she sees him. She rises to her feet, brushing blood from her mouth.
“Is this the girl who turned you in?” asks Kemo, stalking closer. His calm presence has suddenly become coolly menacing.
Karissa backs all the way to a spider-infested corner. “They made me do it!”
“Really.” Colton moves closer to her, not sure what he plans to do, but enjoying the fact that she’s frightened of his righteous rage.
“They have my sister!” Karissa blurts out, bursting into tears that are convenient, but perhaps sincere. “But if I bring them AWOLs, they won’t unwind her. Fifty AWOLs in exchange for her freedom. That’s what they promised.”
“Let me guess,” says Kemo. “You gave them forty-nine, and they made you number fifty.”
Karissa appeals to Colton. “What would you have done if it were your brother?”
“Leave him out of this!” In his stupidity Colton had told her the whole story the night she destroyed his life. “You knew I wasn’t an AWOL, but you turned me in anyway.”
She has no defense for that other than to look down and say, “I had to save my sister.”
Gamon looks back and forth between them, clearly not comprehending, but at the very least getting the emotional gist.
“Do you really think they honored their end of the bargain?” Colton says. “I’m sure she was unwound weeks ago.”
But Karissa shakes her head. “No. I call every week, and they let me talk to her. I know Marisol is still alive!”
“Marisol . . . ,” says Kemo, then glances to Colton. “Yes, you’re right. She is still alive.” But he tells her nothing more, and as furious as Colton is at Karissa, he won’t tell her what her sister has become. He’s not that cruel.
“You know her?” Karissa asks. “Where is she? Is she nearby?”
No one says anything.
“Tell me where she