UnBound - Neal Shusterman Page 0,69
grin. “You’re a regular Akron AWOL,” she says.
Colton shakes his head. “I’m not a hero—I just want to survive.”
“I’m sure that’s what Connor Lassiter said when he tranq’d that Juvey-cop and took a tithe hostage.”
“And what if you can’t find a tunnel?” Kemo asks.
“Then we’re no worse off than we are now.”
“You’ll be worse off,” Kemo points out, and Colton agrees—but he can’t stand the frying pan any longer. He’s ready to take on the fire.
• • •
When inspection is done, and the others return to their dingy gray holding pens, Rodín, speaking Burmese, Lao, or some hybrid of the two, instructs the guards, and they roughly grab Colton. Rodín stops them right away, chastising them. They release Colton but stand close as they escort him to the moss-covered stone palace.
“You’ll have a private room here in the Green Manor,” Rodín tells him after they’ve closed the wrought-iron gates behind him. Colton wonders if he knows that everyone else calls it the Haunted Mansion.
“All your needs will be taken care of.” He waves his hand, and Kunal comes running. Or hobbling.
“We have a volunteer.”
“Yes, Dr. Rodín.”
“Show him to chamber twenty-three.”
“Yes, Dr. Rodín.”
Rodín turns to Colton. “I’ve been teaching Kunal English. I intend to bring him into the West and impress the world with what we’ve done here.”
Colton finds that very unlikely. Rodín is as delusional as Pravda is. Was.
Kunal obediently leads Colton across the courtyard, and Colton looks around, trying not to be obvious about it and trying to ignore the sounds coming from the rooms that border the courtyard. Creations he doesn’t even want to imagine reside in there. He focuses his attention toward the middle of the courtyard. Karissa talked of a well in the center, but now there’s only a huge, gnarled tree—the one Kunal had climbed at the doctor’s request.
“So, can you say anything more than ‘Yes, Dr. Rodín’?”
“My English getting better,” Kunal says.
Colton looks down at the hands connected to his ankles. He wears fingerless leather gloves on them.
“Were you a volunteer?”
Kunal doesn’t answer him.
“Are you happy with . . . with what he made you?”
Kunal stops and takes a good look at Colton, and while Colton tries to read his emotions, he can’t. He’s not sure if Kunal is friend or foe. Has the doctor really won him over?
“My brain, my body still here,” Kunal says. “Better that than no.”
“Agreed—but that doesn’t answer my question.”
“No understand you.”
“I think you do.”
They reach the back of the large courtyard—a place where the strange sounds fade away—and Kunal opens a warped wooden door with an old-fashioned key on his bulky, jangling key ring. The room itself, as the doctor had promised, looks far more comfortable than the crowded cell he had been in. Only the best for a volunteer.
“You here,” Kunal says. “Maybe doctor come bring lunch. Maybe I come. Maybe nobody come.” Colton glances out at the tree again, which rustles in the breeze.
“Have you climbed all the way to the top?” Colton asks. “Have you tried? I’ll bet you could.”
“I no talk no more.”
Kunal locks him in and hobbles off, but an hour later Colton sees him through the small window of his room, swinging through highest branches of the huge tree.
• • •
Late in the afternoon of that first day Rodín has Colton brought to his office on the second floor, away from the sounds coming from the many rooms below. They discuss Colton’s future.
“Such a spectrum of possibilities, yes?” The doctor says, brightly.
Colton can’t keep his knee from bouncing. That’s all right. He forces all his anxiety into that knee so that it doesn’t show anywhere else.
“I have a shipment coming in next week,” Rodín tells him. “The wings of a wandering albatross—three-point-five-meter wingspan—the largest in the world. They’ve been infused with human DNA, to overcome cross-species tissue rejection.”
Colton just nods, keeping his jaws clamped tightly closed, because if he doesn’t, he might scream. The doctor takes his silence for thoughtfulness.
“You must be imagining what it would be like to fly, yes?” Then the doctor glances down at Colton’s lower half. “Of course human legs are far too heavy for flight—but legs were made for walking. What need for them if you can fly?”
Colton tries to hold on to the first thing Rodín said. Next week. If this is to be his fate, it won’t happen until next week. By then maybe he can find that tunnel and be out of here.
“But perhaps we should think about highlighting those hazel eyes of yours.