UnBound - Neal Shusterman Page 0,83
AWOLs. He’s known more than one AWOL who got caught because they stuck their nose somewhere it didn’t belong because they were curious. He will not make the same mistake. Whatever this girl’s interest in him, he’s got to treat it as if she’s a threat and get out as quickly as he can and never come back. It means more scavenging trash cans for food, but there are worse things.
3 • Miracolina
When she sees the boy get up to leave, Miracolina turns to Sister Barbara and says quickly, “Would it be okay if I left early, Sister? I have a test tomorrow.” Another lie for confession.
Sister looks surprised but nods. Miracolina unties the apron, slips on her sweater, and hurries through the dining room. The boy is gone.
Dusk is already settling into night as she reaches the sidewalk. She looks left, then right, and finally spots him turning a corner. The church is in a middle-class neighborhood, but the area goes bad fast as the boy heads toward the freeway. She keeps a safe distance between them. He doesn’t seem to hear or sense her behind him. She’s been tailing AWOLs and Juvey-cops for a few months now and has gotten good at it.
When Miracolina was a tithe, she thought AWOLs were the worst sort. Criminals guilty of stealing a body that no longer belonged to them—allowing others to die because they were cowards. But ever since her misadventure with Lev, she’s much more ambivalent about it. In fact, it keeps her up at night. It’s become a bit of an obsession. She talks to Juvey-cops and muscled boeufs who track down runaways. She listens to them boast about their arrests. They don’t seem to care about the lives saved by the lungs and livers going to cancer patients or the hearts going to cardiac patients or the lives improved by corneas and brain sections. It’s adrenaline and quotas to them. A competition. A game. Nothing more.
Some nights she sneaks out in search of AWOLs when her parents are asleep. Sometimes she finds them; sometimes she doesn’t. The adrenaline-charged fear of being alone in dark corners of the city has become like a drug to her. When she does talk to AWOLs, she finds that some are the criminals she thinks them to be. They run because they have broken any number of laws and feel little to no remorse for it. Whether their hearts were this toxic before they went AWOL is anyone’s guess. That’s just a very small fraction of AWOLs. Most of the ones she’s met aren’t so bad. They’re basically decent kids and certainly have something to offer the world. A lot of them care so much for their friends or for fighting against unwinding that they would sacrifice their lives.
Kids like Lev.
Miracolina slips into a covered bus stop when she sees the boy ahead skirt a freeway overpass and head for a dimly lit pedestrian bridge instead. Her curiosity rises. He’s moving toward a really seedy area. Her mother would just die if she knew Miracolina spends time there.
The boy still doesn’t seem aware that she’s following him. Her boots clang on the metal walkway, but the wind roaring around them and the cars thundering on the highway below muffle her passage.
She loses sight of him when she reaches the end of the walkway at the spiral staircase to the ground. She doesn’t see him walking the main avenue to the factory district or the road to the dump or the streets to the bars, tattoo parlors, and strip joints that fill this part of town.
Perhaps she lost him and should go home. They’re expecting her soon, and after her last disappearance, they’re sure to overreact. And anyway, this boy is probably another of those loser AWOLs who can’t tell her more than what she already knows.
But what if he is the one? What if he knows the secret? What if he can tell her how to turn herself from a bucket of spare parts into a normal girl?
With one hand on the staircase rail and one foot pointed back to the church, she grinds her teeth. She hates this worst of all. Not knowing what decision to make. Feeling that voice in the back of her head telling her that she should be more like Lev. In spite of the fact that he was a no-good clapper with a price on his head.
Tired of waffling, she runs down the stairs as fast as