UnBound - Neal Shusterman Page 0,92
the sea—the same place where he once looked at stars with the Girl He Can’t Remember. He’s learning to come to terms with that absence of memory. It’s a melancholy that is filled by the presence of Una.
He quietly comes up behind her. She’s just finished tuning one of his guitars and has begun to play it. She plays well, but never plays for others—and certainly not for him. She’ll only play when she thinks no one is listening. He waits a few yards behind her, listening, until she senses his presence and stops.
“The humidity here warps the wood,” she tells him. “Can’t get a single instrument to sound right.”
“Sounded fine to me.”
She huffs at that. “Then they must have gotten your ears from the bargain basement.”
He gives her an obligatory chuckle and sits beside her. “We should have brought one of your guitars with us. To show them how it’s done.”
“I’m sure there are plenty of my guitars on the islands,” she says proudly. “People have crossed oceans for my instruments.” Finally she takes a moment to assess him. “You spoke to the rewinds today, didn’t you?” she asks. “How did it go?”
“Fine, I guess,” Cam tells her. “No surprises.” And then he adds, “I wish you would have come.”
The air is too warm for a chill, but she shifts her shoulders and back as if she’s had one. “It wasn’t my place to be there. I would have been just one more thing to confuse them, and you know it.”
“We’re here to do this together,” he reminds her.
Then she looks him dead in the eye. “Then give me something to do. I’m not an accessory for you to wear on your arm.”
Cam sighs. “How can I give you something to do when I don’t really know how to play this myself?”
Una considers that, then gives the guitar a single decisive pat. It resounds with a gentle thud. “Tell you what. You work on your melody, and I’ll find my own harmony.”
“The perfect combination,” Cam says, then he reaches behind her, pulling the tie from her hair and letting her hair fall free.
“Stop that!” she says. “You know I hate that!”
But he knows she doesn’t. He knows she puts that tie there just for him to pull it out. He smiles and playfully says, “Tell me how much you despise me.”
“More than anything in the world,” she answers, clearly suppressing a grin.
“Tell me how sorry you are that you married me.”
She glares at him, but it’s all for show. “I didn’t marry you,” she points out. “I married your hands.”
“I’m sure there’s a hacksaw somewhere on the compound if those are the only parts of me you want.”
She puts the guitar down on the grass. “Just shut up, you stupid quilt.” Then she grabs him and kisses him, biting his lower lip just enough for it to hurt. She’ll never kiss him without first insulting him. He’s grown to enjoy that almost as much as her mildly painful kisses.
Then, as she lets him go, she says something she’s never said before.
“I don’t know whose lips I’m kissing, but I’m starting to like them.” Then she pushes him back in his chair so hard he almost falls over backward and thrusts the guitar at him.
“Your turn,” she says. “Play something.” And then gentler. “It’ll relax you. Maybe give your mind a break from the rewinds.”
He holds the guitar, which has grown warm from the midday sun. “Should I play something of Wil’s?” he asks.
She looks at the hands that had once belonged to her fiancé, Wil Tashi’ne, and says gently, “No. Play something of yours.”
And so he pulls together a brand-new tune for Una from the random fabric of this multitextured day. A tune that feeds and underscores the growing bond between them, without forgetting the ominous tone of the task before them.
3 • 00039
The rewind is escorted to a room down a winding hallway that he knows isn’t winding at all. It’s straight. It’s only his mind that sees it otherwise. He knows that now. He knows that walls that seem crooked are not, and that oddly angled windows are actually perfect rectangles. The more he tells his mind this, the more his mind begins to accept it. Even his muscles are learning to cooperate when he walks. Camus Comprix was right. Integration will come, if he makes it happen.
They lead him to a room, and in that room sits none other than Camus and the doctor, who has