UnBound - Neal Shusterman Page 0,95

Dr. Pettigrew notes, “is probably all they can hope for.”

Cam won’t dignify that with a response. For their leisure time Cam gives a group of them basketballs, and they are allowed to play on the court by the main mansion. Unwinds, Cam recalls, were monitored in harvest camps so that prices could be put on their muscle groups. Cam makes sure there are no video cameras watching them now as they play.

Cam still runs the many paths of the Molokai compound. He encourages the rewinds to run with him, leading by example. “Sound body will bring a sound mind,” he tells them. “Teach your muscles to work together, and the rest of you will follow.”

Some run with him; others walk the route more slowly, unable to coax their reformed selves into the complex concert of a jog. Some don’t come at all. Cam won’t force them. Everyone has a different timetable.

“Is it really wise to give them this much freedom?” Dr. Pettigrew asks, clearly thinking Cam a fool for not keeping them locked up in the ward. If it were up to the good doctor, the rewinds would be turned into institutional vegetables, unable to function outside of the rewind ward.

“They’ll all be free eventually,” Cam tells him. “They should learn how it feels now.” He knows that the doctor is sending reports back to their superiors. Cam can only hope that they’ll take Pettigrew’s reports with a grain of salt—and that his own progress with the rewinds will be proof of Cam’s approach.

But what if they want what the doctor wants? What if they don’t care about rehabilitation—what if they simply wish to brush all these rewinds under a rug and make the world forget about them?

He must believe that if he can prove their value—their humanity—his superiors will see what a mistake it is to keep them locked away.

• • •

After today’s run Cam finds Una in the mansion’s grand living room. It’s a place of many memories. It holds the mirror where he first saw himself. The large tabletop computer interface where Roberta coaxed his reintegration through pictures and torturous mental exercises.

Today Una also has pictures open on the table face. Her photos. She scrutinizes them intently.

“Come here. I want to show you something,” she tells him.

The desktop is awash with digital photos of the rewinds, but she moves her hands across the tabletop screen, swiping most of the images aside and centering three. They aren’t the best of her photos; these are grainy, and pixilated—as if they were taken from a distance, then enlarged. They are all of the same subject.

“This rewind here. Do you know him?”

Cam is a bit embarrassed to admit that he doesn’t. Although he’s made great efforts to treat each rewind like an individual, there are those who fall through the cracks—or rather, hide in the cracks. This is one of them. He probably stays out of sight when Cam is around. Cam knows he must have had a meeting with him, but he was probably one of the silent ones who didn’t meet Cam’s eye.

“Take a closer look,” Una says. Then she enlarges the central photo. He has one umber hand and badly mismatched eyes that just seem to be staring off into nowhere. “He disappears when he sees me, so these are the only pictures I have of him.” She thrums her nails on the glass surface. “Something about him bothers me.”

Cam can see why. There is a vacancy about him that is . . . unique. Looking at him is like looking into an empty bag. “It’s as if . . . ,” Cam begins to say, but then banishes the thought before it has time to surface. Instead he says, “Hmmm . . . It looks like he’s having trouble integrating.”

Una takes a deep probing look at him. Cam hates when she does that. “It’s more than that, and you know it.”

“All I know,” Cam says, his voice rising just the slightest bit, “is that every rewind has to be given time, and the chance to become who they are.”

“What if they’re not becoming anybody?” Una asks. “Not every collection of parts makes a whole.”

Lockdown! The thought hits Cam like it used to in the old days. When there was a thought so dangerous, he dropped a firewall of self-preservation in front of it. He doesn’t let the word escape his lips, however. Instead he clamps his jaw shut until the impulse passes and says in a whisper