UnBound - Neal Shusterman Page 0,97

his left hand. “Hand of my hand. Me, you, same.”

The first rock hits the fence with a resounding rattle. The second one gets through, hitting Keaton on the arm.

He turns to see that the other island kids have armed themselves and are throwing stones at the two of them.

“Get lost!” they yell. “Stinking monsters.”

“Ground beef!” one of them says, and the others laugh and start repeating it. “Ground beef! Ground beef!” Dirk is the first to run, but Keaton stands his ground a moment longer, until a rock hits his forehead and he realizes it’s no use. They’ll keep throwing stones as long as he remains a target.

“Ground beef! Ground beef!”

So he turns, leaving the path, and heads into the dense brush to escape them. His only consolation is that Keliana wasn’t throwing stones too.

• • •

Rewinds sleep the sleep of the dead. Maybe because they’ve tasted it. When Keaton dreams, they’re mostly variations on memories even more disjointed than normal dreams, because the memories are from dozens of different people. But when he dreams of things he’s seen after his rewinding, those images are almost as sharp as waking life. He has a dream of Keliana. Of walking with her on Molokai’s finest beach, which happens to be part of the colony compound. Is it so wrong for him to be dreaming of her? The doctor keeps expecting the male rewinds to be attracted to the girls among them—as if they are their own species. In nature even the most hideous of creatures are attracted to one another. But rewinds are not a species. The girls find the boys frightening and repulsive to the core, and the boys’ disgust is returned in equal measure. There will be no brides of Frankenstein among this bunch. Keaton suspects no girl in the outside world will want to be with him, but the rules of dreams are different.

How infuriating it is, then, when he is shaken out of the depths of such a fine dream.

“Shawshank! Shawshank!”

It’s Dirk. He whispers into Keaton’s ear so close it doesn’t sound like a whisper at all.

“Go away.”

But Dirk won’t leave him alone. “Shawshank! Now! Now!”

“Go away! Not your friend!”

Dirk grabs his umber hand. “Hand of my hand. You, me, now!”

Finally Keaton sits up, and Dirk points to the door of the ward. “You, me, now!”

The last thing Keaton wants is to get involved with whatever trouble Dirk has in mind, but somehow he’s become Dirk’s keeper.

There are two guards on duty at the rewind ward. One for the girls and one for the boys. Currently the male guard is not at his post—probably on a perimeter check. Security cameras are everywhere, but few of them are on. They are leftovers from when the facility was bustling with activity. Now it’s just the two wards of dispossessed souls.

At the door, which is always locked from the outside, Dirk produces from his pocket a Proactive Citizenry security pass featuring the picture of some serious-looking man.

“Finders keepers,” says Dirk.

No surprise there. The rewinds are constantly finding things left over from Proactive Citizenry’s reign of this place. He taps the pass to the reader, and the door unlocks.

“Sesame,” Dirk says with the same flat affect with which he says everything. But Keaton’s emotions are anything but flat. Half of him wants to turn around and return to the comfort of his bed, but if he does, and Dirk gets into some kind of trouble, it will be bad for all of them, so Keaton follows the soulless rewind into the cricket-filled night.

In the stark silver light of a gibbous moon, Dirk leads them to the fence where the locals threw stones at them. The fence is high and rimmed with several rows of tranq-coated barbed wire. With a single prick you’re rendered unconscious and fall, landing hard enough to break bones, and maybe your neck. For a rewind still integrating, he wouldn’t be surprised if they just popped apart like Legos. The thought makes him queasy.

“Pointless,” Keaton says. “Can’t climb out. Pointless.” He grabs Dirk’s arm. “Back now. Late. Sleep. Better for you than this.”

But Dirk shrugs out of his grip and walks farther down the fence . . . to a spot where there’s a hole in the chain link, just big enough to squeeze through. Clearly the chain link was cut by bolt cutters—and probably from the outside. He once heard guards complaining about how the locals would sneak onto the property since some of the island’s best