He doesn’t dare open it, but he knows what’s inside.
Letters.
Hundreds of them.
Each one was written by an AWOL who’d been through Sonia’s basement. Most wrote to their parents. They are missives of sorrow and disillusionment. Anger and the screaming question of “why?” Why did you? How could you? When did things go so wrong? Even the state wards, unloved but tolerated by the institution that raised them, found something to say to someone.
He wonders if Sonia ever sent his letter, or if it’s still in there, buried among the other raging voices. He wonders what he would say to his parents now, and if it’s any different from what he wrote. His letter began with how much he hated them for what they did, but by the time he reached the end, he was in tears, telling them that he loved them in spite of it. So much confusion. So much ambivalence. Just writing the letter helped him understand that—helped him to understand himself a bit more. Sonia had given him a gift that day, and the gift of the letter was in the writing, not in the sending. But still . . .
“I’d ask you to move the trunk back into place for me—but you’ve gotta be on the other side of the trapdoor before I do.” Sonia raises her cane, pointing down the steep basement steps.
“Right. I’m going—don’t use the cattle prod.”
She doesn’t whack him with her cane, but on his way down, she does tap him gently on the head with it to get his attention.
“Be good to her, Connor,” Sonia says, gently. “And don’t let Beau get to you. He just likes to be the big man.”
“No worries.”
He descends, and she closes the trapdoor above him. The basement smells like teen spirit, as the old prewar song goes. For a brief moment he has a flashback without words or images—just a swell of feeling—back to the first time he was herded down those steps two years ago. The invincibility he was feeling when he woke up is now tempered by the cold concentrate of that memory.
Risa’s at her little first aid station tending to a girl’s swollen, slightly bloody lip. “I bit my lip in my sleep—so?” the girl says, instantly on the defensive. “I have nightmares—so?”
Once the girl is tended to, Connor sits down in the treatment chair. “Doctor, I have a problem with my tongue,” he says.
“And what might that be?” asks Risa cautiously.
“I can’t keep it out of my girlfriend’s ear.”
She gives him the best Oh, please look he’s ever seen, and says, “I’ll call the Juvies to cut it out. I’m sure that’ll take care of the problem.”
“And it’ll give some other poor soul a highly talented sensory organ.”
She allows him the last laugh, studying him for a few moments.
“Tell me about Lev,” she finally says.
He’s a bit deflated to have the playfulness so totally squashed out of their conversation.
“What about him?” Connor asks.
“You said you were with him for a while. What’s he like now?”
Connor shrugs, like it’s nothing. “He’s different.”
“Good different, or bad different?
“Well, the last time you saw him, he was planning on blowing himself up—so anything is an improvement.”
Another kid comes to Risa with what looks like a splinter in his finger, sees the two of them talking, and goes away to take care of it himself.
Connor knows he can’t get out of this conversation, so he tells Risa what he can. “Lev’s been through a lot since the harvest camp. You know that, right? Clappers tried to kill him. And that asshole Nelson captured him, but he got away.”
“Nelson?” Risa says caught completely by surprise. “The Juvey-cop you tranq’d?”
“He’s not a cop anymore. He’s a parts pirate, and he’s nuts. He’s got it out for me and Lev. Probably you, too, if he could find you.”
“Great,” says Risa, “I’ll add him to my list of people who want me dead.”
Suddenly, with the specter of Nelson in the conversation, Connor finds bringing the conversation back to Lev is now a relief. “Anyway, Lev hasn’t grown any—except for his hair. I don’t like it. It’s past his shoulders now.”
“I worry about him,” Risa says.
“Don’t,” Connor tells her. “He’s safe on the Arápache reservation, communing with whatever it is that Chancefolk commune with.”
“You don’t sound too happy about that.”
Connor sighs. When Connor and Grace left the Rez, Lev was filled with all of this crazy talk about getting the Arápache to take a stand against unwinding. As if they ever would. In some ways, he’s just as naïve as the day Connor saved him from his tithing. “He says he wants to fight unwinding, but how can he do it from an isolationist reservation? The truth is, I think he just wants to disappear someplace safe.”
“Well, if he’s found peace, then I’m happy for him—and you should be too.”
“I am,” Connor admits. “Maybe I’m just jealous.”
Risa smiles. “You wouldn’t know what to do with peace if you had it.”
Connor smiles right back at her. “I know exactly what I’d do.” Then he leans in close to whisper, she leans in close to hear—and he licks her ear with precision enough to get him happily slapped. He thinks it might get her off the subject, but it doesn’t.
“I miss Lev,” she says. “He’s kind of like a brother. I never had a brother—or at least not that I know of.”
“I have a brother,” Connor tells her. He doesn’t know why he’s chosen to volunteer this. He’s never spoken of him to Risa. Mentioning his life before the unwind order somehow feels taboo. It’s like conjuring ghosts.
“He’s a few years younger than you, isn’t he?” Risa asks.
“Three years younger.”
“Right—now I remember,” she says, which surprises him. But then he shouldn’t be surprised at all. The whole life of the notorious Akron AWOL has been dissected by the media since the day he first got away.
“What’s your brother’s name?” Risa asks.
“Lucas,” Connor tells her—and with the mention of the name comes a wave of emotion more powerful than he was prepared for. He feels regret, but also resentment, because Lucas was the child their parents chose over Connor. He has to remind himself that it wasn’t his brother’s fault.
“Do you miss him?” Risa asks.
Connor shrugs uncomfortably. “He was a pain in the ass.”
Risa grins. “That doesn’t answer the question.”
Connor meets her eyes, so beautifully green, and just as deep and expressive as their natural color.
“Yeah,” Connor admits. “Sometimes.” Back before Connor’s parents gave up on him, he was constantly being compared to Lucas. Grades, sports—never mind that it was Connor who taught Lucas to play every sport. While Connor never had the dedication to stay on a team for a whole season, Lucas excelled, to their parents’ enduring joy. And the more Lucas shone, the dimmer Connor’s light seemed to them.
“I really don’t want to talk about this,” Connor tells her. And as easily as that, his old life and memories of his family are locked away just as securely as his letter to them is locked in Sonia’s trunk.
4 • Lev
Lev is anything but at peace.
He’s in the treetops again. It’s the dead of night, but the night is alive. The forest canopy rolls like aquamarine clouds beneath a blue floodlight moon.
He’s following the kinkajou again, that large-eyed monkey-like creature. Adorable but deadly. He now knows that it is his spirit he chases. It races before him through the highest branches of the dense rainforest, drawing him toward something resembling destiny, but not quite as fixed and fated. Not something inevitable, but something he could make real.
He dreams of the kinkajou, and this journey through the trees, often. Each visit to this peculiar sanctuary of purpose feeds him and sustains him. It reminds him that there is a worthwhile goal to the things he drives himself to do.