Unwind (Unwind Dystology, #1)

by Neal Shusterman

The Second Civil War, also known as “The Heartland War,” was a long and bloody conflict fought over a single issue. To end the war, a set of constitutional amendments known as “The Bill of Life” was passed. It satisfied both the Pro-life and the Pro-choice armies. The Bill of Life states that human life may not be touched from the moment of conception until a child reaches the age of thirteen. However, between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, a parent may choose to retroactively “abort” a child… … on the condition that the child’s life doesn’t “technically” end. The process by which a child is both terminated and yet kept alive is called “unwinding.” Unwinding is now a common and accepted practice in society.

He tries not to think about the fact that he’ll never see the summer again. At least not as Connor Lassiter. He still can’t believe that his life is being stolen from him at sixteen.

His father points at some random carnage on the news. “Clappers again.” “What did they hit this time?” “They blew up an Old Navy in the North Akron mall.” “Hmm,” says Connor. “You’d think they’d have better taste.” “I don’t find that funny.”

He was going off to be unwound, and they were going on vacation to make themselves feel better about it. The unfairness of it had made Connor want to break something.

Besides, he found a certain power in knowing his parents’ secret. Now the blows he could deal them were so much more effective. Like the day he brought flowers home for his mother and she cried for hours. Like the B-plus he brought home on a science test. Best grade he ever got in science. He handed it to his father, who looked at it, the color draining from his face. “See, Dad, my grades are getting better. I could even bring my science grade up to an A by the end of the semester.”

Connor’s motivation was simple: Make them suffer. Let them know for the rest of their lives what a horrible mistake they made.

“Relax,” Mr. Durkin would tell her. “No one is judging you.” Perhaps he truly believes that—but then, he can afford to believe it. He’s not fifteen, and he’s never been a ward of the state.

“You must know that space in state homes are at a premium these days, and with budget cuts, every StaHo is impacted—ours included.” Risa holds cold eye contact with her. “Wards of the state are guaranteed a place in state homes.” “Very true—but the guarantee only holds until thirteen.”

“There are unwanted babies born every day—and not all of them get storked.” “We’re obliged to take the ones that don’t.” “We have to make room for every new ward.” “Which means cutting 5 percent of our teenage population.”

“Please, Miss Ward. It’s not dying, and I’m sure everyone here would be more comfortable if you didn’t suggest something so blatantly inflammatory. The fact is, 100 percent of you will still be alive, just in a divided state.” Then he reaches into his briefcase and hands her a colorful pamphlet. “This is a brochure from Twin Lakes Harvest Camp.”

“Change,” repeated the social worker, “that’s all. The way ice becomes water, the way water becomes clouds. You will live, Risa. Only in a different form.” But Risa’s not hearing anymore. Panic has already started to set in. “I don’t have to be a musician. I can do something else.”

“I was never going to amount to much anyway,” Samson says, “but now, statistically speaking, there’s a better chance that some part of me will go on to greatness somewhere in the world. I’d rather be partly great than entirely useless.”

“To Lev: It’s been a joy to watch you grow into the fine young man you are, and I know in my heart that you’ll do great things for everyone you touch in this world.”

“Here’s to my brother, Lev,” Marcus says. “And to our parents! Who have always done the right thing. The appropriate thing. Who have always given generously to charity. Who have always given 10 percent of everything to our church. Hey, Mom—we’re lucky you had ten kids instead of five, otherwise we’d end up having to cut Lev off at the waist!”

It did bother him, though, when kids called him things like “dirty Unwind.” As if he was like those other kids, whose parents signed the unwind order to get rid of them. That couldn’t be further from the truth for Lev. He is his family’s pride and joy. Straight As in school, MVP in little league. Just because he’s to be unwound does NOT mean he’s an Unwind.

He wishes his bullets were the real thing. He wishes he could truly take these wastes-of-life out rather than just taking them down. Maybe then they wouldn’t be so quick to run—and if they did, well, no great loss.

It’s no use trying to explain to this godless pair what tithing is all about. How giving of one’s self is the ultimate blessing. They’d never understand or care. Save him? They haven’t saved him, they’ve damned him.

There was a time, shortly after the Bill of Life was passed, that Dumpsters such as that would be tempting to girls like her. Desperate girls who would leave unwanted newborns in the trash. It had become so common that it wasn’t even deemed newsworthy anymore—it had become just a part of life.

Funny, but the Bill of Life was supposed to protect the sanctity of life. Instead it just made life cheap. Thank goodness for the Storking Initiative, that wonderful law that allows girls like her a far better alternative.

If they catch her, she’s obliged to keep the baby—that’s part of the Storking Initiative too—but if they open the door and find nothing but the child, it’s “finder’s keepers” in the eyes of the law. Whether they want it or not, the baby is legally theirs.

“No, stealing ourselves. Once the unwind orders were signed, we all became government property. Kicking-AWOL makes us federal criminals.”

Perhaps as the morning goes on they can find a library where they can download maps and find themselves a wilderness large enough to get lost in for good. There are rumors of hidden communities of AWOL Unwinds. Maybe they can find one.

“You got caught in the act, little dearie,” she says.

why's this lady from suburban ohio talk like an evil storybook witch

A little painting of a fruit bowl falls off the wall. Connor catches it before it hits the ground and sets it on the counter. “See?” he says. “My blood isn’t explosive. If I were a clapper, this whole shop would be gone.”

Unwinds didn’t go out with a bang—they didn’t even go out with a whimper. They went out with the silence of a candle flame pinched between two fingers.

The girl is Mai. Her parents kept trying for a boy, until they finally got one—but not before having four girls first. Mai was the fourth. “It’s nothing new,” Mai tells them. “Back in China, in the days when they only allowed one kid per family, people were killing off their baby girls left and right.”

ok lmao

It’s asleep, and right now, in this place and at this moment, there’s something so comforting about holding it in his arms, he’s thankful he saved it. And he thinks that if his soul had a form, this is what it would be. A baby sleeping in his arms.

It makes her furious that she actually misses the baby. It was thrust upon her at the worst possible moment in her life—why should she have any regret about being rid of it? She thinks about the days before the Heartland War, when unwanted babies could just be unwanted pregnancies, quickly made to go away. Did the women who made that other choice feel the way she felt now? Relieved and freed from an unwelcome and often unfair responsibility… yet vaguely regretful?

Which was worse, Risa often wondered—to have tens of thousands of babies that no one wanted, or to silently make them go away before they were even born? On different days Risa had different answers.

CyFi is umber. “They used to call us black—can you imagine? Then there was this artist dude—mixed-race himself, a little bit of this, a little bit of that. He got famous, though, for painting people of African ancestry in the Deep South. The color he used most was umber. People liked that a whole lot better, so it stuck. Bet you didn’t know where the word came from, did you, Fry? Following right along, they started calling so-called white people “sienna,” after another paint color. Better words. Didn’t have no value judgment to them. Of course, it’s not like racism is gone completely, but as my dads like to say, the veneer of civilization got itself a second coat. You like that, Fry? ‘The veneer of civilization?’ ” He slowly sweeps his hand in the air as he says it, like he’s feeling the fine finish of a table. “My dads are always saying stuff like that.”

“You got a problem with the way I talk? You got a problem with an Old World Umber patois?” “I do when it’s fake.” “Whachoo talkin’ about, foo’!” “It’s obvious. I’ll bet people never even said things like ‘foo,’ except on dumb prewar TV shows and stuff. You’re speaking wrong on purpose.” “Wrong? What makes it wrong? It’s classic, just like those TV shows—and I ain’t appreciating you disrespecting my patois. Patois means—”

“Anyway, my dads got no problem with it—and they’re lily-sienna like you.” “They?” Cy had said “dads” before, but Lev had figured it was just some more Old Umber slang. “Yeah,” says CyFi, with a shrug. “I got two. Ain’t no thang.” Lev tries his best to process this. Of course, he’s heard of male parenting—or “yin families,” as they’re currently called—but in the sheltered structure of his life, such things always belonged to an alternate universe.

In fact, they were so pleased, they finally made it official and got themselves married.” Lev opens his eyes, curious enough to admit he’s still awake. “But… after the Heartland War, didn’t they make it illegal for men to get married?” “They didn’t get married, they got mmarried.” “What’s the difference?” CyFi looks at him like he’s a moron. “The letter m. Anyway, in case you’re wondering, I’m not like my dads—my compass points to girls, if you know what I mean.”

“Because if you die, at least you go to Heaven.” Heaven? thinks Connor. More likely they’d go to the other place. Because if their own parents didn’t care enough about them to keep them, who would want them in Heaven?

“The unborn have souls. They have souls from the moment they get made—the law says.” Connor doesn’t want to get into it again with Emby, but he can’t help himself. “Just because the law says it, that doesn’t make it true.” “Yeah, well, just because the law says it, that doesn’t make it false, either. It’s only the law because a whole lot of people thought about it, and decided it made sense.”

Connor sighs, not having the strength to fight anymore. He thinks about the baby he and Risa so briefly shared. “If there’s such a thing as a soul—and I’m not saying that there is—then it comes when a baby’s born into the world. Before that, it’s just part of the mother.”

Only now does Risa realize that his uniform is one from the war. She can’t recall whether these were the colors of the pro-life or pro-choice forces, but then, it doesn’t really matter. Both sides lost.

“This place isn’t a refuge, it’s a slave market. Why doesn’t anyone see that?” “Who says they don’t see it? It’s just that unwinding makes slavery look good. It’s always the lesser of two evils.” “I don’t see why there have to be any evils at all.”

The truth is, there were three sides in the war, not two. There was the Life Army, the Choice Brigade, and the remains of the American military, whose job it was to keep the other two sides from killing each other. That’s the side I was on. Unfortunately, we weren’t very successful.

On one side, people were murdering abortion doctors to protect the right to life, while on the other side people were getting pregnant just to sell their fetal tissue.

But that same year the Nobel Prize went to a scientist who perfected neurografting—the technique that allows every part of a donor to be used in transplant.”

The Admiral paused for a moment to consider it. “Of course, if more people had been organ donors, unwinding never would have happened… but people like to keep what’s theirs, even after they’re dead.

See, runaway Unwinds on the street—that’s a problem for us. But the Admiral gets them off the street and keeps them in that little desert ghetto of his. He doesn’t know it, but he’s doing us a favor. No more rats.”

On the existence of a soul, whether unwound or unborn, people are likely to debate for hours on end, but no one questions whether an unwinding facility has a soul. It does not.

First of all, they are no longer called unwinding facilities, as they were when they were first conceived. They are now called harvest camps.

Happy Jack Harvest Camp, in beautiful Happy Jack, Arizona, is the perfect model of what a harvest camp should be. Nestled on a pine-covered ridge in northern Arizona, the sedating forest views give way to the breathtaking red mountains of Sedona to the west. No doubt it was the view that made happy men of the twentieth century lumberjacks who founded the town. Hence the name.

All things at Happy Jack are serene and gracious—but this moment is the exception to the rule. Once in a while, a particularly troublesome Unwind is singled out and publicly humbled for all to see before being set loose into the general population. Invariably, that Unwind will try to rebel and, invariably, that Unwind will be taken to the clinic and unwound within just a few days of his or her arrival.

The staff’s own announcement that they’ve taken down the Akron AWOL does not deflate the spirits of the Unwinds there. Instead, it takes a boy who was only a rumor and turns him into a legend.

Yet somehow this picturesque nightmare is worse. Just as the airplane graveyard was Heaven disguised as Hell, harvest camp is Hell masquerading as Heaven.

At first she assumed the various activities were designed to keep the Unwinds occupied until their number came up. Then, as she passed a basketball game on the way to the welcome center, she noticed a totem pole by the court. In the eyes of each of the five totems were cameras. Ten players, ten cameras. It meant that someone, somewhere, was studying each of the Unwinds in that game, taking notes on eye-hand coordination, gauging the strengths of various muscle groups. Risa had quickly realized that the basketball game wasn’t to keep the Unwinds entertained, but to help put a cash value on their parts.