UnDivided (6 page)

People call him a monster for lynching “innocent workers” at harvest camps. They call him a murderer for brutally executing doctors who perform unwindings. Let them call him whatever they want. Each label just adds to his growing legend.

“There's a new supply of ammo coming in today,” he tells Bam. “Maybe some new guns, too.” Then he watches her closely to see her response. Not what she says, but what she feels. Her body language. He can tell that she's bristling.

“If the clappers are going to supply weapons, maybe they
could teach these kids how to use them so they don't accidentally blow their own brains out.”

That actually makes Starkey laugh. “They send kids out to blow themselves up for their cause,” Starkey reminds her. “Do you really think they care if a few storks shoot themselves?”

“Maybe not,” Bam says. “But
you
should care. They're
your
beloved storks.”

This gives Starkey pause for thought, but he tries not to show it. “
Our
storks,” he corrects.

“If you care about them as much as you say you do, you would take measures to protect them from themselves . . . and each other.”

But Starkey knows what she's really thinking.
If you care about them, then you'll stop attacking harvest camps.

“How many storks died in the last attack?” he asks.

Bam shrugs. “How should I know?”

“Because you do,” Starkey says. A simple statement of fact. He knows she keeps track of such things to use against him, or maybe just to torture herself.

Bam holds eye contact, but her feigned ignorance fails her. “Seven,” she says.

“And how many storks did we add to our numbers?” Starkey asks.

Bam clearly doesn't want to say, but he waits until she spits it out. “Ninety-three.”

“Ninety-three storks . . . and two hundred seventy-five nonstorks freed from harvest camp hell. I think that's worth the seven lives we lost, don't you?”

She won't answer him.

“Don't you?” he demands.

Finally she casts her eyes out of the window, looking down on the hundreds of kids on the power plant floor. “Yes,” she concedes.

“Then why are we having this argument?”

“We're not arguing,” Bam says as she turns to go. “No one argues with you, Mason. There'd be no point.”

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As the sun begins to sink low, and the power plant's grime-covered windows begin to cast long shadows across the factory floor, Starkey descends to mingle among the masses. Many kids greet him; others are too intimidated to even look at him. He moves through the crowd of kids trouble-free. No one brings him their problems. This is yet another way he runs his ship differently than Connor ran the Graveyard. Connor was constantly inundated by daily minutia. Backed-up latrines, shortages on medical supplies, things like that. But here, kids know better than to waste Starkey's time. If they have a
problem, they either live with it or take care of it themselves. He can't be bothered—he has a war to run.

With dinner fifteen minutes late, he checks their makeshift galley, where Hayden Upchurch and his food-prep team are all sweaty from moving industrial-size cans of processed ham.

“Hail, O mighty chief.” Hayden says.

“Where's dinner?”

“We were waiting for the delivery from the ‘applause department,' but apparently the clappers just sent guns and ammo, no food. So tonight we'll have to make do with SPAM.”

Hayden seems far too pleased by the fact. “What are you smiling about? SPAM sucks.”

“Are you kidding me? SPAM is my god. It's the only deity that can be eaten raw or fried. The stuff of Holy Communion.”

The most annoying thing about Hayden is that Starkey can never tell if he's being disrespectful or just habitually sarcastic. For a while Hayden had been a problem, refusing to do the computer legwork Starkey needed to choose their targets. Lately, however, Hayden seems to have gotten with the program. Now that he's been demoted back to food service, he does his job with competent, if somewhat acerbic, cheer. Starkey still has no real trust of Hayden, but there's no one else who's organized enough to get food on the table three times a day for all six hundred of them. Hayden Upchurch is a necessary evil.

“You'll be serving in ten minutes, or I'll be looking for your replacement.”

“Ultimatum acknowledged,” Hayden says, and continues his work.

Starkey finds Bam in the weapons locker, unloading unmarked crates that were delivered in unmarked trucks. Their benefactors don't scrimp when it comes to giving them best of the best in artillery.

“What have we got?” Starkey asks.

“See for yourself,” Bam says. “More assault rifles, submachine guns. And a whole bunch of Glocks. I guess they decided we need pistols for the littler kids.”

Her voice drips with attitude, a kind of vitriolic sarcasm much darker than Hayden's. “Would you rather they go into a hostile environment unarmed?”

She doesn't answer the question, but when the kids helping her leave for dinner, Bam says, “Doesn't it bother you at all that we're being bankrolled and armed by the same people who fund the clapper movement?”

He rolls his eyes. He's never felt the slightest bit ambivalent about this. You never look a gift horse in the mouth, no matter where that gift horse has been. “C'mon—it's not like we're blowing ourselves up.”

“Not yet. But who knows what they're going to ask in return for all they're giving us?”

“Has it occurred to you that the more they fund us, the less of their money goes to clappers?”

Bam laughs bitterly. “That's your best rationalization yet! ‘Mason Starkey: saving the world from clappers one dollar at a time!' ”

She goes out for dinner, leaving Starkey furious that she got the last word. In spite of being the undisputed master of his domain, Starkey always feels slightly diminished after going head-to-head with Bam. There's no question that she's been an asset—she's great at riding in his wake, keeping things running smoothly—but her insubordination has begun to cross the line, and that cannot be tolerated. Starkey knows he needs her for the next harvest camp takedown. But after that, there's room for change. There are plenty of qualified storks who could do the work Bam does. Kids he can truly trust, who won't second-guess him or give him snark.

The next harvest camp they're taking on is a big one. Lots of security. Lots of firepower. Who's to say if Bam will even make it back alive?

Stagnation. It numbs him, dulls his senses and his response time. It saps his motivation. The task before them is so immense, he doesn't know where to start. Now that they have the printer, they need to make plans, but Sonia's basement is as it ever was, like a black hole drawing them back into the shut-in mentality of the safe-house AWOL. Risa tends to the various scrapes and medical woes, and does a good impersonation of a shrink for those kids who need someone to talk to, which is all of them, although not all of them are willing to talk. As for Connor, there are so many broken appliances, he finds his time is way too easily passed repairing them. It's easier than being proactive with the printer, because the world out there is a minefield. A single misstep and it's all over.

Proactive.

Connor knows while he's treading water, Proactive Citizenry is casting their formidable spells out there. More ads to mystify and befuddle the public. Are people really such sheep that they can be fooled? Maybe. Or maybe with so much conflicting media, people just shut down. Maybe that's the point. The movement to overthrow Cap-17 keeps gaining supporters. Measures calling for more harvest camps, and more ways to legally unwind “incorrigibles” keep gaining traction. The pundits are actually calling it the Starkey Factor. What's been obvious to Connor now has now been officially defined. Starkey and his storks spread more and more terror with every harvest camp they take down, but rather than dealing a blow
to unwinding, those brutal, bloody attacks drive the public to embrace anything and anyone who promises to make the Starkeys of the world go away. Forever.

These relentless wheels turn in the outside world, but in Sonia's basement the days blend into nights, which blend back into days. It's hard not to be drawn into lethargy when your sanctuary is a timeless limbo.

“Sonia's been busy trying to find new safe houses for these kids,” Risa explains, as if it's an excuse for doing nothing but waiting. “But the old network has fallen apart, and without the Graveyard, there's no destination anymore.”

It was clear to Connor even before he left the Graveyard that the Anti-Divisional Resistance couldn't resist anything anymore. The ADR seems to have broken down completely. Key players in the resistance have been disappearing. Rumor has it that a number of them have been killed in “random” clapper attacks. It makes Connor wonder if the chaos and anarchy that clappers espouse have a deeper agenda that's anything but chaotic. And if
he's
wondering, there must be others who are too. Many others. But how does he find them . . . or, more to the point, how can he mobilize them to action?

“We're not going to save these kids by shuttling them around,” he tells Risa. He can't help but look to the organ printer that sits so innocuously covered by a rag in the corner near where they sleep. There's the answer, but an answer means nothing if the world doesn't first hear the question.

They're going to need help. Help from the outside.

It's Grace, with her keen head for strategy, who gives them food for thought. “Of course, if you ask me, which you didn't,” she says, “what ya gotta do is find someone connected in a wireless sort of way.”

“A viral grassroots media kind of thing?”

“More like fertilizer to get those roots growing in a healthy kinda way,” says Grace.

It immediately gets Connor thinking about Hayden. He'd be the first to call his “Radio Free Hayden” broadcasts fertilizer. After all, the range of his “station” never got beyond the boundaries of the airplane graveyard, but his little manifesto upon his arrest has become an iconic meme among the disenfranchised. If he broadcast now—or even shouted from the top of a building—people would listen. Unfortunately Connor has no idea where he is, or if he's even still alive.

When they bring the question of their next move with the organ printer to Sonia, she has the same advice every day.

“Sleep on it,” Sonia tells them—and it's infuriating. Could it be that she's just as terrified as the rest of them about this powder keg on which they sit?

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Connor fixed the broken basement TV on his second day there. Beau insists it be tuned only to entertainment, and never the news.

“We know what's going on out there, and none of it's good,” says Beau. “Better we should all laugh and try to forget for a little while.”

Well, screw that. It's the one time when Connor flexes his muscles and refuses to get with the program. Beau is wise enough not to fight. Instead he permits it, using it to show what a magnanimous leader he is.

The news doesn't make anyone feel good—but as far as Connor is concerned, that's how it should be. When you're a prisoner of society, you shouldn't play at escape. At least until you really can escape it.

It's September now. Less than two months to election day, and the politicians who traditionally waffle on the unwinding issues are beginning to take sides that transcend all party lines, for the parties are divided. Connor watches a congressman on a Washington talk show speak of “the sociological necessity of unwinding undesirables.”