UnWholly (42 page)

This, Starkey knows, is the turning point of his life. Not his escape from the Juvies, not his arrival at the Graveyard, but this moment alone, handcuffed in a plane. Everything depends on getting out of this jet, and no mistakes can be made. If he’s going to lead the storks to greatness, he’s going to have to dazzle everyone with his escape.

Starkey squats, getting his feet on the chain between the cuffs. He knows they’re tempered steel. Not even bolt cutters would separate them. As for the support strut, it’s part of the plane’s airframe and can’t be torn loose. The weakest link here is flesh and bone.

Starkey takes a few deep breaths to steady himself. Every escape artist is someday faced with an impossible escape; however, the true artist knows that nothing is impossible if you’re willing to do the unthinkable.

Getting himself leverage and locking his jaw to keep from shouting out, Starkey brings the heel of his boot down on his left hand. The pain is excruciating, but he swallows his scream. He brings it down again, this time feeling the fine bones of his hand begin to break. The pain makes him weak. His body resists, but his will countermands that biological order, and he brings his heel down again.

Quickly, before blood flows into the area, making it swell, he shifts the cuff slightly and brings his heel down on his wrist. The bones of his wrist shatter on the metal of the cuff. He feels his vision begin to go as dark as if he’s been tranq’d, but he forces away the cloudiness and nausea, breathing slowly, deeply, forcing himself to stay conscious and transforming the pain into action. He’s bit his tongue; blood fills his mouth, but he spits it out. The job is done. With his right hand, he twists his left cuff. This time he’s unable to hold back the wail of pain as he forces his shattered left hand through the small hole.

Being assigned to guard a guy who’s handcuffed and closed inside a jet isn’t exactly a difficult job, but hey—if Connor feels Starkey needs two guards, who is Noah Falkowski to argue? This is the first assignment given to Noah directly by Connor since he was rescued from his unwinding nearly four months ago, and he’s not gonna screw it up. Inside the jet, Starkey lets out a guttural scream.

“What the hell?” asks the other kid who’s guarding Starkey.

“That is one pissed-off dude,” says Noah.

Right about then a Jeep comes speeding toward them, its headlights making the twilight seem darker around them.

“What the hell?” says the other kid. Clearly his favorite expression.

The Jeep screeches to a halt, and out steps Trace. He heads straight for Connor’s jet.

“Whoa, Trace, hold up. Connor’s not in there,” Noah says.

“Where is he?”

Noah’s not quite sure. All he knows is that Connor has called the remaining members of the Holy of Whollies for a meeting after the Starkey incident. “He left the main aisle. One of the supply jets, maybe?”

“You’re useless.” Trace hops back into his Jeep and speeds toward the outlying planes. Only once he’s gone does Noah hear a banging sound from inside Connor’s jet—but it’s not the kind of sound he’d expect Starkey to make. The emergency exit above the wing begins to open.

“What the hell? How did he get loose?”

“Shh!” Noah cocks his pistol. He’s never fired it and knows it’s just a tranq, but it will do the job. He never really liked
Starkey and won’t mind being the one to tranq him as he tries to escape from the jet. The emergency door falls inward. Both kids hold their weapons at the ready, but Starkey doesn’t come out. Cautiously they get closer, and when Noah looks inside, he sees straight through the plane to the darkening desert on the other side. While they were staring at this emergency exit, Starkey had climbed through the other one on the opposite side of the plane and is gone.

“Aw crap!”

Noah is less worried about Starkey than he is about having to tell Connor he screwed up his first real assignment.

He wears a hooded coat pulled from Connor’s closet to hide his face. His left hand feels like a twenty-pound weight on the end of his wrist. With every heartbeat it pounds so painfully that his knees wobble, but somehow he keeps himself moving. He knows that Trace is back, and that’s a game changer. Connor doesn’t know yet, which means Starkey can use Trace’s return to his advantage.

The Graveyard is scrambling. Kids race every which way. An aisle over, there’s a crowd at the arsenal. Hayden hands out weapons; not just one or two, but everything. No one notices Starkey.

A Stork Club member passes, carrying a load of weapons, and Starkey grabs him with his good hand. When the kid sees who it is, he almost shouts out his name, but Starkey stops him.

“Shut up and listen. Get a message out to the Storks. On my signal, we storm the escape jet.”

“But . . . that’s not the plan.”

“It’s
my
plan, do you understand?”

“Yeah, yeah, sure, Starkey.” Then he looks at Starkey’s hand, like he might ask a question about it, but decides not to. “What’s the signal?”

Starkey looks at the kid’s load of weapons and pulls out a flare gun. “This,” he says. “Go now!”

The kid races off to spread the word.

Starkey can see Trace’s Jeep speeding back toward the main aisle from the supply jets, having been given bad information from the idiots guarding him. Starkey’s not sure where Connor is—perhaps the ComBom, which will probably be the next place Trace will check.

Then Starkey spots Ashley racing from the arsenal with a nasty-looking machine gun, and he intercepts her. Her eyes go wide when she sees him.

“What the hell are you doing out? Does Connor know?”

“He will if you don’t keep your voice down!”

Ashley moves closer to him. “Forget it, Starkey. Why don’t you just make a run for it? Connor won’t care, as long as you’re out of his way when the Juvies come.”

“Are you a stork, Ashley, or are you one of Connor’s lackeys after all?”

When it’s put that way, there’s really only one response that Starkey’s key “sleeper agent” could give.

“What do you want me to do?”

Unable to find Connor, Trace speeds back to the main aisle, headed for the ComBom, ready to sound the alarm himself. He sees kids carrying weapons away from the arsenal, but they’re not moving nearly fast enough.

He’s so distracted, he nearly runs down Ashley, who’s standing right in his path. He screeches to a halt.

“Trace! There you are!”

“Where’s Connor? The Juvies are coming with a full takedown force.”

“We know, Hayden heard the chatter,” Ashley tells him. “Connor wants you to power up the escape jet.”

“He knows I’m back?”

“Of course—he saw you racing off to the supply jets in a panic.”

“It wasn’t panic,” Trace says, although he knows it was. “I’ll get the Dreamliner ready for flight. If we’re fast enough, we may not need to fight them. Tell Connor to start loading kids onto the plane.”

“Sure thing, Trace.” But she does no such thing. She watches Trace race to the Dreamliner and climb up the stairs. Then she goes to tell Starkey that her mission has been accomplished.

The rifle shot explodes through the Graveyard gate, ringing in Lev’s ears. “Down!” he yells. “They’re shooting at us!”

But Miracolina is already down. Not just down, but crumpled. She lies lifelessly in the dirt by the side of the road.

“No!” He falls to his knees beside her, afraid to look, afraid to touch her. “Please, God! No!” This can’t be happening. Not again! Everyone Lev gets close to is either killed or maimed, and it can’t happen again! He prays for the impossible. He prays for it not to be true. . . .

Then he rolls Miracolina over to find there’s no gaping hole in her chest. But there is a small spot of blood on her shoulder.
And the tiny flag of a tranq bullet. He doesn’t know whether to be relieved or horrified.

“Looks like you’ve got trouble from both sides, Lev,” says Nelson, somewhere in the dark behind him. “What to do . . . what to do?”

Then, from the gate, he hears a shaky voice say, “Stay away, whoever you are, or I’ll shoot again!”

But before the teen guard can even aim his rifle, Nelson fires a second tranq bullet out of the darkness and takes the guard down right through the fence.

“Enough of him,” Nelson says calmly. “Now, where were we?”

Lev still can’t see Nelson, but Nelson can clearly see him, because Lev hears the telltale
pffft
of a tranq being fired. It hits his pant leg, deflecting off a rivet in his jeans, and lands in the gravel beside him. Lev knows he has no defense against Nelson now, so thinking quickly, he grabs the dart, digs it into the fabric of his jeans, careful not to nick his skin, and collapses on top of Miracolina. He closes his eyes. He hears the second guard panicking by the fence, and hears Nelson’s footsteps approaching from the other direction on the gravel. Lev’s heart races like it might explode in his chest, but he holds still, playing possum for his life, and prays for a second miracle in as many minutes. He prays that Nelson will fall for his act.

He never went to Indian Echo Caverns. Nelson merely drove his van to a roadside café a few miles away, then monitored his laptop and waited for the tracking nanites in Lev and Miracolina’s blood to show movement away from the cabin. Then he followed. It was no accident that the bed frames were nearly rusted all the way through. Nelson had wanted
them to escape. For a while he worried that Lev might be too stupid to figure out how to break free, but in the end the boy rose to the occasion.

Lev didn’t give away the location of Connor Lassiter that day, but Nelson heard enough to know that they were on their way to warn him about the big bad parts pirate. All Nelson had to do was give them a leash and let them lead the way.

Now that he knows Lassiter is at the defunct air force base, he has no use for these two anymore, but killing them would require too much disposal time. Besides, knowing Lev will wake up and have to live with the knowledge that he was responsible for Connor being unwound on the black market is a far sweeter revenge than the numb silence of death.

Nelson is not seriously concerned about the skittish AWOL still manning the gate. The first one fired wild, and he’s confident the second doesn’t really know how to wield a rifle with live ammo either. Most likely they were trained on tranq bullets, which have no kick and shoot lower. Nelson, who can use both, is well armed for this mission. In fact, he has a romantic notion that, for this capture, he will be like an old-fashioned gunslinger—his singular purpose reflected in a tour de force of firepower. He has three pistols at the ready and a semiautomatic rifle slung across his back. All but one pistol are loaded with fast-acting tranqs, which are far more effective than bullets. A bullet can graze a target, hit a limb—even inflict a body shot, and still the target can return fire. With a tranq, no matter where it hits, it takes a target out of the equation instantly. As for the live-ammo pistol, well, Nelson considers that his insurance policy.

He’s about to check Lev to make sure he made an accurate and effective hit, when the situation takes a drastic turn that no gunslinger could have predicted.

The one remaining kid at the gate has no idea what has taken his comrade down. Their job usually consists of giving directions to people who are lost, because no one comes to the Graveyard intentionally at night. Trace has put the fear of God into both of them, however, and now his friend is lying on the ground right in front of the gate, possibly dead.

He hurries to him, fully expecting to be killed on the way. Although he heard voices outside the gate, they’re silent now. No one shoots at him. And he’s relieved to find his friend still breathing.

The only warning he has is the sudden rev of an approaching engine. Then out of nowhere, a police battering ram, its headlights dark, crashes through with such speed that the gates fly off their hinges. He dives out of the way just in time, and when he looks back, he sees his unconscious friend turned to roadkill by the wheels of the battering ram. Flowing in behind the ram is a flood of Juvey squad cars and armored riot trucks, followed by the chilling sight of Unwind transport trucks—it’s just as Trace said. This is a full takedown force!

Only now that they’ve crashed the gate do their headlights come on, illuminating the desert before them, glinting off the planes in the distance. After the last transport truck passes through the gate, a brown van barrels through, following the Juvies, and then some kid races through the ruined gate, running after the van.

What comes next?
thinks the gate guard.
An elephant?

When the running kid realizes there’s no way he’s going to catch up with the party crashers on foot, he spots the guard and runs toward him. The guard reflexively raises his rifle but
realizes that like an idiot, he’s holding it upside down. By the time he rights it, the kid is there, ripping it away from him.

“Don’t be stupid, I’m not the enemy,” he says. There’s something familiar about his face. Like maybe he’s seen him before, but with shorter hair. “You have a Jeep or something?”

“Behind the trailer . . .”

“Good. Give me the keys.”

And this younger kid’s voice is so commanding, the guard obeys, reaching into his pocket and handing him the keys.

“Listen to me,” the kid says. “There’s a girl outside the gate. She’s been tranq’d. I want you to get her and run. Take her someplace safe. Do you understand?”

The guard nods “Yeah, sure. Someplace safe.”

“Promise me you’ll do that.”

“Yeah, yeah, I promise.”

Satisfied, the kid gets into the Jeep and drives off toward the main aisle, where gunfire can already be heard. Clearly he doesn’t know how to drive, but that really doesn’t matter much when there’s no road, only hardpan desert.

Once he’s gone, the guard takes a moment to look at the remains of his fallen comrade, then bolts. Somewhere in the bushes just outside the gate is a tranq’d girl. He doesn’t care. Every man for himself in a Juvey crackdown. Every girl, too. So rather than even looking for her, he takes off running as fast as he can, and leaves the girl to the Juvies, or the coyotes—whichever come first.