UnWholly

“I hadn’t noticed,” Co

Trace reaches out his hand to shake, and Co

“Before today you were just a pawn doing what they wanted you to do,” Trace tells him. “Deep down you knew it—you sensed it. I hope the truth has set you free.”

16 • Risa

Before her shift begins each morning, Risa spends time beneath the wing of the Rec Jet, chatting with other kids who’ve become her friends. She has more friends here than she did back at the state home, but at the same time she feels more like an older sister than a friend. They revere her like some angel of mercy—not just because she’s the medical authority, but because she’s the legendary Risa Ward, the Akron AWOL’s partner in crime. She suspects they think, deep down, she can heal things that are broken inside.

She used to spend time at the Rec Jet in the evening, after her shift, but the Stork Club put an end to that. She has half a mind to demand equal time for the state wards, but knows that fueling a division of the Graveyard into factions won’t do anything but cause trouble. Thanks to Starkey, there’s enough of that going on without her help.

Farther away, she can see Co

He looks up and catches Risa’s gaze. She turns away, feeling guilty, as if she’s been spying on him, and chides herself for feeling that way. When she looks up again, he’s heading toward her. Behind her kids have begun to gather in front of the TV. Something on the news has caught their attention. She wonders whether Co

“Busy day ahead?” she asks him, offering him a slight smile, which he returns.

“Nah, just lying around watching TV and eating chips. I gotta get a life.”

He stands there with his hands in his pockets, looking around, although she knows his attention is on her. Finally he says, “The ADR says they’ll send those medical supplies you asked for in the next few days.”

“Should I believe it?”

“Probably not.”

She knows this is not the reason why he came over to her, but she doesn’t know how to coax things out of him anymore. She knows she has to do something before this distance between them gets ingrown.

“So what’s the problem of the week?” she asks.

He scratches his neck and looks off, so he doesn’t have to look her in the eye. “Sort of the same, and sort of you-don’t-want-to-know.”

“But,” says Risa, “it’s big enough for you to tell me that you can’t tell me.”

“Exactly.”

Risa sighs. It’s already getting hot, and she’s not looking forward to pushing her way to the infirmary jet in the heat. She has no patience for Co

The news report is an interview with a woman, rather severe-looking, and even more severe-talking. Coming in the middle, Risa can’t make heads or tails of what she’s talking about.

“Can you believe it?” someone says. “They’re calling this thing a new life form.”

“Calling what a new life form?” Co

Hayden is there and turns to both of them. He looks almost queasy. “They’ve finally built the perfect beast. The first composite human being.”

There are no pictures, but the woman is describing the process—how bits and pieces of almost a hundred different Unwinds were used to create it. Risa feels a shiver go as far down her spine as she can feel. Co

“Why would they do such a thing?” she asks.

“Because they can,” Co

Risa can feel the heaviness of the vibe around her, as if they’re all watching some awful global event unfolding before their eyes.

“We need to get the escape plan ready,” Co

Risa feels the same blast of communal intuition. Suddenly getting the hell out of the Graveyard sounds like a very good idea. Even without a safe destination.

“Composite human . . . ,” someone grumbles. “I wonder what it looks like.”

“C’mon, haven’t you ever seen Mr. Potato Head?”

There’s a smattering of nervous laughter, but it doesn’t lighten the mood.

“Whatever it looks like,” Risa says, “I hope we never see it.”

17 • Cam

With a finger he traces the lines of his face, down the side of his nose to his cheek. Left, then right. Out from the symmetrical starburst of flesh tones on his forehead, then beyond to the lines that spread beneath his hairline. He dips his finger into the graft-grade healing cream again and spreads it across the lines ru

“Believe it or not, the stuff is actually related to yogurt,” the dermatologist told him. “Except, of course, that it eats scar tissue.” It also costs five thousand dollars a jar, but, as Roberta has told him, money is no object when it comes to Cam.

He’s been assured that when treatment is done, he’ll have no scars at all, just hairline seams where every little bit of himself meets.

His cream-spreading ritual takes half an hour, twice a day, and he’s come to enjoy the Zen-like nature of it. He only wishes there were something that would heal the scars in his mind, which he can still feel. He sees his mind now as an archipelago of islands that he labors to build bridges between—and while he’s had great success engineering the most spectacular of bridges, he suspects there are some islands he’ll never reach.

There’s a knock at his door. “Are you ready?” It’s Roberta.

“Reins in your fist,” he tells her.

A pause, and then, “Very fu

Cam laughs. He no longer needs to speak in metaphors—he’s created enough bridges in his mind to bring some normality to his speech—but he enjoys teasing Roberta and trying to stump her.

He dresses in a tailored shirt and tie. The tie’s muted colors, yet bold, fractal pattern, were specifically chosen to project a sense of aesthetic composition; a subliminal suggestion that an artistic whole is always greater than the sum of its parts. He fumbles with the tie. While his brain knows how to tie it, his virtuoso fingers obviously had never learned to do a Windsor knot. He must focus and overcome the frustrating lack of muscle memory.

Roberta knocks again, a little more insistently now. “It’s time.”

He takes a moment to admire himself in the mirror. His hair is just about an inch long now. A virtual coat of many colors; streaks extending out from the focal point of multiple skin tones on his forehead. Blond runs down the middle, blending to amber on both the left and right. Shades of red and brown arc back from his temples, then give way to jet black above his ears, and tight, dark curls at his sideburns. “All the famous hairstylists will be trampling one another to get to you,” Roberta said.