Unwind

"Yeah," screams a kid from the back, and pumping his fist in the air he begins chanting, "Happy Jack! Happy Jack!" A few kids join in, until everyone realizes this is not what Connor wants. The chants quickly die down.

"We will not be blowing up chop shops," he says. "We're not going to feed into their image of us as violent kids who are better off unwound. We will think before we act—and that's going to make it difficult for them. We'll infiltrate harvest camps and unite Unwinds across the country. We'll free kids from buses, before they even arrive. We will have a voice, and we will use it. We will make ourselves heard." Now the crowd can't hold back their cheers, and this time Connor allows it. These kids have been beaten down by life, but there's an energy now in the Graveyard that's beginning to fill each and every one of them. Connor remembers that feeling. He had it when he first arrived here.

"I don't know what happens to our consciousness when we're unwound," says Connor. "I don't even know when that consciousness starts. But I do know this." He pauses to make sure all of them are listening. "We have a right to our lives!"

The kids go wild.

"We have a right to choose what happens to our bodies!"

The cheers reach fever pitch.

"We deserve a world where both those things are possible—and it's our job to help make that world."

* * *

Meanwhile, excitement is also building at the Dunfee ranch. The buzz of conversations around the garden grows to a roar as more and more people connect. Emby shares his experiences with a girl who has the left match to his right lung. A woman talks about a movie she never saw, with a man who remembers the friends he never saw it with. And as the Admiral and his wife watch, something amazing happens.

The conversations begin to converge!

Like water vapor crystallizing into the magnificent, unique form of a snowflake, the babble of voices coalesces into a single conversation.

"Look over there! He fell off that wall when he was—"

"—six! Yes—I remember!"

"He had to wear a wrist brace for months."

"The wrist still hurts when it rains."

"He shouldn't have climbed the wall."

"I had to—I was being chased by a bull."

"I was so scared!"

"The flowers in that field—do you smell them?"

"They remind me of that one summer—"

"—when my asthma wasn't so bad—"

"—and I felt like I could do anything."

"Anything!"

"And the world was just waiting for me!"

The Admiral grips his wife's arm. Neither can hold back their tears—not tears of sorrow but of awe. If the rest of his heart were to stop now, in this moment, the Admiral would die more content than any man on Earth.

He looks at the crowd and says weakly, "H-Harlan?"

Every eye in the garden turns toward him. A man raises his hand to his throat, touching it gently, and says in a voice that is most definitely Harlan Dunfee's, just a bit older, "Dad?"

The Admiral is so overwhelmed by emotion he cannot speak, and so his wife looks at the man before her, at the people beside her, at the crowd all around her, and she says:

"Welcome home."

* * *

Six hundred miles away, in the airplane graveyard, a girl plays a grand piano sheltered beneath the wing of a battered jet that was once Air Force One. She plays with a rare sort of joy in defiance of her wheelchair, and her sonata lifts the spirits of all the new arrivals. She smiles at them as they go by and continues to play, making it clear that this furnace of a place, full of planes that cannot fly, is more than it seems. It is a womb of redemption for every Unwind, and for all those who fought the Heartland War and lost—which was everybody.

Connor lets Risa's music fill him as he watches the new arrivals being greeted by the thousands of kids already here. The sun has begun to set, taking the edge off the heat, and the rows of jets at this time of day create pleasing patterns of shadow on the hard earth. Connor has to smile. Even a place as harsh as this can be beautiful in a certain light.

Connor takes it all in—the music, the voices, the desert, and the sky. He has his work cut out for him, changing the world and all, but things are already in motion; all he has to do is keep up the momentum. And he doesn't have to do it alone. He has Risa, Hayden, and every Unwind here. Connor takes a deep breath and releases it along with his tension. At last, he allows himself the wonderful luxury of hope.

Acknowledgments

When it comes to a novel, the sum of the parts are sometimes greater than the whole. This book could not have been possible without my editor, David Gale, who challenged me to make this book the best it could be. In fact, I owe a debt of gratitude to everyone at Simon & Schuster, not just for their support of this book, but for being so supportive of all my work.