Last time, Connor 2: Connor, but nicer, mixed race, adopted, and willing to fight back to protect himself and others, so evil incarnate.

Miracolina is Lev 2 and like Connor 2, better engages the basic premise and world, but like Connor 2, the world is still Unwind and it’s all still terrible. She’s a happy tithe.

A stretching of her spirit among the dozens of people touched by her divided body. There are people who say it’s death, but she believes it to be something else—something mystical, and she believes it with every ounce of her soul.

Of course, in this universe no one at all says it’s death as even the kids running away from unwinding debated unwinding vs death last book. For that matter, even I have to admit that in this universe with its bullshit “muscle memory” it’s true that somehow your personality actually does get parceled out and moreover if you can collect all the people who got your pieces and get them in one place somehow a gestalt entity forms where your ears hearing someone say your name makes your throat respond.

But if we just pretend the whole last book never happened and this is our first encounter with the setting, this sounds really nice. Christianity already has the concept of martyrs, eternal souls, and salvation through eating holiness. It’s bizarre as actual church doctrine but not as a individual belief. And in this setting, the Catholic church actually turns out to have no position at all on it, which at first glance makes sense given the church has moved away from making pronouncements all the time but less sense given that that as far as we know the whole murdering kids thing is unique to the US so unless we’ve taken over the Vatican, I think there’d be an opinion there that HOLY SHIT WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS NO NO STOP followed by JESUS FUCKING CHRIST I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU’RE ASKING IF MURDERING CHILDREN SO YOU CAN USE THEIR ORGANS IS OKAY ALL OF AMERICA IS EXCOMMUNICATED I MEAN WHAT THE FUCK EVEN. Or whatever the Latin for that would be.

…Actually, it is possible that we responded to that by just declaring our own pope and calling it a day.

It always made her bristle when he called tithing unwinding, as if they were the same thing. They’re not. The way she sees it, the cursed and unwanted are unwound—but the blessed and the loved are tithed. The process might be the same, but the intent is different, and in this world, intent is everything.

This, meanwhile, works as long as we avoid getting into the idea of how good children impart their goodness through tithing but somehow bad children’s badness vanishes. In terms of what happens to her eternal soul, doing a good thing on purpose vs being dragged kicking and screaming is totally different. It’s about her relationship with God more than anything.

Her backstory then screws up. See, she’s one of those babies where the older kid was sick and they needed a donor.

The family had moved from Rome to Chicago for his treatment, but even with harvest banks all over the nation, a marrow match could not be found for his rare blood type.

I feel like if there’s no matches AND the magic science that allows you to slap on brand new anything into anyone without organ rejection being the slightest concern can’t handle it either, maybe that’s God saying that no seriously, he demands this kid die.

I mean, let’s think here, this place is able to do spinal transplants. Even if somehow you couldn’t mix bone marrow and his existing flesh, you could just plop his brain into a brand-new body. If God hates this kid so much he’s fiating nothing at all works, why are you risking his wrath? Stop struggling before God breaks reality vetoing things.

(Another plot hole is the part where the baby transplant thing is totally legal already, so they didn’t need to stay in Unwind America and could’ve moved back to Rome. But then, there’s the fact that Rome’s ranked second in the world for health care while we know America still makes you pay for everything and we were explicitly told doctors only know how to solve problems with transplants, so I’m assuming we’re not even at 50th place any longer and I don’t see why anyone would come over here for care. Call to see if there was a match, sure, but hanging out while you wait seems like a great way to accidentally kill your kid, because no one actually knows how to treat anyone.)

Anyway, they needed a baby and they were so desperate they promised God they’d tithe her if it worked, despite the fact it was pretty damn obvious it’d work what with this being an established medical procedure even in our primitive modern times and so not the point where bargaining so this only makes sense if I’m totally right that it was just God demanding a dead kid.

I guess this is sort of like what I keep talking about in WWZ, is it that the characters are just supposed to be stupid or what? I think the problem is that the author feels so smart for knowing that transplant babies are even a thing it doesn’t occur to him that the fact he heard about it in passing means it’s already a relatively established medical concept, and so he writes the characters being all omg wow what is this even miracle????

They had to get ten embryos (because she’s Lev 2 and the author thinks he was so clever about having Lev be the tenth kid that he forgot that it at least made sense that a religious family would choose to tithe their tenth kid while it’s sheer coincidence about the embryos) and The law was very specific when it came to the other nine embryos. Her family had to pay nine women to carry them to term. After that, the surrogates could do as they pleased—either raise the babies or stork them to a good home.

Apparently abandoning them directly to the state isn’t an option. Also, wonderful illustration of how the prolife lobby doesn’t care about actual babies, just embryos. Again, one is left to wonder if any of this is a deliberate choice or author stupidity.

And again: they could’ve just moved back to Rome where this bullshit isn’t going on. Pretty sure plane tickets are cheaper than paying nine women to have a kid. Also, don’t they have free health care in Rome?

Now, as her tithing approaches, it comforts Miracolina to know that she has nine fraternal twins out there—and who knows? Maybe a part of her divided self will go to help one of these unknown twins.

What if they’re all getting unwound too, though?

Come to think of it, what happens if someone does this but wants to tithe all the other kids instead? I mean, only one of the kids has value to you, so it’d make sense to give the rest to God instead.

Anyway, turns out her parents really regret the whole promise, so I guess that maybe her brother was the kind of sick where the baby doesn’t sleep and so they were pretty out of their minds at the point they made the decision, but at the same time it seems to have taken them more than five minutes to realize that, so they’re still rather awful – or maybe super religious? I mean, if you really believe that this is a bargain with God, even if you realize it’s a bad idea immediately afterward you might try to force yourself to go along with it.

But you’d think the actual pope in Rome’s speech on how disgusting America was because for god’s sake there’s a whole bible story on the part where God does not want human sacrifice wtf how do you guys not get this tithing isn’t just murder it’s blasphemy and also I am the pope telling you this right now what do you not get would’ve eased their conscious enough.

Miracolina always felt blessed to be a tithe—to know, without question, her destiny and her purpose. Why should her parents feel sorry for giving her a purpose?

And you can see this happening as a result too – kids can get scary into religion, and a twelve year old isn’t exactly going to make balanced decisions.

Perhaps the guilt they feel is for not throwing her a big party—but then, that had been her own choice.

This just makes her sound crazy, though – that’s the level of logic you’d expect of a five year old, not someone a year shy of teenagerhood.

We’re told that While most tithes come from rich communities, and belong to the kinds of churches that expect tithing, theirs is a working-class neighborhood that’s not exactly tithefriendly. When you’re like those rich families, surrounding yourself with like-minded people, there are plenty of friends to support you at a tithing party—enough to offset the guests who find it uncomfortable.

So – why? The thing is, wealthy families generally coddle their offspring. It’s human nature. Like the rest of humanity, they only do weird stuff if there’s some sort of additional factor pushing them into it. Inherited wealth mixed with resource scarcity can result in a lot of backstabbing to thin your competition, for example.

Lev’s family doing it made reasonable sense if we assume that they’re wealthy AND members of a church that says to do it, and it was the churchness that was the primary factor. But now we’re learning that the richer your community the more you’re okay sacrificing the occasional kid.

Now, why do people usually sacrifice kids? Because they can’t provide for the kid and because they’re desperately courting real or imaginary favor to improve their own lot. A world without birth control where even abstinance won’t prevent a baby showing up on your doorstep? You could see how poorer communities might be having trouble, and you can see how telling them their kid will go on to have such a great if divided life would be incentive. You may not have the funds to pay for Jimmy to become a doctor, but now maybe his left nut can be some other doctor’s left nut! And also, God will shower you with money to make your life and your other children’s lives better. I’d expect tithing storked babies to be a semi-established practice by now – God gave you this kid, you do your duty by raising them up, then you send it back to God before you have to pay for college.

Even assuming the wealthy are getting babybombed by all the terrible unwed mothers who just won’t accept responsibility, so there’s greater strain on them, raising a kid from 0-12 is a huge resource investment already. Also, we established first chapter last book that motion sensors hooked up to lights are a normal thing and we know that you can absolutely call backsies if you see the woman, so if the wealthy were getting more kids than they wanted, it’s pretty easy to take precautions. And just as the wealthy in our world can throw money at their churches rather than do any actual works, so too should the wealthy in this world not need to worry about the actual sacrifice of tithing when they could just throw another wad of hundreds at the pastor.

So what else is going on?

My best guess would be that there’s a coincidental overlap – if the extreme right and the extremely wealthy have a lot of overlap in this world, which does fit the idea they set up unwinding in the first place, it could be that the wealthy happened to belong to a branch of madness that said tithing was required. There are a couple child abuse cults floating around in broader Christianity. If there’s enough demographic overlap with “the rich” as a broader class, you could get a similar effect.

So, my guess:

Putting up gates and motion sensors is considered embarrassing and something poor people do, because it makes it look like you can’t afford another kid. People still generally try to catch anyone about to dump a baby on them, but it has to be deniable, and as a result, the wealthy are getting more storked babies than normal. Given how many children Lev’s family had, it seems at least some of them are deliberately trying to flaunt their wealth with as many kids as possible – I’d say it seems like it’s short of the actual Quiverfull movement, as in any normal book Lev would’ve noted his mom spent all her time laid up having babies if that was so, but this is not a book that gives a shit about women dying in childbirth and believes any woman can run around right after dumping their baby on strangers.

At the same time, we’ve seen a lot of signs of the economy being weird. There’s no mention of people being unemployed, but there’s also little mention of jobs and what jobs there are appear to be ones that can’t be outsourced – we have truckers, teachers, mall food vendoers, the guy who fixes the automated sewer pump once in a blue moon, harvest camp workers and surgeons, and so very many pawn shop workers. Everyone seems to be on a 1950s perfect scedule, where the only ones up and about in the early morning are those terrible responsibility-shirking unwed mothers.

Oh! Also there’s those jobs they’re hiring the kids from the graveyard, which were all unskilled labor with a side of maybe this is going to get you raped. Logger, maid. All stuff where you need a human being and not a robot.

So my guess is that the economy doesn’t look so good but, to prevent more social unrest, there’s some sort of dole. Only this is a world where the right wing is in charge and they hate that, so probably they compromised on requiring people to take makework jobs to get that money and keep the economy flowing, which is why there appears to be full employment and only runaway under-eighteens are homeless. Honestly, could be worse.

The extremely wealthy, however, are unable to actually make money because the rest of the economy is barely limping along and there’s nothing left to divert upward, and history tells us that this makes the rich eat their young. They know what they are compared to the poorer classes, and the idea of moving down a step fills them with terror.

So they tithe. Not all of them and not all the time. But the more pious one is about taking in storks, the more one continues to be pious in regifting that to the church. And since tithing is decided at the start, then you know which kid you should give the private math tutor and the piano lessons and which kid to let wander cheaply about without responsibilities – but it’s not like you’re playing favorites, the tithe simply will never need to worry about all those hard responsibilities the others will. And really, it’s making sure all of them will get a good life, in one form or another.

Of course, it all falls apart when we’re told that tithing happens across multiple religions as if the only common factor is wealth. I hate the wealthy as much as anyone but making them the tithing class just doesn’t make sense.

Her mom even prepares her favorite meal, rigatoni Amatriciana. “Bold and spicy,” her mom says, “just like you.”

Yeah, that sure is a thing that a character just said.

What’s particularly bad is that we’ve just spent ages on her character and it isn’t even the stereotypical spicy Latina and yet her name is Miracolina and she comes from Europe and so it doesn’t matter what her personality is, she’s bold and spicy because racism. If she was a dark kid with this personality, she’d presumably be uppity.

At school, she sits through classes, already feeling a dreamy distance from it all. At the end of each class, the teacher awkwardly hands her all her collected classwork and grades, calculated early.

This is one of the many weirdnesses of how the author has unwinding be everything and nothing. Did she work hard at school because she wanted to be better braingoo for her recipients? Did she do her work simply because it was expected and she wanted to be a good child for God, but never fussed about the details? Did she not bother much with studying because she knew it’d never matter and praying was more important?

Her science teacher is the kindest, though, taking some extra time with her.
“My nephew was tithed a few years ago,” he tells her. “A wonderful boy. I miss him terribly.” He pauses, seeming to go far away in his thoughts. “I was told his heart went to a firefighter who saved a dozen people from a burning building. I don’t know if it’s true, but I’d like to believe it is.”

So either this guy is the black sheep of the upper class or tithing is just less likely among the nonrich rather than extremely rare.

Also, it’s interesting that the teacher is explicitly told what happened to the kid’s heart and doesn’t believe it. Maybe, as a science teacher, he’s run the math and noticed that there are way too many organs going in for the number coming out as transplants, or maybe, as a science teacher, he’s heard too many parents saying their child’s heart went to a fireman.

In 2013, a study found 1,140,750 total firefighters, of whom two-thirds were volunteer. Meanwhile, there were more than 315 million total people in America. So, one firefigher per 280 people, about. Career firefighters, those most likely to be getting into a situation like that, are one in 900 people.

Firefighter is one of those iconic jobs everyone knows and is generally considered “heroic” and a career asperation in kindergarten, but which rarely intersects with actual life. And similarly, the heart is easily the most iconic organ for transplant. Even if you haven’t heard everyone else having stories like this, you should be a little suspicious. And he probably has heard a lot of these.

Miracolina would like to believe it too.

This is just weird, though – the teacher isn’t saying that he heard of a firefighter who got a heart and likes to think it was his nephew’s. He’s saying someone told him that, but for unspoken reasons, he finds it unlikely enough that he only believes it because he desperately wants to. And she seems to understand the subtext or else she wouldn’t be saying she “would like” to believe it but that she did.

So she accepts that whatever did happen to the kid could’ve been something different, and that different thing worse enough that the people in charge would lie about it, and she doesn’t think at all about what that could mean.

That’s really this whole series in a nutshell – any time you try to think about something, you come up short. It’s incredibly difficult to extrapolate anything because there’s nothing really here. It’s just a pile of hate. The author doesn’t like unwinding, so he treats it with the same dismissive contempt that made him think the prochoice movement would demand dead children in the first place, and the mere fact this is the center of his story isn’t enough for him to bother figuring out how it works. Instead, it’s just that so yeah, the dead kids aren’t going anywhere important, thought finished we’re done no one needs to actually think about what that means.

The only thing the book is consistent about is pandering to kids, so having discussed how her terrible parents decided to murder her for stupid reasons then cowardly cried about it a whole bunch, we get yet more awkward bullying.

See, most of the kids are saying goodbye.

Some even give her uncomfortable hugs, but the rest say their farewells from a safe distance, as if tithing is somehow contagious.

Or as if it’s just creepy to touch someone who’s committing suicide, but okay sure.

And then there are the other ones. The cruel ones.
“See you here and there,” a boy says behind her back during lunch, and the kids around him snicker. Miracolina turns, and the boy tries to hide behind his gaggle of friends

What friends?

Look, kids are cruel but generally you don’t make fun of kids who are about to die, let alone out loud to their face in front of everyone else. How does he even have enough social standing left that anyone would let him hide behind (risking someone thinking they were the one who said it, even) rather than parting before her gaze like the Red Sea?

I really don’t think I went to a particularly nice middle school but making fun of the dying was still not on the table.

But then, that’s probably the point, it’s a form of bullying even the worst bullies can feel superior about.

There’s nothing here about the actual reactions kids might have, like telling her they’ll miss her or someone saying she should run away, because they’re not kids and none of this is an actual world, it’s just all the things the author feels superior about and if the result of throwing that all together is a world whose nonsense serves only to refute the idea any of this could ever be real, well…thinking about that would get in the way of backpatting over how he realizes bullying is wrong and killing teens is wrong and so is the greatest ever.

Therefore:

“Oh, you won’t see me, Zach Rasmussen . . . but if any part of me sees you, I will definitely let you know.”
Zach’s face goes a little green. “Get lost,” he says. “Go get tithed.” But still there’s that look of uneasy fear beneath his idiotic bravado.
Good, thinks Miracolina, I hope I’ve given him a few nightmares.

It’s just witty lines to put the bully in his place. At least it’s an actual retort and not nice socks.

The final disappointment is that Miracolina doesn’t think to feel bad about using the tithing she thinks is so perfect to scare him. She’s supposed to be a delusional koolaid drinker who believes she’s about to kill herself to help so many other people, but she’s pretty much an ordinary kid who just says she’s fine with it rather than seeing how that would warp her every interaction. It’s the same as how we’re told nothing about her actual grades.

Nothing adds up to anything. It’s just a crappy morality play.