Charles Cavenaugh Jr. meets Lev personally at the entrance of the crumbling mansion. He’s dressed like he’s too rich to worry about how he’s dressed. Even with the Cavenaugh family fortune long gone, Lev figures there must be enough residual wealth to keep at least his generation living elite.
Or, he still moves in rich circles to get information or because it’d be suspicious to suddenly act otherwise – the fact his mansion started out as the headquarters of one side of the war should mean he’s under at least moderate scrutiny. And he’s obviously not pouring tons of money into his outfit if he’s going with slobby chic.
But no, it’s adults doing a thing, they must be hypocritical or stupid or greedy or maybe all at once.
Also haha Lev thinking “family fortune” and “industry” have any connection these days.
The only thing that betrays his allegiance to the resistance is his thinning hair. Nowadays the rich don’t have thinning hair. If they do, they just replace it with someone else’s.
We know last book the kids were baffled by the admiral’s decrepit looks, not specifically confused because they thought he was rich. Cosmetic stuff likely isn’t too pricy, or it is but men are willing to pony up the money anyway.
“Lev, it’s an honor to meet you!” He grasps Lev’s hand with both of his, shaking it firmly and maintaining a steady eye contact that Lev finds awkward.
He’s friendly! That’s a sign he’s evil. Him not being friendly would also have been a sign he was evil. Point is, don’t make waves and just shut up and stop trying to fix anything.
The mansion looks like crap but they’ve fixed up one wing.
It’s camouflage for anyone who tries to look too closely.”
Lev can’t imagine anyone looking too closely. The place is on seventy-five fenced-in acres, in the middle of a weedy field that was once a lawn, which is surrounded on all sides by dense woods. The only way to even see the mansion would be from above.
Okay, now we can be reasonably certain America still has satellites because they’ve got super cellphone tracking and tower tracking is extremely unreliable. That means part of their internet censorship campaign was to wipe things like Google Earth and now kids like Lev don’t even realize this is possible.
Perhaps the only reason the kids in the Graveyard know to stay out of sight is because the guy in charge predates this change and knows you can use satellite imagining to look down any time.
(…come to think of it, it’s odd we don’t have drone surveillance, which could track every single person. What else are they doing that was bad enough they were willing to cripple their ability to protect our freedoms hunt these sacks of delicious organs? I mean the only other reason I can think of is the cop’s union complained that drones shooting the kids was removing employment, and haha like future people will still know what a labor union even is.)
In the restored area is a giant painting of Lev glowing like an angel with flowers and notes cluttering below like it’s a shrine to a saint.
“These things spontaneously began to appear after we put up the portrait,” Cavenaugh explains. “We didn’t expect it, but maybe we should have.”
This doesn’t actually make sense given where would they be getting the flowers given they have to stay out of sight, but I don’t think this book is convoluted enough to have this be a lie and secretly he smuggled this stuff in just so people would have something to throw at Saint Lev’s painted feet.
And by people, I mean kids, and by kids, I mean remember ages ago how Miracolina and whatshisface got kidnapped on their way to their holy hacking apart?
“Ex-tithes, actually. Rescued before their arrival at their respective harvest camps.”
Then something clicks, and it dawns on Lev how this is possible. “Parts pirates—the ones who target tithes!”
“Oh, there are certainly parts pirates,” Cavenaugh says, “but to the best of my knowledge, none of them have taken any tithes. It’s a good cover story, though. Keeps the Juvenile Authority barking up the wrong tree.”
The idea that tithes are being rescued rather than sold on the black market is something that has never occurred to Lev.
Tithe organs go for a premium. Parts pirates are in it for the money. Therefore they don’t go for the most high-yield items because…………………….
Now, if we hadn’t had Nelson meet…Devan, I think, and how he couldn’t even meet on American soil because we hate him so much, then we could take this to mean that actually the reason the government seems unable to deal with the pirates is that it’s running them. They’re a great way of drumming up fear and scarcity. But parents of tithes aren’t just going to be annoyed that there’s theft going on somewhere in the system so they have to wait another month for a scalp, they’re going to be livid that their precious lamb offering was yoinked away from the butchershop they lovingly chose in to be brutalized by some criminal instead. And we know they are rich as fuck, so their rage counts triple.
Perhaps what’s really going on is that the organ thieves may be an annoyance the government wants gone, but the government has lots of other things to do and just taking runaways keeps you low priority. So, if known organ brokers show up on US soil, we’ll totally arrest them, but we’re not going to bother asking Canada to arrest the guy while he hangs out there. They don’t need official orders to know not to take anyone people will really get mad about.
So, the question then becomes, does the government think this is just some particularly brave/stupid new group? Or are they suspicious and just saying it’s regular theft so the group doesn’t realize that they are not, in fact, barking up the wrong tree?
We know the government lets the pile of unwinds hang out in the desert. Maybe right now it serves their purpose to fan the flames, and then once people are scared and angry enough, they’ll swoop in and bust the place.
I wonder what’d be better – that the anti-division group is now forcing children not to be unwound against their wishes, or to kill the kids and say that how secretly, the organization was just a scam to get the best organs for the elite, sorry we couldn’t rescue your precious tithes before these monsters tore them apart. Oh, show a pile of discarded organ, maybe one intact kid in the pile with a bullet through the head because no one wanted him at all.
The kids gush at Lev for a bit.
“So . . . you were all tithes?”
“Yes,” says a girl in bright green, “until we were rescued. We know how wrong tithing is now.”
“Yeah,” says another. “We learned to see the way you see!”
Lev finds himself giddy and caught up in their adoration.
In fairness, maybe at fourteen you don’t recognize it when people sound brainwashed.
So yeah, evil. Adults are in charge so of course it’s evil.
“That’s enough for now,” he tells them. “But you’ll all get your chance to have a personal audience with Lev.”
“Audience?” Lev says, chuckling at the thought. “Who am I, the pope?” But no one else is laughing—and it occurs to him that his inside joke with Pastor Dan has actually become a reality. All these kids are Leviathan.
See, if you actually were in a Catholic denomination you’d be able to recognize you don’t need to be pope of a whole new religion, you can just be a saint within the existing framework.
They’ve got 64 kids. The cars are large, but I don’t think they jam the kids in either. We know Miracolina’s car was emptier than usual, so let’s just assume the upper limit is eight. In that case, they’ve ambushed at least nine (if every car but Miracolina’s was about full) and less than thirty-two (unless they always attack cars with almost no kids in them).
Either way, you’d expect that people would have reacted by the second time and definitely by the third.
It gives Lev a hope he hasn’t felt since the passage of the Cap-17 law, which turned out to be as many steps backward as it was forward.
Just in case you forgot, LIE DOWN AND DIE BECAUSE NOTHING YOU DO WILL FIX ANYTHING.
How can he live up to all this buildup? Should he even try?
“Don’t you think it’s kind of . . . overkill?” he asks Cavenaugh.
“We’ve come to realize that by pulling these kids from their tithing, we’ve removed from them the focus of their lives; the one immutable thing they believed in. We needed to fill that space, at least temporarily. You were the natural candidate.”
So basically, he realizes this looks like brainwashing but he’s only registering the part where he’s uncomfortable to be the new object of worship.
I’d like to point out here that they could absolutely have used Lev for this purpose without going creepy brainwashing about it – for example, pointing out the good Lev accomplished by not being dead – and the author is obviously trying to pump up the creepy here as much as he can instead of having an actual discussion.
Anyway, Lev decides it’s totally worth it because he’s sick of people thinking he’s bad so sure, worship him instead.
Lev listens to their life stories and tries to give advice, much the same way he did for the incarcerated “divisional risk” kids he used to visit on Sundays with Pastor Dan. For these kids, though, no matter what Lev says, they take it as divinely inspired. He could say the sky is pink, and they would find some mystical, symbolic meaning to it.
“All they want is validation,” Cavenaugh tells him, “and validation from you is the greatest gift they could hope for.”
But see, that really is what’s going on, and you’d think the time he spent with troubled kids – the time he draws a direct parallel to – would have taught him that yeah, sometimes kids just want to be told they’re okay.
These kids were brought up being told that their purpose in life was to die. They may have been aware some adults didn’t approve, or, given it’s mostly a rich thing and it’s clear they’re better at setting up the echo chambers, maybe not even that. A few adults they’ve never met and don’t know telling them it’s okay to not kill themselves for other people is going to be hard to fully accept. What if those adults are just wrong and don’t understand how good tithing is? But Lev was brought up with it. If he was able to see his life could have value intact, then he can look at them now and tell them if they have value as they are.
I mean, look at what he told that other kid – don’t keep doing this because I care about you not being unwound. Don’t do it because I, after you told me your life story, still think you have value, still care what happens to you, still don’t want you dead.
He’s encouraged by Cavenaugh and the staff to write his memoirs, which feels like an absurd request of a fourteen-year-old, but they’re completely serious.
I’m not sure if this is meant to be part of them being incompetent or if the author doesn’t think it’d be obvious to them that they should hire someone to do the interviewing and typing of his definitely personally written autobiography.
Honestly, it’d be a good idea. We know that as shiny as they make the harvest facilities they also don’t seem to want anyone else to see them. Just talking about what went down in the camp and publishing that would be quite powerful. And while they don’t know it, he’s also got the story of the ghost unwind and the story of the magical healing leprechaun getting cut up by someone who can only do this so easily because there’s an organ market in the first place. And how THE ARKON AWOL!!!! was the one who saved him and then saved the baby and then shared the story of the other, deader baby. I’d say he could talk about Risa, but no one cares about her.
Really, this is like if only one person had ever escaped slavery. It’s actually a really good idea to get some memoirs out of him.
Instead Lev slowly freaks out under the weight of expectations while continuing to not quite get that brainwashing the kids to have those expectations is a problem of its own.
Anyway, they then go steal some new kids.
They’re fresh off the hijacked van, and all they know is that they’ve been kidnapped and tranq’d. They do not yet know by whom.
“It would be our wish,” Cavenaugh tells him, “that you be the first thing they see upon their unveiling.”
“Why? So they can imprint on me like ducklings?”
“This is my objection and not the part where you’re deliberately keeping them terrified as a prank.”
They’ve been tied to chairs and blindfolded, making it clear what Cavenaugh means by “unveiling.” The man is way too theatrical.
“I continue to fail at empathy.”
The boy sobs, and the girl tries to calm him. “It’s all right, Timothy,” she says. “Whatever ’s going on, it’s going to be okay.”
Lev sits across from them, feeling awkward and frightened by their fear. He knows he needs to put forth confidence and comfort, but facing a pair of terrified kidnap victims is different from facing adoring ex-tithes.
“Yep just gonna keep failing.”
But yes, Miracolina is back! Oh Miracolina, how I have missed you and your actually having a personality and how also you aren’t awful. You were always the best one and the other two have just got worse and worse as time progressed. It may just be that the author doesn’t care enough about you to bother getting to you again until now so there was no time to mess you up, but I don’t care why, you’re so incredibly adequate as a character!
Cavenaugh is not present, but two adults in his employ stand at the ready. Lev swallows and tries to keep his hands from shaking by gripping the arms of his chair. “Okay, you can take off their blindfolds.”
The boy’s eyes are red from crying. The girl is already looking around, surveying the situation.
“I’m really sorry we had to do it this way,” Lev says. “We couldn’t risk you getting hurt, or figuring out where you were being taken. It was the only way to safely rescue you.”
Lev – best liar or bestest liar?
Miracolina is Not Pleased With These Shenanigans. Lev is all oh nooooo she’s not just gushing at him life is soooo hard…
The other kid, Timothy, is a lot more okay with it, so he gets ignored.
Lev forces eye contact again. She knows who he is, but she hates him. Despises him even. He’s seen that look before, but it surprises him to see it here.
“Maybe you didn’t hear me,” Lev says, getting a little bit angry. “We just saved you.”
“By whose definition of ‘save’?”
Could you fanwank that Lev apparently having no clear memory of his pre-saint self as yet another side effect from the clapperjuice (for all your random needs!)? Yeah, sure, but it’d be a bad answer because having Lev sit here baffled by the fact she’s acting just like him last book is boring and frustrating.
You can always make an explanation for why something is going the boring way, it doesn’t change that it’s boring and make it any less of a mistake.
There is something about Miracolina’s behavior that feels disturbingly familiar. He tries to think back to when Connor pulled him from his limo on his own tithing day. Was he that belligerent? That uncooperative? There is so much from that day that he’s blocked out. At what point did he begin to realize that Connor wasn’t the enemy?
“Sometime after I called the cops to get him killed, obviously, but when exactly.”
He will win her over. He has to. All the ex-tithes have been turned eventually. Un-brainwashed. Deprogrammed.
But what if this girl is the exception? What then? Suddenly this whole rescue operation, which had felt like a grand and glorious idea, feels very small. And very personal.
Yes, it’s not that she might be right or a sign lots of people feel this way, it’s just he’ll throw a tantrum and quit if an exception even exists.
And of course he should panic and assume she can’t be convinced after drawing direct parallels to how he felt before he was convinced. QUALITY TENSION HERE, FOLKS.