So, last time I said that the Connor and Risa stories seemed to be separate? I forgot that’s how pretty much everything this book works, and now we’re into a Lev and Miracolina stretch. Either the author doesn’t grasp how to move around between stories or he thinks his audience is too stupid to follow it.

Be aware that separate does not, in this case, mean different. Lev and Cam, Risa and Miracolina…it’s all the same.

We’re on the sixth part, though, which means the end is in sight! Today’s quote is a google search.

Google search: “Feral teenagers.” About 12,100 results (0.12 seconds)
Global Faultlines | World Politics, Political Economy, Contemporary . . . “Nihilistic and feral teenagers” the Daily Mail called
them: the crazy youths from all walks of life who raced around the streets mindlessly and . . .
The Black Flag Cafe© • View topic – feral teenagers attack . . . 3 posts – 2 authors – Last post: Jul 7, 2007—feral teenagers
attack once more…….. » Fri Jul 06, 2007 10:31 pm. WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. – Two teenagers were accused of . . .
Feral007’s Blog—Random rants about feral teenagers » teenagers Random rants about feral teenagers. Day to day problems of
a single parent with teenagers! What to do?
Feral Teenagers Attack Strangers in Philadelphia Aug 18, 2011—The word “wilding” refers to gangs of teenagers assaulting strangers for fun and . . .
“Feral” teenagers beat man to death – News – Wigan Today Apr 4, 2007—Two “feral” teenagers who subjected a harmless and deeply vulnerable Wigan man to months of bullying before savagely . . .
Silver Spring, Singular: Coveting thy Neighbor’s Restaurants Jun 30, 2010—Bethesda has far fewer packs of feral teenagers, which makes the whole downtown experience over there vastly more pleasant . . .

Hm. Let’s do that google search ourselves! Here’s the first result I get, from the very Daily Mail referenced above:

Feral youths: How a generation of violent, illiterate young men are living outside the boundaries of civilised society

Hm. Fearmongering about how we need to kill all children?

Nine months ago, I started investigating why so many boys are turning into feared gang members and criminals.

During my travels across the country, I talked to more than 50 teenage boys from low-income families, as well as dozens of men in their 20s and 30s from the same background.

I sat in on lessons in school, talked to teachers and encouraged youth-club leaders, school inspectors and charities to reveal the real reasons why so many young men are going to waste.

Tuggy Tug’s chances of having a decent childhood, it became clear, had been weighted against him from the start. As a black boy from a low-income Caribbean background, he belongs to one of the two categories most likely to fail at school and least likely to break out of poverty.

White boys from low-income families perform worst: 63 per cent are unable to read and write properly at 14 (compared with 43 per cent of white girls from a similar background).

Black working- class boys do not do much better: at age 14, 54 per cent cannot read or write properly.

The scale of the crisis in our education system is going unrecognised – but we ignore it at our peril.

They’re using feral to mean, well, feral – kids who are being failed and ignored by the society and left to run around on their own.

Of course, this is a UK publication. Let’s try to find the links themselves.

Google search: “Feral teenagers.” About 12,100 results (0.12 seconds)
Global Faultlines | World Politics, Political Economy, Contemporary . . . “Nihilistic and feral teenagers” the Daily Mail called them: the crazy youths from all walks of life who raced around the streets mindlessly and . . .

UK article.

But the problem is that we live in a society where capitalism itself has become rampantly feral. Feral politicians cheat on their expenses, feral bankers plunder the public purse for all its worth, CEOs, hedge fund operators and private equity geniuses loot the world of wealth, telephone and credit card companies load mysterious charges on everyone s bills, shopkeepers price gouge, and, at the drop of a hat swindlers and scam artists get to practice three-card monte right up into the highest echelons of the corporate and political world.

The Black Flag Cafe© • View topic – feral teenagers attack . . .

The less horrifying bit of this is, The two were being held without bail Friday on suspicion of armed sexual battery by multiple perpetrators, sexual performance by a child, armed home invasion and aggravated battery. Both were arrested this week, but formal charges had not been filed.

“Feral” doesn’t seem like a particularly harsh term under the circumstances. It’s rather a bit nicer than “irredeemable monsters” and has the connotation that there’s more to this than just teenagers being inherently evil.

Admittedly, it’s a conservative forum with a gun subsection, so they’re obviously in favor of shooting everyone involved, but that’s just America, it really doesn’t matter what’s going on somebody will be in favor of shooting everyone involved.

Feral007’s Blog—Random rants about feral teenagers » teenagers Random rants about feral teenagers. Day to day problems of a single parent with teenagers! What to do?

This is a) not American and b) clearly a fond use of the term “feral”.

Feral Teenagers Attack Strangers in Philadelphia Aug 18, 2011

Attempting to google this finds that he appears to have edited the title – both copies of the article I can find, one of which looks like it’s specifically the one he saw then, is Feral Black Teens Attack Strangers in Philadelphia. Trying to search for the exact title he gives actually produces no results but his book. I’m assuming this happened because “America continues the whole black people attacking our precious white women” is actually not really related in the least to what he’s claiming his point is.

“Feral” teenagers beat man to death – News – Wigan Today Apr 4, 2007

Here we have an article that is both not American AND actually describing some pretty horrible violence from those kids, so again, feral seems like a comparatively nice term. Here, we call them thugs.

Silver Spring, Singular: Coveting thy Neighbor’s Restaurants Jun 30, 2010—Bethesda has far fewer packs of feral teenagers, which makes the whole downtown experience over there vastly more pleasant . . . is a comment on the page and not even an actual part of the article, but hey, at least this is relevant to the American attitude toward teenagers.

So in conclusion, this all sounds sinister as fuck coming after the book’s own claims that the word gets applied to innocent kids, but in practice is getting used mostly out of the country and when not used to outright criticize the idea of demonizing kids is in response to incredible sadism.

Anyway, on to Lev who really has no connection to this issue at all.

Lev gets a bucket of water to the face and finds he’s tied to a bed. He’s not happy about it, but his supposedly weakened constitution doesn’t seem to have any trouble handling anything.

“You know, I’ve been staking out the Cavenaugh mansion for days. Just had a hunch. See, everything pointed to a major safe house in the area, but no one could nail down the location. But the Cavenaugh estate—there’s that guard gate made to look abandoned that’s not abandoned at all. And all those state-of-the art surveillance cameras in the trees that border the property. I didn’t know the resistance had that kind of money!”

I did kind of know the resistance was that stupid, though.

It’s not clear why he was even over there, though – he’s tagging regular runaways, while the mansion kids are ones swiped right out of the cars, so none of his kids should’ve led in that direction.

He then guesses that Lev and Miracolina were trying to get there rather than realizing how suspicious it is that they were asking for a ride further away.

Lev says he really has nothing to do with Nelson’s grudge against Connor.

“Actually,” says Nelson, “it is your fault. If you weren’t being used as a human shield, none of us would be here today.”
Lev realizes how true that is. Had he not inadvertently taken Nelson’s bullet meant for Connor, then both of them would have been unwound on schedule.

I am not sure why Lev is the same exact flavor of crazy as Nelson, but evidently he is.

Nelson, who’s been playing with his gun, now explains that what he’s been doing is setting up for Russian roulette, or at leasst a modified, extra stupid version.

My clip is loaded with five tranq bullets and one nickel-plated lead shell with an explosive tip.

Lev points out the obvious:“This game could last for days if I keep going unconscious.”

To which Nelson replies, “Or it could be over very quickly.” completely ignoring that the core issue is just why did you modify this to make it waste as much of your time as possible?

The first question is if Connor’s alive. Lev promptly fucks up:

Lev suspected he might ask this, so he does his best to lie as honestly as he can. “I’ve heard the rumors too,” he says, “but I’m out of that loop. He was taken away, bloody and unconscious, from Happy Jack, and I was arrested. Beyond that, I have no idea.”

No, he was killed! You dumbass!

The official story of that day was the mangled dead body they pulled out was Connor. Lev didn’t see any authorities identify a still-breathing and merely unconscious body as Connor and take that away.

Lev can say he helped dig through the rubble but couldn’t find Connor. He can say he admits, he never saw the body – but anyone he couldn’t find would be deep in, at the center of the collapse and fire.

And come on, what rumors? The only reason Connor actually survived without anyone realizing who he was is because bullshit author fiat. We know that, because of different author fiat, Connor was a legendary figure, it’s obvious that’s all that’s behind it. Maybe Lev can tell this guy is unbalanced enough that he won’t accept Connor isn’t there for vengeance, but in that case, play on it – that he never found Connor, that maybe the guy got out in the confusion, but the kind of asshole who grabs a kid to use as a human shield is also the kind of asshole not to get back in contact with Lev or the resistance in general.

Really, anything is better than yeah, I totally saw him breathing can confirm he survived but uh nope don’t know anything else.

Nelson does the first slightly intelligent thing in all this and shoots Miracolina instead of Lev, so now he’ll stew over that. But it’s still pointlessly taking forever.

Hell, if we weren’t going on the fiction that tranq bullet are safe even if you replace every ounce of blood with them, you could play Russian roulette like this without any real bullet – how many times before her heart stops?

Instead he just leaves, because this is now one of those shitty scifi shows my dad won’t stop watching where everyone does everything as slow as possible to hide the fact the writers are out of ideas.

We then jump to Nelson’s POV. Explain what the fuck you think you’re doing, Nelson.

Well, he recaps where the tagged kids are going. Some don’t go far from the initial capture, which honestly suggests that some of the kids are dying without their bodies being found. Others get caught. One goes to Argentina but he thinks that was just a chunk. Why hasn’t Argentina just started unwinding their kids directly? Did America’s slow collapse free up the various South American places to unshittify?

There are two signals pinging from Arizona at the site of an old defunct air force base. This he finds the most curious. He heard talk of some sort of AWOL sanctuary in the Southwest when he was still with the Juvies, but details were sketchy

Yeah, nope. Two just shows that two kids met up. Three would mean something, as would the fact those two signals should’ve moved a significant distance in a single go at one point. Somewhat suspicious would be one of the ending up there, then the other some time later, since that’s the behavior you’d expect from a place kids are getting funneled.

The tranq bullets Nelson loaded in his pistol are the mildest kind, with the shortest half-life.

Why are you even using them?

When he returns about two hours later, he lingers outside the door, listening. The girl is awake but groggy, and Lev is all about apologizing for getting her involved in this. No talk of Connor or any potential AWOL hideouts.

OR you could’ve pretended to leave with them both still conscious, meaning they’d have had two hours to talk about Connor or potential AWOL hideouts! Plus Miracolina would’ve been awake to see the gun pointed at her and gotten terrorized as well, so she’d be more likely to beg Lev to tell the truth! WHY ARE YOU SO BAD AT THIS?!

Nelson’s next question is where Connor’s hiding. For some reason, Lev thinks saying he’d rather be shot than Miracolina is going to convince him not to shoot Miracolina, because Lev is also dumb.

Lev therefore tells him that he’ll talk and there’s a hideout in some caves that are also a popular tourist attraction a kid would know off the top of his head – and okay, Lev was under pressure here, but he also had two hours to think of a lie! Also, why is “Canada” not an option?

“Hmm,” says Nelson, considering it. “It’s on an Indian rez. I’ll bet stinking Slotmongers are always
giving sanctuary to AWOLs.”

Confirmation that this – which is to say, the very first word out of Lev’s mouth when he woke up to see where he was – is the worst of all available slurs for them.

Nelson then casually drops the fact he’s been tagging kids (remember this, it’s important for why Lev and Miracolina are idiots later) and says that there’s no signals from there. Lev, despite two hours only producing “uh tourist caves???”, is now capable of thinking so fast on his feet as to say that anyone to the west of there gets sent elsewhere, but he doesn’t know about it. Nelson says that sounds believable and leaves.

Lev begins thrashing around. The bed he’s tied to is really rusty, so he thrashes around, eventually breaks the metal of one bar and then scrapes the ziptie apart on the other one, bleeding horribly all the while. Miracolina, as a girl, just waits quietly with no idea what he’s doing. It’s sure a good thing filling his blood with a highly toxic substance didn’t make him weak or anything! Then he frees her while she continues to do nothing.

Let’s get out of here.” But the moment he puts weight on his right ankle, he grimaces and starts to limp.
“What is it?” Miracolina asks.
“I think I sprained my ankle kicking out the bars,” Lev tells her.
…
He tries putting weight on his ankle and grimaces again—so she continues to let him put his arm over her shoulder, and he gratefully accepts her assistance.
Then, when they’re a good distance away from the shack, he says, “I’m really going to need your help now. You have to help me warn my friend.”
She steps away from him, and he almost topples, but manages to keep his balance.
“I’ll do no such thing. Your friend is not my problem.”
“Please, look at me. I can barely walk—I can’t make it there on my own.”
“I’ll get you to a hospital.”
Lev shakes his head. “When I went to Cavenaugh, I broke the terms of my parole. If I get caught, I’ll get locked away for good.”
“Don’t blame me for that!”
“I just saved your life,” Lev reminds her. “Don’t repay me by destroying mine.”

Incidentally, Lev’s ankle is fine.

We go to Miracolina. We’re told that she’s not at all impulsive, Therefore, she is completely unprepared for the madness
that overtakes her as she stands in that dirt path with Lev. Yes. Manipulate someone long enough and they’ll start to crack.

“I will contact my parents before I help you get anywhere,” she tells him, realizing that by saying this, she’s entered into negotiation. She’s actually considering going with him. Perhaps it’s post-traumatic stress disorder.

Oh, sweetie. Miracolina. That’s not the disorder you’re developing.

Lev keeps up the pressure, telling her that no, she can’t contact her family. It will compromise the entire Cavenaugh operation.” She asks why he even left if he likes it that much. Lev dramatically grimaces about his very real hurt ankle and says that he supports them but it wasn’t his work.

This baffles her. His motives—his hazy integrity. It was easy to dismiss Lev as “part of the problem” when she did not know him, but now it’s not so easy. He’s a paradox. This is a boy who almost blew himself to bits in an attempt to kill others, and yet he offered himself to the parts pirate in order to save Miracolina’s life. How could someone go from having no respect for one’s own existence to being willing to give himself as a sacrifice for someone he barely knows? It flies in the face of the truths that have defined Miracolina’s life. The bad are bad, the good are good, and being caught in between is just an illusion. There is no gray.

Miracolina, he just wants to own you.

Seriously, that’s all anything this book comes down to. ~Romance~ of the shittiest type. You’re confused because you think he’s acting based on some core conviction about about the value of life, but the core conviction is wanting you to like him and wanting to keep you from escaping him, and in that, he’s perfectly consistent.

Incidentally, that means you can put him in “the bad are bad” pile.

Miracolina says she’s just going to tell her parents she’s alive.

“A call can be traced.” replies Lev, because insisting someone can’t contact their family at all for no actual reason because they’re nowhere near any important location is definitely the thing a good person does.

“We’ll be moving, won’t we? If my parents report it to the Juvenile Authority, they’ll only know where we’ve been, not where we’re going.” And then she asks, “Where are we going?”
“I guess you can get in touch with your parents,” Lev says, giving in

But doing this means he’s made a big production about how look, he gave in, he let her do this thing he had no right to tell her not to do in the first place, and now in return she has to do what he wants.

At this point, and with no clarification regarding when Miracolina figured it out, she says she knows he didn’t really hurt his ankle, and this makes it okay because her figuring out he was manipulating her means the manipulation doesn’t count.

Lev puts his full weight on the ankle and offers her up an impish little grin. It’s in this moment that Miracolina realizes she lost this negotiation before it began. Because even before he asked her to come along with him, a part of herself—secret even to her—had already decided that she would.

Yes, this book is really into boys stockholming their love interests into compliance. The part where you view lies and manipulation and guilt trips as “impish” and cute is the part where you need to tell yourself to STFU and start running.

We then go back to Lev, who fills in his trip last book in more detail, which is to say a bunch of words that actually amount to nothing much.

Supposedly, after the ghost kid shenanigans, Lev was left alone to fend for himself, prey for bottom-feeders as stealthy as mosquitoes. I’m going to assume he means not very stealthy in that case. They would offer help, or shelter, or food—but they all had some bloodsucking agenda. Somehow this wasn’t an issue all through his trip before then. Somehow after his time with another more experienced kid explicitly teaching him the ropes he’s way worse than when he was just starting out. So anyway, Lev got street smart and gritty and mad at the world therefore clapper.

To honor Miracolina’s wishes, Lev slips a cell phone out of the coat pocket of a businessman so she can call home. The call is brief, and as promised, she gives no more information than the fact that she’s alive, cutting off her mother ’s rapid-fire inquiry by quickly hanging up.
“There, are you happy?” she snaps at Lev. “Short and sweet.” She insists he return the phone to the same businessman’s pocket, but he’s long gone, so he drops it in the pocket of a similar man.

That sure was the most dickish of your avaliable options.

We’re then told tha With no money of their own, everything they need must be stolen. despite how Lev did fine not stealing last time we saw him.

Lev uses milder versions of the survival tricks he learned his first time on the streets. Smash and grab without the smash. Breaking and entering without any actual breaking.

Your survival trick was “go to the food court and wait for someone to leave their food” and then you learned the L2 skill, “chat up the girl behind the counter for free stuff after closing”.

Oddly, Miracolina has no problem with them stealing.
“I am making a list of all the things we take, and where we take them from,” she tells him. “All will be paid for in full before I am unwound.”
However, the fact that she is allowing for the bending of her personal moral code gives Lev hope that it may bend enough to break her of her tithing fixation.

Now THIS. This suggests that he doesn’t really mean these tricks are required. He’s deliberately trying to do stuff she won’t like and that violates her sense of how things are in the hopes that forcing her to compromise her own ethics will leave her open to further manipulation.

That definitely didn’t sound like the description of a villain.

Lev says he’s trying to get to Connor fast (because just getting in contact with the overarching group that has cells all over and having them pass the message along isn’t an option…) so they ride in the back of any truck they can sneak onto.

More than once they’re chased away, but never seriously pursued.

Even though there’s bounties out for escaped kids and that’s the most likely reason you’d find runaways.

“I hate what we’re doing, and how we’re doing it!” Miracolina yells, after running from a particularly aggressive trucker who chased them with a tire iron for all of ten yards. “I feel dirty! I feel subhuman.”
“Good,” Lev tells her. “Now you know how a real AWOL feels.”

Lev continues to glory in how he’s breaking her down. He goes on to say that he’s actually enjoying it all. But it’s okay because Some of that survival excitement seems to be rubbing off on Miracolina—for every time they get away with something, she loosens up. She even smiles. See, he forced her to do something she didn’t want to do and didn’t need to do, over and over and over, but after long enough she’s totally enjoying it so it’s okay.

The longest leg of their journey is in the baggage compartment of a Greyhound bus—having climbed in behind luggage when no one was looking.

…unless the Greyhound buses of the future function completely differently I can’t imagine how this worked. You’re standing right there as they throw your luggage on with everyone else in line staring at it too. Then they close the compartment. I mean, did they, I don’t know, throw a bottle into the bushes then sneak in while everyone’s subpar AI made them turn as one toward the sound and not the place it came from and then hold still for a couple minutes to give the player time to actually get on, and also they can’t see over anything or notice it’s not packed all the way to the back despite the luggage compartment being low to the ground because the programmer just wanted the damn level done already and made it so they can’t actually see the player at all if they reach the luggage?

Anyway, what’s important is Miracolina will finally snap. Lev has to pee, and he decides to just pee into a random suitcase because He will not foul the compartment so instead he should ruin someone’s day. Miracolina just laughs uncontrollably even as he tells her she has to keep quiet. She’s entered into a full-fledged laughter fit—the kind that leaves your stomach hurting. “They’re gonna open their suitcase,” she blurts between bursts of glee, “and their clothes’ll be full of pee!

So yeah, snapped. She mentions having a shampoo bottle spill, and then he realizes he could pee into that, so he dumps all that in the corner he’s refusing to pee into and then pees into the bottle. He considers putting it back in the suitcase because he’s just a really horrible person, but decides against it. Then he talks to her and bursts into laughter and they both laugh a while.

And in the silence that falls afterward, something changes. The tension that has been strung taut between them since the moment they met now goes slack. Soon the motion of the bus begins lulling them to sleep. Lev feels Miracolina lean into his shoulder. He doesn’t move for fear of waking her. He just enjoys the feeling of her there—certain that she would never do such a thing if she were awake.
And then she says, with no hint of sleep in her voice, “I forgive you.”

See, if you just keep forcing girls to stay with you, girls you know what nothing to do with you, eventually this happens. Eventually they willingly cuddle up to you and say they forgive you and they’ll finally be your girlfriend.

Lev explains that what he wanted was forgiveness, then says some bullshit about how also that other forgiveness he got previously didn’t count, he specifically wanted the sweet, sweet forgiveness-hit from someone who started off hating him until he broke her down into accepting him.

Oh also Nelson’s been following them this whole time because they didn’t take the hint when he said he was tracing kids.

But yeah, we’ve now done two sets in a row of “boy manipulates and breaks down girl until her personhood is destroyed for getting in the way of his waifu dreams”. Thank christ Connor2 is evil or we’d probably have a third coming.