A representative from the Anti-Divisional Resistance shows up the next afternoon—three days late for his scheduled meeting with Connor. He’s disheveled, paunchy, and drenched in sweat.
“And it’s not even summer,” Connor says—hoping to make the point that the sweltering Arizona summer is just a few months away. The ADR had better get their act together, or there are going to be a lot of angry AWOLs. That is, the ones who survive the heat.

Or maybe just say that, because people generally like direct statements and not passive-aggressive bullshit.

So it’s hot. Does he know the sort of facilities the kids have at the moment? They’re supposed to stay out of sight during the day, remember? It’s not as obvious that kids who are only outside at night would be struggling with heat. Explain your air conditioning is breaking down already, and say what the temperatures hit without it. Actually give the other person information.

The man introduces himself as Joe Rincon, “But call me Joe. No formalities in the ADR.” He sits at the conference table and pulls out a pad and pen to take notes. He’s already glancing at his watch, as if there’s somewhere else he would rather be.

Or he’s anxious about spending time at a place that’s supposed to be hidden.

I really hate “looking at watch” being always used to mean impatience when it’s a nervous gesture that means anything to do with time. Could be that he’s anxious the longer he spends the more likely some law enforcement agent is going to think it’s weird how often he comes there. Could be that they’ve got a set schedule for vehicles entering and exiting to avoid this concern, so he’s worried about how he has to get everything done by that point and can’t stay longer despite wanting to. There are different ways people look at watches!

Connor has a whole list of gripes from every corner of the Graveyard. Why are the food shipments so few and far between? Where are the medical supplies they requested? How about air conditioner and generator parts? Why are they not being warned when planes show up with new arrivals—and for that matter, why are the numbers coming in so light? Five or ten at a time, when the planes used to come in with fifty or more. With food supply being a constant issue, Connor doesn’t mind the low numbers, but it troubles him. If fewer AWOLs are being found by the resistance, that means the Juvies —or worse, the so-called parts pirates—must be finding them first.

“I’m constantly telling you we’re on the brink of starvation. Unrelatedly, why aren’t you sending me huge numbers of kids?”

“What’s wrong with you people? Why does the ADR keep ignoring all our requests?”

In fairness to Connor, he is just a kid thrown into all this – but that just highlights that it makes no sense they’d actually pick him to keep running the place.

Someone else, who was capable of thinking beyond just their little patch of ground, probably wouldn’t jump to “the people whose entire organization is about is are just blowing us off!!!”

What we’ve just been told here is that something’s messing with all forms of shipments. If it was a monetary issue, you’d expect them to be shipping crappier food but the same quantities and making up the difference by not sending expensive items at all, and it shouldn’t have any connection to the fact that they’re not told when new arrivals are coming. They definitely shouldn’t be sending only a handful of kids per flight.

There are two options this points to:

1) The group has been directly attacked and the organization is crippled. Large chunks of the chain have been taken out and they’re now opperating in more of an independent cell structure, trying to reestablish contact without hitting law enforcement. It’s those semi-independent groups that are sending the smaller batches of kids now that they can no longer funnel them onward, and they don’t know who to contact on the other end. What supplies the group had were probably based on what was avaliable, so if you lose contact with that one hospital head who was smuggling you medical supplies, that’s it for those until you can find someone new. The food shipments are irregular because some of the people who sent them are gone.

2) The group hasn’t yet been attacked directly, but there’s significantly tigher scrutiny and a great deal of concern about moles. They’re trying to lay low and find new ways to sneak stuff in. Many of their shipments have been interrupted. Given the whole “parts pirate” thing supposedly does exist and somehow is making money in a world where there’s already government sponsored organs, those guys could even have figured out a way to attack/hijack one of the larger planes of kids. (I mean, given you don’t need them alive, even just crashing the plane and scouping up what organs remain seems a pretty okay deal.)

Of course, the problem with either one is that supposedly the government knows about this place so they could catch everyone just by tracing back anything that enters the area.

But then again last book supposedly the place was kept in the black by the actual work the kids did, so who knows what’s still true.

“There’s really nothing to worry about,” Rincon says, which sends up a red flag for Connor, because he never said anything about being worried.

That’s because this guy is either politely ignoring or unable to believe that your response to the illegal organization shipping you food having problems with it is to demand why they’re deliberately blowing you off while feeling no worry about the part where you might actually starve.

The guy says that stuff is reorganizing, which, because adults are evil and incompetent, I assume doesn’t mean either of those two options and actually it’s that lots of them are having second thoughts and quitting because who cares really.

Connor asks what that even means and why he hasn’t heard about it, and the guy repeats not to worry, and Connor then says that only the Admiral (the way, the truth, and the life) was able to run anything in the ADR properly and all other adults suck. He then tries to justify the nonsense of him being in charge by saying that the group’s decision to do that shows how dumb they are.

There was a crazy time when kids were coming in every few days. The Graveyard boasted more than two thousand kids, and the ADR sent shipments of everything they needed on a regular basis.
Then, when Cap-17 passed, Connor was ordered to immediately release all the seventeen-year-olds— who were a large percentage of the Graveyard population—but he made a command judgment to do it slowly, releasing them in increments, so they didn’t flood the city of Tucson with more than nine hundred homeless teenagers. The fact that they wanted him to just let all those kids go at once should have been another sign that the ADR leadership was faltering.

So to recap:

Everything is running great.
Connor is told to do a thing.
Connor refuses to do a thing.
Now things suck.

Clearly, something totally unrelated happened to change things, because it sure as hell couldn’t have been Connor.

Did Connor explain his reasoning? Did they explain theirs?

The thing is, this place must take a ton of effort to keep running, and you just gave us the numbers – they weren’t a large percentage but the biggest group by far. And anyone could tell that the law would result in a surge of other parents sending their sixteen year olds off in response to the new deadline, so it’s likely that from their side, they were looking ahead to dealing with more runaways and needed the place freed up. Plus there’s whatever else is going on now – it makes sense that an apparent victory would be followed by the government cracking down on them.

Connor had released them over a period of two months, but the ADR cut their supplies immediately, as if those kids had suddenly ceased to be their problem.

Okay but they are. The point of this place isn’t to provide for homeless kids, as valid a purpose as that is – we’re even told that some tiny number of non-unwind runaways exist and there’s no sign this group collects them. It’s to hide kids who will die if they’re found. From what little we saw of Connor 2 earlier, as well as Lev’s own experiences, it seems like it’s not that hard for homeless kids to find food, the problem is staying out of sight because if the police see you they can kill you, plus we know there are still entry-level jobs in the unwinding industry somehow since that’s the only place last book’s adult Ward could find hiring, so all these new guys could go infiltrate there and actually be helping rather than draining resources.

Also, they do sell whole planes at times. If the sum total of Connor’s objections was dumping the kids into a single area, they could absolutely have flown a few batches out.

Between the released seventeen-year-olds, kids sent out on work programs that had been set in place by the Admiral, and kids who deserted when there wasn’t enough food, the Graveyard population had dropped to about seven hundred.

Also, if under-seventeen kids still at risk are willing to ditch this place because there’s not enough food, surely it can’t be that rough on the older ones to leave.

“I see you’ve planted yourself quite a garden—and you’re raising chickens as well, yes?” Rincon says. “You must be fully sustainable by now.”
“Not even close. The Green Aisle produces only about one-third of the food that we need, and with the ADR flaking on our food shipments, we’ve had to resort to raiding market delivery trucks in Tucson.”
“Oh dear,” says Rincon. That’s all, just “Oh dear,” and he starts to gnaw on the end of his pen.

Anyway adults = useless and Connor = great despite how unspeakably terrible an idea that is.

More importantly, CHIKKENS.

Chickens are so great.

If this wasn’t situated in a hellstate I’d also suggest fish too, but, hellstate.

But the thing is, if they want the kids to be self-sustaining, why not start up new compounds? The reason for this one being here was the admiral and the plane thing, but if the plane thing actually making money is now retconned away and the admiral isn’t around, then why not put this somewhere that isn’t one of the circles of hell? I hear this “rain” stuff is helpful with growing food. If you want the place incredibly unpleasant to discourage police bothering to check on it, why not at least branch out to a different circle of hell and try cold?

Anyway, the adult finally says that actually, what’s going on is they know the place is compromised.

Connor cannot believe what this fool is telling him. “Of course it’s been compromised! I’m the one who told you it was compromised! The Juvies know about us, and since the day I took over, I’ve been saying we need to relocate!”

This all illustrates how sueishness and bad writing undermine the plot. This guy might legitimately be incompetent, but Connor’s flipping out too early so we never see it.

Why aren’t they sending loads of kids and stuff? Because they’re working on setting up new places, like I just suggested. Maybe they’ve been collecting as many kids as ever but they’re busy feeding them elsewhere. Maybe they are storing up medical supplies, but they’re being transported to the new areas. We have no idea what their situation is, and trying to remove the kids from here is likely going to be the most difficult part – if they’re already under surveillance, then there’s the possibility that moving them to the new safe area will just give it away. It’d be understandable, if that’s true, that they’d rather have the kids here just age out as they close it down – and perhaps part of the strain could be that though Connor’s only getting few kids, it’s almost all big sixteen year olds who need more food than mousey twelve year olds.

Now, there are questions here that’d show they’re incompetent, like saying they haven’t even gotten started yet and the shortages are just a matter of not wanting to bother. Or admitting that they aren’t currently under any pressure. Maybe saying that they feel that getting the seventeen year olds freed seems like they’ve done enough – it wouldn’t make much sense, sure, but Connor’s reaction to it could. Or maybe Connor could just generally ask questions instead of flipping the fuck out long enough for us to be convinced the guy won’t keep him in the loop – right now he’s getting vague answers, but he’s also not asking specific questions and he’s just shouting at what he’s told, which doesn’t encourage people to tell you more.

If Connor was saying he needed to know what was going on with the rest of the group so he knew what to expect on his end, and still the guy was brushing him off as just a dumb kid, then we’d know he’s an asshole. Instead, because how dare anyone not worship Connor-sue, Connor is throwing a fit preemptively, the guy’s never given the chance to properly show he’s bad.

With any luck, the Juvies will never find a need to invade—”
“With any luck?” Connor stands and storms from the table. “The resistance should be about action, not luck. But do you take action? No! I send you my plans to infiltrate harvest camps, and ideas on how to free kids in nonviolent ways that won’t piss people off and create a backlash—but all I hear from the ADR is ‘we’re working on it, Connor,’ or ‘we’ll take it under advisement, Connor.’ And now you’re telling me to rely on luck for our survival? What the hell is the ADR good for?”
Rincon takes this as his cue to end the meeting—something he’s clearly wanted to do since the moment he arrived. “Hey, I’m just the messenger—don’t take this out on me!”
But there are some things Connor simply cannot help, and he finds himself swinging Roland’s fist at “Call-Me-Joe” Rincon’s face. The punch connects with the man’s eye, and he stumbles backward into the bulkhead. He looks at Connor not with contempt, but with fear, as if Connor might not stop there. So much for nonviolence. Connor backs off.
“There’s my message,” he says. “Please take it back to the people who sent you.”

So what we see here is there’s every reason not to tell Connor things. If he’s told your group, your highly illegal group, is having difficulties, he screams at you about how you’re supposed to do everything he wants. If you tell him you’re doing things and they’re not exactly what he, a kid with no idea how anything you’re doing works, thinks it should be, he screams at you and punches you in the face – even if you tell him that you aren’t even in charge and have no say about that stuff either.

We’re supposed to take it on faith that whatever the fuck Connor’s plans are, they’re good ones and the ADR is just lazy, but why should we think that? We just saw Connor’s stupid-ass plan for saving unwinds. We know he thinks that raiding trucks for food is an okay idea as opposed to something that should’ve fucked them over five minutes after the first one. Dumpsters too good for you and yours, Connor? You had nine hundred kids who were safe from unwinding, who you could’ve sent out to collect food and offset the drain they were on your resources. Have them go around offering to clean up at restaurants and take the leftover food in return – even if adults are all evil, all we’ve seen working there so far are fellow teens, they’d be sympathetic, and being safe from unwinding, the worst an adult can do is tell them to fuck off. Take the garbage you can’t eat and feed it to chickens. Take what they can’t eat and compost it. Fill any container you can with water and cart that back. Actually use the resources available to you.

Instead, Connor goes to the exercise section which doubles as the brawling section, and he punches a punching bag super well, but his unwind arm punches extra super well and he’s all stupid Roland being evil.

It does note that he hates his parents but also feels bad for hating them, which is a nice moment of realism even if it is still stuck so solidly in telling rather than showing or generally having it matter at all.

He then goes to bench press.

Every day he does this, and every day this is the part he hates the most . . . because nowhere is the difference between his left arm and his right clearer than on the bench press.

Okay this isn’t as stupid as muscle memory but only because nothing is as stupid as muscle memory. Musculature is built based on hormones. Some people can put on muscle better than others, but the part controlling that doesn’t live in the muscles themselves. Without exercise, Connor’s other arm would slowly lose muscle until they were equal. With exercise, Connor’s other arm will rapidly improve in response to the greater effort it’s going through until they’re equal. The only way to keep them out of sync for a long time is if Connor is doing exercises for one arm at a time and stopping when each feels the same amount of fatigue.

Connor 2 heads over and asks about the arm, knowing to suck up by saying that The way I figure it, if the guy who’s so against unwinding has an Unwind’s arm, it probably wasn’t by choice. even though we know plenty of kids object to unwinding on the personal basis of not wanting to die. It’s only Risa who’s made a statement that she refuses, and even then it was something that benefited her to say.

Connor tries to remember what he knows about Connor 2 and tells us the guy is confident and There are also rumors that he killed a Juvey-cop or two while escaping, but they’re only rumors.

So Connor shooting one guy with a tranquilizer is national news, but another kid blowing the head off two isn’t. The media doesn’t even have reason to cover it up this time – the new climate includes them making the case for unwinding by talking about how dangerous the kids are, and Connor 2 is on the older end of things, so he’s all the better of a target when talking about the need to be able to unwind seventeen-year-olds too.

Every group of new arrivals has at least one kid who thinks blowing up harvest camps is a good idea. Actually, most of them probably think that, but most kids are too intimidated upon arrival to shout it out.

Shame most kids aren’t in charge, isn’t it.

“Is it true that you risked getting caught to save a storked baby?”
“Yeah,” Connor says. “Not one of my brightest moments.”
“Why’d you do it?”
Connor shrugs. “Seemed like a good idea at the time.” He tries to laugh it off, but Starkey’s not laughing.
“I was a storked baby,” Starkey tells him.
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“No, it’s all good. I just want you to know I respect you for what you did.”

Only this seems to be fake because we end with But what he doesn’t see is what happens after he’s gone: Starkey lying back on the bench press, doing twenty reps of that same weight without even breaking a sweat. and so we know Connor 2 was pretending to be weaker than Connor for nefarious purposes. And that’s a shame because really, a kid who does have a sense of morality but comes at it from a different angle than everybody else is a lot more interesting than DID YOU KNOW ADOPTED KIDS ARE EVIL AND UNTRUSTWORTHY??? DOUBLY THE MIXED RACE ONES!!!

We then go to Connor’s meeting, where we hear more about how all the special stuff he has to mark the office isn’t his idea at all and it’s all his right hand guy’s plan because Connor is so fucking humble, he is way more humble than you, so much so.

Connor occasionally hears kids grumbling about it: “Look at him living like a king, while the rest of us get nothing but a bedroll.”
“Nature of the beast,” Trace is always quick to remind him. “Respect doesn’t come without a little resentment.”
Connor knows he’s right, but he doesn’t have to like it.

He is not, of course, right, but this version of reality lets you have all the perks while pretending it’s an imposition, so it’s sure the one people want to believe is true.

And who is this inner circle?

Hayden is master of the ComBom, running computer and radio communications, monitoring the outside world, police frequencies, and all communication with the resistance. He also has a radio station for the Whollies, with a signal that barely reaches half a mile. He calls it “Radio Free Hayden.

So part of this is presumably that the author isn’t aware there’s options other than radio, and how in the modern age there’s way better ways to get speakers scattered about a small area to play what you want, especially when supposedly you’re trying to be subtle.

But the bigger issue is, so a signal that reaches half a mile is no problem because they’re that far out. So, how are they hearing the police? Police’s stuff is really short range, and only works because they’re using repeaters – are we to assume they built a ton of those out toward some random scrapyard just so the signals they don’t want people listening in on can be more easily heard by non-cops?

This is especially funny because I spent all my car time in Arizona searching for any radio stations because apparently that place is a radio desert too. Even the scary Christian one that appeared to be trying to blanket the country at any cost to spread the gospel couldn’t even manage full coverage of actual cities. Am I to believe that every single police station across the whole state is more devoted to making sure their local talk can be heard anywhere than religious fanatics getting piles of donations from other religious fanatics? Where did they even get the money for this?

Anyway, Connor tells them that

“I met with the ADR dude today. We can expect more of the same.”
“More o’ nothin’ is still nothin’,” Drake says.
“You got it. We’ve pretty much known we’ve been on our own for a while—now it’s official. Deal with it.”

“They’re not sending us quite as much stuff as I want! Therefore they do nothing for us at all.”

“If we can’t get cash from the front office to buy it, we’ll have to creatively find it.” Creatively finding is Connor ’s euphemism for stealing. He’s had to send kids as far as Phoenix to creatively find things the ADR won’t supply. Things like hard-to-find medications and welding torches.

So “front office” seems to be a euphemism here for the ADR, despite the fact they’re supposed to literally have a front office getting money in.

The more this goes on the more you can see why it makes sense for the main group to just give up on this place.

“The bigger issue,” says Connor, “is having an escape plan. We can’t rely on the ADR to save us if the Juvies decide it’s time for fresh parts.”

Okay, so in addition to “revolution is bad” we now have “organizations must be capable of doing literally anything or they’re worthless”.

Anyway, he wants to move the remaining seven hundred out – with no idea where or how and after making it clear he can’t even support them in a place already set up to do so with additional handouts.

What they should be doing is stepping up the work crew thing, since whatever that involves is currently set up to move kids back out. The kids often seem to be going to remote areas. Could they send more? Could they establish permanent camps?

“The point is,” says Connor, coming between them before Ashley can launch into her anger management speech, “that we all need to be thinking about how to kick out of here on a moment’s notice if we have to.”

But there’s no actual thinking about it.

That’s really my biggest disappointment with all this – I read so many enjoyable books about people actually building stuff up, using what was available to them to accomplish things and solve problems. And here it’s just vague whining.

The rest of the meeting deals with the minutiae of management. Connor wonders how the Admiral could stomach conversations about sanitary napkin supply, when the threat of harvest camp was a clear and present danger every minute of every day.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the example of trivial bullshit is something women need.

Speaking of women, Connor then says he needs a private conversation with the girl in charge of food.

“Tell me about the tainted meat loaf.”
Bam shrugs like it’s nothing. “What’s the big deal? The generator to one of the refrigerators blew out. It’s fixed now.”
“How long was the power out?”
“Don’t know.”
“So you had no clue how long the thing was without power, and you still served the food inside?”
“How was I supposed to know people would get sick? They ate it, so it’s their problem.”
Connor imagines the punching bag and makes a fist with his right hand. Then he looks at the shark, and forces his hand to relax. “More than forty kids were down for over two days—and we’re lucky it wasn’t worse.”
“Yeah, right, so I won’t let it happen again.” Bam says it in such a rude tone of voice, Connor can imagine her saying it that same way to her teachers, her parents, the Juvies, every authority figure in her life. Connor hates the fact that he’s one of those authority figures now.

It makes sense Connor wouldn’t know how to deal with this. It doesn’t make sense that his crap dealing with it is exactly the same as a levelheaded adult.

Let’s consider some things here. One is that people can get defensive – maybe she’s being flippant because she’s upset at the screwup, maybe she’s being defensive because she didn’t know how else to deal with it. We know Connor will not shut up about how crappy their food situation is, so this isn’t pure laziness, they really can’t afford to throw food away. Connor isn’t asking, “Has this happened before?” or “How often are the refrigerators checked?”, he’s going right to “so you had no clue…” aggression. He certainly hasn’t considered looking at any of the actual problems here.

For example, how long could it have been? Do they do a first in/first out thing with the food to prevent spoilage, so no one notices a refrigerator isn’t working until it’s the day to empty it? Was the refrigerator opened a few times but it was still cool for a while and people weren’t paying attention, so it went unnoticed? And how fast does food spoil? Given it’s hamburger and it’s being shipped in from a sketchy organization, it’s possible that it may have been going bad already and even a very short period, the sort of period someone might think would be no big deal, was enough to push it over the edge. Or, since it’s unclear, maybe the problem was this was precooked meatloaf and they barely reheated it.

And there are responses to all these things. Have systems in place to check the generators and, when one fails, to estimate how long it might have been. Decide how you’re going to handle suspect food. Plus if it wasn’t obviously rotten (and she seems to be saying this, and certainly the kids ate it without realizing) then there may well have been a way to cook it safely – look into that, and consider taste testers too. Given the food shortages you can probably find people willing to get extra food in return for risking the occasional bit of sickness, and if they’re only eating a little, they shouldn’t be incapacitated for two days if there’s trouble.

Now, if they weren’t short on food, this is less needed, you just throw it out because there’s no need to risk people’s health. And if there were supposed to be regular checks of the refrigerators and she wasn’t bothering, then it’s entirely her fault for fucking up the system and trying to hide it. But this seems to be trying to get us to take this at face value – she’s flippant when getting blamed, therefore she’s not taking her job seriously.

Honestly, he shouldn’t be talking to just her. He should be asking her underlings how she runs things and if she’s cutting corners and so on.

But nope, she’s out.

“You’re getting rid of me just because of one stupid screwup?”
“No one is getting rid of you,” Connor tells her. “But you won’t be running food service anymore.”
She burns him a long, hateful glare, then says, “Fine. To hell with you. I don’t need this crap.”

So she could well have been trying really hard to keep everyone fed, could’ve been dealing with broken refrigerators and judgement calls all the time and really did make just one stupid screwup here. We don’t know because Connor-sue can judge anyone he feels like despite seeming to know very little about how things are run (if there was a system for this, he’d be asking, “Why didn’t anyone notice the refrigerator was out during the daily check?”)

Connor decides to go ask Connor 2 if he wants to take over food.

Starkey waves his hand and makes an egg appear out of thin air, then hands it to Connor. He saw the egg trick a few minutes earlier, but now its relevance makes it even more entertaining.

Connor doesn’t think to wonder what’s up with the fact he’s using food for magic tricks. You don’t want people running around playing with eggs, you eat those.

Anyway we end with dramatic irony where Connor thinks this is the best decision ever. The book doesn’t get that this is no dumber than pretty much everything else he’s been doing.