Now time to see how the goblins and their king are doing.

Bam is complaining to Connor2 because that’s her one role in this story, and Connor2 is losing his temper with this and the sobbing of everyone else.

crying at the ordeal they’ve been put through and the friends left behind.

Now, which friends? Presumably other storks, because if they had regular friends they’d have headed to the plane together. And they’re quickly perked back up by Connor2’s reminder that goblins are badasses and not to cry. He then goes to try to bully Trace, and Trace says that he’s not quite so spiteful he’d want to kill the rest of the kids so shut up, he’s doing his best. Is he right not to kill them? I think just barely, this book does manage to stop short of saying it’s okay to murder a whole bunch of children here, although we’ll see it’s really not going to be all that good of an idea.

Trace then explains the plan is to fly into Mexico, because they can’t be chased across country lines by American planes and Mexico won’t shoot until they see us as a threat. I misread that as “unless” but no, until? So Trace thinks it’s inevitable that Mexico will fire on them at some point, which is I guess is why they’re supposed to swap flight signatures with another jet they find then fly back into the US and land in an abandoned airfield in the Anza-Borrego Desert, east of San Diego. Why does that seem like the best bet? Why not just land in Mexico? Who knows. Anyway, since no landing gear, it’s got to be a water landing, so instead he’ll fly to The Salton Sea, a huge dead lake south of Palm Springs. Fine whatever. Sure, that place is currently saltier than the ocean, and given future-America is even more of a craphole than now I doubt the remediation efforts go through so it’s shocking there’s even still a lake there, let alone a “huge” one, and no matter what the salinity must be absolutely through the roof at this point, but yeah, why wouldn’t kids do great being abandoned in a deadly hellhole?

So yeah.

We’re near the end of this and really, the actual conclusion of this plotline won’t add anything, so let’s talk now about what could’ve been done with this. It’s so close to working.

In the previous book’s discussion, I laid out the idea of having the story be based around the kids’ actions being in opposition to how society views them – that as society condemns them for being self-centered criminals, they sacrifice to take care of the baby and each other.

This one has been full of stuff that works as a dark mirror, so why not the theme as well?

The biggest issue with the storked kids is that the book can’t give us a straight answer on if they’re actually mistreated. We have their main spokesperson bring up all sorts of issues, but any time he mentions it to someone directly, that person explains he’s just imagining things – it’s just sheer coincidence they never rescue storked kids because all storked kids have siblings for some reason!

And that’s bad. I’d even say downright awful – a book spending ages on what amounts to discrediting the idea you should believe people about their own experiences is not something we needed.

So – they are. Storked kids are burdens their parents don’t want and everyone knows it, and their odds of being unwound are far higher. They have a similar life trajectory as a tithed kid but without the social approval and acceptance. Tithed kids have trouble making friends because who wants to be friends with someone doomed – and so storked kids can lose friends for the same reason when someone finds out. We know from Miracolina that even tithes are often bullied, and they’re even associated with the very rich while most storked families are likely those not rich enough to take precautions. The storked kids are under more stress than average, and we know kids act out when under stress.

Storked kids really are more likely to be trouble. People notice the correlation and start treating them differently, which then makes them more likely to be trouble and keeps the cycle going. People have no real reason to want to break that cycle either – no one wants to get attached to someone doomed, and why spend effort trying to get through to a kid in the hopes of them turning out as okay adults when they’ll never be adults?

Unlike tithed kids, though, there’s no certainty, so at least some kids must choose to be good in the hopes their parents won’t kill them. There really doesn’t seem to be much connection there that we’ve seen, though – our two main characters both had the backstory of causing trouble, but they also had parents willing to wait until they were sixteen. Other kids we hear about had completely different reasons. Nothing makes you safe.

Starkey’s backstory would be that he always gets blamed whenever there’s trouble, so he learns he might as well get to cause the trouble when he’ll be punished either way. At the same time, he’s chasing approval – what he really wants is for his parents to love him despite this, unconditionally. That’s why he doesn’t just run for it even though he knows storked kids get unwound. And he really hoped, when he didn’t get sent off at twelve, that maybe they wouldn’t do it.

And being unwound puts you even lower on the ladder than just a stork. The cops treat him like a dangerous animal. In the book we’ve seen people consistently horrified at the use of live ammunition, so we can take a minute to explain why a cop would be carrying that – it’s because the teens vs the world thing is heating up again. What happened last book isn’t just about Lev – no matter how people try to bury the events behind his still-living face, how much they make a big deal about him not clapping, the fact is two other clappers blew up a harvest camp. It’s set off a wave of copycats as the clapper movement finally pulls its head out of its ass and realizes focused targets do harm.

(Maybe, in fact, these are rogue clappers. It really doesn’t make sense that clappers go after random targets, and if there’s an adult group who are just chaos cultists, that’d explain why it doesn’t seem to be serving the needs of those actually killing themselves and justify the otherwise nonsensical lol chaos thing we had last book. So why is Lev attacked? Because now when they try to recruit, the kids don’t just blow themselves up at a mall like they’re supposed to, they blow themselves up in the back of cop cars or police cells. He’s fucked up their perfectly good bullshit by making it actually start accomplishing things.)

There isn’t a direct line between increased fear of clappers and using real bullets, but we can use that as a jumping off point to say that the kids have become more aggressive in general and/or people are more willing to say they are. Why does everyone keep going on about the Arkon AWOL? Because it was the first time they’d published anything about a kid escaping successfully in recent memory, and it set off a new wave of escape attempts as kids who’d usually give up and go meekly decided to try their luck anyway, as well as a new wave of reporting on that to put it in everyone’s minds. Kids started doing things like carrying hidden knives. Adults started expecting things like hidden guns.

Starkey will credit his own knife as being inspired by the infamous Arkon AWOL, and the idea is he’s far from the first. And we know from last book that the cops were already irrationally jumpy, with Nelson claiming way back in the first book that the tranquilizer darts don’t always work despite the fact they’ve worked perfectly every time we’ve seen them. So, nervous cops are now starting to load real bullets…

…and while wrestling for the gun, Starkey becomes a murderer.

I really do like that scene – it’s not just that he didn’t mean to kill the guy, which was great enough! There’s also the fact that in that same instant, he realized the cop was trying to kill him. None of this should’ve happened. He became a murderer only because the guy thought the worst of him – and while unwinding may be functionally death, everyone involved feels it’s less horrible, so the guy also viewed Starkey’s life as worthless.

And it continues to show how everything Starkey does is a reflection of larger society. He repeats what his hero did, but Connor was dealing with someone pulling punches and Starkey wasn’t. Not only would Connor not have been able to harmlessly disable the cop if the guy had real bullets, but his human shield idea would’ve gotten Lev killed as well. Starkey if anything is less disrespectful to human life than Connor was, but because the people around him assumed the he was terrible, the outcome became terrible.

But all anyone’s going to care is that he blew a cop’s head off. If a cop sees him now, what are the odds they just do the same to him? Now he has even more to be afraid of.

And he may conclude, and perhaps be right to, that the reason the cop was so heavily armed was because they expected a stork to try something. He’ll have plenty of time to think about every time something went wrong for him just because he was storked while he’s hiding out.

It’s in this context that we have the conversation between him and the other kid and it’s the final straw. If no one, not even other kids, care about people like him, then he won’t care about any of them either. If they think he’s a monster, if they think his life is worthless…then fine. That’s how it’ll be.

When he ends up in the safehouses, he’s surrounded by storked kids – they’re not only more likely to be unwound but also the ones most likely to see it coming and run.

And we learn different groups hate each other.

The Ward kids are a bunch of weirdos who don’t know anything. Their parents must’ve hated them to give them to the state! At least a stork’s mom bothered to drop them off at a family.

The storked kids deserve it. They weren’t unwound because the government didn’t think they were useful enough – they had a family, had a chance, and they fucked it up!

The “regular” kids? What kind of total disaster do you have to be to get unwound when you’re a baby your parents actually wanted?

Starkey sees all the stupid shit the storked kids are getting up to (and the adults in charge still treating them as the troublemakers) and is the first one to say hey, you can be more than this. He doesn’t judge them for how they’re acting because he did the same before his revelation that the entire world is out to get them, and he can share that – everything that’s gone wrong is because of someone else’s fault! It wasn’t you, it was them. But even if the whole world’s against us, we have each other, and we can make them treat us right. (And all the things they say about us, those will be virtues – we’re sneaky, we’re street-smart, we’re tough. Acting in those ways must always be good.)

Starkey is already ripe for disillusionment by the time he actually reaches the Graveyard. The Arkon AWOL wasn’t a stork, after all. And when he finds out the kid is alive and yet preaching “don’t save anybody, don’t fight back, just worry about yourself”? Well, of course he’d say that! What does he care about all the storks getting carted off? He got handed the world and screwed it up all on his own so of course he doesn’t get that for other people they never have a chance. No one else ever worries about storks, so they’ll have to do it for each other.

But – if you’re part of a disenfranchised group and want to change that, you can’t just play to your fellow disenfranchised and powerless. He’s got to schmooze his way into Connor’s inner circle, as in the book. The storked kids, at least those open about it, generally get the crappy grunt-work jobs – you can’t trust them for anything important and certainly they shouldn’t be in charge! They’re always getting punished and blamed for things, always losing out on little petty power struggles like getting shorted food at mealtimes, always having authorities take the other person’s side. And maybe the Wards aren’t much in power, but those that are help out Wards. Risa obviously favors her own kind and keeps promoting Wards in medical, for example! It’s so unfair.

Starkey starts working his way through camp, jumping between various jobs. Every time a stork is dismissed or ignored or passed over or looked down on, he’s there to point it out to the reader. In the background, ignored because it doesn’t impact him, there’s more going on, a web of mistrust and division and prejudice. Slowly, that builds. Although Starkey dismisses any bullying he sees done by his fellow storks, he starts to notice bullying between others is happening too.

Eventually, he ends up getting hurt and having to go to Risa the unfair Ward-promoting jerk’s territory. And you really know it’s unfair, because it’s not like they get promoted other places and they would if they were any good, right?

Wards are consistently the best educated in camp, often having at least minimal career training in several jobs just as Risa was both a piano prodigy and a junior nurse, but the other kids don’t want anything to do with them. They aren’t taught the ropes when they join and they aren’t promoted much afterward, because everyone thinks they’re just kind of…weird, you know? All intense and sticking with their own kind and talking funny. But the kids Starkey finds working in the same jobs as him are hard workers, often the best ones. And the kids under Risa? Okay, they don’t have the best bedside manner, but when Starkey ends up in there, they talk about how this is like back at the state homes, where they’d work under real doctors and nurses because there were never enough adults to actually take care of the kids. (Meanwhile the “normal” kids are just fucking around like idiots in the background, accomplishing jack shit, giving Starkey a perfect target for his hate.)

So, they’re not storks and they’re prejudiced and he hates them for hating him but maybe he can ally with them just a little, against those damn regular kids who are the ones really in power. And while he’s expecting them to be cliquey assholes, it turns out not to be all that hard to get into their little weird-dialect circle. He does quick enough, because as a stork he’s had practice trying to fit in at school, but of course he still resents having to play their stupid game and having to prove himself. Storks are always forced to play along with others and try to fit in to be accepted.

(But with Starkey trying to get crossover appeal with the Wards so he can use them, he starts noticing more how the two groups interact. Starkey was never the most popular kid in class but he was never on the bottom, and part of that was because he made sure to stomp on anyone less popular just like the cooler kids did, trying to be one of them and never getting there. They’re both stomping on each other while the regular kids whose parents actually wanted them and ruined it for themselves sit back and laugh. What began as pretending to care about the Wards starts to become more honest.)

The Wards also serve a nice role as being the more visible minority. Having had a totally different upbringing, they really can’t pass as non-Wards, and instead group up. Before Starkey, the storks generally tried to hide that fact. There are plenty of storked kids spread throughout the camp but generally those who kept quiet about it, and a lot of them buy into the idea that it’s because they’re not like the other storks.

This isn’t a situation where everyone’s equally prejudiced and equally to blame. When Starkey finds out about the rescue missions, the answer to, “Why aren’t you saving any storked kids?” is more along the lines of, “Who knows if the kid’s even there? Storked kids sneak out at night all the time,” and, “We pretend to be cops, a storked kid might try to stab us!” and, “Aw, he’s probably already run away, storked kids are street-smart, they see it coming, I mean everybody knows storked kids get unwound.”

Starkey manages to get into that group for a bit, considering that maybe if there was a stork in charge it’d change. They go out, they save a kid, Starkey stews a lot on how everyone else gets saved before storks. Another kid is a Ward, though, and nowhere near as good at keeping their mouth shut as Starkey, and that kid want to know why they never try to stop any of the Ward buses headed for the camps. “To much of a risk, sorry.” “There’s a hundred kids on just one of those! More of a risk than going out a hundred times?” The kid then starts shouting about how the regular kids  who could’ve left any time that’s not an option for kids like him, why is it losers like them who deserve help?

As Starkey tries to take over the camp piece by piece, and tries to suss out who’s a stork when it’s something most people try to deny, he’ll be getting involved with people all over. In the previous book we had the one bit where everyone shares why their parents decided to kill them, and here we’d be able to keep getting that. Everyone’s reasons for being unwound are terrible, whatever background they come from.

Starkey will eventually get into Connor’s inner circle. I should say at this point – this isn’t Connor’s book. He had his time. We see Connor only through Starkey’s eyes. Starkey comes into this expecting Connor to be the evil mastermind of oppression, and we’ll see him fuck up, but ultimately, it’s no one thing and no one person. Connor just doesn’t see it, because everyone’s always been focused on their own experiences. Connor ultimately makes most sense being unwound for being a bad student and poor communicator. So Connor is envious of kids like Starkey who pick up stuff fast, who are good at talking to others. How could Starkey, who’s so smart and likable, be disadvantaged? What does being a stork matter when Connor’s never cared about that? He doesn’t even ask about people’s parents, he evaluates everybody who’s recommended to him completely fairly!

“Well, how many storks get recommended?” How could Connor know he doesn’t ask people that because he’s not prejudiced!!!

So, while Starkey is still working on his whole master plan of finally storks on top, he’s starting to feel like there’s more to this. Like maybe the Wards aren’t any different. People like Connor are obviously still evil. All regular kids, it’s all their fault, they’re just like mini versions of the adults who’ve been mistreating the storks and Wards.

Nothing Connor does prompts an epiphany. Starkey is on gate duty, because that’s a boring job storks get and Starkey likes to do the rounds to keep in touch with his people. Some kid comes up to the gate and wants in, saying they were told they’d be safe here.

The kid isn’t a stork. They’re not a Ward. And, it turns out when they check the database, they’re not an unwind at all. They’re a missing person, someone whose parents actually want them back so much other people are actually looking for them. What the fuck? What sort of spoiled brat are they to throw all that away? And now they want a handout here?

Starkey reins them in once the shouting gets deafening and says to go get somebody to drive the kid back to the city. The kid sits down and falls asleep. Starkey never finds out why they ran away. He only knows they were from Washington, the biological only child of their parents, they were sixteen, and they hiked through a desert without food or water and died.

This whole time, everyone’s been on edge because they’re expecting the place to be raided. Plans have been tossed about. Starkey’s been working on his own plan, where the storks use everyone else as a distraction to escape by themselves. He’s justified it a lot of ways. The other kids have had so much, shouldn’t storks get something for once? The other kids will probably do the same anyway, why should the storks die to cover someone else’s escape? The other kids are evil, they don’t think storks are people. The other kids are different. The other kids deserve it.

And he thinks about everyone yelling when the kid showed up, about how lucky that kid was. About how much he hated them for coming here like they had real problems like he did, like they should get even more help on top of all they already had.

All of them are here because the adults decided their lives weren’t worth living. And doesn’t he – or shouldn’t he – hate the people who decided that more than anyone else?

The attack comes. Starkey never gives the order. He stays in position.

“A stork,” says the adult checking him off in the van. “Should’ve guessed, only an idiot would fight.”