I get to go back to published books now! What were we doing – oh.

Right.

Well then.

When we last left our…characters, Connor punched the messenger, whined a lot, and decided Connor 2 doing magic tricks with chicken eggs meant he was the best choice for managing their incredibly limited food supplies.

This chapter, it’s Risa playing piano. She explains she was surprised to find the piano was made by Hyundai and then there’s an honestly pretty pleasant piece of exposition:

Multinationals can make anything they want if people will buy it. She once read that Mercedes-Benz had gotten heavy into artificial hearts before the Unwind Accord made such technology pointless. “The Pulsar Omega,” the advertisement went. “Take luxury to heart.” They invested a fortune in the product, only to lose every penny once unwinding began, and artificial hearts went the way of pagers and CDs.

(Except of course there were papers last book, remember?)

But the artificial hearts thing – I really wish we had a better idea of what the costs of things are. Current artificial hearts are pretty terrible yet extremely expensive, but we know unwind organs are pricey and if you’ve completely mastered tissue rejection and people have good enough mechanical stuff to be calling it a luxury version…well, the fact is heart surgery is really, really rough on you. Even accepting their magic surgery technology – look, step one of heart surgery is snapping your ribs apart. A robot heart could well be the better option if it took longer to wear out. And if it’s got an alternative power source like you’d expect, maybe better for older people as well because it’s one less organ they have to keep fed. Certainly a million times better than Plan New Cougar Heart Each Decade/Plan No Organs Ever Because Your Spirit Animal Is Hummingbird So Fuck You that the magicial leprecauns went with.

Now, we’re told that the whole unwinding business is actually a political ploy to murder children, so it’s possible the government actually destroyed all alternative options, even if they were already better.

That, in turn, tells us about how strong of a government we have here. There are many things about this that don’t seem at all plausible as the future of our world, but here’s a new one: since when is our government more powerful than a corporation?

If corporations were heavily invested in artificial organs, they aren’t going to like this. And supposedly the magical leprechauns got ungodly amounts of money from the casinos and weren’t down with murdered child hearts, so they’d have been throwing their weight around to keep those on the market. And almost every manufacturer of almost every medical device is bankrupt now. And the entire pharmaceutical industry.

There’s also the fact the internet is apparently incredibly censored and there’s real-time monitoring, given what happens if you look up the story of the parents trying to reassemble their kid and also the fact the internet appears to be wholly irrelevant to all the kids here. That would take a great deal of power.

Now, the main route our government has to power is war.

That would suggest that the real start of all this was them. They set it all up to get a scared populous who’d accept a transition to wartime rules, in turn giving them both the legal power and political capital to stomp down anyone in their way. Maybe it went a little better than they meant it to, since a full-on civil war is way more investment than anybody has about the war on drugs, which is why they’re now really scared of anything disrupting the status quo.

The question then becomes, was the whole organ thing always the plan or is the current setting just collateral damage? I could see it going either way. The medical industry as a whole is crazy powerful and the unwind thing seems to also justify increased overall surveillance and increased employment with that. On the other hand, it seems to be such a bizarre series of coincidences that it’s had to believe anyone could’ve deliberately set it going.

Anyway. In the present, Risa is explaining that all the kids love hearing her play at night, but didn’t we just find out they have perfectly good radios?

Even those kids who claim to despise classical music have come asking her why she isn’t playing when she’s skipped a night.

This I can absolutely believe if we’re talking kids in the desert where this is the only music they can listen to at all, but it’s harder to believe if they can listen to various genres all the time.

She adds that sometimes Connor shows up but mostly he doesn’t and she’s sad. Also she explains that the arm bugs Connor but luckily the eye is an absolutely perfect match so he’s totally fine about dead kid parts. Remember, dead kid parts are only creepy if they’re mismatched.

Thinking about Connor makes her miss a chord—the same damn chord she missed at her life-or-death recital that left her on a bus, speeding her off to be unwound.

With what we know it seems like if she’d missed a few more chords they might’ve decided to give her another year of piano lessons instead. You’d think actually being at a harvest camp and seeing how much they want skill in their meat chunks would’ve clued her in.

Then she explains that she’s really upset because Connor has gotten through her HOW DO YOU EMOTIONS that never appeared to be an issue last book but now she’s just a love interest so here we are. She explains that having tons of walls is required for state home life because it was a dog eat dog sort of thing. There’s really no sign the state homes take older children, which are more likely to be coming into the system abused and messed up. As we discussed in the previous book, the kids raised from infants with barely any attention are going to be incredibly messed up too, but not in the scrappy fighter sort of way. If anything, I’d expect the state home kids to be extremely apathetic and obedient. Learned helplessness doesn’t get you tough badasses with walls. And the kids don’t even seem to have realized they were in competition with each other, so there’s not that aspect either.

When had that changed? Was it when she was forced to play music as kids were led into the building beneath her to be unwound? Was it when she made the choice to accept a shattered spine, rather than having it replaced by the healthy spine of an Unwind? Or maybe it was before that, when she realized that, against all sense and reason, she had fallen in love with Connor Lassiter?

“What made me open up? Was it the trauma, or the trauma, or the not trauma?”

Anyway she decides to go visit Connor. Haha, you thought a Risa chapter would be about her. She’s just the girlfriend, sucker!

Next chapter is Connor, who’s sitting half asleep in a chair because he works so hard. Risa throws rocks at the plane to get his attention.

“Not going to invite me in?”
“You’re invited. You’re always invited.”
“Well, then maybe you should have put up a ramp.”
And although he knows he’s going to regret saying it, he says it anyway. “Maybe you should let someone carry you.”

Maybe you should put up a damn ramp, asshole.

Connor’s all I AM BUSY WITH IMPORTANT MAN WORK and Risa’s all WHY DON’T YOU LOVE ME IS IT BECAUSE I’M IN A WHEELCHAIR and he’s all GOD WOMAN I LOVE YOU OKAY GO AWAY NOW.

“You don’t behave like a boy when he’s in love.”
“Maybe because I’m not a boy,” he tells her. “I haven’t been for a good long time now.”
She thinks about that, and quietly says, “Then show me how you feel the way a man does. And make me believe it.”

I’m already missing the romance fanfics.

For a moment he imagines himself lifting her out of the chair and carrying her into his jet, all the way to his room at the back, and gently laying her down on his bed, being for her the man he claims to be.
But Risa will not be carried. Under any circumstances. Ever. And he wonders if maybe this is not entirely his fault. Maybe she’s partially to blame for this invisible rift between them.

Remember, if you’re in a wheelchair and you like having any sort of autonomy whatsoever, you’re the problem. You.

But since carting her around like a realdoll isn’t an option, he goes with a kiss which he describes as “superheroic” and she’s all lolno build a fucking ramp, the unreasonable bitch with her “basic accessibility requirements”.

Connor then goes off to lie all alone in bed thinking about how yeah the ramp would be super easy, but what if his arm makes him rape her or beat her to death.

Roland attacked her—he tried to force himself on her, and she must have been looking at that damned shark when he did it.

Except that the time you were 110% convinced he was just pretending to get you mad and that’s why it was okay to give him a thumbs up and then leave again.

But no, now that it actually is hurting Risa he suddenly gives so many fucks about how he knows better than her. Because really, it’s never been about Risa. She’s just the girlfriend. What matters is Connor manpaining nobly.

So you don’t build a ramp. You don’t visit her in her jet, and when you do have physical contact, it’s out in the open where it’s safe. And when she rolls away from you in tears, you let her go, thinking whatever she wants to think, because that’s better than admitting to her that you’re too weak to feel safe with your own arm. Then, alone in the dark of a private jet, you smash your fist furiously against a wall until your knuckles are raw and bloody, but you don’t care, because even though you can feel the pain, you know they’re not your knuckles at all.

God do I wish the author could’ve just switched to a new set of POVs. Connor 2 may be a terrible character but I’ll take fool’s gold over shit.