We’re reached the fifth part! Matters of Necessity. There are seven parts total. There’s also eighty-four chapters. Luckily, it looks like the “parts” option is a more accurate measure because we are indeed most of the way done and it’s just there’ll be a lot of micro-chapters to come.

Wait, you say. That can’t be right. If that’s so, the plot should’ve kicked in a while ago.

Yes. It really should’ve.

This time, the quote is about a UK study showing that the media demonizes teen boys. This is true, but also kind of old news (honestly, an awful lot of studies happen after people have already realized the problem, and I certainly heard of it before 2009, when the article is dated as). What I find more interesting is the way it uses teenager and teenage boy interchangeably, as if they’re the same thing.

And it also says the good press is only for dead ones which, yes, we do say nice things about dead people we otherwise wouldn’t.

I feel like the teenager/teenage boy conflation of the article he picked has a connection to how a huge part of the worldbuilding is that they banned abortion but also the fact they banned abortion is completely irrelevant and the cast is almost entirely boys.

Speaking of, hey, we’re back at fucking Connor.

He explains that he’s at his punching bag twice a day because he worries he’ll punch someone otherwise:

The lazy kid who won’t clean the latrines. The moronic girl who smuggled in a cell phone so she could call her friends and tell them where she is. And the kid who makes jokes after every clapper bombing.

So to recap: it’s very wrong how we treat teenagers when we act like all teenage boys are thugs, but teen girls, haha, fucking cellphone morons am I right?

Also, I can make this worse.

We know from fucking Connor that cellphones are easily traced. For the girl to have smuggled one in, she must have had it during her time running around on the street, throughout the series of safehouses, and then finally here, a process that at best takes months of time. If the cellphone was traceable, she wouldn’t have gotten this far.

So that moronic girl, unlike some people I could mention, some people who incidentally had months of advance warning, either knew to immediately buy a new cellphone under a false name and did so without anyone flagging it as suspicious or somehow modified her existing one to not report her location.

God, teen girls. Such airheads. Connor has such impressive restraint not punching the dumb bitch’s face in for that.

Oh, also he’s sad Risa is gone and, he assumes, dead.

He can’t help but think that it’s not all him. His anger always seems to settle in Roland’s hand.

Remember, personal responsibility is for suckers. It’s obviously the fault of the abused kid who despite his much worse upbringing never seemed to lash out!

Connorsue chats with Connor2 about the whole thing, suggesting maybe Prime Connor can retire and clear the way for, who knows really anybody pretty much he doesn’t really know can’t think of anyone in particular.

“Maybe we could put it to a vote, once you’re gone. Make the whole thing democratic.”
“And you’re already guaranteed at least a quarter of the vote, aren’t you?” says Connor

Connor informs us not that it’s literally JUST occurred to him that maybe his evil double has been deliberately building a power base.

“You’re good at getting food on the table, and you gave the storks some self-respect,” Connor tells Starkey, “but don’t think that makes you God’s gift to Unwinds.”
“No,” says Starkey. “I guess that spot’s reserved for you.” Then he puts down his cue stick and leaves.
Connor mentally smacks himself for being so paranoid. The truth is, he might actually want to groom Starkey to replace him someday—but who is he to be grooming anybody for anything?

In sort of fairness, Connor’s response is so shitty that he’s right to be kicking himself here and dismissing what he just realized.

On the other hand, he’s already solidly aware that the guy is focused on favoring a particular subgroup. Even if he’s too dumb to realize that favoratism like this is generally bad, he must be at least aware that someone known for favoring a subgroup can’t be put in charge of the entire group without causing an awful lot of drama.

The plot here requires that Connor 2 be some supremely clever manipulation no one sees coming, but the fact the writing is shitty requires it to be blindingly obvious what a bad idea it all is.

Connor explains he has no one much to talk to – Risa’s missing and boys can’t talk about emotions with each other, which is hilariously on-point. Anyway, so Hayden just responds to feelings with jokes until Connor stops and Trace tells him to move the fuck on because talking about feelings is hard.

“I’m not a boeuf,” Connor tells him. “I wasn’t trained to have no feelings.”
“It’s not that we don’t have feelings, we just know how to harness them and direct them toward specific goals.”

By “harness”, we mean “repress” and by “specific goals” we mean “shooting people”.

Anyway while Connor agrees that using some unrelated task to crush his feelings down sounds like a way better idea than actually talking about them, he can’t think of one.

at the Graveyard feels more and more directionless. A treadmill that hurls kids off when they turn seventeen.

THEN MAKE THAT YOUR PROJECT.

The adults would like for this place to be more sustainable, and you want it to be because you can’t rely on them for food. There’s also the those jobs you sell kids off to, some of which served as employment up to eighteen back when that was the age limit.

Now, you’re situated in a hellstate, so there’s a limit to what you can do directly. You can, however, work with the existing sympathizers about longer-term jobs or setting up a secondary camp nearby. The best thing to aim for would be some sort of farm commune, which as I say it is why you’re not going to do it because communism is much wronger than dead kids.

Come to think of it, doesn’t the admiral have a ranch or something?

Someone—Connor suspects it’s Hayden—alerts the Admiral that he’s not taking Risa’s capture well, so the Admiral pays a surprise visit.

Right, that guy! He’s apparently still alive. Okay, I’m going to assume that the “ranch” that was just a bunch of pretty landscaping is probably not, currently, at max productivity. He could take the water currently being wasted on that bullshit and use it for actual farming and cattleraising. Use it to produce expensive, high-maintenance organic crops and say all the workers are unpaid interns. Ship the bruised vegetables and offal back to the kids.

Will it be obvious that something’s up?

Yes, but we established everyone already knows about the actual secret unwind hideaway and that the unwinding thing is really just to get rid of troublesome kids, they’re not going to kick up a fuss over the guy employing those kids and keeping them off the streets once they age out.

Ideally, you could then transition the kids into jobs in landscaping, which is like farming but more useless and therefore better paid. He was already running a legitimate-looking scrap business, he (or perhaps his wife) could set up a landscaping business next. It’d pay shitty wages, so as soon as anyone was halfway qualified they get a job at some other company or go freelance – maybe he could even buy old cars in bulk, have another group working on fixing those up a bit, then sell those to the landscapers who want to set out on their own.

Meanwhile, you could also look into online learning. Maybe have the ones at the ranch sign up then copy all the info and let younger kids work on it when they’re not hacking up planes. At worst, it’ll make it much easier for them to do later under their actual name, at best they can get jobs where you just need to show you know what you’re doing. There are a lot of jobs that require you know things without actually asking for a degree.

He arrives at the Graveyard in a black limo waxed to such a smooth sheen it doesn’t collect the dust it kicks up.

Also why is it evil when anyone else has anything nice, but it’s fine for him to have the nicest stuff we’ve seen?

He invites Connor to join him in his plush, air-conditioned limo, and they sit idling on the runway like the thing could sprout wings and take off at any given moment.
They make small talk just a bit. The Admiral tells him of the Great Harlan Reunion: a huge party

Why is it this okay and not everything else???

“You’ve put on some muscle since I last saw you,” the Admiral tells him. “I hope to God you’re not shooting up those damn military steroids they have the boeufs on; they shrink your testicles down to peanuts.”

Also, I think this is just to remind everyone steroids are bad but I suspect this is a feature not bug thing. If abortions aren’t an option and birth control is so banned no one even remembers it exists, you need to do something to cut down your population. It seems like most state ward kids are killed while the “boeufs” are guaranteed to survive, which likely means they make up the vast majority who make it to adulthood. Sterilization means you’ve prevented your lower class from breeding and producing more of themselves. Probably the only reason they don’t just sterilize everybody is that doing it on purpose is banned but side effects are fine – just like women shouldn’t have abortions, but even more definitely shouldn’t get to sue the company for poisoning the water and causing the whole town to miscarry.

Now, obviously you’re better served by sterilizing women than men, but it seems like the military is surprisingly equal-opportunity about this and while steroid use doesn’t sterilize women as well as men, it can fuck up enough things that women won’t be able to carry a baby to term.

In fact, I don’t think they’re using steroids at all.

The whole point of steroid bulk is that it happens fast. It also does stuff like make you stop growing. The government’s program would create hypermuscled, viciously aggressive kids (with wrecked immune systems), and if they were immediately shoving those kids into war zones that’d be reasonable, but supposedly they just keep them sitting around in the state homes until they’re old enough to enter the legitimate army while being about the same size as they started.

I’m thinking they’re just straight up castrating them. Castrating kids produces huge adults, then you can steroid them up to whatever muscle mass you want later. (And it’s not like you need super muscles on your soldiers these days, you’re not supposed to punch the enemy to death.) And this is true for girls as well. It also explains why Risa couldn’t transfer into the program – at sixteen, she’s already been through the hormone flux that’ll set her max height.

This also fits with what little we’ve seen of them – the amount of steroid abuse that would cause permanent sterility should be more than enough to cause hyperaggression – and indeed, their name itself. You don’t make steer by injecting boy calves with extra testosterone, after all.

He tells Connor how, when all the “parts” went their separate ways, Emby, his asthmatic friend, had nowhere to go, so the Admiral kept him on and is now raising him like a grandson.

This suggests that despite the implication last book, Zachary was the only time the guy found someone with his son’s parts who’d escaped unwinding himself.

“Not the shiniest Easter egg on the lawn,” the Admiral says, “but he’s very sincere.”

I fucking hate you.

Anyway, it’s time for Feeling Talk.

“I hadn’t pegged you as the kind of young man who wastes his time feeling sorry for himself.”
“I’m not feeling sorry! I’m angry!”
“Anger is only our friend when we know its caliber and how to aim it.”

Man feeling talk, about how you should crush your feelings into a tiny ball and then kill someone about it.

Then he notices Connor’s arm and immediately knows that clearly Connorsue must’ve gotten it by convenient shenanigans.

“If I had a choice, I would have refused it, the same way you refused an unwound heart. The same way Risa refused a new spine.”
Connor feels goose bumps rise on the arm from the near-arctic chill of the air conditioner. “But now I’ve got it, and it’s not like I’m gonna hack it off.”

Except that is the choice you’re making. You’re claiming you’d be willing to live with one arm, but that also, you’re not willing to do that.

If you’re going to say that hacking the arm off wouldn’t do anything about unwinding, let me tell you a secret: refusing the heart didn’t either. Neither did the spine. No one person refusing a part is going to end the demand for dead kid chunks. You could even argue that, given the kids have already been chopped up and the brains may well have already been thrown in the blender, even those opposing it can still use the existing parts without directly causing harm.

But – that’s the rule everyone but Connor lives under. Miracolina makes it clear all the adults working to stop tithing aren’t using parts. Lev is devastated his brother’s willing to accept parts rather than die. The admiral nearly died and currently is expected to only have a few months left to live because he refuses parts.

“And well you should keep it!” the Admiral says. “Roland may have been a miscreant, but he was a human miscreant, and deserved better. I’m sure he’d be satisfied to know that his arm is ruling the Graveyard with an iron fist.”

This is actually pretty clever!

But again, only Connor gets this excuse.

The guy then says that Connor needs to move on. He says he shouldn’t have let her go.

“If she hadn’t, from what I understand an innocent boy would have been unwound.”
“So? Let him be unwound!”
The Admiral quietly bristles. “I’m going to forget you said that.”

It was one for one. It’s not really that awful to be upset about which one was lost. Hell, ignoring Connor’s feelings, Risa had the most experience patching kids up. Losing her for a random kid means more kids are going to die later.

The guy then explains that Connor is being tested and he’ll be a great leader in the end.

Also, he doesn’t know much of the Proactive Citizenry guys but says their ads remind him of old stuff from before the war about the Teen Uprisings? The Feral Flash riots?” which Connor has no idea of.

History is written by the victors—and when there are no victors, it all winds up in corporate shredders.”

Side A: people who want kids to die. Side B: kids. Current setup: kids die. GOSH I GUESS NOBODY WON!

Connor then considers mentioning that his second in command works for these people, but decides it’d stress the guy out.

Speaking of, Trace respectfully requests a private meeting with Connor. In spite of his admission that he’s working for the Juvies and Proactive Citizenry, he still treats Connor with the full respect of a commanding officer. Connor doesn’t know what to make of this. He can’t tell whether it’s a scam or if Trace is being sincere.

Honestly, I would be assuming something worse than either.

Trace was raised from a young age – we don’t even know how young, just that Risa was already far too old – for the army. It’s obvious that wasn’t just whatever they do to them physically but also about making sure they’d be obedient soldiers. And nothing Trace has said suggests that he was expecting a career path of eventually being in charge. How high do you think something you call “boeuf” gets promoted?

When Trace says he’ll take orders from whoever is designated his commanding officer, regardless of age or training or blinding incompetence, when he makes it clear his obedience to military procedure has no connection whatsoever to a belief in military procedure working, I don’t think that’s just respect for procedure. I think we’re running a slave army taking orders from higher classes who get the officer positions.

But hey, who really cares why when what matters is that the badass soldier can show how awesome Connor is by deferring to him all the time.

Anyway, plot? Haha not really but supposedly, there’s dissent in the Juvenile Authority. There are some who want to take this place out. But they’re not going to because the people in charge are still fine with it. Pretty sure that’s how it already was.

Then he says that he’s found out a mystery name.

There was a marble wall in the lobby commemorating former presidents of the organization—some names you’d probably recognize—giants of business both before and after the war … but there was one name missing. It had been gouged right out of the marble, with no attempt to patch it up. And then again, out in the garden there was a sculpture of the founders. Five of them, but clearly the pedestal was built for six. There were still rust stains from where that sixth statue had once been.”

So, making a point that doing whatever this guy means they’ll take a hacksaw to all memory of your name.

Then they let him hang with them in their super rich guy club with the kind of alcohol you can’t even get on the black market. It’s worldbuilding time! What sort of alcohol is that?

Real Russian vodka.

Uh. So even if there’s an embargo against Russia/Russian embargo against us, I’m pretty sure the black market would still be able to get some out. That’s like the black market’s whole thing. From this, I’m going to guess somebody accidentally all of Russia. I don’t see us doing that and I’m sick of everything always being all our fault in dystopias, so you know what, China, you’re getting the blame for this one.

Tequila from before the agave extinction.

So my first thought was holy shit how did we do that. Then I googled it to find out how hard it’d be and found out that actually it’s referring to a trumped up scare about one inbred cultivar of one species and not the almost two hundred different agave species.

Admittedly, blue agave or Agave tequilana is, indeed, the one you use for tequila, but they readily hybridize so even if disease outbreaks render farming the current cultivars impossible and, I don’t know, every non-farm area was paved over so there’s no other blue agave with better genes, you could just cross the farm version with other species a bit to get genetic diversity back. This isn’t like with bananas where you just have to start over completely every time, plus we’re talking about a heavily processed product so there’s plenty of tweaks people could make to adjust the flavor if necessary.

Stuff that must cost thousands of dollars a shot, and they were guzzling it like water.

I’d actually expect it to be pricer. I mean, we have some pretty expensive alcohols these days and we’re not drinking extinct plant juice or the last exports of a presumably nuked country. There’s tequila sold now that would cost thousands per shot.

Anyway, since they were stupid drunk he figured it was a good time to ask what was with the statue, and one says the name and then gets concerned and they won’t talk further.

“But then, as I was leaving, one of them said something to me that I still haven’t been able to get out of my mind. He clapped me on the shoulder, called me his ‘friend,’ and told me that unwinding is more than just a medical process, it’s at the very core of our way of life. ‘Proactive Citizenry is dedicated to protecting that way of life,’ he said, ‘and if you know what’s good for you, you’ll forget you ever heard his name.’ ”

Yeah, no shit. You’re really not that used to this spy stuff, are you? “They viciously removed all evidence of his name, and also are a pack of murdering assholes. But then they ominously told me not to mention the thing they don’t want mentioned!”

Anyway, it’s now time to actually get to the plot, for real, sort of! Also, to start off our microchapters.

Risa’s chapter, in its entirety:

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT
“I was a ward of the state about to be unwound, so I went AWOL. That means I shouldn’t be here right now. You might think I’m lucky . . . but because I stayed whole, fourteen-year-old Morena Sandoval, an honor student with a bright future, died because she was denied the liver I would have provided. Jerrin Stein, a father of three, died of a fatal heart attack because my
heart wasn’t available when he desperately needed it. And firefighter Davis Macy lost his life to pulmonary asphyxiation because my lungs weren’t there to replace his burned ones.
“I’m alive today because I ran from unwinding, and my selfishness cost these, and many others, their lives. My name is Risa Ward, AWOL Unwind, and now I must live knowing how many innocent people I’ve killed.”
—Sponsored by Citizens for AWOL J ustice