Lev again! It’s sad that I’m kind of happy about that. Lev is the only one doing shit.
His plotline of wandering around living off slaughtered fields of armadillo and cracking pawnshop guys over the head is, in broad strokes, what I want out of a book about kids running away and trying to survive, even if the details have so many issues. You could fix basically everything with just some consequences afterward. There’s even lots of variety regarding what those consequences should be! Like, if we want it to be depressing and gritty, Lev leaves the diamond necklace, but the guy dies after he leaves. If we don’t, the guy’s okay but CyFi points out that holy shit you could’ve killed him doing that.

(Plus, Lev’s plotline so far involves zero rape.)

Anyway, they’ve reached Joplin. It’s in Missouri, which is one of the many, many states I would just never set foot in if I were “umber”, freaky ghost kid in my head or not.
“Home of the Joplin High Eagles— reigning state champions in girls’ basketball,” CyFi says.
“You know a lot about the place.”
“I don’t know anything about it,” CyFi grumbles. “He knows. Or knew.

So…the kid doesn’t remember his name, but does remember the name of the basketball team and also factoids about them. It would make perfect sense for annoying kid to have just looked this stuff up on the internet, but that seems to have regressed to 1980s levels. Since the prolife people have won everything, I’m going to just assume they’re to blame for that too. Kids were probably using it to get sex ed. Or maybe it’s the author’s fantasy of a world where people can’t freely download his books.

Their journey has gotten no easier. Sure, they have money now, thanks to Lev’s “deal” at that pawnshop, but the money’s only good for buying food.

So you caused brain damage and/or killed a guy (remember, just because he woke up doesn’t mean he won’t suddenly die the next day!) for stuff you didn’t need. There’s no sign you guys were having trouble with food and you just got done with your train roadkill brainstorm.

Now me, I’d have said that their journey had gotten faster because they no longer needed to scrounge for food, and maybe they bought some better winter clothing, then gone on to explain that they’re still on foot. The book just says that they can’t buy train tickets therefore exactly as hard.

CyFi might still be playing the role of leader, but it’s Lev who is now in charge.

The author just really has issues with secondary characters. Or even primary characters, come to think of it. It’s like he’s arranged all of them in a list from most to least important and then made that into a moral judgement.

There’s a guilty pleasure in knowing that CyFi would fall apart if Lev weren’t there to hold him together.

An incredibly fucked up moral judgement because he’s also incapable of writing sympathetic characters, probably for related reasons.

Being so close has annoying kid convulsing “like a seizure” but I guess one of those where you can keep walking, as people with seizures so often do? There’s no talk of it making him fall or anything. Also we learn they didn’t use the money to get any better jackets, because they are stupid.

Lev hopes that the dead kid isn’t trying to do anything bad, but he thinks it probably is. Also, he explains why he’s staying:

“because someone has to witness what happens in Joplin.

Here I thought it was because the guy can barely function without you! But apparently you’re sticking around because this particular disaster is one you want to rubberneck.

Lev then compares him to a salmon.

Cy looks thoughtful. “I once saw this poster about a salmon. It was jumping up this waterfall, see? But there was a bear at the top, and the fish, it was jumping right into the bear’s mouth. The caption beneath— it was supposed to be funny—said, The journey of a thousand miles sometimes ends very, very badly. “

The author’s attempts to be hip are almost worse than when he’s talking about real subjects.

Also, no you did not see any such thing, because those are funny demotivational posters from the internet, which as I explained does not exist in its normal form. The only reference to it has been school computers and from how Connor talked about finding a mysterious page on the subject, it sounds like it’s set at the very beginning of internet searches if they exist at all.

Finally they reach Joplin, which apparently is home to 45,504 people! It seems really weird to give an exact number for such a large population that probably changes all the time, but okay, it’s a regional thing or something.

That concludes Lev’s chapter!

Chapter 30 is Cy-Ty. That’s his actual name? If he explained that’s there the nickname’s from I must have blocked it from my mind.

Anyway, he goes on about how he’s going nuts.

His heart is his own, but it pounds in his chest, threatening to burst—and wouldn’t that be a fine thing? They’d rush him to a hospital, give him someone else’s ticker, and he’d have that kid to deal with too.

Organs are officially magic.

Also, I think they might just leave him to die, given how difficult it was for Emby’s family to afford one half-functioning lung and the fact right now he’s just some homeless kid. They might still have a thousand dollars cash or so, but I’d expect surgery to cost a lot more than that, especially for hearts which should be the most in-demand organ.

Annoying kid recaps for us that the brain chunk is emotional but doesn’t have any words, despite also being the chunk involved in word processing, because fuck it that’s why.

He keeps looking for things in Cyrus’s head that just aren’t there. Memories. Connections. He keeps looking for words, but Cyrus’s brain codes words differently.

Which is why the brain chunk shouldn’t be working for him either, he should be getting the same incompatible code thing. You can’t have one way incompatibility.

So they wander around town until he finds an icecream store.

I can taste pumpkin ice cream. I hate pumpkin ice cream.”

I just don’t understand how “pumpkin ice cream” is a common enough flavor everyone has opinions on it. Did the prolifers take away all the good flavors?

He tries to go directions he remembers from there and ends up at the high school, where he realizes the kid was on the fencing team and they speculate that he probably stole the opponent team’s swords because shiny and also apparently that’s tradition. So, it seems like he must have been decently well off, since I don’t really associate with fencing and swords with poor kids, though anything’s possible depending on if his school subsidized things. (I feel like there probably isn’t, because this place seems a hellhole, but on the other hand we had some liberal panic over Alexis’ school helping care for the babies.)

So they reverse and he starts going to the dead kid’s home, and the brain starts possessing him so much it changes his expression because scifi ghosts.

A police car is following them but he won’t stop. He starts explaining that the dead kid’s parents get mad at him if he stays out.

“I’m gonna be late. They’re gonna be so mad. They’re always so mad.”
“Late for what?”
“Dinner. They gotta eat it right on time, or I get hell for it. They could eat it without me, but they won’t. They don’t. They just stew. And the food goes cold. And it’s my fault, my fault, always my fault. So I gotta sit there and they ask me how was my day? Fine. What did I learn? Nothing. What did I do wrong this time? Everything.”

I guess that’s abusive? I don’t know, it also sounds pretty concerned. I mean, when are they eating supper here? Why is he always getting home too late for that? Maybe he’s avoiding coming home because of the rest of it, but it seems like he’s saying the late thing is the major issue.

At the house itself is another police car and his parents. The police grab him but he says he’s got to do this so his parents say to let him go and come ooooon if you guys were so damn okay with this you could’ve saved us a lot of time and just took him to this place.

The cops are surprisingly competent and check to see he doesn’t have a weapon. The cops are honestly the only good characters in this book. They’re on the ball, they react and do stuff and it’s just great. I even forgive them for having the shittiest marksmanship outside of Star Trek.

Inside he finds the dead kid’s parents, who are looking about as freaked out and horrified as you’d expect.

Part of him is happy at that, part of him sad

Are all kids in this world dicks? I mean, we’ve heard over and over that the kid doesn’t even understand he’s dead, which would justify this sort of thing, so it comes off as just glee his parents are looking traumatized for its own sake.

“Tyler?” says the man. “Tyler, is that you?”
It’s the first time Cyrus has a name to go with that part of him. Tyler. Yes.
I’m Cyrus, but I’m also Tyler. I’m Cy-Ty.

Oh, okay.

That’s stupid that it’s almost the same as his nickname, but okay.

He demands they give him “it” and eventually comes up with “shovel”.

In the back are the graves of his pets, which mostly died understandable deaths although “a pack of wild dogs” is, uh, does Missouri have roving wild dogs? What are we, Russia?

Next to that, he digs up something and gets a briefcase full of all the stuff he stole.

There are diamonds and rubies, zircons and plastic. The priceless and the worthless, all mixed in together.

This is dumb. The proportion of shiny shit that is valuable shiny shit is very very low, and that’s before we consider that the valuable stuff is also going to largely be out of reach. It should be 99% shiny plastic. But no, it’s mostly real gold and diamonds, somehow.

He picks up a handful and brings it to them and wails he’s really sorry and please don’t unwind him.

I mean, yeah, it’s really creepy and sad, but it’s just so damn stupid that he’s possessed by a transplant ghost that I can’t get over that. Also, just…you shouldn’t kill your kid for this, but in their society that’s what you do with problem kids and being compelled to grab incredibly valuable things and horde them is kind of a huge problem. It’s not like they seem proud of what they did. And everyone says the kids are still alive and Lev’s bit about being happier divided up is probably standard dogma.

Anyway, then we go to the next chapter, back to Lev, who starts screaming at them.

Tyler’s parents still huddle together, comforting each other instead of comforting Cy. It makes Lev even more furious.

Because Cy isn’t their kid. Their kid is dead.

This is how bad the book is. It isn’t even able to make me upset at people who killed their kid.

Lev orders them to lie to the dead kid and say they aren’t going to kill him. He does this by grabbing the shovel and saying he’ll smash their heads in. He then goes on to explain this isn’t a threat to get them to do it but an actual thing he is seconds away from doing. The cops aim their guns at him, which apparently are actual guns instead of tranq guns because why use your magic nonfatal weapon when you can use lead, and he doesn’t care because he’s pretty sure he can still kill at least one of the parents before he dies.

So I guess having strong opinions about abortion is evil but it’s okay to be upset about unwinding? Maybe because compromises aren’t politicized into two camps which is the root of all evil?

I should point out here that the dead kid’s mother was crying pretty heavily and basically everything points to them being pretty upset about this.

But who cares about this! What matters is LEV because it is all about LEV so his threat makes them promise not to unwind the dead kid because he is a reverent and works on those rules, and now that his unfinished business is done he’ll stop possessing shit, I guess.

So Lev lets go of the shovel, the cops either have a moment of stupid or were just really not looking forward to shooting a thirteen year old so they lower the guns and start paying attention to the rest of the scene, so Lev books it because adults are useless and talking to the only parents who seem actually concerned for their kid would surely be a waste of time.

The look on Cy’s face as he dropped the jewelry at the feet of those horrible, horrible people, and the way they acted, as if they were the ones being victimized—these things will stay with Lev for the rest of his life.

It is amazing how much the book drops the ball here.

Like I said, they killed their kid! It obviously wants them to be selfish assholes. But all we see of them is that they’re crying and upset. They don’t jump at the chance to lie to the dead kid, but that’s the opposite of bad. If they’d calmly identified what they needed to do and said it just to get this done with, I would have found it much easier to view them as unaffected, but they were so obviously upset by what was happening and…would the first thing on your mind be to lie, in that situation? Or would you be too caught up in guilt?

He knows he’s been changed by this moment, transformed in some deep and frightening way.

I was spoiled on a plot twist due to it being the subject of the novella, so I’m going to just say here that I think the novella is some Darkest Powers style money grabbing shit. This is obviously the point Lev changes. It’s explicitly stated here. There doesn’t need to be a whole other book explaining it.

Anyway the chapter finishes with a bunch of talk about darkness because Lev is dark now get it????????