Last time, we’ve just finished meeting our three POV characters.

The pain in Connor’s arm is unbearable. That little monster actually bit him—practically took a chunk out of his forearm.

Human bites are actually really serious. Even assuming he’s being melodramatic and Lev didn’t actually remove a mouthful of muscle, the wound is going to get infected.

He sees the bus girl run off into the woods and he’s baffled by this because he’s stupid. Aside from the fact you apparently can’t turn around without tripping over some kid picked for organ murdering, it’s not like that’s the only reason someone might make a break for it. If nothing else, if you think your parents might be considering murdering you, running away early might be your only chance to actually get far enough. If he recognizes the bus as full of state-owned kids, that should bump it up to obvious, since so far, there’s been no mention of monetary gain, the place is just killing her to free up a room. If she runs away, they have no reason to waste resources trying to find her.

That’s when Connor makes a split-second decision.

This is going to turn out to mean That’s when I needed Connor to do something that made no sense because I wanted the plot to go that way. isn’t it?

He knows it’s a stupid decision, but he can’t help himself.

Yup.

All he knows is that he’s caused death today. The bus driver’s, maybe more. Even if it risks everything, he’s got to balance it somehow. He’s got to do something decent, something good to make up for the awful consequence of his kicking-AWOL.

This just doesn’t work for me.

If Connor’s upset by the death, he should be being upset by the death, not totally unbothered by it until he needs an excuse to do something else.

And so, battling his own instinct for self-preservation, he races toward the kid in white who was so happily going to his own unwinding.

Also, it’d help if he hadn’t nearly gotten this kid killed minutes ago.

As usual, the most annoying thing about all this is it’s not necessary.

See, we know Lev is in “tithing whites”, ie, a special outfit marking him as a lamb for the slaughter. All you need to do is have Connor see him in that outfit and decide to grab him. If Connor wasn’t a little shit incapable of gratitude, you could even have a nice character moment when he thinks of how Andy tried to help him escape and how he should do the same for another unwind, and maybe something about how the only people who’d help an unwind is another unwind so if it isn’t him, there won’t be anyone.

Anyway, Connor heads back just in time to see the cop shoot Lev for some reason, despite the fact he’s heading back for the car. Maybe the childmurderer cops are at least familiar enough with the setting to recognize Lev’s a tithe and shoot him automatically.

He takes a minute to think about how incredibly stupid it was, but when he sees Lev fall he decides Plan A was a good one:

Connor wastes no time. He picks the kid up off the ground and flips him over his shoulder. Tranq bullets fly, but no others connect. In a few seconds Connor’s past the bus, where a gaggle of shell-shocked teens are getting off. He pushes past them and into the woods.

So he was apparently right next to Lev and yet the officer aimed at the kid who wasn’t their main target, was smaller and weaker, and currently trying to get back to his family. Because otherwise the plot wouldn’t work.

Then, Connor manages to outrun an adult while carrying a thirteen year old. He also outruns the apparently inexhaustible tranq bullets.

He sees the girl up ahead and calls out to her. “Stop!” She turns, but
only for an instant, then renews her battle with the dense growth all around her.

So she starts running well before him, but he easily catches up with her. He then

grabs her arm gently, yet firmly enough so that she can’t pull away.

Eurgh. This book had better not go this way.

He explains that they need to work together, which I guess is true because Connor and people in his sphere are apparently the only ones capable of moving around.

On to the next chapter. So far, each chapter has the name of the POV character. This one instead is labeled simply “Cop”, your advance warning that this is not going to humanize the cops in the least.

Officer J. T. Nelson has spent twelve years working Juvenile. He knows AWOL Unwinds will not give up as long as there’s an ounce of consciousness left in them. They are high on adrenaline, and often high on illegal substances as well. Nicotine, caffeine, or worse.

Okay so first, this totally proves it’s a theocracy. Specifically, I think the Mormons took over.

Next, notice he does have a name. Why not use it for the chapter title? And he’s totally fine with his job.

In fact, his only objection is that he can’t use actual bullets.

He wishes he could truly take these wastes-of-life out rather than just taking them down. Maybe then they wouldn’t be so quick to run—and if they did, well, no great loss.

It’s actually really easy to kill people with tranquilizers, so if he felt like that, he could easily “accidentally” kill plenty of them. Shooting them extra times is the obvious one, plus it’d be easy to smother them while they’re out and say they must have just been unusually sensitive to the drug and stopped breathing on their own.

Also – god, what utter bullshit. This is killing the kids. The book’s already had a bunch of adults admit it when they get all upset at the idea of anyone mentioning what they’re doing. All the adults act really guilty – Connor’s dad clearly understood his son’s life would be over. The adults talking to Risa spend a page making excuses about how they don’t want to do it but have no choice, and the social worker flips out at calling it murder. Lev’s whole family admits he’s being sacrificed, and a sacrifice, by definition, requires something to be given up.

Then he finds Lev.

Good, thinks the officer. It was a good thing this boy took that bullet after all. Being unconscious probably saved this kid’s life. No telling where the Unwind would have taken him, or what he’d have done to him.

So not only do the cops in charge of unwinds not even recognize the tithing robes practice, but they’re also Stormtrooper Academy graduates. As stupid as it was, the idea he deliberately shot Lev is at least somewhat plausible. But he just can’t aim? Again, tranquilizers are actually dangerous. Hitting random people with them is bad.

The guy then hears a girl calling for help, saying she’s hurt.

He doesn’t have time for this, but “Protect and Serve” is more than just a motto to him. He sometimes wishes he didn’t have such moral integrity.

I realize this is just supposed to be ironic because he’s full of the evulz, but look, he stops his job to help another injured kid. He doesn’t have to do that, someone else will presumably find her shortly since she’s just off the road and calling for help. So he doesn’t hate all kids.

A thing to consider is that probably, the kids who actually run are the worst troublemakers. Risa was being killed for no reason, but the state facilities seem pretty good at keeping the kids locked down, so that’s probably not who the cops see when they’re chasing kids down. In contrast Connor, the one being killed because his parents are dicks, finds out because he regularly snoops through their things, and then manages to keep it a secret so he has a chance to escape because he doesn’t have human emotions other than cruelty. The troublemaker kids are also probably the ones who might have run away a couple times before – they’re the ones most likely to get far and be real trouble.

That alone shouldn’t be enough for him to hate them so much, but – well, when I was working at at a vet’s, I was the only one who liked the cats. I’ve had cats most of my life so I saw their snarling and clawing at me as fear, but everyone else saw it as malice and hated them right back. And that’s a very human impulse. We perceive pain to ourselves much more easily than other people’s pain.

And this feeds on itself. Once someone hurts us, we’re less likely to care about their feelings, so the next time we’re hurt it seems even less justified, and we care less about the other person, and so on.

You figure some of the cops doing this when they start out see they’re harming these kids, and quit. And others see how much trouble the kids are causing them, and keep going, coming to hate the kids more and more over the years. Anyone who’s been a cop for a long time is inevitably going to end up in the second camp.

Anyway. Risa says she ran away because she was scared the bus would explode and that her arm is broken. He takes a look at it and sees it’s fine – and then doesn’t go into a rant about how she’s terrible and wasted his time or if this is some sort of plot, but reassures her he’ll be right back.

Actually not realizing something’s up is kind of odd, but I guess most of the unwinds don’t really have time for plotting and are mostly just into running desperately.

But anyway, so then Connor drops from the tree and the two kids grapple with him long enough to get his gun and shoot him with it, knocking him out.

Lev wakes up with a sore shoulder.

His left shoulder was the entry point of a tranq bullet

I’d also like to mention that I don’t quite get what these bullets are. They don’t appear to be tranquilizer darts but some sort of paintball-like thing. I think that could work – shoot a liquid with enough force and it could be forced into the skin, but the bit about entry point makes it sound like these are actual bullets getting shot into people that then release tranquilizer, in which case it’d be even easier to kill someone by accident.

It’s hard for Lev to remember what happened, and he’s not sure if the bit about the pastor telling him to run really happened.

He tries to get up, but can’t. At first he thinks that’s also because of the tranquilizers, but then he realizes he’s tied to a tree by thick vines.

Connor is really good at the winning-hearts-and-minds thing.

Risa says he’s safe now. It’s like the scene was written first and then the author went back and added in that Lev was tied up. Lev is all suspicious of how chummy the two are and how they’re probably only talking nicely to him to give him stockholm syndrome, and the book’s obviously trying to present him as an unreasoning prejudiced idiot, but come on, they tied him up!

The crazy kid looks to a pile of berries and nuts obviously foraged from the woods.

This is absurd. Even assuming both Connor and Risa were regular campers and spent a lot of time learning about food in the woods, if nothing else it takes time to find those and much more time to harvest them. (And they’re generally not found in the actual forest, they’re found in open areas because they need sun.) They’re also really low in calories, so there wouldn’t be a nice pile left.

I’m not even sure what the nuts are. Maybe they tripped over a walnut tree. For that matter, why not mention what kinds of berries? The kinds you’d find in a forest are mostly pretty recognizable – blueberries, raspberries, blackberries. If they’re super on the ball they might know you can eat American nightshade, but that’s a big risk since the European toxic death version was brought over and can now be found in the wild here. And really, if they know enough to have done such a good job scavenging berries, they should know enough to know there’s non-berry/nut food to be found and be currently chewing their way through some dandelion.

Anyway, Lev assumes he’s being held for ransom or something and Connor yells at him.

It’s no use trying to explain to this godless pair what tithing is all about. How giving of one’s self is the ultimate blessing.

See, that totally contradicts everything else everyone’s been saying about how the kid stays alive and fine.

Anyway, Lev’s brain finally flickers back to enough life that he realizes he’s better off agreeing with them so they’ll untie him and he can escape.

There’s a moment of silence, then Lev, biting back his anger and revulsion, says, “Thank you. Thank you for saving me.”
“Don’t mention it,” says Connor.
Good. Let them think he’s grateful. Let them think they’re earning his trust. And once they’re lulled into their own false sense of security, he’ll make sure they both get exactly what they deserve.

The book is trying really hard to present Lev as evil, with him describing the kids every other line as vicious murderers and sadistic criminals, but Connor attacked him, tossed his dad into traffic, killed who knows how many other people in the resulting pileup, then kidnapped him and tied him up, and now is denying him the choice of what to do with his life. Yes, Connor’s forcing Lev to stay alive while other people would force Connor and Risa to die, but he’s still saying he has the right to make decisions about other people and doesn’t even display the uncomfortableness a normal person would or any rationalization for it. Lev’s reaction is totally understandable.