Back to Connor again.

Roland is slowly breaking. He confesses to many things, petty acts of vandalism and theft, that Connor couldn’t care less about.

I am really ambivalent about this.

With America’s current stance on torture being “uh…bad…maybe? unless it’s for, you know, reasons…” I really do not like anything that portrays coercing confessions out of people as anything but a disaster.

But it’s something a kid might think would work (certainly something Connor would have no problem with) and this isn’t really outlandish.

But then again, Roland is bad so I really doubt this is going to end on realizing what he did here is wrong, so I guess it is solidly on the bad side.

Anyway, Roland finally thinks to ask why Connor thinks the kids are dead, anyway, and Connor explains that he totally buried the bodies.

“Then you did it!” says Roland. “You did it, and you’re trying to make me take the blame!”

See, it’s not about rumor mills, this is the only sane interpretations.

Now Connor begins to see the flaw in his plan.

Just now. Before this, plan grab someone and accuse them of a crime that officially never happened was looking so great.

If he lets Roland out without a confession, then he’s a dead man. But he can’t keep him in there forever.

The admiral could totally just send Roland off somewhere. I mean, assuming the whole place wasn’t about to collapse but you don’t know that. Should’ve just done that instead of this whole idiot plan in the first place. But hey, that’d mean no locking people up and saying you’ll leave them to rot until you get a confession, and how can Connor be a hero without that?

Then Hayden calls from outside.

“Help!” screams Roland at the top of his lungs. “Help, he’s crazy! Come in here and let me out!” But his screams don’t make it out of the hold.

…

Seriously though, Connor is the villain.

Also, how can you hear someone calling from outside, but they can’t hear someone screaming from inside? Probably Hayden just doesn’t care.

Hayden explains the riot, which shocks Connor because obviously burying people in hidden graves and lying about how they’re still alive is something you do when you don’t kill them. So Connor leaves Roland to rot and heads out.

So. Connor made Roland confess to all the actual stuff he did and doesn’t provoke a false confession. If only Connor had been even more heroic and just gone right for waterboarding he could have resolved this all in time to be back to stop the riot.

He gets there in time to see fire everywhere and them tearing someone apart because kids other than Connor are scum:

There’s a group of jeering kids near the helicopter, gathered like a rugby scrum, kicking something in the center. Then Connor realizes it’s not something, it’s someone.

Also, no future kid would know what rugby even was.

But anyway, it’s no one we care about:

Cleaver grimaces, his mouth bloody. Then Connor realizes that this isn’t a grimace at all. It’s a smile. “Chaos, man,” Cleaver says weakly. “Chaos. It’s beautiful. Beautiful.”

At least that should be the end of chaos hippie.

“It’s okay,” Cleaver says. “This is an okay way to die. Better than suffocating, right?”
Connor can only stare at him. “What . . . what did you say?” No one but Connor and the Admiral knew about the suffocation.

Hey, Connor, I know you don’t give a shit except about a handful of people, but the intentionally murdered kids are the second batch to suffocate, remember? The plane flight you were on was the first batch, and everyone knows they suffocated.

But anyway Connor’s been wrong long enough with Roland so he’s reasserting his sue powers. Cleaver lives just long enough to clarify that Roland was uninvolved and then dies.

So Connor storms over to the jet.

“Look at you!” he screams. “You’ve destroyed everything! How could you have done this? You should all be unwound, every single one of you! YOU SHOULD ALL BE UNWOUND!”
It stops everyone. The kids on the wings, the kids at the bonfires. The shock of hearing such words from one of their own snaps them back to sanity. The shock of hearing his own words—and knowing that he meant them—frightens Connor almost as much as the scene before him.

Destroying things because you think the guy in charge is killing people means you should be killed.

Connor gets the staircase into position and Risa opens the door. She also figured out he’s having a heart attack.

So, Connor gets the guy out and when someone mentions the kid-killing again, Connor says it was chaos hippy, which everyone instantly believes.

That starts a murmur through the crowd, until someone says, “Yeah? Well, what about Emby?”

You hear a guy murdered five kids for no reason, and you don’t assume he’s connected to the sixth inexplicable disappearance? Just look at how this is presented. The kids don’t ask if chaos hippy was behind that too the way real people would, it’s presented as a counter-argument against stopping because the point of this section is that everyone but Connor and Risa suck.

The Admiral’s hand flutters up. “My . . . my son . . .”
“Emby’s his son?” says one kid, and the rumor begins to spread through the crowd.

SHUT UP ABOUT THE STUPID RUMORS

Anyway, Risa points out that the guy will die if they don’t get him to a hospital, but of course the only way out is the helicopter. So they’ll have to go get Roland. Connor heads off and tells Hayden he’s in charge, because only characters met in the first safehouse matter. Where’s the person in charge of medical stuff? They were seventeen and probably relatively levelheaded, they’d be a good choice.

We don’t get to see what Connor says to Roland, but presumably it’s not an apology let alone an oh god how could I do this and was more along the lines of threats. We skip over that to a new chapter from the POV of a female doctor, which I approve of because this book is mostly guys. The author just needs to graduate to also making important characters female and we’d actually be pretty good on this front. Doctor lady sees the helicopter land very badly in the parking lot.

“We have a rooftop helipad, you know,”
“He didn’t think he’d be able to land on it,” says the girl.

Kids! Doing things they aren’t qualified because there’s no one else! I believe this is the only time that we’ve seen the kids actually struggle with the roles they’re trying to take on, and it endears me further to Roland. He just needs to learn that sexual violence toward your rival’s girlfriend is absolutely horrible and he’d be a perfectly tolerable antihero.

Doctor lady gives a quick check to verify that yep, that sure isn’t a functioning heart.

“You’re lucky you landed at a hospital with a heart bank, or we’d end up having to medevac him across town.”

But. We’re told transplants are basically the only treatment for anything ever now. Why would there be hospitals that didn’t have hearts?

The book attempts to distract me from this by having admiral guy get a sudden burst of strength he uses to say no transplants, but I can’t hear you over the fact heart attacks are serious! Maybe you could say this hospital has the big heart bank so they can pick a perfect one while the other one just a couple for emergencies, but you’d want hearts on hand in both.

They attempt to explain to the guy that, uh, this is sort of what they do, and the kids argue that no, he doesn’t want one.

“Tell you what,” says the boy. “Why don’t you do whatever they did before you had a tissue locker full of healthy young hearts.”

You mean, watch them die?

Our current way of handling people with major heart problems is desperately try to keep it twitching in the hopes we’ll get a heart to jam in before they die. Stuff like pacemakers shouldn’t do jack for him at this stage because so much of his actual heart tissue must have died between the long delay in getting help and the strain of being in a boiling jet.

The doctor sighs. At least she’s still close enough to medical school to remember what that is.

Why would they waste time teaching that in med school when the treatment is heart transplants? Is that why it’s so hard, because you have to memorize ten different obsolete treatments for every current working one you learn? Is there a class on balancing the humors with leeches?

Risa and Connor rush off after admiral guy, because they are dumb, leaving Roland behind. He goes up to the doctor, who thinks he’s there to plead about the whole helicopter crash landing thing. She reassures him that she personally doesn’t care and that anyway, if it saves the guy she’s sure it’ll be forgiven.

That’s not what he’s there for.

“I need you to call the Juvey-cops,” he says

And apparently her not caring about the helicopter thing was not because she realized it must have been necessary but because, as a doctor, she just doesn’t really care about things. Hearing those kids are unwinds, her response is “All right. Fine. I’ll see what I can do.” (she also doesn’t have any concern about the fact those kids were arguing about the guy’s treatment – what if he was saying that because they threatened to kill him if he took organs? These are unwinds, mostly people seem to believe they’re monsters in teen form.)

But whatever:

If he wants the Juvey-cops, fine, he’ll get them. The sooner they come, the sooner this whole thing can fall into the category of “not my problem.”

Because adults are useless and evil!

Next is Risa’s chapter.

Juvey-cops always look the same. They look tired, they look angry—they look a lot like the Unwinds they capture.

I’d think there’d be a lot of job satisfaction given how successful they seem. Or maybe that’s just an illusion because there’s so many of them, and the average one spends more of his time bored? But in that case you’d think the ones actually catching unwinds would be looking cheerier.

Risa wants to know if the guy is okay, and he doesn’t seem to care about that and just says hospital only tells next of kin. No one is remarking on the fact these kids have gotten themselves killed trying to save someone’s life. Because adults are useless and evil. This whole sequence should be so great. In another, better book, it’d probably be the climax or something. But no. It’s just more bullshit.

Connor nice-socks him because the author still thinks that’s brilliant.

Risa explains that the cops are bullies or people who were bullied and see unwinds as the bullies.

“How does it feel to do what you do?” she asks him. “Sending kids to a place that ends their lives.”
Obviously he’s heard all this before. “How does it feel to live a life no one else feels is worth living?”
It’s a harsh blow designed to get her to shut up. It works.
“I feel her life is worth living,” says Connor, and he takes her hand. “Anyone feel that way about you?”
It gets to the man—although he tries not to show it. “You both had more than fifteen years to prove yourselves, and you didn’t. Don’t blame the world for your own lousy choices.”

Why is this so shitty?

First off, why doesn’t Risa point out that she’s getting killed over budget problems? Second, why are neither of them pointing out that they just saved a man’s life? That’s a pretty good defense of their own existence. This conversation is a farce.

“Doesn’t it ever occur to you Unwinds that you might be better off—happier even—in a divided state?”

And now it’s just piling everything into one conversation. A moment ago this guy was taunting them, now he’s saying it’ll be great. Connor, surprisingly, gets an actual good response:

“Hey, if that’s the case,” says Connor, “maybe everyone should get unwound. Why don’t you go first?”

Promptly ruined by the cop’s response:

The cop glares at Connor, then takes a quick glance down at his socks

Stop being a sue, Connor.

Anyway, Risa thinks about how much this sucks. She doesn’t see how the cops got there so fast, even though she knows Roland is currently chatting away in a separate room. Admittedly, Roland’s actions were probably motivated in part by Connor going psycho on him, which she doesn’t know about, but still, with him chatting away happily she should have started to realize he’s the one that betrayed them. Instead she just whines about how she thought she was going to have a future but now she’s doomed again, and okay, that sucks but it’s also really repetitive and I don’t see why we need to hear it again.