So, last time, Risa is now giving odd, self-flagellating messages of support for unwinding that totally don’t sound like they were delivered at gunpoint. This time, we find out everyone falls for it. It’s like an even worse version of the plot in Mockingjay.

He tries to come up with alternate explanations. Maybe it’s not real—just a digital image. Maybe it’s a trick designed to demoralize them . . . but the truth screams louder than any conjecture. Risa is publicly speaking in favor of unwinding. She’s gone to the other side.

I mean, at least in Mockingjay someone was able to spit out the, “Maybe he’s being forced to say it!” option. And fucking Millstone wasn’t even a known supporter of the cause. Risa goes off to her likely death to prevent a kid from being unwound, then shows up saying she’s a piece of shit murderer for not being unwound, and the best anyone can come up with is “maybe it’s ‘shopped?”

Mind you, Risa deserves some blame for this. Remember, no one on the pro-unwinding side knows Connor’s alive, so it is really fucking easy to pass along a coded message. All Risa has to do is say that her opposition to unwinding is as dead as the oh-so-great Arkon AWOL, and the kids would know something was up. And don’t say she couldn’t have worked it in to that particular message, because:

It’s not just one, either. She made a whole bunch of public service announcements—and there’s an interview, too.”

So it should’ve been easy to slip in something.

For that matter, I think Roberta would’ve been supportive of it, to the point Risa doesn’t really need to slip anything past her. Roberta just wants something shiny for her precious science baby. She’s not trying to demoralize the escaped kids and fucking with Risa’s head by making her miserable thinking they’ll hate her is outright counterproductive. I mean, maybe she could try it if the goal was to completely break Risa, but she really doesn’t seem interested in going through that much effort.

Back to the idiots. Their solution is hilarious:

“So, can we route everything through facial recognition software before it goes out and scramble it every time she turns up? Do we have a program that can do that?”
No one answers for a few seconds; then Jeevan speaks up. “We have tons of old military security programs, there’s got to be facial recognition stuff in there. I’ll bet I can patch something together.”

They’re so dumb they take this at face value, yet can slap together a program like this.

Also, Hayden goes on to seriously think he can tell all the kids there to just not mention it to anybody. And it’s just entirely forgotten that these have been running for a while before the tech kids noticed, so there’s a good chance someone else already saw.

We then go to Connor, who is totally going to find out and it’ll be worse for hiding it you dumbasses.

Surprisingly, he’s actually being a good character at the moment.

Connor knows that things haven’t always been the way they are now—but when the world’s been one way for your entire life, it’s hard to imagine it being any different. Years ago, before he was even of unwinding age, Connor got bronchitis, and it just kept coming back. There was actually talk about getting him new lungs, but the problem cleared up. He remembers feeling so sick for so long, after a while he had forgotten what being well even felt like.
Could it be that way for an entire society?

Not exactly Miracolina quality, but that was pretty good writing. Therefore, and this is amazing, Connor makes the time to go to the library jet to do some research. Yes! Thank you! Let the worldbuilding infodump commence.

Of course, the internet went down to hide the whole Risa thing, but that’s just a blip as Hayden offers to run the search for him and we’re still on exposition train.

They search the name but can’t find anything. Connor continues to actually be a good character and, instead of wandering off to my frustrated screams, decides to follow up on what the admiral said.

“I want you to look up ‘the terror generation.’ ”

It’s time for the author to well-meaningly fuck up.

See, the author wants to write about how the real conflict was people hating teenagers, and while one might say, ideally loudly and repeatedly, that banning abortion should not have been used as a prop for that, it is valid to argue that yeah, intergenerational conflict is a thing and it’s generally the adults shitting on the teens.

Unfortunately he didn’t quite grasp that the reason this is wrong is because it’s lies. It’s like he was trying to talk about how oppressing black people is the secret thing underlying a lot of government/societal decisions and in the process claimed that black people are all drug-dealing rapists.

The kids find an article from around “Heartland War” time, and also mention they don’t know the actual dates because the author grudgingly knows the internet exists but the idea kids can and do learn things outside of school without getting told by an adult is still beyond him. It talks about a “flash riot” because the author did hear about flash mobs.

Police have been authorized to use the new, controversial tranquilizer bullets to subdue the crowd. . . .”
The idea that tranq bullets could be controversial sets Connor reeling. They’re just an accepted part of life, aren’t they?

Oh, so close! This is a really nice bit that’s cut off at the knee by the fact that tranquilizer bullets have no consequences ever. No issues of dosage, no concerns about getting hit multiple times, even the dart itself seems magically unable to cause physical harm. Tranquilizer bullets are the kindest, gentlest thing we have ever invented as a species. More people would choke to death from being offered milk and cookies. You might be able to reverse the effects of regular bullets by shooting victims with these. I am not entirely convinced they don’t cure cancer.

The cause of the protests is the public school closings, and let’s all just laugh quietly at the idea the schools would properly shut down instead of straight up charging people while employing a single teacher for an entire grade, as if the people up top even give that much of a fuck. I’m sure he’s thinking about some schools closing early, and yes, it’s an embarrassment, but the stuff they do to technically keep the lights on the rest of the year is even more bullshit.

You know, I wonder if this has anything to do with the fact I get the impression of a completely fucked economy from this but it’s not referenced at all. The idea that the issue is not getting a high school diploma that’d qualify you for the job and not that the issue is the jobs don’t exist just seems so archaic. And it may be connected to the idea that somehow this just stops at eighteen, as if anyone who did manage to graduate high school is fine and college is fine and everything else about this is just so very, very fine.

No one would be abruptly protesting an early end to their already shitty classes. They’d already be busy protesting their shitty classes and their total lack of opportunity regardless and the minimum wage and health care.

This came out in 2012, a year after Occupy Wall Street started. And – I mean, even assuming he didn’t actually pay attention to anything being said because he figured you could replace it with “schools closing” without any of the other issues still mattering, what age did he think they were? Did he really think it was fifteen year olds doing that? Sure, closing schools would sure give them more opportunity to participate, but the rest of the protesters aren’t going to flee the teenage cooties in response.

We then get a snippet from pundit that actually sounds like something you’d see in the real world and does manage to vaguely reference the economy:

He talks about the struggling economy and the collapse of the public education system. “A nation of angry teenagers with no jobs, no schools, and too much time on their hands? You bet I’m scared—and you should be too.”

But that guy isn’t speaking to all non-teens. He’s talking to the baby boomers, down to the part where he’s dodging the issue of if there aren’t jobs because the economy went belly-up or there just aren’t jobs for people with no qualifications because the economy is tight. The problem of not having a job isn’t going to disappear once someone isn’t a teenager! He can try to scapegoat the kids all he wants, there’s still going to be plenty of young and middle-aged adults being angry and rioting too.

And that’s all this ever really is. You don’t call the actual “terror generation” that. You call the powerless people you’re using as an excuse that.

Fear and hatred of children goes hand in hand with lowered birth rates. The fewer kids there are, the less they can protect themselves and the fewer other people have any interest in protecting them, the more the rest of society turns on them.

More reports—those same angry kids calling for change, and when they don’t get it, they hit the streets, forming random mobs, burning cars, breaking windows, letting loose a kind of communal fury. In the midst of the Heartland War, President Moss—just a few weeks before his assassination— calls an additional state of emergency, this time ordering a curfew on everyone under the age of eighteen.

In what universe are disenfranchised nineteen year olds harmless?

Anyway, this lets them round up the kids into camps, especially the homeless kids who are referred to as ferals.

Then to really hammer home how the author has fucked up, also this is when clappers start, and they appear to have been doing it randomly from the very start, because of fucking course they were. I really hope we’re going to get a ~shocking reveal~ at some point that the clappers were a false flag operation and that’s how the kids got access to super explosive totally undetectable murder blood in the first place.

“All this was going on during the Heartland War,” Connor points out. “The nation was tearing itself apart over pro-life and pro-choice but completely ignored the problems of the kids who were already here.

Go fuck yourself.

Support of one policy does not guarantee that you support the rest of the policies under the broad umbrella. It just makes it pretty fucking likely.

If you support abortion rights, you also, statistically speaking, support funding schools, welfare, right of free speech, homeless shelters, living wage, health care, rights of children – you support a social support system were people aren’t left with no options and aren’t abused by those more powerful. There are libertarians who don’t much give a fuck about banning abortion, and I appreciate that they don’t actively want to condemn women to death, but those are not the sort of people who are going to pick up a gun to defend someone else’s right. And there are religious people who believe fetuses are people but also the rest of people are people, and that tension is why my Kansas relatives choked down their horror at the scary Muslim atheists long enough to vote against the party of FUCK YEAH KILLING PEOPLE. I don’t think they’re joining up with murder for fetuses army. (And honestly, the fact the conservative party is cracking up from trying to force single-issue voting was visible long before this book was published. You don’t extrapolate the far future from what’s already crumbling.)

Suddenly it was obvious to Connor why they don’t teach it. Once education was restructured and corporatized, they didn’t want kids knowing how close they came to toppling the government.

Speaking of predictions, let’s spare a moment to consider the idea the author is predicting that someday in the future, education will become corporatized and structured to create obedient drones.

They didn’t want kids to know how much power they really had.

If the kids had power, the government would’ve scraped up the funds to get the schools open. If the kids had power, they wouldn’t have been talked about like they were vermin.

You want to try to figure out what group actually has power? Look at which one’s getting what they want.

within weeks of the Accord, the Juvenile Authority was established, feral detention centers became harvest camps, and unwinding became … a way of life.

Nope.

If the goal was to get rid of an overpopulation of angry teenagers, you don’t make it up to the parents and you don’t do everything you can to ensure unwanted children.

Let’s return, again, to Lev talking to the “divisional risk” juvie kids. Only if the parents agree do the kids get hacked up. If not, the state has to house and feed and deal with them, to say nothing of the money and manpower sunk into catching and bringing them in. Parents can kill the mouthy kid who isn’t causing any trouble outside the house and not give a shit about the kid stealing a cop car to drive it off the bridge so long as he doesn’t say any foul language under their roof.

If this is a response to the government being sick of dealing with it or a response to a widespread madness among the adults, it wouldn’t leave it up to the parents. They’re often demonized along the way. It’s other people’s kids we hate the very most.

Remember that bit ages ago about how some seventeen year old had killed someone drunk-driving, and how oh, maybe if seventeen year olds could be unwound her parents would’ve ordered her death before she could do that? And how incredibly stupid that chain of hypotheticals was? Now imagine the ad was, “She would be unwound before, but thanks to the no-murdering-seventeen-year-olds thing, now she’ll live! Horror!”

That’s when the truth hits Connor so brutally he feels light-headed. “My God! The Unwind Accord wasn’t just about ending the war—it was also a way to take down the terror generation!”

Connor, I know you’ve been though a lot, but you were explicitly told this last book.

On to Connor 2:

Mason Starkey knows nothing of Janson Rheinschild, the terror generation, or the Heartland War. If he did, he wouldn’t care.

He would absolutely care. This is why storking exists. This is where the idea of children as burdens came in.

The problem here is that there are heroes and villains, and the one who is not Connor must either be the good version or the evil one. Since original flavor Connor is good, this guy is evil.

His motives are a complex weave of self-interest and altruism. He truly wants to raise his storks to glory, as long as they all know he’s the one who’s done it.

Therefore wanting credit is now super evil. You should be like Connor, who just gets the whole Arkon AWOL thing handed to him and the more he humbly downplays it the more he just fans the flames further. Yes, children, trust THOSE people, trust the ones acting humble while the story just keeps somehow growing by unknown means! Those are the good guys who definitely aren’t manipulating you!

Here’s what should be –

Connor 2’s issue is with ingroup/outgroup. Already sensitive, when the other runaway unwind made light of storked kids getting killed, he decided that if everyone who wasn’t a stork didn’t think he was a person, he wouldn’t think anyone who wasn’t a stork was a person.

Learning this could make him realize that he’s fighting over scraps with people who are just as victimized by the real enemy. Maybe some parents would keep their blood children and murder their adopted ones, but all of the kids here had parents willing to kill them. And all adults in this world said that they should have the right to kill any child they owned, not just those they didn’t share genes with.

The abuse they hurl at him is the same abuse they hurl at all the kids. He truly wants to improve the lot of his fellow storked kids, because he recognizes they’ve been mistreated. Knowing how the system came into place (and how much of it was kids abandoned by their parents, and how those abandoned kids made up the first crop of murdered children, so really, can’t you say all unwinds are abandoned?) makes him realize this is true of all the kids there. They all deserve better.

But that would mean it isn’t Good Original Model Connor vs Evil Knockoff Connor, and also mixed race adopted kids just have to be evil, you know? Plus he’s all into actually doing shit to stop things and not sitting around explaining that fighting back is just as wrong.

Oh, also he’s mad that Connor, in spite of all his pretenses of fairness, still refuses to rescue storks from their unwindings.
“We save the kids we’re most likely to get away with saving,” Connor told him. “It’s not our fault that storks are in bigger families and more complicated situations.”

And so we continue Schrodinger’s discrimination.

The fact Connor talks of him giving the adopted kids self-respect suggests that there’s legitimate discrimination, but the fact that apparently, not a single time has there been two kids in the same night where they had to pick and picked “not the fucking stork lol who cares even” suggests otherwise. And given how discrimination really works, maybe the fact everyone’s okay with “giving the storks self-respect” is really because they weren’t oppressed in the first place.

Did anyone hear about The Dangerous Book for Boys? It was partly hyped on the basis that kids today need to go out and do stuff but also partly hyped on a “boys should be proud to be boys” basis. And I remember a site that was full of fun children’s activities…written explicitly and only for dads and their kids, full of asides about how men could do everything women can but better. If it’s a group we already agree should feel good about themselves, we’re far more likely to support a feel-good-about-yourselves initiative for them.

Or put another way – if there was an hour when you needed to have the last name Ward to get in to the rec center, I bet there’d have been more complaints. I bet the idea of those people thinking they were better would’ve bit harder to swallow.

Connorsue loses his temper when his evil double won’t accept how unprejudiced he is.

“If it was up to you, we’d be blowing up harvest camps, wouldn’t we? That’s not how this battle is going to be won! It will just make them come down harder on every Unwind, every AWOL.”

Except for last time.

What’s particularly weird is that we spent last chapter on the argument that kids aren’t taught their riots and exploding have power, then open this one on the same topic. Chronologically, we jumped back in time here, which is why Connor isn’t mentioning it – but do you really think it’ll do anything to change his actual do-nothing position? Of course not. If your oh my god!!! revelation just tells you to keep believing the same stuff you already did, it really wasn’t much of one.

“I’m sorry,” he told Connor. “You know I get passionate when it comes to storks.”
“Your passion’s a good thing,” Connor told him, “when you keep it in perspective.”
He could have slammed Connor for that

And he fucking should’ve.

Perspective is, adults decided to murder their children. Now they’re not even scared any longer, it’s just sadism and greed.

If abortion really is murder, it’s right to shoot up abortion clinics. The people willing to die doing that I respect more than the people who claim to believe it but are fine sitting around feeling holier-than-thou while claiming it’s the greatest genocide the world has ever known.

Is unwinding murder or not, Connor? What exactly are we to keep in perspective here? If your evil double could see beyond his mandated obsession with one subgroup, he’d see that it’s not just storked kids you leave to die. It’s pretty much everybody. Your few attempts are a drop in the bucket that serve only to compromise the one valid reason for not acting, which is keeping the main group of kids safe. You’ll get everyone killed without doing anything that’d really help.

When he takes over, the new Holy of Whollies will be made up of all storks. Drake will be demoted to picking beans, or cleaning chicken crap. Many things will change when Starkey takes over, and God help anyone who’s not in his good graces.
“You gonna get off your ass and play me a game of pool?” Bam asks, pointing her cue at him like a harpoon. “Or do my superior skills challenge your masculinity?”
“Watch it, Bam,” Starkey warns. He will not play her, because he knows she’ll win.

And here we see the same issue as the bit about how he legitimately wants to make things better for others.

Is respect what he wants? Can a non-storked kid be one of those who are in his good graces? Drake is glowering at him, so it’s pretty obvious that in the restructuring he should be demoted somewhere in retaliation. What if Drake had given him a friendly nod? We can see here that Bam is also giving him shit but he doesn’t go on from this to talk about his plans to get rid of her once his power base in more secure. It’s as if good graces have nothing to do with it, and in power he’d elevate storks that don’t think he’s hot shit over non-storks that do.

Prejudice is hardly a good trait, but can’t live exactly alongside pure ambition.

On a more positive note:

Farther down the main aisle, Connor comes down the stairs of the ComBom with Hayden.
“What do you think that’s all about?” Bam asks.
Starkey keeps his opinion to himself.
“I think they’re hot for each other,” says one of the other storks.
Starkey turns to him. “You’re the only one I know who keeps checking out Connor ’s butt, Paulie.”
“That ain’t true!” But by the way Paulie goes red, it’s clear that it is.

Gay kid! That’s the first incidentally gay character we’ve seen in quite some time, and it’s not even a big deal.

Unfortunately a search tells me this is the only time he appears, and I doubt we’ll get lucky enough to see another one.

Bam then mocks Connor2 with the knowledge Connor Prime has been meeting a lot with Trace as well and how clearly he’s being deliberately snubbed. Anyway can we kill him already, she adds, and he’s I have no idea why you think he’s not perfect I support him totally.

Bam turns and spits on the ground. “You’re such a freakin’ hypocrite.”

And yet, not one bad thought about his fellow adopted kid.

Instead, he just tells us that he has a mole in Hayden’s people who told him about the Risa thing. Time to make Connor regret chatting with other people instead of him!

And with that, we go back to fucking Connor.

We can’t stop unwinding, the Admiral once told him. The best we can hope to do is save as many of these kids as we can. But somehow, after seeing those old news reports, Connor is starting to feel that maybe the Admiral was wrong. Maybe there is a way to end unwinding. If only he can figure out how to truly learn from the past …

Well, how about learning from the fact zero of god knows how many clappers have ever been unwound?

But anyway, that was the limits of Connor being a good character. He managed to learn something, but he’s sure as fuck not going to actually take that and turn it into anything resembling a course of action. I suppose I should be grateful he’s even doing the rescue attempts instead of just sitting around whining.

Connor’s evil double interrupts what was honestly just a waste of time anyway to progress the Risa issue.

Starkey pulls out a microdrive and plugs it into the TV’s data port. “You should sit down.”
Connor laughs. “Thanks, but I’ll stand.”

Connor will end this being all “how could he have not realized how much this would hurt me??? :( it’s almost like that was his intention!” and yet from the instant it begins it’s this damn obvious that it’s meant to upset him.

But enough about sucky characters, it’s time for the interview.

“A little over a year ago,” she begins, “clappers took out an unwinding facility in Happy Jack, Arizona. The social and political fallout from that event still resonates today, but one girl—an infamous player in that event—is speaking out. Her message, however, is not what you think. You may have seen her in various public service announcements blitzing the airwaves. In a short time, she’s gone from being one of the Juvenile Authority’s most wanted to becoming the poster child for the cause of unwinding. Yes, you heard me right: FOR unwinding. Her name is Risa Ward, and you’re not going to forget her anytime soon.”

We’ll see this is a huge overstatement of Risa’s lukewarm at gunpoint ambivalence, but I’m not sure if that’s bad writing or an accurate reflection of how 24 hour news is.

“Risa,” begins the journalist, “you were a ward of the state slated for unwinding, became a co-conspirator with the notorious Akron AWOL, and were even present at Happy Jack Harvest Camp to witness his death. After all that, how is it that you now speak in favor of unwinding?”
Risa hesitates before answering, then says, “It’s complicated.”
…
“Could you walk us through it?” the journalist asks, with a disarming grin that Connor wants to punch right off her face with Roland’s fist.
“Let’s just say I have a different perspective now than I had before.”
“You’ve come to see unwinding as a good thing?”
“No, it’s a terrible thing,” she answers, which gives Connor hope … until she says, “But it’s the least of all evils. Unwinding is there for a reason, and the world would be very different without it.”
“Pardon me for pointing this out, but that’s easy for you to say, now that you’re seventeen and beyond unwinding age.”
“No comment,” says Risa, and it’s like a dagger slowly twisting in Connor ’s gut.

It’s really annoying how all of this gets framed around Connor’s feefees. Risa was loved by everyone there. She saved their lives and then martyred herself protecting another kid from unwinding. She’s one of the very few kids who are older than sixteen and choosing to stay out of solidarity. This isn’t just a big deal because Connor’s got girlfriend sads.

“Let’s talk about the charges against you,” the journalist says, looking at her notes. “Theft of government property, namely yourself; conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism; conspiracy to commit murder—and yet all these charges against you have been dropped. Does that have anything to do with your change of heart?”

It can’t because we know there appears to be a universal amnesty thing going on for anyone who survives to adulthood. If it just switched from lock up and hack apart to lock up and throw away the key, the current setup of being safe once you hit the age of majority couldn’t exist.

I’m sure they could trump up some sort of change for her specifically, but it wouldn’t be generic unwind charges. They should be getting her on her involvement in protecting other kids – theft of government property ASIDE FROM herself, interference with police.

“I won’t deny that I was offered a deal,” Risa says, “but the dropping of those charges is not the reason why I’m here today.”
…
“Risa, would you call your change of heart a matter of convenience or a matter of conscience?”
Risa takes time to craft her answer, but that doesn’t make it any less devastating. “Neither,” she says. “After all I’ve been faced with, I find I have no choice. For me, supporting unwinding is a matter of necessity.”

At this point Connor, being a fucking idiot, can’t handle listening to any of Risa’s weirdly phrased not really support and demands it be turned off over his evil double’s protests, then wants to know why his goateed version showed him it, and Connor2 says because he has a right to know and it’s wrong to keep secrets and as REAL friend he knew he shouldn’t do that blah blah.

He is hobbled. How could Starkey not know how devastated he would be? Either he’s stupider than Connor thought … or he’s much, much smarter.

Connor, he spent the entire interview with the self-control of a Chihuahua puppy “oh boy oh boy you gotta see this!!!” “you won’t believe how bad this is!!!” “no why you take ball????” The only reason his tail isn’t knocking the plane over from wagging so hard is that he doesn’t have one.

I guess the next chapter fits in well with this, because it’s a continuation of fucking stupid while everyone pretends this was so totally unforeseen.

We go back to Knockoff Evil version. He’s evilly going to evil save a kid, because he’s sick of the storked kids always being left to die. His moles in different areas get them guns and cars. They burst in and terrify the family while looking for the kid, who sneaks up with a baseball bat and begins to beat I Wish It Was Actual Connor to death.

“Juvies! Here! Tomorrow!” Starkey gasps. “Your parents! Unwinding you!”
“Nice try!” he says, and pulls back the bat, ready to swing again. “Run, Dad! Get out!” The man tries to scramble away but is cornered by other storks. Doesn’t this kid get it? Doesn’t he realize they already signed the order to have him unwound?

Nice try indeed book. We spent the entire opening on the subject of kids not believing their parents would do this, using this particular character’s viewpoint for it no less!

Jesus LaVega tenses his muscles to swing just as one of Starkey’s storks comes up behind him with a large football trophy and swings the marble base at his head. The heavy stone connects with the back of Jesus’s head, and he crumples to the ground instantly. The trophy falls to the floor, broken.
“What did you do?” screams Starkey.
“He was gonna kill you!” screams the stork.

This is going great.

Their illustrious leader responds by flipping out and saying that really, it’s all the dad’s fault the kid is dead in the first place, so let’s kick him – but fail to kill anyone at all on purpose – and then burn the whole place down.

“Let this be a warning,” he yells out the front door as the man stumbles away. He spots neighbors on their porches. Strangers are there to hear his words. Good! It’s time for people to listen. “Let this be a warning,” he says again, “to anyone who would unwind a stork! You will all get what’s coming to you!” Then, in a flash of inspiration, he runs through the house and into the garage.
“Starkey!” one of the others yells after him. “What the hell are you doing?”
“You’ll see.”
In the garage he finds a gas can.

So yeah.

Anyway, what’s unexplained is why they wanted to unwind the kid. We’re told he’s got a linebacker body and he did good enough at football to have at least one impressive trophy, probably multiple ones given the odds of grabbing any one heavy object at random. You know why football players are at the heart of so many scandals? Because it’s a socially-valued occupation where people will overlook a great deal of bad behavior. Now sure, good muscles are probably worth a lot, but we know parents don’t get that money unless they make a second deal with a black market guy and then let their kid know about the unwinding in time to run for it.

Plus, given the age limit, it can’t even be something like that he wasn’t quite good enough for a college scholarship, since he must be only sixteen at the moment. All injuries can be fixed, so it can’t be a matter of some accident crippling him just enough he couldn’t compete further.

And football isn’t exactly cheap to compete in in the first place! They must have sunk a lot of money into getting him this far, and the investment is almost ready to pay off, so they kill him and let the government reap all the profits of the training they paid for? It’s the Ward kids where it makes sense to kill the best of them and see if they’re worth more in pieces than they would’ve been alive.

The only option I’m left with it that this kid had a terrible temper or something. That’s not impossible, I guess, but there’s no suggestion of it here, and it’s pretty rare.