There is only one permanently disabled resident of the Graveyard. Since the disabled are a protected class, they’re never at risk for being unwound, so they never turn up at the Graveyard with all the other kids who ran from their unwind order. It’s a testimony to the swiss-cheese nature of public compassion.

It’s also just random plot fiat.

It does make a weird sort of sense that prior to unwinding, the kids are required to be given medical care, and this happens to result in the fact they’ll use unwind parts to fix someone’s broken back so they can unwind them into parts and pull that spine right back out. Hell, maybe they even view it as a good chance for newbie doctors to practice transplants because if you fuck up who cares, it’s not going to be there for long.

But – that poor kid who now only had a single replacement lung, and that single lung had asthma, and also horrible allergies? Disability. Multiple disabilities, in fact. The kleptomaniac ghost kid, that’s a disability. Any kid with legitimate behavioral issues, disability.

It’s like the author has this picture in his head of disability that’s just a person in a wheelchair. And public compassion is barely even on their side, it certainly doesn’t extend to much else.

Now, you could do something where you acknowledged that disability is actually a complex topic plus it can be affected by things like education and social class, so a mentally ill kid might have parents who didn’t understand this and never got a diagnosis, then resorted to unwinding when the kid kept having problems. Gaming the system might also work – if you know there’s something wrong and you’re also a horrible person, you might make sure your kid never gets near any doctor who’d notice this because it’s easier to just kill them than give them treatment.

And it’d actually address my points about why the kids they’re getting seem relatively stable – if there’s a certain minimum competence to kill them, then the pool of unwinds will only contain kids who are judged mentally competent and the few who slipped through the cracks. At the least, you shouldn’t get to unwind kids who are mentally below age twelve if that’s the minimum murder age.

But there’s the problem that people hate disability. They wouldn’t want those kids around. In times past we just killed them, but then people like Hitler ruined that. But now we’ve got a brand new excuse! Before, people had to argue that if you were disabled, your quality of life was so awful you were better off dead. Now they can point out that by harvesting you for parts, those parts can go on to have a full, abled life! No more does your liver need to be sad you’re deaf. The premise of this is that parents get sick of dealing with their kids so they kill them. Disabled kids are more likely to get abused and killed, so why would unwinding somehow get a pass here?

Risa is disabled by choice. That is to say, she refused surgery that would repair her severed spine, because it involved giving her the spine of an unwound kid.

Okay but also, if she did get the surgery she’d just have been hacked apart afterward.

Risa is the only good character in this, so I’m willing to accept that she, personally, was willing to do it only for that reason. But as exposition, it’s terribly clunky.

It used to be that spinal damage was irreversible, and if that was the card you were dealt, you spent the rest of your days with it.

The book admits that they’ve stopped doing regular medical care, but what I think is a bigger deal is that all medicine appears to have stalled. We’re so close to fixing this. A future where medicine has ground to a halt, where all the progress we were making was undone…that’s another way to condemn the whole thing, it’s hurting society as a whole as well as the individuals. Like slavery! Unwinding is like the south having slaves – individual horrors, people as commodities, general stagnation for everyone else, plus that’s the good/evil thing everyone knows so it fits into this being about pandering to teens and white American culture’s love of “what if slavery but white people” given who the characters are.

Anyway, Risa, as a girl, hates that just because she’s disabled and needs different accommodations, she gets different accommodations than others.

The whole lousy jet singles her out—and although her shattered spine is a well-earned war wound, it doesn’t change the fact that she is constantly condemned to receive special treatment.

Meanwhile Connor is leader of everything.

Speaking of,
Every day at five o’clock, Risa waits for Connor beneath a stealth bomber they’ve nicknamed Hush Puppy. Every day, Connor is late.

Because she is a girl and girls wait.

She goes on to say that apparently they’re now “modern folklore” although last book was all about how modern folklore in this universe makes no sense so that doesn’t actually give us any idea what might be going on.

Hard to imagine that so much notoriety came from merely surviving the blast at Happy Jack Harvest Camp. Merely because Connor was lucky enough to be the first Unwind ever to walk out of a Chop Shop in one piece. Of course, as far as the rest of the world knows, Connor died there

And what more we’re told manages to make even less sense. Connor’s famous for getting out except he died there.

and Risa is missing—either dead herself, or in hiding deep within some AWOL-friendly nation, if there even is such a thing anymore.

Uh, well, we know Miracolina’s parents left Rome to take advantage of America’s “harvest banks”. That suggests that Europe doesn’t do it. It also suggests China doesn’t do it or else that’d make sense as a destination. And there’s no reason for them to have stayed when it’s not like their kid needed continual treatment, so the most likely reason is because they took the tithing promise seriously but couldn’t do it in another country.

Then Connor kneels before Risa’s wheelchair and begins to massage her legs, trying to coax circulation to those parts of her that can no longer feel. It’s part of their daily ritual together, this physical contact between them. It’s coolly clinical, yet strangely intimate at the same time.

….eurgh and he’s got the unwind arm so that’s doing that.

But this is a legitimate issue so hey, research.

Connor isn’t into the usual clinical yet intimate this time, because he wonders what are they doing even, and then clarifies he doesn’t get why they’ve been left alone so long. Risa reminds him the author had the whole plot twist about this not really being about organs and Connor explains that now, the author’s decided that actually it is weird and something else is going on.

She realizes that both of them have been profoundly changed in the wake of the Happy Jack Harvest Camp revolt. Risa likes to think that their spirits have been galvanized like iron in a furnace, but sometimes it feels like they’ve only been damaged by those harsh flames.

Wasn’t Connor unconscious for the whole thing? You know, so he could get that arm without compromising his principles?

We then recap the weirdness of the book’s ending:

Even before Happy Jack, there had been a bill in Congress calling for the lowering of the legal limit of unwinding by a whole year, to one’s seventeenth birthday instead of eighteenth. The “Cap-17” bill had never been expected to pass—in fact, most people didn’t even know about it until Happy Jack made the news—and until poor Lev Calder ’s face became plastered on the cover of every major magazine: the innocent boy clothed all in white. A bright-eyed, clean-cut kid smiling out from a school picture. How the perfect child became a clapper was a question that made parents everywhere stop and take notice . . . because if it could happen to Lev, who’s to say that their own child might not turn their blood explosive someday and detonate themselves in a burst of rage? And the fact that Lev chose not to detonate himself troubled people even more, because they couldn’t just file him away as a bad seed. They had to accept that he had a soul—a conscience—which meant that maybe society had a hand in making him a clapper. And then suddenly—as if to assuage everyone’s feelings of cultural guilt—the Cap-17 bill became law. No one could be unwound after their seventeenth birthday.

Well, the idea that the bill just happens to be there when something related happens makes sense. The whole thing with Lev doesn’t. If even perfect kids may turn suicide bomber, and the real reason for unwinding is fear of children, then that means more unwinding is the solution. And then he didn’t – but suicide bombers choose not to do it all the time, and people just shrug and say they were cowards. All this means is that kids are unpredictable and confusing, plus he was a tithe and not a regular unwind, so it should’ve resulted in a ban on tithing, but it seems like people who change their minds on that can just not send their kid.

The book goes on to explain that releasing the seventeen-year-olds seemed like a good idea, but then everyone decided they’d done enough so nothing more happened, adn it was followed by lots of ads to talk up unwinding, which I guess is why there’s been so many ads throughout this.

“Troubled teen? Love them enough to let them go,”

But we’re still not going to consider that parents might do bad things with good intentions.

The sad truth about humanity, Risa was quick to realize, is that people believe what they’re told. Maybe not the first time, but by the hundredth time, the craziest of ideas just becomes a given.

But also trying to change things is wrong, so basically, fuck it.

Anyway point is that by losing out on all those sweet seventeen-year-old organs, there’s now a shortage despite how we were told they didn’t even need the parts they already had which was why they actually stopped the cops from going there to pick up all the extra kids.

Risa can’t point this out because Connor-sue is always right and instead has to mumble about how nobody knows so let’s not wonder and keep doing what we’re doing.

Then she pushes off toward the infirmary jet, maneuvering over the rugged ground on her own, as always, refusing to be pushed by anyone, ever.

This is a good line, if one that doesn’t make any sense where it’s placed.