Before we begin the next disaster of a chapter, I’d just like to mention something I noticed.

I thought this was running through the kids’ chapters in order, but actually so far, there’s been five with Connor, four with Risa, and three with Lev, and this new one will bring him up to four as well. I guess that doesn’t really tell us anything we hadn’t already figured out, though – this is Connor’s story, with Risa there for girlfriending and Lev there to be the weirdo antagonist.

Anyway, when last we left things Risa and Connor had just realized Lev was gone.

Lev explains that he snuck out by opening the door when the bell rang (because I guess the stall door makes lots of noise?), then he waited by the entrance for another kid to open the door because it was too loud to be missed.

he’d had to make it to the bathroom entrance without the others hearing his brand-new sneakers squeaking on the floor. (Why did they call them sneakers if it was so hard to sneak in them?)

Why does everyone always say this like it’s something clever?

And for the record, it is really easy to walk silently in sneakers. They generally squeak if you’re dragging them because you’re trying to sneak like you see in movies.

Anyway, back to the door getting opened.

he pushed his way past her, hoping she didn’t say anything that would give him away. If she commented about a boy being in the girl’s bathroom, Connor and Risa would know.
“Next time, wear a dress,” the girl said to him as he hurried away, and her friend laughed.

And…this means what? My best guess is it’s saying “if you want to sneak into the girl’s bathroom wear a dress” but…that doesn’t really make much sense. Why would seeing a boy there be so unnoteworthy? What’s the joke to this?

This line does appear near the end of the last chapter, though, so there’s that.

Lev spends a moment disoriented in the press. Since he’s just thirteen, the other kids are all bigger and scarier, and we’re reminded Lev never expected to see the inside of a high school because of the whole dying at thirteen business.

Except supposedly your parts are still you so wouldn’t he have expected bits of him to end up there?

Anyway, he manages to ask one of the kids where the office is, gets blown off, then another one tells him where to go.

This is the best place to do it: a school. If there are any secret plans to kill Connor and Risa, it can’t happen here with so many kids around

Well, that’s reasonable. I’m going to take Lev’s continued acceptance of the fact his family could and would do this as proof I’m right about the mobster theory.

all three of them will be safely on their way to their unwinding, as it ought to be. As it was ordained to be. The thought of it still frightens him, but these days of not knowing what the next hour will bring—that is truly terrifying.

Oh, Lev. You’re annoying because you’re in this book, but I do like your flashes of having actual opinions that make sense for you to believe!

“Excuse me . . .”
Finally, she looks up. “Can I help you, dear?”
He clears his throat. “My name is Levi Calder, and I’ve been kidnapped by two runaway Unwinds.”

Yes!

It makes sense for Lev to do this, he’s got the opportunity to do it, and it’ll cause things to happen! Very good, book.

They send Lev to the nurse’s office to wait. He thinks about how he hopes they don’t send the other two there because he feels bad and doesn’t know why.

“The police have been called, everything’s being taken care of,” the nurse tells him. “You’ll be going home soon.”
“I’m not going home,” he tells her. The nurse looks at him strangely, and he decides not to go into it.

This, though? Weird. Maybe it’s playing into how Lev feels bad about what he thinks was right, but you’d really expect him to be trying to assert the whole willing-tithe thing since that’s the core of his identity. Plus it’d have been really nice to see someone’s reaction other than Connor and Risa, who seem to have been dropped into this from our world.

Anyway, he just asks for a phone to call them, so the nurse gives him her cellphone.

He starts to call them, but then decides to call the family pastor instead. He’s shocked to hear from Lev and can’t make sense of Lev’s nonsense plea about his parents ordering his kidnappers killed.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. We never told the police.”
Lev is not expecting to hear this. “You never . . . what?”

Pastor-guy tells Lev that he spun this whole god’s-will bit about Lev’s kidnapping and convinced them not to tell the police at all.

“Lev, listen to me. Listen to me carefully. No one else knows that you’re gone. As far as anyone knows, you’ve been tithed, and people don’t ask questions about children who are tithed.

Uh…except the people expecting to get him and cut him up for parts.

Connor established that parents can’t change their mind about unwinding. I could buy that maybe tithing is different, but if the government was concerned about not antagonizing people who changed their minds, they wouldn’t be signing the other unwind orders well in advance. And overall it seems the people in charge just have issues with letting parents change their minds. For whatever reason, the idea it can’t be taken back seems to have become part of the cultural understanding of unwinding, so allowing tithes to be the exception would undermine that.

Even if we ignore that and say that for tithes, the unwind thing is only signed when they bring their kid in, in that case Lev’s in no danger, since he’s not actually an unwind after all. Furthermore, since he was never checked in to happy happy murder camp, officials should expect he’s still with his family and get upset when he mysteriously disappears.

I’m going to have to fall back on my mob theory here. Clearly, Lev’s family must have pressured whoever handles this stuff to check off that they got Lev. They can’t actually take the kid back, since flaunting that they subverted the unwinding system isn’t something anyone can do, but they can just sweep the whole thing under the rug. There’s no other explanation.

Lev attempts to explain that he wants to be murdered for his organs.

“Don’t make me do that! Please, don’t make me do that!”

Oh grow up, pastor guy.

Lev finally realizes that his pastor didn’t want him to be unwound and was telling him to run so he wouldn’t die.

After all of his sermons and lectures, after all that talk year after year about Lev’s holy duty, it’s all been a sham. Lev was born to be tithed—and the man who convinced him this was a glorious and honorable fate doesn’t believe it.
…
He doesn’t want to answer this man who led him to a cliff only to turn away at the last minute.

Or, he was trying to give you a good life because he didn’t think there was anything else he could do.

To portray the guy as actually having second thoughts of his own, he shouldn’t have been yelling at Lev to run. He should have come to that realization afterward, in time to convince the family. But it would appear he’d always felt like this and was ready to jump into action as soon as an opportunity presented itself.

Which then gets us back to the previous problem that if this is true, the pastor friend of the family since before Lev was born should really have weighed in then on how very okay the church would be if there wasn’t any tithing.

So anyway, Lev doesn’t know what to think, so he says bye and hangs up. He realizes that Connor and Risa are going to get cut up for organs, and suddenly that this too is wrong, so he pulls the fire alarm.

It’d have been helpful if pastor-guy had said something about how the whole practice was evil, since Lev’s made it clear he has extra reasons for believing Connor and Risa should be cut up.

But hey! Stuff actually happened and not only that, everything in this is a relatively believable chain of events. Lev showed off his different opinions on right and wrong too, even if we’re probably about to see him settling into the same standard anti-unwinding attitude from here.