Risa’s turn again.

So they spend three weeks getting moved between safe houses. That much movement really seems like it’d just attract more attention. And the safe houses themselves only allow five or six, because ??? author says so. Also for no reason they like to shuffle the kids but they let Risa and Connor stay together because they pretend to be a couple, because that’s the only kind of relationship that counts.

Finally, they’re dumped in a huge, empty warehouse in a thundering airtraffic zone. Cheap realty for hiding unwanted kids. It’s a spartan building with a corrugated steel roof that shakes so badly when a plane passes overhead, she half expects it to collapse.
There are almost thirty kids here when they arrive, many of them are kids Risa and Connor had come across over the past few weeks. This is a holding tank, she realizes, a place where all the kids are warehoused in preparation for some final journey. There are chains on the doors to keep anyone unwanted out, and to keep anyone too rebellious in. There are space heaters that are useless, since all the heat is lost to the high warehouse roof. There’s only one bathroom with a broken lock and, unlike many of the safe houses, there’s no shower, so personal hygiene is put on hold the moment they arrive. Put all that together with a gang of scared, angry kids, and you’ve got a powder keg waiting to explode.

Risa is very whiny.

Part of this is the same problem I first mentioned way back in the early chapters, when they come out of the forest. There’s no mention of being cold and hungry, no sign of their environment even mattering. And Risa glosses over what the safe houses before now have been like as well, so there’s no sense they’ve been getting steadily wound up by bad conditions.

More annoying slang rears its head – the people in charge are called “the Fatigues”—not just because they have a penchant toward khaki military clothing, but also because they always seem exhausted. Just stop, book.

A handful of new kids arrives almost every day.

You know what’d be more useful to know here? How many days it’s been. Who was here first and how long have they been here, and how much longer will you have to wait? How much space will there be?

We learn there’s a rumor about the Akron AWOL who shot a cop with his own tranquilizer gun because that apparently has never happened before and also totally wasn’t inexplicably suppressed by the police, because we really need to be told everyone thinks Connor is awesome and he’s so awesome he doesn’t even let anyone know how awesome he is.

“Why are you doing this for us?” Risa asked one of them during their second week.
The Fatigue had been almost rote in her answer—like giving a sound bite to a reporter. “Saving you and others like you is an act of conscience,” the woman had said. “Doing it is its own reward.”
The Fatigues all talk like that. Big-Picture-speak, Risa calls it. Seeing the whole, and none of the parts. It’s not just in their speech but in their eyes as well. When they look at Risa, she can tell they don’t really see her. They seem to see the mob of Unwinds more as a concept rather than a collection of anxious kids

It initially surprised me that the book would expand its general hatefulness even to the people helping the unwinds, but no, that does make sense once you realize the book believes the compromise was monstrous yet necessary due to both sides being evil. It follows that people opposing the compromise wouldn’t be painted too well either.

That this is utterly alien to how people act doesn’t matter, since as we’ve established by now, no one acts like people because that would get in the way of what the author wants to say.

Anyway, in addition to making them unsympathetic, this also means they don’t realize there’s trouble among the kids like Risa does. Trouble is Roland, who’s shown up again and is super dangerous somehow because.

He’d been all right in the safe houses. He’d held his temper—he hadn’t done anything too impulsive or irrational. Here, however, in the midst of so many kids, he’s different. He’s irritable and defiant. The slightest thing can set him off. He’d been in half a dozen fights already. She knows this must be why his parents chose to have him unwound—a firestorm temper can drive some parents to desperate measures.

Another sue flaw. We don’t see these fights, and certainly don’t see him hurting kids who don’t deserve it. We just hear that he’s badass.

So she goes over to him one day and finds him drawing a picture on the ground.

“Just a girl I knew back home,” he says.
Risa silently suffocates her jealousy in a quick emotional vacuum.

Fucking book.

“Her eyes are too big for her face.”
“I guess that’s because it’s her eyes that I remember most.”
“And her forehead’s too low. The way you’ve drawn it, she’d have no room for a brain.”
“Yeah, well, she wasn’t all that bright.”

What the fuck is this even.

Risa complains about how he’s avoiding all the kids and he says they’re losers, prompting a quick look over that includes:

Mai is paired off with a glum spikehaired boy named Vincent, who’s all leather and body piercings. He must be her soul mate, because they make out all day long, drawing a cluster of other kids who sit there and watch.

Which raises a more pressing question! Namely, why aren’t all the kids fucking?

You have a mixed group of teenagers who are bored to death and also currently on the run from actual death. Under normal circumstances you’d expect the female half of them to be hesitant due to pregnancy, but getting pregnant is actually a positive right now. It’s also freezing cold so your only chances of staying warm are to be under a blanket, preferably with someone else. Really, the only drawback is the lack of privacy, and I can’t see that alone preventing sex among dozens of unsupervised angsty teens.

Connor then explains he’s sticking to himself to try to avoid the fights. The attempt to make this a valid flaw is empty, although the book makes a better effort than usual and ends up portraying something suggesting a sensory processing problem:

“I don’t know what gets into me. Maybe it’s all the voices. Maybe it’s all the bodies moving all around me. It makes me feel like I’ve got ants crawling inside my brain and I want to scream. I can stand it just so long, then I blow. It happened even at home, everyone was talking at once at the dinner table. One time, we had family over and the talk got me so crazy, I hurled a plate at the china hutch. Glass blew everywhere. Ruined the meal. My parents asked me what got into me, and I couldn’t tell them.”

But this hasn’t come up before and I’m betting we’ll watch this never come up again, so, you know, doesn’t count for much.

Risa informs him Roland is trouble.

“Like the kids who eat first are the ones who spend the most time with Roland—but he never goes to the front of the line himself. Like the way his closest friends infiltrate the other cliques and get them arguing so they break apart. Like the way Roland is especially nice to the kids that everyone else feels sorry for— but only until nobody feels sorry for them anymore. Then he uses them.”

Where did Roland suddenly get his super people handling skills? Not explained. I expect the book is also oblivious to the subtext of making the one kid with an abusive family into the evil mastermind.

There’s also the issue that this isn’t, in itself, sinister. Not unless you were planning your own power bid. The only particularly sketchy bit is he’s apparently orchestrating the destruction of other groups, and that’s rather eyerolling so it’s hard to take seriously in the first place.

“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because you’re his biggest threat.”
“Me?”
“You’re a fighter—everyone knows that. And they also know that you don’t take crap from anyone. Have you heard kids mumbling about how someone oughta do something about Roland?”
“Yeah.”
“They only say that when you’re close enough to hear.

For fuck’s sake, go talk to an adult.

Seriously! It’s what they’re there for. If Roland is actually disruptive and compromising the group, then next time they unload new kids they can shove him onto the truck and send him to cool his heels in a smaller safehouse. They must have ways to deal with problem kids if they’re dealing with unwinds on a regular basis in stressful environments like this.

If you want me to actually believe the adults are useless and don’t care, then SHOW ME IT. Show me her telling the adults Roland’s trouble and not being listened to because he’s being subtle about it, instead of this all just being an excuse to tell Connor he is so super awesome. If all the kids are grumbling that Roland is a bully and they want someone else to fight him, the heavily armed actual adults certainly qualify, and there needs to be a clear reason they don’t try the obvious option.

So Connor says fine, he’ll beat the kid up, but oh no, that’s the opposite of what she means!

“No! You can’t take the bait! That’s what he wants! He’ll do everything within his power to pull you into a fight. But you can’t do it.”
Connor hardens his jaw. “You think I can’t take him in a fight?”
Risa grabs his wrist and holds it tight. “A kid like Roland doesn’t want to fight you. He wants to kill you.”

Don’t worry, Risa, I’d never be so lucky.

Then an unbelievably brief chapter with Connor where he explains that yeah, Risa is right about that stuff she said, particularly the bits that best serve his sueishness.

Roland is a master of structuring life around him for his own benefit. It’s not the overt bullying that does it, either. It’s the subtle manipulation of the situation. The bullying almost acts as cover for what’s really going on. As long as people see him as a dumb, tough guy, they don’t notice the more clever things he does… such as endearing himself to one of the Fatigues by making sure the man sees him giving his food to one of the younger kids. Like a master chess player, every move Roland makes has purpose, even if the purpose isn’t immediately clear.

Seriously seems like time to just outright tell the adults something fucked up is going on. Also, if you noticed that, why the fuck did you need Risa to tell you?

We also check in to know Connor is still sad about Lev because he is so nice and forgiving and stuff and keeps watching the new kids in the hope one will be Lev. So this chapter is spent telling us two things we already knew.