Part Five
Graveyard
Part five already! And yet going by chapters we’re not yet halfway done.
This chapter’s quote just explains that Arizona has a great climate for airplanes. I don’t know what global warming and stuff would do to Arizona, so sure, let’s just say it’s exactly the same a hundred years from now. Then it explains that a “graveyard” is actually a place where you take out the pieces and sell them, so just fucking call it a scrapyard if you think it’s so hard to understand, god.
On to the admiral guy’s chapter. Even he doesn’t get a name for his chapter. I think the only non-main-character to sort of get one is “Cy-Ty” and that’s probably because the author was in love with the concept.
We run down a list of rules while describing the place.
Rule one is that they stay “by choice” which is such bullshit if any kid leaves and gets caught they can blow the lid off the whole place so there’s no way they’d let any of them go.
Then it describes how they can’t hide that the place has lots of people in it from the sky, catching it and noticing it are two different things. CIA data analysts have far more pressing things to look for than a band of refugee Unwinds.
Right, because it’s not like they have an entire alternate police force just for hunting these kids down with unlimited rounds of special ammunition. Given that they seem to be slaughtering kids left and right, I could believe they don’t care much because they already have plenty of parts, but Emby makes it clear that nope, stuff is still horribly pricey. Still, they are supposed to keep in the shade, which, given it is super hot, is generally followed. I’m not sure why bother with all this, since I’m pretty sure it’d be obvious that he’s got lots of people there just from his purchases.
What would make sense here is that he “officially” employs a large crew of adults, who are then the ones running the more time intensive portions of the underground railroad. That way, no one’s looking for them while they’re doing stuff and no one finds it suspicious that he’s buying so much food and water.
Plus, if they’re trying to hide the place is inhabited at all, the only thing more obvious than the purchasing records would be the fact he apparently owns a scrapyard and sells stuff from it without having anyone there to actually do the work. Even if the CIA gave negative fucks about the unwinds themselves, they are all over people cheating on their taxes, which is what “no really I only pay the salaries of Jack and Shit at my giant mega scrapyard” sure sounds like.
#2) SURVIVING HAS EARNED YOU THE RIGHT TO BE RESPECTED.
I guess rule two is basically fuck everyone else and let them rot.
I’d also like to point out that it’s not like Connor and Risa got all that far on their own. They were snapped up within a few days and spend the next few months being cared for by friendly adults. Lev is the only one who actually showed real ability to survive on his own, and he likely had a big leg up by the fact no one was looking for him – I still think it makes more sense to just grab any homeless-looking kid, but maybe there’s too many false positives from kids wearing crappy clothes as a fashion statement.
The description following this is that apparently The Admiral doesn’t exactly own the Graveyard so who the fuck does, and also he’s sole manager, and this is all because he’s got lots of favors he called in and the military will do stuff just to keep him from paying attention to the actual political situation. If he was outspoken enough they will do anything to keep him retired, I think he’s outspoken enough that it’s easy to figure out his sudden interest in large, out of the way areas is suspicious.
The third rule is that it’s done the way he wants or not at all, because yeah that’s gonna go over great with all the discipline cases he’s sent.
The description then explains what Risa already said, he buys airplanes then sells them or their parts.
#4) YOUR LIFE IS MY GIFT TO YOU. TREAT IT LIKE ONE.
Okay just fuck this guy.
Description explains that when buyers come by the kids hide. No shit. They do so rarely and the guy claims that the rest of the time he’s working on a wildlife preserve, because I guess the only think someone could be busy with in a scrapyard is the selling of parts that just magically appear out of the planes.
Incidentally a wildlife preserve would actually be a pretty good idea to get on, just to have more space. If it were somewhere else I’d add that farmland could be useful, but Arizona’s water table is fucked enough now, I don’t even want to imagine it in a hundred years.
Rule five is that they’re better than their unwind-happy parents so they should act like it. That’s the first rule that actually makes sense, especially given we’ve got Connor doing stuff like wangst over how if his mommy doesn’t love him he’ll probably go to hell.
There are actually people legally employed there, so I guess it’s not exactly zero: two office workers stationed in a trailer far from the Unwinds, and a helicopter pilot.
You need two office workers to handle your zero scrapyard workers doing zero work. I am trying to imagine a worse way of hiding that you’ve filled the place with unwinds and it is hard. At this point, I’m going to assume that whoever gets his taxes laughs himself sick and that the government tolerates the place because every time an eighteen year old walks out, they headshot the guy and cut out the rest of the now fully developed organs.
Even more ridiculously, the helicopter pilot is the only one who even knows the unwinds are there, because the office workers sure aren’t going to notice anything weird about everything about this place ever.
Apparently the guy will stay quiet because he’s being paid a ton, which sounds like it’d be hard to afford when they’re already trying to run a business with unskilled underage workers and buying planes based on a secret alternate goal rather than what’s the best deal.
Rule six is just that everyone works. The description explains the unwinds do the work on the planes. Again, no shit. Also they redo some of the planes to live in them. They would be able to have regular houses if only you could pretend they were real workers, you know.
Rule seven is not to be rebellious because yeah that’ll fucking work.
Description is that they’re all kept in teams, which I’m pretty sure actually encourages factionalism and strife.
A lifetime of experience molding military boeufs into a coherent fighting force has prepared the Admiral for creating a functional society out of angry, troubled kids.
I really don’t think it does. Or has, given this list.
Rule eight is he doesn’t want hormones shitting stuff up, which he accomplishes by grouping girls and boys separately because this is written by a guy and he doesn’t think there might be any more practical reasons to separate the two, like all the rape. You’d think someone in the military especially would know about all the rape. Also, the guy’s military career failed to teach him that people will still manage to have sex. I remember hearing about a guy on a navy ship whose job it was to patrol, which is to say to walk two feet, tell people to stop fucking in the doorway, repeat until patrol is finished.
No word on what they do with the inevitable pregnancies. Personally I’d go with them hoping they all miscarry from sunstroke and calling it a day because god damn this place is not well organized.
#9) AT EIGHTEEN YOU CEASE TO BE MY CONCERN.
This is so stupid. This kind of thing applied to foster kids fucks up society, because you have people who lack any ties or support system and you boot them out the door. Unwinds should be even worse off because they’ve committed a federal crime – just because they can’t be organ-murdered doesn’t mean they can’t still be grabbed by the police, and if the government really wanted to deal with the runaway problem, the obvious solution is to declare theft of government organs to be a capital crime. But that’s never been brought up and everyone’s acting as if once you’re eighteen the government doesn’t even care.
It’s also stupid because he obviously needs trained workers and also he needs workers at all on his payroll. The eighteen year olds would be safe to interact with the outside world, they could keep the younger kids in line (and the older kids themselves could be better kept in line because they could be kicked out if they’re not pulling their weight, while he has to support the younger ones) and also, they already know how to do the stuff he wants done. They’d also be good additions to his whole underground railroad network.
And continuing to employ the kids also reduces the risk that they walk out of this place and right into the nearest police station to report the rest.
#10) MAKE SOMETHING OF YOURSELF. THIS IS AN ORDER.
About half of these are just restating the same thing. Also, I think another issue with the idea running this place like a military is that the military is self-selecting. If your discipline problems are worsened by a guy barking orders at you, you don’t sign up. Not everyone needs tough love and a lot of people don’t respond well to it. I can only imagine how much worse that gets when you’re doing this to troubled thirteen year olds.
It’s a challenge keeping almost four hundred kids healthy, hidden, and whole.
Okay, so they’re getting about one plane a month. The one Risa came on had sixty kids (exactly half of whom were girls because god does YA lit like dividing things up evenly, even when it makes sense you’d get some demographic variation). If 60 a month, that’s 720 a year, and most of the kids are going to stay more than one year – in fact, I don’t think we’ve even seen any seventeen year olds at all yet, and most of them seem to be younger than sixteen year old Connor.
For there to be “almost four hundred” per year, the per plane average would have to be thirty, making Risa’s plane a severe outlier – twice the average, and meaning that the standard plane must have even fewer kids. And that’s before considering that almost or even all of the kids he gets will stay more than a full year. If everyone is sixteen, then he can only get two hundred more a year. If most of the kids are fourteen, he can only get in a hundred kids per year – that would fit with Risa’s sixty-some group sitting around for months if perhaps they only do about two batches per year, but not with the claim kids are coming in monthly.
In order to make up the difference, he’d have to be shuffling kids off elsewhere all the time. Like to Canada or Mexico. If this place was really more like an extended halfway house, then it’s easier to assume the math works out.
his motivation for doing this, like his name, is something he prefers to keep to himself.
So I guess there’s something important about his motivation, because the other adult’s motivation being basic human decency was not treated as a big deal, and also it was a sign they were secretly evil.