Connor tells us they’re in thirty-kid dormitories and that before dinner he sees two beds have been stripped, and no one mentions it.

Conner can’t remember either the names or the faces of the missing kids, and that haunts him.

Connor has never given a solitary fuck.

Still, if we pretend we’re starting the story here, it’s not too bad. Ch56 Connor seems like a good guy, lamenting that he can’t do anything to save the others and hating his powerlessness and being selfless enough to feel glad that at least Risa isn’t on the chopping block yet.

Of course it also says the staff keeps waiting for him to make a mistake and seriously they don’t need an excuse to murder you when their job is murdering you. Even if, hypothetically, the shareholders would object to killing annoying kids early and missing out on some market value, we know there’s no oversight of these places so they can kill him then write down he did something wrong if it’s so important. Who’s going to argue, other dead kids?

While he’s busy thinking about how much life sucks due to the fact it’s about to be over, everyone else heads out. And there’s Roland, ready to pounce. Roland is ridiculously on the ball here, but I guess he has to be taking every chance to get Connor in order to manage it in the time they have left. Not sure what his goal here is. Maybe it’s the opposite reasoning of Connor’s – he’d be willing to put aside his hatred for the sake of longer term goals, but since he’s about to die he might as well make Connor miserable first. See, if the book played this up it would’ve been much more interesting. You could have Connor as kind of a dick but with strong personal loyalty, vs Roland who’s outwardly nice to everyone but secretly doesn’t care about anyone. And then have that finally coming to a head here, where, deprived of the option of taking over, Roland defaults to pure malice and shows exactly why he’s not someone you want around.

Connor warns Roland that if he’s caught he’ll get killed faster, because Ch56 Connor is like that.

Roland blocks his path. For the first time Connor notices that in spite of Roland’s muscular build, they’re not all that different in height. Connor always thought Roland towered over him. He doesn’t.

It sure would have been good to have heard this before. I had no sense Connor was intimidated by him and all the narration focused on was how Connor didn’t want to. The only time he seemed to seriously think he’d lose the fight was when he was going to get stuck with Roland and friends, otherwise it’s all oh, I totally could take Roland even with a knife but the fight would end in death and I don’t want that.

Roland says he totally could have killed Connor lots of times and that he regrets this because everything is Connor’s fault! Connor points out he’s the brainiac that called the police. Roland then blames Connor for the disaster at the scrapyard because if he was there the riot wouldn’t have burned everything, and Connor says that yeah by killing people because Roland is evil, and Roland flips out.

“Well, if I’m a killer, I’m running out of time,” says Roland. “I better get to it.”

Roland wins, so really, not sure why he went through the trouble of trying to provoke Connor all those times instead of just jumping him.

“You call me a killer, but you’re the only criminal here!” screams Roland. “I didn’t take a hostage! I didn’t shoot a Juvey-cop! And I never killed anyone!

The author really has a thing about authority, doesn’t he? Breaking laws is just inherently evil.

Anyway, Roland can’t go through with it after all.

To Connor’s amazement, there are tears in Roland’s eyes that he tries to hide behind his anger, but they’re still there. Roland looks at the hand that came so close to taking Connor’s life.

Poor Roland.

Now go apologize to Risa and explain you’re realized threatening to rape someone is terrible.

But no, Connor just thinks about how huh, guess the sixteen year old kid wasn’t a practiced killer after all. I’m not sure if we’re supposed take this as an actual positive or not. Connor appeared to believe he was quite capable of killing if it came down to it, and we know he feels no remorse for the person he did get killed or about risking so many other people in his first escape attempt.

Then jump to Lev!

The tithes at Happy Jack are like first-class passengers on the Titanic. There’s plush furniture throughout the tithing house. There’s a theater, a pool, and the food is better than homemade. Sure, their fate is the same as the “terribles,” but at least they’re getting there in style.

You know, why are they bothering? They could be keeping these kids in pits and no one would know, so there’s absolutely no reason to be giving better treatment to some of them. It’s not like they’re competing for the parents to send their precious tithe babies. And we know their murders are arranged in advance, so they could just be moved straight to getting hacked up.

Anyway, Lev is staring at his hands and wondering about people who get transplants.

What a nightmare of identification it must be when other people get an Unwind’s hands. What can fingerprints mean when they’re not necessarily yours?

They have an entire database of who got what part, I’m sure they thought to take prints of the hands.

Anyway, Lev then says it won’t be happening to his hands. This is the first of various ominous pronouncements that add up to Lev is going to blow himself up holy shit. You know what, Lev? Go for it, it’s about time someone actually did shit that has to do with the plot. Your entire sideplot has been the only thing worthy of this setting.

In fact, let’s pause a moment and consider this story with Lev the main character. Instead of starting off with other people talking about how unwinding sucks, we open with Lev thinking about how great it is for some nice culture shock. Just when he’s done easing the reader into the idea with all his happy acceptance, some escaped regular kid yanks him out of the car and uses him as a human shield! When he wakes up again, there’s another criminal kid with him, and they’re plotting how to avoid the police. He plays along, listening to their bad kid conversation, until he gets his chance to turn them in – only for the rug to be yanked out from under him as his beloved pastor tells him unwinding is wrong. Reeling, he stumbles out into the riot the other kids were causing to escape and begins to travel, slowly coming to understand that unwinding is wrong until he comes full circle – he’s again ready to die, but this time for the cause of fighting unwinding.

Anyway, one of the perks is not having to do the games if you don’t want to.

Part of preparation for tithing is a monthlong regimen of mental and physical assessments even before one’s tithing party, so all the hard work is done at home, before they get here.

Another thing that should have been brought up before. Also should have been taken into account when the author was saying Lev’s family doesn’t believe in IQ tests.

True, this isn’t the harvest camp he and his parents had chosen

Why not? Why not send him to that one?

He’s by himself because mostly people are in prayer groups.

There are pastors of all faiths in the tithing house— ministers, priests, rabbis, and clerics—because that notion of giving the finest of the flock back to God is a tradition as old as religion itself.

Yeah, Buddhists are really into the sheep killing. Also, apparently you don’t have religion until you domesticate herd animals.

Lev shows up just to keep up appearances.

He also keeps his silence when Bible passages become shredded to justify unwinding, and kids start to see the face of God in the fragments.

It’s really not a hard sell, Lev.

“My uncle got the heart of a tithe and now people say he can perform miracles.”
“I know this woman who got a tithe’s ear. She heard a baby crying a block away, and rescued it from a fire!”
“We are Holy Communion.”
“We are manna from Heaven.”
“We are the piece of God in everyone.”

This is all really cool. Terribly implemented, particularly when I don’t see what this has to do with shredding the bible so it doesn’t make sense in its positioning, but cool idea.

Lev says his heart is hard.

He wishes it could be hard enough to be diamond instead of crumbling jade—maybe then he’d have chosen a different path. But for who he is now, for what he feels and what he doesn’t feel, the path is right.

I am not sure this makes sense. He believes it’s right except that if he was better he’d do something different? The book then suggests that it’s definitely not right and he’s just too broken to admit it. I’m really not sure why blowing up a childmurder camp is wrong.

Lev then explains that he’s got explosives in his blood, which the blood tests just thought was high triglycerides. I’m not going to argue with the human bomb thing because it’s cool, but the idea the blood tests wouldn’t notice it is really pushing things. What if the reason it was a big deal to have a tithe on their side was because they don’t get tested, since, as Lev explained, that’s all done in advance? But no. And the other chaos cult kids are there too.

although the three of them were “captured” independently and arrived a few days apart from one another, so no connection among the three of them could be made.

Wait, but earlier Lev was saying he was the prodigal son and came back on his own. Also, a few days apart really doesn’t seem enough not to flag things, I mean how often do they catch runaways in the first place? And why wouldn’t they want to spread out to multiple camps, anyway?

Another boy enters the workout room. He has fine hair so blond it’s practically white, and eyes so green, there must have been some genetic manipulation involved. Those eyes will go for a high price.

What?

Since when is there genetic manipulation? Why don’t all the tithes get it so they’re worth more? Why would people want genetic bright green when they already have iris dyeing down? If you want freaky genetic manipulation, wouldn’t an artificial white iris be best since it could be dyed any color?

Lev explains the kid must have been sent because tithes aren’t supposed to be alone, because.

Later he sneaks out to a secret meeting, because there can always be secret meetings, with the other chaos cult kids. Mai is impatient, or the book thinks she is but they’ve apparently been there at least a week so yeah, get to the blowing yourselves up already. (It’s a moot point, admittedly, because they can’t blow up now – their kidneys would have filtered that stuff from their blood by now.) Lev doesn’t give a damn about how long it’s taking despite claiming he doesn’t like pretending to be a good tithe, third kid hands out bandaids that are actually detonators.

They plan to do it in two days, because the third kid is going to be playing football after that and will probably blow up on the field if they don’t. I still don’t know why they waited so long in the first place.

The book explains that the Alaskan job was a fake, which doesn’t explain why it made quite so little sense. Surely you could find a job that sounds crappy but plausible.

Their van had taken them from the Graveyard to a rundown house, in a run-down neighborhood where people who had been run down by life plotted unthinkable deeds.

Blowing yourself up isn’t all that unthinkable.

Lev knows they’re scary bad people but feels kinship.

And when they told Lev how important he was in the scheme of things, Lev felt, for the first time in a long time, truly important.

The first time in two whole months! Or maybe just one month, since during his time with annoying possessed kid he explained how very important he was to keeping annoying possessed kid functional.

The word “evil” was never used by these people—except to describe the evils of what the world had done to them.

…so the word evil was used by these people, then.

What they were asking Lev, Mai, and Blaine to do wasn’t evil—no, no, no, not at all.

Okay, see, I can understand how people might view abortion as inherently evil. I don’t agree, obviously, but I can follow the whole logic chain where killing things is very bad.

But I have no idea what’s going on here? Is it because it’s suicide and suicide adds like +3000 evil points to your soul? Is the plan to blow up in a big group of kids to deny people their organs, which does seem unnecessarily malicious? Is it that suicide bombing is what terrorists do and that’s where the +3000 evil points come from?

Hm.

Okay, so the author, whatever he might say, is definitely on the prolife side, in that he understands prolife while his grasp of prochoice is babymurder for evil science. But his mouthpiece, Admiral Dumbass, says he’s not on either side and is aligned with the third faction of people who just tried to uphold the previous laws. I guess what it comes down to is that the real evil is disobeying the law, and there’s some wiggle room regarding just avoiding the law (kind of like the wiggle room of moral clauses where doctors will refuse to treat women if it might harm the widdle fetus)

It was an expression of all the things they felt inside. It was the spirit, and the nature, and the manifestation of all they had become. They weren’t just messengers, they were the message. This is what they filled Lev’s mind with, and it was no different than the deadly stuff they filled his blood with. It was twisted. It was wrong.

So I guess on the long list of stuff that the book’s fucked up, we now have extremist groups are always evil no matter what.

The book goes on to give the SHOCKING REVELATION that chaos itself can be a cause, which I thought was what helicopter guy said when he said the no cause but chaos bit but no, the book repeats the line then smugly explained that he didn’t understand chaos was a cause.

He does not know, or care, that he himself is being used. All Lev knows is that someday soon the world will suffer a small part of the loss and the emptiness and the utter disillusionment he feels inside.

This book manages to be terrible in so many ways.

Back to Connor. At least it means the moralizing is done for the moment, although it’s at the cost of getting to hear about him meeting up with Risa.

They meet in the girls’ bathroom. The last time they were forced to meet in a place like this, they took separate, isolated stalls. Now they share one. They hold each other in the tight space, making no excuses for it. There’s no time left in their lives for games, or for awkwardness, or for pretending they don’t care about each other, and so they kiss as if they’ve done it forever. As if it is as crucial as the need for oxygen.

I’ve been so busy hating the way female authors write romance I’d forgotten how much I hate the way male authors write romance.

Anyway, she coos over his Roland bruises and he says tells her not to worry her pretty little empty head about explanations. And he says she’s great at music! And then she heads off to music more. That was a complete waste of a chapter.