Unable to resist its gravity, he kneels before it. It's a heavy, old thing. Antique to be sure. Old travel stickers adorn it, practically shellacked to the surface. Connor can't tell whether the old steamer trunk has actually been to those places, or if the stickers are merely decorations applied once it stopped travelling and became a piece of furniture.

He doesn't dare open it, but he knows what's inside.

Letters.

Hundreds of them.

Each one was written by an AWOL who'd been through Sonia's basement. Most wrote to their parents. They are missives of sorrow and disillusionment. Anger and the screaming question of "why?" Why did you? How could you? When did things go so wrong? Even the state wards, unloved but tolerated by the institution that raised them, found something to say to someone.

He wonders if Sonia ever sent his letter, or if it's still in there, buried among the other raging voices. He wonders what he would say to his parents now, and if it's any different from what he wrote. His letter began with how much he hated them for what they did, but by the time he reached the end, he was in tears, telling them that he loved them in spite of it. So much confusion. So much ambivalence. Just writing the letter helped him understand that-helped him to understand himself a bit more. Sonia had given him a gift that day, and the gift of the letter was in the writing, not in the sending. But still . . .

"I'd ask you to move the trunk back into place for me-but you've gotta be on the other side of the trapdoor before I do." Sonia raises her cane, pointing down the steep basement steps.

"Right. I'm going-don't use the cattle prod."

She doesn't whack him with her cane, but on his way down, she does tap him gently on the head with it to get his attention.

"Be good to her, Connor," Sonia says, gently. "And don't let Beau get to you. He just likes to be the big man."

"No worries."

He descends, and she closes the trapdoor above him. The basement smells like teen spirit, as the old prewar song goes. For a brief moment he has a flashback without words or images-just a swell of feeling-back to the first time he was herded down those steps two years ago. The invincibility he was feeling when he woke up is now tempered by the cold concentrate of that memory.

Risa's at her little first aid station tending to a girl's swollen, slightly bloody lip. "I bit my lip in my sleep-so?" the girl says, instantly on the defensive. "I have nightmares-so?"

Once the girl is tended to, Connor sits down in the treatment chair. "Doctor, I have a problem with my tongue," he says.

"And what might that be?" asks Risa cautiously.

"I can't keep it out of my girlfriend's ear."

She gives him the best Oh, please look he's ever seen, and says, "I'll call the Juvies to cut it out. I'm sure that'll take care of the problem."

"And it'll give some other poor soul a highly talented sensory organ."

She allows him the last laugh, studying him for a few moments.

"Tell me about Lev," she finally says.

He's a bit deflated to have the playfulness so totally squashed out of their conversation.

"What about him?" Connor asks.

"You said you were with him for a while. What's he like now?"

Connor shrugs, like it's nothing. "He's different."

"Good different, or bad different?

"Well, the last time you saw him, he was planning on blowing himself up-so anything is an improvement."

Another kid comes to Risa with what looks like a splinter in his finger, sees the two of them talking, and goes away to take care of it himself.

Connor knows he can't get out of this conversation, so he tells Risa what he can. "Lev's been through a lot since the harvest camp. You know that, right? Clappers tried to kill him. And that asshole Nelson captured him, but he got away."

"Nelson?" Risa says caught completely by surprise. "The Juvey-cop you tranq'd?"

"He's not a cop anymore. He's a parts pirate, and he's nuts. He's got it out for me and Lev. Probably you, too, if he could find you."

"Great," says Risa, "I'll add him to my list of people who want me dead."

Suddenly, with the specter of Nelson in the conversation, Connor finds bringing the conversation back to Lev is now a relief. "Anyway, Lev hasn't grown any-except for his hair. I don't like it. It's past his shoulders now."

"I worry about him," Risa says.

"Don't," Connor tells her. "He's safe on the Arpache reservation, communing with whatever it is that Chancefolk commune with."

"You don't sound too happy about that."

Connor sighs. When Connor and Grace left the Rez, Lev was filled with all of this crazy talk about getting the Arpache to take a stand against unwinding. As if they ever would. In some ways, he's just as nave as the day Connor saved him from his tithing. "He says he wants to fight unwinding, but how can he do it from an isolationist reservation? The truth is, I think he just wants to disappear someplace safe."

"Well, if he's found peace, then I'm happy for him-and you should be too."

"I am," Connor admits. "Maybe I'm just jealous."

Risa smiles. "You wouldn't know what to do with peace if you had it."

Connor smiles right back at her. "I know exactly what I'd do." Then he leans in close to whisper, she leans in close to hear-and he licks her ear with precision enough to get him happily slapped. He thinks it might get her off the subject, but it doesn't.

"I miss Lev," she says. "He's kind of like a brother. I never had a brother-or at least not that I know of."

"I have a brother," Connor tells her. He doesn't know why he's chosen to volunteer this. He's never spoken of him to Risa. Mentioning his life before the unwind order somehow feels taboo. It's like conjuring ghosts.

"He's a few years younger than you, isn't he?" Risa asks.

"Three years younger."

"Right-now I remember," she says, which surprises him. But then he shouldn't be surprised at all. The whole life of the notorious Akron AWOL has been dissected by the media since the day he first got away.

"What's your brother's name?" Risa asks.

"Lucas," Connor tells her-and with the mention of the name comes a wave of emotion more powerful than he was prepared for. He feels regret, but also resentment, because Lucas was the child their parents chose over Connor. He has to remind himself that it wasn't his brother's fault.

"Do you miss him?" Risa asks.

Connor shrugs uncomfortably. "He was a pain in the ass."

Risa grins. "That doesn't answer the question."

Connor meets her eyes, so beautifully green, and just as deep and expressive as their natural color.

"Yeah," Connor admits. "Sometimes." Back before Connor's parents gave up on him, he was constantly being compared to Lucas. Grades, sports-never mind that it was Connor who taught Lucas to play every sport. While Connor never had the dedication to stay on a team for a whole season, Lucas excelled, to their parents' enduring joy. And the more Lucas shone, the dimmer Connor's light seemed to them.

"I really don't want to talk about this," Connor tells her. And as easily as that, his old life and memories of his family are locked away just as securely as his letter to them is locked in Sonia's trunk.

4 * Lev

Lev is anything but at peace.

He's in the treetops again. It's the dead of night, but the night is alive. The forest canopy rolls like aquamarine clouds beneath a blue floodlight moon.

He's following the kinkajou again, that large-eyed monkey-like creature. Adorable but deadly. He now knows that it is his spirit he chases. It races before him through the highest branches of the dense rainforest, drawing him toward something resembling destiny, but not quite as fixed and fated. Not something inevitable, but something he could make real.

He dreams of the kinkajou, and this journey through the trees, often. Each visit to this peculiar sanctuary of purpose feeds him and sustains him. It reminds him that there is a worthwhile goal to the things he drives himself to do.

The dreams are remarkably vivid, and he always remembers them. That, in and of itself, is a gift he's grateful for. It's not just the vibrancy of the sights that makes it so palpable, but the chirping, screeching, singing sounds of nocturnal life around him. The scent of the trees and the ground far below, so earthy, yet unearthly. The feel of the branches on his hands, feet, and tail. Yes, his tail, for he has caught up with the kinkajou now. He has become the creature, and becoming it makes him whole.

He knows what comes next. The edge of the forest, the edge of the world. But this time something's different. A feeling begins to well up inside of him. A foreboding that's way too familiar in his life, but unknown here, until now.

Something acrid wafts toward him now on the breeze. The stench of smoke. The soothing blue light around him is tainted to lavender then maroon. He turns behind him to see a forest fire that stretches like a blazing wall in the distance behind him. It's still perhaps a mile away, but it's consuming the trees with alarming speed.

The sounds of life become shrieks of warning and terror. Birds frantically take to the sky, but burst into flames before they can escape. Lev turns from the approaching firestorm, and leaps from branch to branch trying to outrun it. Branches appear before him exactly where he needs them to be, and he knows he could outrun whatever that fire is, were the forest canopy endless. But it's not.

Far too soon he comes to the place where the forest ends at a cliff that drops off into bottomless oblivion, and in the sky before him, just out of reach it seems, is the moon.

Bring it down, Lev.

He knows he can do it! If he leaps high enough, he can dig his claws into it and pull it from the sky. And when it falls, the shock wave it will create shall blow out the blaze like the breath of God blowing out a candle.

Lev gathers his courage as searing heat blooms against his back. He must have faith. He must not fail. On fire now, he leaps to the sky, and to his amazement he grasps the moon . . . but his claws don't dig deep enough to give him purchase.

It slips from his hands, and he falls, while behind him the fire consumes the last of the forest. He plummets from that world into an unfinished corner of the universe that not even dreams have reached.

Lev's teeth chatter uncontrollably and he shivers with the force of convulsions.

"Playing the castanets tonight, little brother?" says a figure standing over him. In the moment before time and place settle in his mind, he thinks this is one of his older sisters, and that he's home, a much younger, much more innocent child. But in an instant he knows it's not true. His sisters, along with the rest of his family, have disowned him. This is his Arpache sister, Una.

"If I could shut off the air conditioner I would, but like everything else in this lousy iMotel, it's automated, and for some reason the thermostat thinks it's ninety-two degrees."

Lev's too cold to speak yet. He clenches his teeth to stop from chattering, but is only partially successful.

Una grabs his blanket from where it has fallen on the floor, and covers him with it. Then she takes the bedspread and covers him with that as well.

"Thank you," he's finally able to squeak out.

"Is it just the cold, or do you have a fever?" she asks, then she feels his forehead. There's been no one for almost two years to feel his forehead for a fever. It brings him a wave of unwanted emotion, yet he can't be sure what that emotion is.

"Nope, no fever. You're just cold."

"Thanks again," he tells her. "I'm better now."

His chattering becomes intermittent, and eventually begins to fade, his body heat now held in by the covers. He marvels at how far his dream was from the real world, how the searing heat of the flames so quickly became the cold of a roadside motel room halfway between two nowheres. But then heat and cold are two sides of the same coin, aren't they? Either extreme is lethal. Lev closes his eyes, and tries to get back to the business of sleep, knowing his body needs as much rest as it can get for the days ahead.

In the morning, he awakes to the sound of a door closing. He thinks Una must have left-but no, she's been out and has just returned.

"Good morning," she says.

He grunts, still not having mustered enough energy to speak. The room is still cold, but with double covers, he feels warm.

Una holds up a McDonald's bag in either hand. "Your choice," she says, "heart attack or stroke?"

He yawns and sits up. "Don't tell me they were out of cancer . . ."

Una shakes her head. "Sorry, not served until after eleven thirty."

He takes the bag in her left hand and finds inside an Egg McSomething that tastes too good to be anything but deadly. Well, if it wants to kill him, it'll have to get in line behind the Juvenile Authority and the clappers and, of course, Nelson.

"What's the plan, little brother?" Una asks.

Lev gobbles down the rest of his breakfast.

"How far are we from Minneapolis?"

"About three hours."

Lev reaches over and pulls out of his backpack the pictures of the two parts pirates they're hunting. One is missing an ear, and the other is as ugly as a goat. "Do you need another look?"

"I've memorized every inch of those faces," Una says not even trying to hide her disgust at the thought of them. "But I'm still not thinking it'll make a difference. Minneapolis and St. Paul are big cities. It will be next to impossible to find two losers who don't want to be found."

Lev offers her the faintest of grins. "Who says they don't want to be found?"

Now Una sits on the bed next to his, regards him closely, and says again, "So what's the plan, little brother?"

Chandler Hennessey and Morton Fretwell. The two surviving parts pirates who infiltrated Arpache territory, and captured Lev and a bunch of younger kids in the woods.