It was Wil Tashi'ne-the love of Una's life-who saved them. He traded himself for Lev's life and the lives of the others, a trade the pirates took because he had something that would fetch them a very high price. Wil had talent. Talent in his hands, and in the parts of his brain that had mastered the guitar like few others. They took him, leaving Lev to deal with the consequences. He was helpless to stop Wil from sacrificing himself, and yet the Arpache blamed him. Lev was an outsider, like the parts pirates. He was a refugee from the same broken world. Even Una's feelings about him had a measure of ambivalence. "You're the harbinger of doom," she had told him. And she was right. Where Lev goes, terrible things always seem to follow. Yet still, he dreams he can break that pattern. It certainly would be easier than bringing down the moon.

Wil Tashi'ne's unwinding left a wound in the Arpache people that Lev knows he cannot mend, but perhaps he can soothe it. The scar will always be there, but if Lev has his way, he and Una will bring those flesh thieves back to face Arpache justice.

And then the Tribal Council will have to listen to him.

They will have to consider his plea to finally take a public stand against the Juvenile Authority.

Catching Hennessey and Fretwell won't quite bring down the moon, but if the Arpache-arguably the most influential Chancefolk tribe-can be brought into the battle against unwinding, it will be more than the moon that falls.

5 * Starkey

Mason Michael Starkey couldn't care less about what some Chancefolk tribe does or doesn't do. He doesn't need their pathetic support because he's taken his battle against unwinding right to the enemy, in the form of a gun muzzle rammed down the Juvenile Authority's throat. As far as he's concerned, anything less is for losers. Starkey knows he is poised for greatness. In fact, he's already achieved it. Now it's just a matter of degree.

"A little higher," he says. "Yes, right there."

He escaped with his storks from the Graveyard before the Juvies could capture them. He survived a plane crash. And now Starkey is a war hero. Never mind that no official war has been declared-he has declared it, and that's all that matters. If others out there choose to behave like this isn't a war, then they deserve what's coming to them.

"I'm not feeling it," he says. "A little harder."

Starkey is the savior of storks. He and his brigade of unwanted babies who grew into unwanted kids have now grown into an army bursting with righteous rage against a system that would permanently silence them. Society would have them dismantled, their parts going to "serve humanity." Well, now humanity is getting a slightly different sort of service from them.

"You're not very good at this, are you?"

"I'm trying! I'm doing everything you say!"

Starkey lies facedown on a massage table in a room that used to be the executive office of a power plant. The plant was gutted years ago, leaving nothing but a rusty shell within a chain-link fence, miles away from anyplace anyone wants to be. It's a weedy corner of northern Mississippi, as overgrown and unloved as a place can be. The perfect hiding spot for an army of six hundred.

Starkey pushes himself up on one elbow. His masseuse, a pretty girl whose name he can't remember, looks away, too intimidated to meet his eye. "A good back massage should hurt as much as it soothes," Starkey tells her. "You have to work out the knots. You need to leave me loose and limber and ready for our next mission. Do you understand?"

The girl nods, overly obedient and too eager to please. "I think so."

"You said you've done this before."

"I know," she tells him. "I just wanted the chance . . ."

Starkey sighs. This is the way of things around him now. They climb over each other like rats to be close to him. To bask in his light. He can't blame them, really. He should applaud this girl for her ambition-but right now all he wants is a good massage.

"You can go," he tells her.

"I'm sorry . . ."

She lingers, and he contemplates the moment. Starkey knows he could take a detour with this afternoon and maybe get something other than a massage from this eager girl. Whatever he wants, he knows she will oblige . . . but the fact that he can have it so easily makes it so much less desirable.

"Just go," he tells her.

She slinks away, trying to do so quietly, but the rusty hinges on the door complain when she opens it. Rather than making the door squeal again, she leaves it open. Starkey can hear her clambering down the metal stairs, probably in tears at her failure to please him.

Alone now, he rolls his left shoulder and checks the bandage there. He took a bullet in the last harvest camp liberation. Well, not really. The bullet grazed him so slightly, it couldn't even be called a flesh wound. Yes, it drew blood, and yes, it will leave a scar, but as wounds go, on a scale of one to ten, this one is somewhere around one-point-five. Still the bandage makes it look worse, and so he wears a tank top that clearly displays the bandage on his upper arm for all the storks to see. Another war wound to go with the one farther down that same arm. His ruined hand, the hand he smashed to free himself from handcuffs back at the airplane graveyard. Smashing his hand saved him. It freed him to escape with the storks and start his war. Considering that he was once on the fast track to be unwound, giving up one hand seems like a bargain. Now he keeps it in a very expensive Louis Vuitton glove. That day at the Graveyard was early July, and now it's September. Less than three months have passed. Although it feels like a lifetime ago, his body measures the time properly, even if his mind doesn't. His broken hand still aches, still oozes, still requires a nice dose of painkillers every once in a while. It will never heal properly. He will never use that hand again, but it matters little. He has hundreds of other hands to do the work for him.

He looks out of the cracked, grimy windows that overlook the gutted power plant floor, now lined with bedrolls, folding tables, and the various necessities of the Stork Brigade's nomadic life.

"Keeping watch over your subjects?"

He turns to see Bam, his second-in-command, coming into the room, carrying a few newspapers.

"Some of the tabloids are now suggesting that you're Satan's spawn," she says. "A woman in Peoria claims she saw a jackal give birth to you."

Starkey laughs. "I've never even been to Peoria."

"That's okay," she says. "I don't think there are any jackals in Peoria either."

She drops the newspapers on the massage table. Starkey is pleased to find that he's on the first page of each one. He's seen his face on the newsfeeds and the public nimbus, but there's something very visceral about seeing his face in hard print.

"I must be doing something right, if the crazies think I'm as powerful as the Antichrist."

He leafs through the newspapers. The legitimate papers have more legitimate takes on him, but none of them are silent on the subject of Mason Michael Starkey. Experts try to psychoanalyze his motives. The Juvenile Authority goes rabid at the mention of his name, and in schools across the country, riots are breaking out, stork against nonstork. Everywhere, other kids like himself are demanding equal treatment in a world that would rather they just go away.

People call him a monster for lynching "innocent workers" at harvest camps. They call him a murderer for brutally executing doctors who perform unwindings. Let them call him whatever they want. Each label just adds to his growing legend.

"There's a new supply of ammo coming in today," he tells Bam. "Maybe some new guns, too." Then he watches her closely to see her response. Not what she says, but what she feels. Her body language. He can tell that she's bristling.

"If the clappers are going to supply weapons, maybe they could teach these kids how to use them so they don't accidentally blow their own brains out."

That actually makes Starkey laugh. "They send kids out to blow themselves up for their cause," Starkey reminds her. "Do you really think they care if a few storks shoot themselves?"

"Maybe not," Bam says. "But you should care. They're your beloved storks."

This gives Starkey pause for thought, but he tries not to show it. "Our storks," he corrects.

"If you care about them as much as you say you do, you would take measures to protect them from themselves . . . and each other."

But Starkey knows what she's really thinking. If you care about them, then you'll stop attacking harvest camps.

"How many storks died in the last attack?" he asks.

Bam shrugs. "How should I know?"

"Because you do," Starkey says. A simple statement of fact. He knows she keeps track of such things to use against him, or maybe just to torture herself.

Bam holds eye contact, but her feigned ignorance fails her. "Seven," she says.

"And how many storks did we add to our numbers?" Starkey asks.

Bam clearly doesn't want to say, but he waits until she spits it out. "Ninety-three."

"Ninety-three storks . . . and two hundred seventy-five nonstorks freed from harvest camp hell. I think that's worth the seven lives we lost, don't you?"

She won't answer him.

"Don't you?" he demands.

Finally she casts her eyes out of the window, looking down on the hundreds of kids on the power plant floor. "Yes," she concedes.

"Then why are we having this argument?"

"We're not arguing," Bam says as she turns to go. "No one argues with you, Mason. There'd be no point."

THE FOLLOWING IS A PAID POLITICAL ADVERTISEMENT.

There's no question that these are frightening times. Clappers terrorize our neighborhoods; AWOL storks murder the innocent; violent feral teens threaten a deadly uprising-and while there are various measures on state and local ballots to help reign in incorrigible youth, those measures just don't go far enough. What we need is a comprehensive national policy that will take the incorrigibles out of the equation before they darken tomorrow's headlines.

The Greater Good Divisional Option-also known as the Parental Override bill-will do just that! It will identify the most dangerous teens and allow for their unwinding, taking the decision away from negligent parents and putting it in the hands of the Juvenile Authority, where it belongs.

Write to your congressman and senators. Tell them that you support Parental Override. Your family won't be safe until Parental Override becomes law.

-Paid for by Citizens For the Greater Good

As the sun begins to sink low, and the power plant's grime-covered windows begin to cast long shadows across the factory floor, Starkey descends to mingle among the masses. Many kids greet him; others are too intimidated to even look at him. He moves through the crowd of kids trouble-free. No one brings him their problems. This is yet another way he runs his ship differently than Connor ran the Graveyard. Connor was constantly inundated by daily minutia. Backed-up latrines, shortages on medical supplies, things like that. But here, kids know better than to waste Starkey's time. If they have a problem, they either live with it or take care of it themselves. He can't be bothered-he has a war to run.

With dinner fifteen minutes late, he checks their makeshift galley, where Hayden Upchurch and his food-prep team are all sweaty from moving industrial-size cans of processed ham.

"Hail, O mighty chief." Hayden says.

"Where's dinner?"

"We were waiting for the delivery from the 'applause department,' but apparently the clappers just sent guns and ammo, no food. So tonight we'll have to make do with SPAM."

Hayden seems far too pleased by the fact. "What are you smiling about? SPAM sucks."

"Are you kidding me? SPAM is my god. It's the only deity that can be eaten raw or fried. The stuff of Holy Communion."

The most annoying thing about Hayden is that Starkey can never tell if he's being disrespectful or just habitually sarcastic. For a while Hayden had been a problem, refusing to do the computer legwork Starkey needed to choose their targets. Lately, however, Hayden seems to have gotten with the program. Now that he's been demoted back to food service, he does his job with competent, if somewhat acerbic, cheer. Starkey still has no real trust of Hayden, but there's no one else who's organized enough to get food on the table three times a day for all six hundred of them. Hayden Upchurch is a necessary evil.

"You'll be serving in ten minutes, or I'll be looking for your replacement."

"Ultimatum acknowledged," Hayden says, and continues his work.

Starkey finds Bam in the weapons locker, unloading unmarked crates that were delivered in unmarked trucks. Their benefactors don't scrimp when it comes to giving them best of the best in artillery.

"What have we got?" Starkey asks.

"See for yourself," Bam says. "More assault rifles, submachine guns. And a whole bunch of Glocks. I guess they decided we need pistols for the littler kids."

Her voice drips with attitude, a kind of vitriolic sarcasm much darker than Hayden's. "Would you rather they go into a hostile environment unarmed?"

She doesn't answer the question, but when the kids helping her leave for dinner, Bam says, "Doesn't it bother you at all that we're being bankrolled and armed by the same people who fund the clapper movement?"

He rolls his eyes. He's never felt the slightest bit ambivalent about this. You never look a gift horse in the mouth, no matter where that gift horse has been. "C'mon-it's not like we're blowing ourselves up."

"Not yet. But who knows what they're going to ask in return for all they're giving us?"

"Has it occurred to you that the more they fund us, the less of their money goes to clappers?"

Bam laughs bitterly. "That's your best rationalization yet! 'Mason Starkey: saving the world from clappers one dollar at a time!'"

She goes out for dinner, leaving Starkey furious that she got the last word. In spite of being the undisputed master of his domain, Starkey always feels slightly diminished after going head-to-head with Bam. There's no question that she's been an asset-she's great at riding in his wake, keeping things running smoothly-but her insubordination has begun to cross the line, and that cannot be tolerated. Starkey knows he needs her for the next harvest camp takedown. But after that, there's room for change. There are plenty of qualified storks who could do the work Bam does. Kids he can truly trust, who won't second-guess him or give him snark.

The next harvest camp they're taking on is a big one. Lots of security. Lots of firepower. Who's to say if Bam will even make it back alive?

6 * Connor

Stagnation. It numbs him, dulls his senses and his response time. It saps his motivation. The task before them is so immense, he doesn't know where to start. Now that they have the printer, they need to make plans, but Sonia's basement is as it ever was, like a black hole drawing them back into the shut-in mentality of the safe-house AWOL. Risa tends to the various scrapes and medical woes, and does a good impersonation of a shrink for those kids who need someone to talk to, which is all of them, although not all of them are willing to talk. As for Connor, there are so many broken appliances, he finds his time is way too easily passed repairing them. It's easier than being proactive with the printer, because the world out there is a minefield. A single misstep and it's all over.