UnBound (23 page)

“What for?” Colton asks dubiously.

Karissa shrugs. “To escape a coup? To hide weapons? No one knows for sure—but the point is, this place, after it was an opium farm and before it was a harvest camp, was a military training ground. The only building that still exists from those days is on the north end of the camp. They took an old temple and turned it into a palace for the general.”

“The Haunted Mansion!” Colton says. Karissa looks at him funny. “Go on,” he says.

“There are pictures in the public nimbus that show this place—or at least how it looked all those years ago. There's an old well right in the middle that leads down to the tunnel. I was trying to find where it exits, so I could sneak in and save my sister—but all I know is where those tunnels start, not where they end.”

“So,” says Colton, “they could lead right to another Dah Zey stronghold.”

“Or,” says Karissa, “they could lead to freedom. . . .”

•  •  •

At the next inspection, a whole host of kids are pulled out of the line and dragged off to be unwound. If there's any rhyme or reason to whom they choose, Colton can't see it. He's become used to the dread of inspection. Used to the relief of being allowed to return to the horrible little holding cell, as if returning there is some sort of triumph.

Rodín doesn't keep his distance today. He's right at the front line, checking sores, determining the quality of the product and who might need medical attention to bring up the price of their parts. But Colton knows why he's really here. He's looking for subjects. As Rodín moves down the line toward him, Colton gets an idea. It's probably a very bad idea, but it's a desperate measure in a very desperate time. He steps forward out of line and waits to be noticed.

A guard lifts his rifle butt, moving as if to strike Colton, but Colton knows he won't. Not in front of Sonthi, who is farther down the line, and definitely not in front of the doctor. Mustn't damage the merchandise.

“I want to volunteer,” Colton says as soon as the doctor sees him standing here. He's horrified by his own words but also energized by the risk he's taking. “I want you to change me, Dr. Rodín. I want to be something new. Something different. Something great.”

Rodín smiles like he's just unwrapped the perfect present. “A volunteer. I very rarely get volunteers. Few are so brave.”

Colton knows Rodín already had him pegged. If it wasn't today, it would be tomorrow or the day after. Then he would be a prisoner. But now he's a willing subject. It could make all the difference.

“And what sort of creation would you like to be?” Rodín asks.

Colton swallows and tries to sell it. “I surrender to your imagination.”

Rodín looks him over, judging him, trying to read him. “You fear the shelling.”

“We all do,” Colton tells him. “But it's not just that. I want something . . . more.”

Rodín turns to the guard, speaking in Burmese. The guard nods. Colton has no idea what he says, but then Rodín smiles at him again. “I must complete the inspection,” Rodín says. “Then we shall talk.”

After Rodín is gone, Kemo turns to Colton, his calm entirely shaken. “Why?” he asks. “Why would you do such a thing?”

“To save us,” Colton whispers. “If the tunnel exists, I'll find it. Give me three days, then at inspection on the third day, demand to see your sister,” he tells Karissa.

“Why would they let me?”

“They will,” Colton says, sure of it. Sonthi will bring her, if only to see the look on her face. “The hard part will be convincing them that Kemo and Gamon should come too, but I have faith you'll figure out a way.”

Karissa gives him a twisted grin. “You're a regular Akron AWOL,” she says.

Colton shakes his head. “I'm not a hero—I just want to survive.”

“I'm sure that's what Connor Lassiter said when he tranq'd that Juvey-cop and took a tithe hostage.”

“And what if you can't find a tunnel?” Kemo asks.

“Then we're no worse off than we are now.”

“
You'll
be worse off,” Kemo points out, and Colton agrees—but he can't stand the frying pan any longer. He's ready to take on the fire.

•  •  •

When inspection is done, and the others return to their dingy gray holding pens, Rodín, speaking Burmese, Lao, or some hybrid of the two, instructs the guards, and they roughly grab Colton. Rodín stops them right away, chastising them. They release Colton but stand close as they escort him to the moss-covered stone palace.

“You'll have a private room here in the Green Manor,” Rodín tells him after they've closed the wrought-iron gates behind him. Colton wonders if he knows that everyone else calls it the Haunted Mansion.

“All your needs will be taken care of.” He waves his hand, and Kunal comes running. Or hobbling.

“We have a volunteer.”

“Yes, Dr. Rodín.”

“Show him to chamber twenty-three.”

“Yes, Dr. Rodín.”

Rodín turns to Colton. “I've been teaching Kunal English. I intend to bring him into the West and impress the world with what we've done here.”

Colton finds that very unlikely. Rodín is as delusional as Pravda is. Was.

Kunal obediently leads Colton across the courtyard, and Colton looks around, trying not to be obvious about it and trying to ignore the sounds coming from the rooms that border the courtyard. Creations he doesn't even want to imagine reside in there. He focuses his attention toward the middle of the courtyard. Karissa talked of a well in the center, but now there's only a huge, gnarled tree—the one Kunal had climbed at the doctor's request.

“So, can you say anything more than ‘Yes, Dr. Rodín'?”

“My English getting better,” Kunal says.

Colton looks down at the hands connected to his ankles. He wears fingerless leather gloves on them.

“Were you a volunteer?”

Kunal doesn't answer him.

“Are you happy with . . . with what he made you?”

Kunal stops and takes a good look at Colton, and while Colton tries to read his emotions, he can't. He's not sure if Kunal is friend or foe. Has the doctor really won him over?

“My brain, my body still here,” Kunal says. “Better that than no.”

“Agreed—but that doesn't answer my question.”

“No understand you.”

“I think you do.”

They reach the back of the large courtyard—a place where the strange sounds fade away—and Kunal opens a warped wooden door with an old-fashioned key on his bulky, jangling key ring. The room itself, as the doctor had promised, looks far more comfortable than the crowded cell he had been in. Only the best for a volunteer.

“You here,” Kunal says. “Maybe doctor come bring lunch. Maybe I come. Maybe nobody come.” Colton glances out at the tree again, which rustles in the breeze.

“Have you climbed all the way to the top?” Colton asks. “Have you tried? I'll bet you could.”

“I no talk no more.”

Kunal locks him in and hobbles off, but an hour later Colton sees him through the small window of his room, swinging through highest branches of the huge tree.

•  •  •

Late in the afternoon of that first day Rodín has Colton brought to his office on the second floor, away from the sounds coming from the many rooms below. They discuss Colton's future.

“Such a spectrum of possibilities, yes?” The doctor says, brightly.

Colton can't keep his knee from bouncing. That's all right. He forces all his anxiety into that knee so that it doesn't show anywhere else.

“I have a shipment coming in next week,” Rodín tells him. “The wings of a wandering albatross—three-point-five-meter wingspan—the largest in the world. They've been infused with human DNA, to overcome cross-species tissue rejection.”

Colton just nods, keeping his jaws clamped tightly closed, because if he doesn't, he might scream. The doctor takes his silence for thoughtfulness.

“You must be imagining what it would be like to fly, yes?” Then the doctor glances down at Colton's lower half. “Of course human legs are far too heavy for flight—but legs were made for walking. What need for them if you can fly?”

Colton tries to hold on to the first thing Rodín said.
Next week.
If this is to be his fate, it won't happen until next week. By then maybe he can find that tunnel and be out of here.

“But perhaps we should think about highlighting those hazel eyes of yours. Eyes are lost in one's face, do you not think? But imagine them in the palms of your hands. How much more useful they would be!”

“Are those my choices?” Colton finally asks. “Eyes in my hands or albatross wings?”

Rodín frowns. “Do you have something better? Something you dream you could be? Something the human body cannot do in its natural, inferior form?”

Colton takes a deep breath. What possible variation of awful could he propose? Something that would keep most of him intact? But more important, something that would take a long, long time to prepare.

He imagines the albatross wings, which leads him to think of a Pegasus, which leads him to think of—

“Centaur.” He cannot believe he's even considering it, much less saying it out loud.

The doctor laughs. “You reach for the stars, yes? Centaurus, the brightest constellation in the southern sky. Like me, you are enamored with the mythological. This I can respect.” The doctor taps his chin thoughtfully. “I've thought of it before, of course, but such an endeavor is fraught with complications. The spine must bend at a sharp angle; the central nervous system must be effectively fused—and the operation itself? Risky. Very risky.” He looks at Colton a moment more, then he slaps the table. “But if you're up for the challenge, then so am I!”

He rises, full of excitement, and Colton begins to laugh. He finds none of this funny, and yet still he laughs and doesn't know why. The doctor takes his laughter as a sign of some sort of connection.

“We shall find a horse of the proper size. Chestnut, I think—to match your hair. It will take several weeks to infuse human DNA.”

Several weeks. That was the reprieve Colton was hoping for! Colton is ready to congratulate himself on his own cleverness, until Rodín says:

“But first we must give you a larger heart. I'll make that this week's priority.”

“What?”

“You can't expect a mere human heart to pump all the way to your hindquarters.”

“No—but . . . but won't you need time to infuse it with human DNA too?”

“Usually yes—but I happen to have the heart of a bull already prepared. I had plans to make a pair of minotaurs to stand on either side of the palace entrance—but that can wait; this is so much more exciting.” Rodín claps his hands in delight. “What a wonder we will create!”

Dizzy now, Colton holds on tightly to his chair, praying he can get off this ride before its terrible conclusion.

The bed this boy has made for himself is worse than any the doctor could have devised. Kunal thinks his mind must be broken, like that poor Russian girl. Or maybe he truly does fancy himself as the makings of mythology.

The first procedure—the heart transplant—is scheduled for Friday, just three days after his arrival at the Green Manor. The boy's heart will be sold on the black market, and in its place will be a beef heart more than twice its size.

Kunal is there as the doctor has his second conversation with the boy. The preoperative discussion. “Of course we'll have to enlarge your chest a bit,” Dr. Rodín casually tells him, “but that's simple enough.”

Kunal watches Colton, but he shows no hint of a reaction. How could he not be terrified? Kunal was terrified when he was the focus of the doctor's attention—but then Kunal didn't volunteer. He was selected.

Perhaps that's why this American boy is treated differently from the others.

“You will lock him in his room at night, but allow him to move about the manor during the day,” Rodín instructs Kunal. “But keep a close eye on him. Escort him wherever he goes.”

“Why, Dr. Rodín?” Kunal dares to ask. “Why he get no chains?”

The doctor looks at him, affronted. “You question me?”

“Only to understand.”

Rodín sighs. “This boy will most certainly die. If not after this procedure, then after the next. Progress cannot be made without the experiments that fail, no? But I admire this boy's bravery. The least I could do is allow him his humanity for a day or two.”

Kunal does not like the idea that he is now the valet to some spoiled American kid—but knowing what he's in for softens Kunal's judgment just a bit.

The next morning Kunal gives Colton the grand tour of the Green Manor—or at least the places that Kunal is allowed to go. The library full of mildewing books. The shrine—for before men resided in this place, the gods did. And the veranda, which looks out over an electrified fence to the jungle and Thailand in the east—its border barely a kilometer away, so tantalizingly close.

There are, of course, guards all over the grounds, and although they grip their weapons tighter when they see Colton, they know that he is not to be touched. Not until he's touched by the doctor's scalpel.

Kunal makes the mistake of bringing Colton near the north wing. And the sounds make Colton stop in his tracks. They are different from the sounds in the front sections of the manor. Those are merely sounds of the aftermath. Ruined beings scrabbling and babbling, trying to comprehend their fun-house existence. But in the north wing—these are the sounds of souls in transition. The hollow howls of purgatory.

In spite of Kunal's attempts to direct Colton away from the north wing, the boy moves toward a heavily bolted double door, beyond which they can hear muffled moans and weakened wails. Rodín's own
Gates of Hell
.