Some Good Advice
A/N: I finished Unwind yesterday and I just couldn't get it out of my mind. Here's a quick, dark one-shot about Risa a few years after the book ended.
Risa hums to herself, focusing on Janice's manicured nails around the scalpel. Back and forth, back and forth. The rhythm is numbing. Janice is new, so she goes much more slowly than Roy, her mentor. He stands in the corner, critiquing her method every now and again. He hasn't for a while. Risa can tell he's just as bored as she is.
"Am I doing this right?" Janice squeaks to Leah who's doing the other foot. Leah's very experienced, she's probably been doing this since Risa was supposed to be unwound herself. She snorts. Oh, how times change. "You're doing wonderfully," says Leah. "Just try not to think so much."
Good advice, Risa thinks. She bets someone told her that in the beginning. She can't really remember her first few procedures though. They all seem to have run together over the past few years. Of course, Risa tries to keep it that way. She's much smarter than surgeons like Janice, who don't go up any higher than the abdomen. Risa works with the brain, the trickiest part. Out of the three hours the procedure takes, the brain takes more than an hour. Sometimes more, especially if the kid is smarter than average. She comes across those more often than you'd think. Parents don't like teenagers that are smarter than them.
"I like your fingernails, Janice," Risa says, breaking her little tune. Janice looks startled.
"What? Oh, yes, thank you. I didn't know you could see them through the gloves."
"The gloves are clear. So I can," Risa answers.
"Oh. Oh, well, yes, then," Janice replies.
Risa smirks to herself. Roy gives her a reprimanding face. Sorry, she mouths. She can't help messing with the interns during their first few procedures. They're just such easy targets. So, so nervous.
"Don't mind Risa, Janice," Leo, the heart guy, says. "She's mean." Risa laughs.
Risa hasn't always been mean. In fact, once, she was one of the nicest people she knew. Living in a StaHo and on the run with other unwinds doesn't give you a good pool of nice people to choose from, however. God, the only nice person she can think of is Lev, before he ran away and totally lost it. It still makes her ache, that a kid that pure, that kind, ended up a clapper. Lifetime sentence, no bail. He was corrupted so quickly, so entirely. It just doesn't seem fair.
But nothing is fair, Risa quickly reminds herself. Nothing, nothing, nothing. In her eyes, Lev certainly didn't have the worst deal. To be able to hide from the world forever, to create your own world of few people and eight by eight foot room doesn't seem too bad to her. Maybe he's a little lonely. But at least he's not getting hammered into pieces by the world day after day after day.
Unexpectedly, her thoughts turn to Connor. Actually, it isn't that unexpected or sudden. She was just thinking of Lev, obviously, and about "getting hammered to pieces"…Connor's name had to come up in her mind eventually between the two.
She sighs. She doesn't like thinking about Connor. She liked him a lot, maybe even loved him. But that was just at the time. It proved to be just another teenage romance, vapid and short. Just because they faced death-defying circumstances on a daily basis back then didn't mean their feelings for each other had to be death-defying either. That's what all the teen adventure novels got wrong, Risa thinks, looking back on the books she used to devour at the StaHo. Teenage romances are still teenage romances. And they all mean nothing, because we all grow out of them.
She's not sad about it, really, because she and Connor grew out of one another, truly. They tried to make it work. They really, really tried. But it just seemed that, when it came down to it, they just didn't know each other well enough. Plus, Risa had been suspicious that Connor was cheating on her, periodically. (The no-sex predicament that came with her below the waist paralyzing had a deep effect on him, it seems). It was inevitable, she had known. She just tried to put it off as long as possible.
After Risa and Connor broke up, they both went their separate ways. They planned to stay in contact, but they didn't. They just didn't have enough in common, besides that they had both once been unwinds. But they didn't want to reminisce about any of those memories, so they had nothing to share. A few months later, Risa was wheeling herself home from a piano lesson and got attacked by four runaway unwinds. They raped her, the paralyzed girl, and she was powerless to stop it.
It would change her forever. Her sympathy towards the damned had finally ended. All the grandiose ideas she and Connor had once shared about changing the world, ending the act of unwinding left her mind, because now she saw that unwinds were usually bad. Evil, sometimes. They deserved to be unwound.
Before she knew it, she had become an advocate for unwinding, using her rape as fuel. With her new lower spine intact, she would give lectures to huge groups of people about what happened to her, and why unwinding must be done, and people must take parts from the unwound. "It's the only way to save the good in society and get rid of the evil," she would say.
She is credited in the textbooks as the leader of the Counter Reformation, bringing her world back to the stability it had known before unwinding was being questioned, before the existence of the graveyard came to be widespread. She also expanded unwinding from seventeen back to eighteen. There were even talks of expanding from ten to twenty.
One day, a friend of Connor's called to let her know Connor had been unwound a few weeks earlier. She wasn't sure how she felt about him, even after all this time. He treated her terribly at the end of their relationship, but still, she sat on her kitchen floor for hours, sobbing. When she finally wiped her red eyes, coughed and sputtered, she realized it wasn't all that bad. But somehow, it was. But she wasn't that scared little girl sent to be unwound anymore. She was something stronger than that. So she locked whatever she had felt for Connor in a little box inside her and swore never to look in it again.
When she was eighteen, Risa went to college on a private fund from a generous donor. She never would know who it was, but she didn't really care. All she knew was that she could go to medical school, like she always had secretly longed to. And she did. She graduated, top of her class, and went on to become one of the most acclaimed brain surgeons of her time. She got a job at one of the top harvest camps in the world, Salt Springs.
That's where she is right now, in the Chop Shop. She's just performing another routine unwinding. Well, currently, she's just waiting around, watching Michelle deal with the jaw, but soon she'll be operating, cutting apart the patient's brain. Risa looks down at the unwind, the scared little girl, for the first time. She's still talking to Candice, the nurse, who's holding her hand. Tears are streaming down her cheeks. She's talking to Candice. Risa can't hear what she's saying.
Amid all the noise and clatter of a routine unwinding, Risa feels a pang of something. Guilt, maybe. Or sorrow. Unfairness. But whatever it is, she swallows it back and locks it up in her heart. She pulls out her scalpel.
"Let's get started."