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.”