“We’re not all evil,” the man says.

“Neither are we,” Jeevan responds.

And they wait there in silence hiding in the ivy, hiding to stay alive, until the sounds of gunfire fade and Starkey, the triumphant general, enters the theater of battle to claim his victory.

16 • Bam

When the battle begins, Bam and her team of twenty-five storks are positioned at the camp’s back entrance. Their view is of the loading dock behind the Chop Shop, where medical vans haul away coolers of life, ready to be transplanted to those deemed more deserving. Or at least those whose pocketbooks or insurance can afford new parts. A single van is parked by the loading dock today, ready for the next shipment.

Bam’s team—“Marabou Squad,” as Starkey has called them, since he insists on naming each assault team after some kind of stork—waits outside the electrified gate, hidden by a dense oak grove, its branches filled with the oversize leaves of late September, just beginning to yellow. They have explosives to take out the fence. Bam is determined not to use them.

When the explosions begin on the other side of the harvest camp. Bam’s team gets anxious. They remove the safeties from their weapons—weapons that they’ve only been minimally trained to use. The slighter kids can barely hold them, much less use them.

“Put the safeties back on!” Bam orders.

A meek, wide-eyed girl named Bree looks at her, almost more terrified by her order than by what lay ahead. “But . . . if we keep them on—”

“You heard me!”

All around, Bam hears the clicks of the weapons being returned to the safe position. She takes a deep breath. Another explosion from somewhere beyond the Chop Shop shakes the ground beneath their feet and dislodges a hail of acorns. From this angle, all they can see are trees and the loading dock. Debris flies over the Chop Shop, landing on the loading dock. Small chunks of concrete pummel the roof of the medical van.

“We should go in!” says Garson DeGrutte. He’s a muscular kid with painfully piercing gray eyes and a jarhead haircut. Clearly he wanted to be a military boeuf, and must see the Stork Brigade as his chance to live out his dream. “We need to go in now!” Garson shouts.

“Quiet!” yells Bam. “We’re the second wave.”

That’s a lie, of course. Starkey adheres to an “all in” strategy: Hold nothing in reserve. Do or die. But Bam is determined to save these kid’s lives. Today that is her personal mission.

“Look!” Bree says, pointing.

People in medical whites and scrubs burst out of the back door of the Chop Shop. Surgeons, nurses—the people who do the actual unwinding. Bam feels a surge of hate rage within her as the medical staff desperately tries the doors of the van, but can’t get in. Another explosion blows out some of the Chop Shop’s windows. The medical staff abandons the van and runs toward the gate. One of them hits a remote, and the gate begins to open.

“We’re in without wasting explosives!” says Garson. “Pretty smart, Bam.”

“Just shut your freaking mouth!” Bam growls at him. She glances to see the safety is off his weapon again and she burns him a glare that makes him click the safety back in place.

The medical workers, about seven or eight of them, race out of the gate.

“You’re just letting them go?” Garson asks, incredulous.

Bam locks eyes with him. “Do you want to go out there and gun them down?”

The question leaves Garson speechless. He looks at his weapon, as if really seeing it for the first time. Bam looks to the whole group. “How about the rest of you? Anyone who wants to go out there and murder them, be my guest.”

There are no takers. Not a one.

So they stay hidden in the trees as the men and woman run past, panicked and out of breath, some crying—and then out of nowhere comes a kid that Bam doesn’t know. He has black hair hanging in his eyes, bad acne, and is emaciated in a radiation-chic kind of way. He stands in the middle of the road, holding his hands apart and tilting his head back like a flower opening for the sun.

The running people see him, but they’re so terrified of what they’re running from, they don’t even consider what they might be running toward. Just before they reach his position, the dark-haired boy swings his hands together in a single powerful stroke.

The force of the explosion throws Bam and her team to the ground. And when she gets up to look, the trees on either side of the road are on fire, there’s a crater in the asphalt, and there’s no one there anymore. No one at all.

The other storks are silent for a few stunned moments, listening to the sound of flames, settling debris, and gunfire from beyond the Chop Shop loading dock, trying to deny the charred smell that has just reached their nostrils.

“They were unwinders,” Garson says, his voice shaky. “They deserved to die.”

“Maybe,” says Bree. “But I’m glad I wasn’t the one who killed them.”

Bam’s team waits out the battle, making no move to join it, and no one argues anymore. Not even Garson who seems hateful of the whole situation, probably thinking himself a coward, and blaming Bam for it.

It is only when the battle is over that Bam leads her team past the smoking remains of the Chop Shop, and into the battle-torn grounds of Horse Creek Harvest Camp.

Starkey has already gathered the liberated Unwinds in a grassy common, now strewn with bodies and wreckage. “My name is Mason Michael Starkey,” Bam hears him announce to the gathered Unwinds, “and I have just freed you.”