Unwind

The guards wake everyone up and move them to a new room in the warehouse, where airline packing crates wait. The guards arbitrarily choose groups of people, with four to a crate. Connor is put with Roland’s group. He panics and punches one of the other boys. The guards break them apart, to Connor’s relief. “The [guard] doesn’t know it, but this is exactly what Connor wanted” (163). They put him in a new crate. His companions are Diego, Emby, and Hayden—Connor knows Hayden from the antique shop.

Connor’s group worries it will suffocate in the crate. Hayden says, “At least dying’s better than being unwound. Or is it? Let’s take a poll” (166). Each of them has a different opinion about whether being dead or unwound is worse. Hayden pushes the conversation further: “if every part of you is alive but inside someone else…are you alive or are you dead” (167). Again, they each have a different opinion. Connor wonders, “Could consciousness exist like that? He thinks about the trucker who performed a card trick for him with an Unwind’s hand” (171).

Hayden mentions someone he knew who “believed that if someone actually gets unwound, then they never had a soul to begin with” (172).