Read Online UnDivided by Neal Shusterman - Free Book Online Page B

organ . . .
    The full article can be found at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/10390183/Girl-smuggled-into-Britain-to-have-her-organs-harvested.html

7 • Sky Jockey
    Trouble in the world, trouble at home. How can they expect a man to concentrate on his work with all this trouble? AWOLs wreaking havoc everywhere, clappers blowing things up—and then, of course, there’s my daughter. I thought she was finally wising up, getting a good head on her shoulders—and now she does this? What is she thinking?
    â€œEarth to Frank!” the foreman’s voice booms over the intercom, startling him. “Are you on this freaking planet?”
    â€œYeah, I’m here. Are we ready?”
    â€œReady? We’ve been waiting here twiddling our thumbs. Start hoisting already!”
    â€œStarting the hoist. Clear the area around the payload.”
    â€œThe arm’s clear. I’ll alert the media.”
    Frank chuckles—because the foreman isn’t making a joke; he is literally alerting the media. They’re gathered around Liberty Island, cameras aimed upward at the statue, which is ensconced in construction scaffolding. It may be a momentous occasion to them, but to a crane operator, it’s just another job.
    What the hell is my daughter thinking? How could she date such an obvious loser? She’s barely fourteen; what business does a fourteen-year-old from Queens have dating a sixteen-year-old delinquent from the Bronx?
    â€œHe’s got a good heart,” she tells me.
    Fine. So rip it out and put it into another kid more deserving of her attention.
    The cables go taut, and the new arm shifts on the barge, slowly, smoothly. This is not a job accomplished with cavalierspeed. That’s the best way to wind up with snapped cables, dead coworkers, and lawsuits. Lots of lawsuits. The arm begins to rise, as if being levitated by a magician. He mans the crane’s controls, feeling the cables attached to the massive unwieldy object as if they’re his own sinews and the crane itself is just an extension of his body.
    The boyfriend is not too old to be unwound. Not yet. That freaking tool won’t be seventeen for at least a few months. And then if they repeal the Cap-17 law, there’s a whole year of potential unwinding tacked on to his miserable life. The problem is, the lowlife’s parents won’t do it. Of course they won’t! They’re probably druggies or worse. No supervision, no boundaries. If you don’t raise a kid right, it turns into a weed that’s gotta be torn out. The whole damn thing is their fault!
    â€œFrank! Jesus! What’s going on up there? Keep it steady!”
    â€œI’m on it. It’s the wind.”
    â€œSo compensate! The last thing we need is the freaking arm lying crushed at the freaking base of the statue like a dead freaking whale!”
    There are cameras mounted on the crane, on the ground, and on the statue itself to monitor the arm as it rises, but the monitors don’t tell as clear a story as actually seeing the thing. Frank leans to the side, looking out of the huge glass windows of the sky crane, to see the arm twisting and torquing in the wind below. He adjusts the tension on the cables, like fiddling with a pair of venetian blinds, to get the torch and hand to take on a forty-five-degree angle. Now it rises with the torch slightly higher than the rest of the arm, and at this angle it catches the wind differently, rising more steadily. In a minute, it has risen past the height of the statue’s base. Now he pulls it in, the cable dolly bringing it closer to the statue.
    Breed a bum to a bum, you get a bum. What goes for horse racing goes for humans as well. The loser’s parents are probably toostoned to even sign an unwind order. Sometimes these things can’t be left to the parents. Especially when those parents shoulda been unwound themselves before they started to breed.