103 pages • 3 hours read
Rodman PhilbrickA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Spaz notices that the latch is burning; the jetbikes have formed a mob that is coming to get them in the stackboxes. Ryter is reciting poetry and politicians’ quotes and preparing himself to be killed. Spaz’s instinct is to run and to take Ryter with him, but the old man won’t budge. The mob descends and grabs Ryter, calling out “wheel,” and the old man requests that Spaz save his papers—an impossible task, as the mob is burning everything along the way.
Billy appears holding a knife and a gun and clears a path for Spaz. He apologizes for not being able to save Ryter. The proov enforcers deactivated all the probes and the people are looking for someone to blame. Billy is in fact there to protect Spaz, not Ryter. He reveals he is Spaz’s birth father.
Before he can take in the new information from Billy, Spaz is chasing after Ryter, pushing Bangers out of his way so that he can get to him and try to free him from the wheels. The Bangers have attached ropes from Ryter to their jetbikes in order to spin and drag the life from him. Ryter finds out his pages have been burned, but he declares Spaz himself is the last book in the universe. He is killed by the wheel, which the mob enjoys very much. Spaz goes unconscious as another seizure hits him.
When Spaz wakes up, the mob is gone, the streets are deserted, and Ryter’s home is completely empty. Spaz goes home to his own cube in the Crypts, the concrete bunker where the Bully Bangers live. Billy tries to get his attention and even visits himself, to explain why he gave Spaz up—so that he could grow up normally—but Spaz sends him away. Spaz begins voice-writing his own story and becomes known as Ryter himself. One night he gets a message from a runner delivering a message from Eden about his friends. Little Face is doing well. Lanaya reminds him: “Today is theirs, but the future is ours” (201).
In Chapter 30, Ryter predicts that he will be called upon as a scapegoat for what happened in Eden: “[W]hen things go wrong, outsiders get blamed, and writers tend to be outsiders” (190). As he suspected, in Chapter 31 when the mob descends on the stackboxes, they’re only there to “wheel” Ryter. After his death, Spaz adopts his name and takes on the role of writer. However, there is one big difference between these two figures. The old “gummy” Ryter had no story of his own; throughout the book, Ryter pushed Spaz to tell his own story but never divulged a past of his own. Of course, he told countless stories from before his time, but never the events of his own life. When the pages of his book burned, so did his internal, personal life. His mode of storytelling was different in this way from Spaz’s, as the reader has been led to assume the narrative of this book is the actual story as told from Spaz’s perspective through his voice-writing. This could explain why Ryter declared Spaz “the last book in the universe,” rather than the last writer.
At the end of Chapter 31, Billy Bizmo reveals himself as Spaz’s birth father; rather than process this information or have a heartfelt discussion with Billy, Spaz runs away. Not necessarily because of the revelation, but because the mob—made up of Billy’s henchmen, the Bangers—is in the process of killing his mentor, and Billy won’t stop them. After Spaz has returned to the Crypts, his father tries a few more times to contact him:
Once a Banger came and told me Billy Bizmo wanted to see me, but I said forget it, and then one day Billy himself came down and told me how my mother had died when I was born, and he’d put me with a family unit because it was no good growing up with a latchboss for a dad, and he hoped someday I’d understand about that, and about everything else, too. ‘I understand I never want to be like you,’ I said, and he went away and left me alone (200).
This may be the reason for Spaz’s special treatment all these years. Similar to how Lanaya was allowed to hand out food and visit the Urb and get away with smuggling normals into Eden, Spaz was allowed to leave his own latch, to travel safely between the latches, to witness unrest across the Urb, and not get killed by his own people or the proovs who despised him in Eden.
By Rodman Philbrick