Tear Jerker / Unwind

• Connor's recounting of a storked baby in his neighborhood that nobody wanted. It was passed around from house to house for two weeks, until it died of exposure. Everybody at the funeral cried, even those who didn't find it on their doorstep.
• Sonia is an old woman who shelters runaway Unwinds before they're transported to the safety of the Admiral's airplane graveyard. Before each Unwind leaves, she asks them to write a letter to their loved ones to be delivered on their 18th birthday. When Connor writes to his parents, he starts his letter with I hate you, but he ends it with I love you.
  Even before he signs his name, he feels the tears welling up inside. They don't seem to come from his eyes but from deep in his gut. It's a heaving so powerful it hurts his stomach and his lungs. His eyes flood, and the pain inside is so great, he's certain it will kill him right here, right now. But he doesn't die, and in time the storm inside him passes, leaving him weak in every joint and muscle of his body. He feels like he needs Sonia's cane just to walk again.
  • The sheer number of letters that Sonia has in her trunk, hundreds of them. Each one represents an Unwind who didn't want to die, whose parents didn't want them, and who still wanted their voice heard in a world that wanted them sliced up into little pieces.
• CyFi pitifully holding the items he stole under the subconscious influence of Tyler's right Temporal Lobe.
  • CyTy begging Tyler's parents not to unwind him, and breaking down into tears when they promise. Even worse is the implication that when Tyler was alive, he begged his parents not to unwind him in the exact same way...and they still did.
• Chapter 61. Roland's unwinding. People either cry buckets, or are left numb and sick.
• Lev's parents disowning him after Marcus gets injured by a clapper at the detention center. His brothers and sisters come to the hospital, but they're only there to see Marcus, not him. Then Lev sees that one of his sisters has a baby son...and he's dressed all in white, implying he's a tithe.
• Hayden's memories of his parents' divorce and decision to unwind him in UnWholly. Both of them hated the idea of the other getting custody over him so badly that they decided to unwind him, like some twisted version of the Judgement of Solomon.^note A story from the Bible in which two women fought over who was the real mother of a baby, and Solomon ordered his guard to cut the child in two pieces so they could each have half. One of the women begged him to give the baby to her rival but not to kill it, while the other woman didn't care, so Solomon declared that the first woman was the real mother.
  "Fine!"
  "Fine!"
  "If that's the way you want it!"
  "If that's the way YOU want it!"
  "Don't put this on me!"
  They signed the unwind order just to spite each other, but laugh, laugh, laugh, Hayden, because if you ever stop laughing, it might just tear you apart worse than a Chop Shop.
• Connor having to kill Starkey. Connor finally giving in is painful enough, but then he tries to strangle Starkey and fails several times. Eventually he realizes that (because Roland wasn't a killer) he can't do it with Roland's arm...but he can do it with his own.
• Roland's mother getting the letter he wrote at Sonia's antique shop and imagining that he'll come home some day. Except he never will, because he's already been unwound...and she's the one who signed him away to be unwound in the first place.