by Dan Wells
Through it all, she couldn’t stop thinking about Tovar’s words. Was there really a war coming? Was the Voice really that desperate—or that organized? The Senate seemed to paint them as half-wild terrorists, raiding and running and killing indiscriminately, but then, she supposed, the Senate would want to paint them that way. If there were actually enough of them to mount a serious front, and start a real war, then they were a bigger threat than she had ever imagined.
RM would slowly strangle humanity, one death at a time, with no new generations to replace it. A war, on the other hand, could snuff it out in weeks.
Kira pressed herself deeper into the couch, willing herself to fall asleep.
In the morning she was tired and stiff.
Tovar led them out the back of the house and through his maze of safeguards: over a temporary bridge, through another house’s weathered patio, and back to the road nearly half a mile down. The rain had stopped, and Dolly pulled the cart swiftly, so they kept a good pace. Kira tried to force herself not to look behind, not to focus on the hundred phantom Voices she imagined behind every tree and broken car. They had to stay visible, in case the Defense Grid backup came looking for them, but that visibility made Kira feel vulnerable and exposed. Even Jayden seemed anxious. They broke for lunch when the sun was high overhead, and Kira drank the last of her water while she watched the rows of ruined houses. Nothing moved. She rubbed her aching feet and checked Lanier on his stretcher; he was unconscious, and his temperature was dangerously elevated.
“How is he?” asked Gianna.
“Not good,” Kira sighed. “We’re running low on Nalox, and now I think he’s got an infection.” She rummaged in her medkit for antibiotics and began prepping a small shot.
“Is it good that he’s asleep like that?”
“Well, it’s not awesome,” said Kira, “but it’s not bad. The painkiller we’re using is designed for battlefield use; you can give him way too much and not worry about killing him. Our battlefield cleansers, on the other hand, don’t seem to be doing their job.” She stuck him with the antibiotic and injected the full dose. “If we don’t get picked up by reinforcements pretty soon, he’s in big trouble.”
Kira heard a distant whistle and looked up suddenly; Jayden had heard it too. “The scouts,” he said. “They’ve seen someone.” They pulled everyone back into a nearby house, the windows broken out and the interior filled with enough windblown soil to support new plant growth; kudzu already covered the couch. Kira crouched in the corner behind a sagging upright piano, Lanier trembling fitfully behind her. Marcus caught her eye and forced a smile.
She heard another whistle, a series of short bursts she recognized as “the people I warned you about are friendly.” She started to stand, but Jayden motioned her back down.
“Doesn’t hurt to make sure,” he whispered.
A minute later a wagon rolled past, a long, armored trailer pulled by six stamping horses. Jayden whistled loudly—“friendlies coming out, don’t shoot”—and trooped outside. Kira and Marcus carried Lanier onto the porch, where they were met by another team of medics. Kira gave them a full update on his condition, and the newly arrived soldiers handed out water and protein bars as they helped everyone into the wagon.
Tovar led Dolly out from behind the house, grimacing unhappily. “Do they shoot me now, or when they get home?”
“Ideally they don’t shoot you at all,” said Kira.
Jayden saluted the leader of the new soldiers; Kira didn’t recognize his rank insignia. “Thanks for the pickup.”
The other soldier saluted him back. “We didn’t expect to find you for a few more hours; you’re making good time.”
“This trader’s been a big help,” said Jayden, nodding to Tovar. “Carried most of our gear in his wagon.” He took a drink of water and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “We haven’t seen anybody else, so if anybody followed us, they decided not to mess with an armed Grid patrol.”
“Damn Voice,” said the soldier. “We have outriders looking for whatever they can find—your explosion out there stirred up a lot of trouble back home. We’re going to stop at Dogwood for a debrief.”
The wagon turned and carried them back, the driver lashing the six-horse team into a pretty good gallop. The sun on the armored shell was hot, baking the inside, and Kira felt herself drifting away; she woke up with her head in Marcus’s lap, sitting up abruptly as the wagon jerked to a stop. Dogwood turned out to be an old power station, a guardhouse on the edge of the settled East Meadow area. There was a high chain fence all around it, and another soldier opened the gate for them as they approached. Kira saw more soldiers on the perimeter.
“We can walk from here,” said Kira, but the lead soldier in the wagon shook his head.
“Mkele wants to debrief all of you, not just the trader.”
Debrief, thought Kira. Military-speak for “interrogate politely.” “Who’s Mkele?”
“Intelligence,” said the soldier. “Command’s getting pretty freaked out by your news. I think they’re just hoping you’ll know something important.” He helped them down from the wagon and led them into the old power station building. A young man in full combat armor took Kira to a small room and left her there, closing the door behind him.
She heard the lock click shut.
The room was small and unadorned, though she could see from the discolored linoleum that several pieces of furniture had been recently removed. Rough outlines of desks and bookshelves covered the floor like a ghostly office, an afterimage of an older time. There was no table, but there were two chairs in the far corner.
She sat and waited, planning out her conversation, scripting both sides and sounding effortlessly brilliant, but the wait grew longer, and her subtle barbs about being held unfairly for questioning turned to angry rants about unlawful imprisonment. Eventually she got bored and stopped altogether.
There was a clock on the wall, the old circular kind with little black sticks, and she wondered for the umpteenth time in her life how they worked. She had a similar clock in her house, prettier than this one—whoever had lived there before her, before the Break, had had a thing for glass. Apparently the hands would move if you powered them, but digital clocks used less energy, so they were all she’d ever seen.
Well, all she could remember. Had her father ever had a round clock with sticks? It was stupid that she didn’t even know what this type of clock was called—there was no good reason for something so ubiquitous to just disappear from human vocabulary. And yet try as she might, she couldn’t remember ever seeing one that worked, or learning how to read them, or hearing what they were called. They were a relic of a dead culture.
The big stick was pointing at the ten, and the little stick was halfway between the two and the three. Ten oh two and … a half? She shrugged. This clock ran out of juice at exactly ten oh two and half. Or whatever it said. She stood up to examine it. It must be bolted to the wall, or it would have fallen off by now.
The door opened and a man walked in—Kira recognized him as the mysterious man from the town hall meeting. He was perhaps forty years old. His skin was even darker than her own—mostly African descent, she guessed, as opposed to her mostly Indian.
“Good evening, Ms. Walker.” He shut the door behind him and extended his hand; Kira stood and shook it.
“It’s about time.”
“I am deeply sorry for the wait. My name is Mr. Mkele.” He gestured to Kira’s chair, pulled the other a few feet away, and sat down. “Please, sit.”
“You have no right to hold me in here—”
“I apologize if you got that impression,” said Mkele. “We are not holding you here, it was simply my desire to keep you safe while you waited. Did they bring you food?”
“They haven’t brought me anything.”
“They were supposed to bring you food. Again, I apologize.”
Kira eyed him carefully, her anger at being locked in the room for so long turning slowly
into suspicion. “Why ‘Mr.’?” she asked. “Don’t you have a rank?”
“I’m not in the military, Ms. Walker.”
“You’re in a military installation.”
“So are you.”
Kira kept her face rigid, trying not to frown. Something about this man irked her. He’d done nothing but speak to her calmly, a model of manners and courtesy, and yet … she couldn’t put her finger on it. She glanced at the chair he had offered, but stayed standing and folded her arms. “You say you locked me in here to keep me safe. What from?”
The man raised his eyebrow. “That’s an interesting question from someone who just got back from no-man’s-land. My understanding is that someone tried to blow you up not two days ago.”
“Not me personally, but yeah.”
“My official title, Ms. Walker, is head of intelligence—not for the military but for the entire island, which in practice means I’m the head of intelligence for the entire human race. My job today is to ensure that there is still a human race tomorrow, and I do that by knowing things. Consider, if you will, the things we know now.” He held up his hand, counting on his fingers. “One: Someone, potentially the Voice or, heaven help us, the Partials, has enacted another successful assault on East Meadow forces. Two: That someone is highly proficient with explosives and perhaps radio technology. Three: That person has killed a minimum of three people. Now. Given the ominous nature of these few, small things we do know, I think you’ll agree that the massive number of things we don’t know is, to put it mildly, incredibly troubling.”
“Well, yeah,” said Kira, nodding, “of course. But I’m not in no-man’s-land anymore—I’m in a military base. That’s got to be, like, the safest place on the island.”
Mkele watched her calmly. “Have you ever seen a Partial, Miss Walker?”
“In person? No. I was only five during the war, and no one’s seen any since then.”
“How can you be sure?”
Kira frowned. “What do you mean? No one’s seen one in years, they’re … well, I’m alive, for one thing, so apparently none of them have seen me either.”
“Let us assume,” said Mr. Mkele, “just for the moment, that whatever the Partials are planning is larger in scope than the murder of one teenage girl.”
“You don’t have to be insulting about it.”
“Again, I apologize.”
“So is that really what this is about?” Kira asked, with more than a hint of exasperation. “Partials? Really? Don’t we have more important threats to deal with?”
“If a Partial were planning something big,” he said, ignoring her question, “some insidious attack on us or our resources or any other aspect of our lives, the most effective way would be to infiltrate us directly. They look exactly like us; they could walk among us without any fear of discovery. You’re a medic; you should know this as well as anyone.”
Kira frowned. “The Partials are gone, Mr. Mkele—they backed us up onto this island and then disappeared. No one has seen one anywhere—not here, not on the border, not anywhere.”
Mkele flashed a small, mocking smile. “The innocent complacence of a plague baby. You say you were five when the Partials rebelled; the world you see is the only world you’ve ever known. How much of the rebellion do you remember, Ms. Walker? How much of the old world? Do you know what even one Partial is capable of, much less an entire battalion?”
“We have bigger problems than the Partials,” said Kira again, trying not to lose her cool. It felt like the same old attitude she got at the hospital—from every adult, really, a stubborn, brutal insistance on dealing with yesterday’s problems instead of today’s. “The Partials destroyed the world, I know, but that was eleven years ago, and then they disappeared, and meanwhile RM is continuing to kill our children, tensions are rising because of the Hope Act, the Voice are out there raiding farms and stealing supplies, and I don’t think—”
“The Voice,” said Mkele, “look even more human than the Partials.”
“What’s your point?”
“This is the point, Ms. Walker. The Partials may indeed be gone, but they hardly need stage an outright attack on the island if tensions between the settlement and the Voice progress any further. RM is performing a more insidious function than even the Partials devised: our inability to produce healthy children and the measures we’ve subsequently taken to try to deal with it—”
“You mean the Hope Act.”
“Among other things, yes … they are tearing the island apart. I have a hard time believing that what happened to your team yesterday didn’t have something to do with this, and unless there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary, I’m going to assume that it was part of a plan to destabilize the human civilization and thus to hasten our extinction.”
“You are an incredibly paranoid person.”
Mkele tilted his head to the side. “I’ve been charged, as I said, with the safety of the human race. It’s my job to be paranoid.”
Kira’s patience was wearing thin.
“Fine, then—let’s get this over with. What do you want to know?”
“Tell me about the veterinary clinic.”
“What?”
“The clinic you and Marcus Valencio were assigned to salvage—tell me what you saw there.”
“I thought you wanted to know about the bomb.”
“I have already spoken to other witnesses who were present both before and during the explosion, and their information trumps yours in that area. The clinic, on the other hand, you experienced directly. Tell me about it.”
“It was a clinic,” said Kira, searching for something interesting to say. “It was the same as every clinic we salvage—old, smelly, falling apart. There was a pack of dogs living in it, and, um … what else do you want to know?”
“Did you see any dogs when you were there?”
“No, why? Is that important?”
“I have no idea,” said Mkele, “though it does seem odd that a pack of wild dogs would fail to defend their home against a group of invaders.”
“I guess so,” said Kira. “Maybe the salvage group that went through a few days earlier scared them all off.”
“It’s possible.”
“Um, what else…,” said Kira. “We started on the meds, and then the bomb went off after just a few minutes, so we didn’t get a chance to test the X-ray machine.”
“So you saw the front exterior, the foyer, and the medicine storage.”
Kira nodded. “Yeah.”
“Did you see anything out of the ordinary?”
“Nothing comes to mind. Except…” She paused, remembering the marks in the dust. “Now that you mention it, the pill bottles had all been messed with before we got there.”
“Messed with?”
“Moved,” said Kira, “like someone had gone through them or something. Like they were looking for something.”
“How recently?”
“Not very long. There were smudges and tracks and marks all through the dust, both up in the cupboard and down on the counter.”
“It could have been, as you suggested with the dogs, the grunt salvage crew that went through before you.”
“I guess,” said Kira, “but I’ve never seen any of the grunt crews go through the meds like that.”
Mr. Mkele pursed his lips, thinking. “Do any of the drugs you found there have recreational uses?”
“You think one of the grunts was trying to get high?”
“It is one of many possibilities, yes.”
Kira closed her eyes, racking her brain to remember the names of the medicines. “I’m not sure—it’s all kind of rote at this point, you know? You know which ones last and which ones don’t, and you toss them in the piles without really thinking about it. But these vet clinics always have painkillers, stuff like Rimadyl, and a big enough dose of almost any painkiller will get you high. It might also kill you, though, unless you use the military nanoparticle stuff that obviously wouldn�
��t be in a veterinary clinic. Aside from that, though…” She paused, thinking. If she were a Voice, living in the wilderness and getting into fights with the Defense Grid, she’d have bigger concerns than recreational painkillers. She started to see where Mkele was coming from, and thought about the clinic as a military target. “Clinics like that have a lot of meds a group of rebels might find really useful,” she said. “Antibiotics, antiparasitics, flea powders and shampoos—there’s any number of things a band of forest raiders could make good use of.”
“Interesting,” said Mkele. “You’ll have to forgive my ignorance on the subject of veterinary clinics, but do you think there’s any way to find a record of their inventory? It might be possible to determine, within a small margin of error, exactly what might have been present, missing, or tampered with.”
“I doubt they have anything on paper,” said Kira, “but the clinic had a computer system. You could hook it up to a generator and hope they stored their inventory on the hard drive. If they stored it on an exterior network, you’re probably out of luck.” They used computers in the hospital, thanks to the solar panels, but the old world had used them for everything, all linked together in a worldwide network Kira couldn’t even fathom. It had collapsed along with the power grid, and everything on it had been lost forever.
“We’ll do that,” said Mkele, nodding. “Is there anything else you think might help us?”
Kira shrugged. “If I remember anything, I’ll be sure to let you know.”
“Thank you very much for your time,” said Mkele, gesturing to the door. “You’re free to go.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Private Brown drove Kira home in a small wagon, and she sat in the back holding tightly to Marcus’s hand. Jayden and his soldiers were staying for more debriefing. She didn’t see Gianna or Tovar.