by Dan Wells
“You made pretty damn sure we couldn’t get away from this thing, didn’t you?”
The Partial turned its head to look at her, and Kira felt like she could almost see the thoughts whirring through its mind. When it spoke, its eyes seemed almost … curious. “You can’t reproduce.”
“What?”
“That’s why you’re trying to cure RM. We don’t have children, so their absence didn’t seem odd at first, but you don’t have any, do you? You’re trying to cure RM because your children don’t survive it.”
Kira wanted to scream at it, to force it to acknowledge its own hand in their extinction, to attack it for daring to speak so matter-of-factly about something so terrible, and yet she stopped, one thought catching in her mind.
Did it not know the virus was still killing them? She knew she shouldn’t trust it, but it seemed like something it was just now understanding. It really hadn’t known. But if it hadn’t known, that suggested two very important things: first, that the Partials weren’t spying on them. The theories cropped up now and then, that Partials were hiding among them, infiltrating the island with deep cover spies. But if that were true, this one would already have known that human infants were dying. Its surprise meant they weren’t being watched.
Or if they are watching, she thought, they aren’t telling each other what they see.
The second thing it suggested was that the Partials—or at least this Partial in particular—did not know how RM worked. It hadn’t expected the virus to stick around, and presumably most of the Partials it interacted with thought the same. Were the Partial leaders hiding the information from their own soldiers, or did they not know either? And how could they not know the function of a virus they’d created? It was possible the virus had mutated; Kira shuddered at the thought of it. If something as deadly as RM was mutating, acting beyond its original parameters, who knew what it was capable of?
She supposed there was one way to find out how much he knew. “You,” she said, “Partial. What do you know about RM?”
It didn’t answer.
“Oh, come on,” said Kira, rolling her head back in frustration. “Are we going to go through this again? Can’t you at least say something?”
“Well, human,” he said, “you’re going to kill me in five days. I don’t see much of an incentive to say anything.”
Kira stormed back to the medicomp and threw herself into the chair, so angry she could hardly think. It was going to be killed because it had killed Gabe, and Skinny, and six billion other people. After everything it had done, every atrocity it had been a part of, how dare it have the temerity to imply that it was a victim?
The images on the screen seemed to swirl and blur; how could she concentrate with that thing lying twenty feet away? It was times like this when she needed Marcus to make a joke, to defuse the situation and help her realize what mattered and what didn’t. She looked at the door, but of course he wasn’t there. He didn’t even know where she was.
The Partial was right about one thing: She only had five days. She needed to work. She pushed the Partials out of her mind and forced herself to focus on the task at hand: a screen full of viral images, a series of reports on the viral structure. It had two forms, one for blood and one for air; the Blob and the Spore, the yellow and the blue. Concentrate! The Spore was tiny, perfect for traveling through the air. That must be how the virus passed from host to host. But then what was the Blob for?
None of the studies had the answer; they knew both forms of the virus existed, but not how they worked together. Kira turned back to the sample report from Marcus’s blood, combing through the results for any sign of the Spore. If it could get into the body, it would; there should be some sign of it in Marcus’s sample, but there was nothing. That meant that whatever happened to the Spore when it got into the body was happening very quickly, and leaving no trace.
That is, the Blob was the trace. Kira ran through the possibilities in her head: The virus obviously reacted to human blood and tissue—that was how it worked, using the host body’s own material to replicate itself—so maybe there was an extra layer of interaction. Maybe the Spore wasn’t designed to replicate itself at all, just to convert itself into the Blob and let that one replicate. It was weird, but it was possible. Whatever it does, thought Kira, it has to do it quickly: By the time we get a chance to test the blood, any samples of the Spore have all been converted. Kira ran her fingers through her hair, trying to figure out how to see the transformation in action. If she could get a sample of uninfected blood, and get it into the medicomp fast enough, she’d be able to study the actual process of infection. But where could she find uninfected human blood?
In the newborns. There were four pregnant women in the city due to deliver in the next week, and several samples beyond that if one of the other mothers delivered early.
She would put a request in to Dr. Skousen, just to see what he said. They always took blood samples at birth, but they usually didn’t test those samples for several minutes while they dealt with other problems—most blood samples aren’t this time-sensitive. If Kira’s theory was correct, they’d have to test the blood immediately if they wanted to see this specific reaction.
The next question was the more difficult one: If the Blob came from transformed Spores, where did the Spores come from? Did the Blob create them, or did it transform back? Observing that change would be difficult, because she had no idea how it worked, and thus how to re-create it. Obviously the transformation couldn’t happen in the blood, because it would reverse itself instantly. The lack of any Spore samples in Marcus’s blood attested to that. In the lungs, then? Does the Blob react to oxygen the same way the Spore reacts to tissue? It was the simplest answer, which made it the best place to start. But how could she test it?
I need to isolate the virus first, she thought. She looked around the room for something that could trap the tiny virus, and her eyes fell on a box of latex gloves. She remembered how she and Marcus used to inflate them in school, pinching them almost closed and blowing them full of air. If the virus transformation really did happen in the lungs, her breath would be full of it. And if a rubber glove will hold oxygen, it’ll contain the virus too, at least long enough to take a look at in the medicomp. She walked to the rubber gloves, held one to her mouth, and blew it up like a balloon. Now what? She stood in the middle of the room uncertainly. Would the medicomp be able to read anything through the rubber? Probably, even if she felt stupid shoving an inflated rubber glove into the sensor bay. But there was another problem, which was that whatever she did with her own breath, she’d have to do the same with the Partial’s breath as well. Both tests needed to be the same, or the results wouldn’t mean anything, and she was pretty sure the Partial wouldn’t blow up a rubber glove. She let the glove deflate. She’d have to think of something else.
“We were winning the war,” said the Partial softly. Kira still started when it spoke, not expecting to hear anything from it.
“What?” Kira stared at it, then shoved the glove into her pocket. “Why the hell are you bringing that up?”
“Because you think we created the virus; that’s why you’re studying me as part of your mission to cure it. You think we engineered it.” It shook its head. “We didn’t.”
“Obviously I expect you to lie to me,” said Kira, “but I was hoping you’d be a little more creative.”
“It’s the truth.”
“It is not true!” she shouted. The Partial didn’t respond, simply watched her from the table. Its eyes were dark and serious. “You attacked us, you killed us, and you released that virus to finish the job.”
“We were winning the war,” it said again. “We were the largest branch of your military, so there was no effective way for you to fight back; we struck quickly, we took out your communications, we crippled your counterattack. You had no way of stopping us. In another few weeks, maybe as few as two, we would have taken full control of the government, and we would have done
it without losing the infrastructure your society had created—electricity, natural gas, shipping and industry and food production—”
“Was that your plan?” asked Kira bitterly. “To use us as slaves? As labor to maintain your infrastructure?”
“You mean the same thing you had done to us?”
Kira stared at it, anger rising up by the second, hot as a welding torch burning through her from inside. She pulled the glove back out of her pocket, stalked to the medicomp, and threw the glove into the hazmat can.
“We didn’t want to enslave you,” said the Partial. “Even if we did, we didn’t want or need to kill you to do it. There was no purpose, tactical or political or otherwise, in releasing a killer virus.”
“You expect me to believe that a perfect supervirus, which destroyed humans and left you unscathed, was coincidentally released in the middle of your attack—and that you had nothing at all to do with it?”
“I admit that it seems far-fetched.”
“Far-fetched is an understatement.”
“We’ve been searching for an explanation ever since,” it said, “but we still don’t know where it came from.”
“I don’t know why I am even talking to you,” said Kira. It was crazy to think she was putting any credence in anything it said—and she was crazy to be listening to it at all. She turned back to the medicomp, staring angrily at the images and data, but she couldn’t stop herself from glancing at the Partial, first once, then again. It knew something. If she could see through its lies, perhaps there was something useful in what it was saying. Everything it said was flat and emotionless, almost as if it didn’t, or couldn’t, care. She swiveled fully toward it, leaning forward in her chair. “All right,” she said, “since you’re in such a talkative mood: Why were you in Manhattan?”
It said nothing. She waited, staring at him, and asked again in frustration, “What was your mission? Why were you so close to our border?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Why not?”
The Partial stared at the ceiling. “Because I don’t want them to kill me.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
It was nearly midnight when Kira left the hospital, and she shivered slightly in the cool air—summer or not, night on Long Island could still get chilly. The Partial had refused to say any more, and Kira was half grateful: As desperate as she was to know what he was talking about, she was also scared. If what it knew was so dangerous that even talking about it would get it killed … she shivered again, just thinking about it.
Instead, she’d spent the day buried in the medicomp files, studying the virus: its specific structure, the proteins that made up the walls and receptor nodes, the genetic payload it carried inside. The hospital had some incredibly advanced genetic equipment, some of the same old devices they had once used for genetic modification—everything from curing diseases to changing eye color—but all the people who knew how to use them had died in the Break. It was ironic, in a way, that they had such incredible technology, from a time so recent, that no living person could understand. Sometimes Kira almost thought of them as magic: mystic artifacts from some forgotten civilization. Dr. Skousen and his researchers studied them in darkened rooms, surrounded by the ancient tomes of their craft, but the magic was gone. They could find the genetic coding in RM, but they couldn’t change it or even read it. All they could do was watch, and guess, and hope for a breakthrough.
Kira had found no breakthroughs. There were four days left.
She walked slowly through the city, eager to go home and collapse into sleep but still aimless, in a way, as if her brain were too tired of focusing, and wanted simply to meander. She followed it through the darkened city, passing quiet houses and cracked sidewalks and dirty roads beaten smooth by traffic. At night East Meadow seemed almost as empty as the outside world—the omnipresent plant growth was kept in check by the sheer mass of people and animals, but the houses were just as dark, the streets just as empty, the world just as quiet. In the daytime the city was populated but sparse; in the night, it was just another part of the ruin that covered the world.
Kira rounded a corner and realized where she was—where she’d been walking, subconsciously, since the moment she left the hospital. Marcus’s street. She stood on the corner, unmoving, counting down the houses five, four, three, two, one and then his on the right. He’d lived with an older man for several years, then moved in with another foster parent when the first man died, and when he turned sixteen he moved out into his own place. It was no big deal, moving; all you had to do was find a house in good condition, clean it up, and there you were. The owners were all dead, the banks were all defunct, there were more than enough for everyone to have two, five, even ten houses if you wanted them. Long Island had been home to millions of people. The old world had been consumed with the search for More Stuff. Now there was more stuff than anyone could ever use, and little or none of anything else.
Kira saw a gleam of yellow light, faint and distant. She paused, squinting, and saw it again. It was definitely Marcus’s house. Why was he up this late? She walked forward, stepping carefully over the tree-root cracks in the buckled sidewalk, keeping her eyes on the flickering light. It was a candle, shining softly through the window. She stopped on the lawn in front, peering in at the room beyond: a candle, a chair, and Marcus, asleep sitting up. The walls were bare, marked with the nails of somebody else’s photos, now pulled down or stored or thrown away. She watched Marcus for an endless moment, and then suddenly he was watching her, his head raised, his eyes open.
He sat still, watching with wide eyes, waiting for her to move. She stood still and watched back.
The candle flickered.
Marcus stood up and disappeared behind the frame of the window, and then the front door opened. Kira was running up the porch steps before she even knew what was happening, and when Marcus appeared in the doorway, she threw her arms around him, sinking her face into his chest. He caught her tightly, holding her close, and she closed her eyes and soaked him in: his strength, his smell, his presence, as recognizable to her as her own. He’d been a part of her life for as long as she could remember; he was more real than anything in the old world. That was the life she’d been born in, but this—East Meadow, Marcus, even RM—was the life she lived. She held him close, raising her face and finding his. Their lips met in a long, fierce, desperate kiss.
“I’m sorry I didn’t go with you,” Marcus whispered. “I regretted it every day you were gone.”
“You could have died,” said Kira, shaking her head and then kissing him again.
“But I should have been with you,” he said, his voice hard. “I should have been there to protect you. I love you, Kira.”
“I love you too,” she said softly, but a voice in the back of her head said, You didn’t need to be protected.
She ignored the voice, shoving it away. Right now, all she wanted in the entire world was to be in his arms.
“You got one, didn’t you?”
Kira paused, not wanting to talk or even think about the Partial, then nodded. “Yeah.”
“The rumors are going around. Everybody knows the Grid brought something back from the west end of the island, but nobody knows what. It wasn’t hard for me to put two and two together.”
Kira felt a wave of tension creep back through her body, remembering how tense the city had been before she’d left it. How close the people were to civil war. “You think anyone else has figured it out?”
“I doubt it,” said Marcus. “Bringing a Partial into the middle of East Meadow is not exactly the first thing that’s going to leap into anyone’s mind.”
“Maybe not the first,” said Kira, “but the second, or the fifth, or the twentieth. Someone might figure it out.” She felt suddenly cold, pulling away from Marcus to rub her arms. He put a hand on her back and led her gently inside.
“We have plenty of other things to worry about,” he said, uncharacteristically somber. “There wa
s another Voice attack while you were gone, a big one. They raided the kennels and killed or kidnapped almost every trained dog the Grid had. Now we can’t—”
Kira stopped and grabbed him by the arm, her heart pounding. “The kennels? Isn’t that where Saladin worked?”
“The boy wonder,” Marcus nodded, “the youngest human on the planet. They took him when they took the dogs, and half the people working with him. It was a pretty big blow, psychologically. Without the dogs we can’t track the Voice through the wilderness anymore, but without Saladin … it’s like they came in, kicked a puppy, and stole a baby. A lot of people are calling for an all-out war.”
“Why would they do that?” asked Kira. “Obviously it was going to make people mad—it’s almost like they went out of their way to piss us off. It’s certainly not going to win them any new supporters. Maybe they’re trying to start a war?”
“They might be holding him for ransom,” said Marcus. “He’s a pretty big bargaining chip, and they left a note.”
“A note?”
“Well, technically they tagged the kennel with twenty feet of graffiti, but still. The message was clear, the same as it’s always been: ‘Repeal the Hope Act.’”