by Dan Wells
I only have three days left, she told herself. Stop whining and work. She struggled to concentrate on the DORD images, looking for any discrepancy between Samm’s physiology and that of a human, but she kept thinking about what he said yesterday. The sincerity in his voice. What if he was telling the truth—what then? If the Partials had never created the virus in the first place, then who did? The Lurker in his breath, whatever it was, proved that he had some relationship to RM, but that didn’t mean he made it. The Partials were soldiers, not geneticists; they had doctors, but they weren’t necessarily capable of this level of engineering. What if the similarity meant something else entirely?
What if it was a sign of common ancestry? What if RM and the Partials were both created by the same third party?
Kira closed her eyes, trying to remember what she’d learned in school. What was the name of the company? Para-something? It was so hard to remember the details of the old world—names and places and technologies that simply had no meaning in modern life. Food companies were easy, because the ruins were all around her: Starbucks and Panda Garcia and a dozen more like them. She could even remember eating at some of them as a child, before the Break. Genetics companies, on the other hand, were completely outside the realm of her experience. She’d learned the name in her history class, but they hadn’t made a big deal about it. It was the government who’d commissioned the Partials, Para-something was just the contractor.
Para-Genetics, she remembered. They were called ParaGen. Haru had mentioned them the other day. But what could they have to do with RM? Certainly they hadn’t created it—they were human too. It doesn’t make sense.
“Did you have a mother?” asked Samm. The question broke Kira’s train of thought in an instant, and she looked at him quizzically.
“What?”
“Did you have a mother?”
“I … of course I had a mother, everyone has a mother.”
“We don’t.”
Kira frowned. “You know you’re the second person in the last twelve hours to ask me about my mother?”
“I was only curious.”
“It’s okay,” said Kira. “I never really knew my mother. I guess that makes us more alike than we thought.”
“Your father, then,” said Samm.
“Why do you want to know about him? I was five when he died, I can barely remember him.”
“I’ve never had a father either.”
Kira scooted her chair closer, coming around the edge of the desk. “Why are you so curious?” she asked. “You never talk, for two solid days, and now this morning all of a sudden you’re obsessed with families. What’s going on?”
“I’ve been doing some thinking,” he said. “A lot of thinking. You’re aware that we can’t reproduce?”
She nodded warily. “You were built that way. You were … well, you were intended to be weapons, not people. They didn’t want self-replicating weapons.”
“Yes,” he said. “The Partials were never intended to exist outside the infrastructure that created us, but we do, and now all those old design parameters are—” He stopped suddenly, glancing at the cameras. “Listen, do you trust me?”
She hesitated, but not for long. “No.”
“I suppose not. Do you think you ever could?”
“Ever?”
“If we worked together—if we ever offered a truce. Peace. Could you learn to trust us?”
This is where he’d been angling since day one—since she’d asked him what he was doing in Manhattan. He was finally willing to discuss it, but could she trust him? What was he trying to get from her?
“I could trust you if you proved yourselves trustworthy,” said Kira. “I don’t… I don’t know that I distrust you on principle, if that’s what you’re asking. Not anymore. But a lot of people do.”
“And what would it take to earn their trust?”
“Not having destroyed our world eleven years ago,” said Kira. “Short of that… I don’t know. Putting it back together.”
He paused, thinking, and she watched him carefully—the way his eyes twitched, as if examining two different objects in front of him. Every now and then they flicked toward one of the cameras, just a fleeting glance. What is he planning?
She looked him in the eyes. When in doubt, don’t hold back. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because the only hope, for either of us, is to help each other. To work together.”
“You’ve said that before.”
“You’ve asked about our mission. That was it, Kira—we were coming here to try to make peace. To see if we could work together. You need our help to cure RM, but we need you just as much.”
“Why?”
He glanced at the camera again. “I can’t tell you yet.”
“But you have to tell me—isn’t that why you’re here? If you came on a mission of peace, what were you going to say? ‘We need your help, but we can’t say why’?”
“We didn’t know how much you still hated us,” said Samm. “We thought perhaps we could persuade you with an offer to work together. When I was captured and brought here, when I saw what’s going on here … there was no way. But you, Kira, you listen. More than that, you understand what’s at stake. That no price is too high to pay when it means the survival of your species.”
“So just tell me,” she pleaded. “Forget the cameras, forget whoever’s listening on the other side, and tell me what’s going on.”
Samm shook his head. “It’s not just a matter of them not believing me,” he said. “If they find out why I’m here—the instant they know the reason—I’m a dead man.”
It was Kira who glanced at the camera this time, suddenly filled with unease, but Samm shook his head and glanced at his wounds. “It’s okay, they know I have a secret.”
She folded her arms and sat back in her chair. What could be so dangerous he’d be killed just for saying it? Something they didn’t want to hear—or something they did? She racked her brain, searching for a theory that made sense. Was he really a bomb, like they’d initially feared, and Samm thought the Senate would kill him to get rid of him? But what did that have to do with peace?
Peace. It was exactly what she had hoped for when she was talking with Marcus the day before. She wanted to reach out and touch it, to taste it, to know what it felt like not to live in constant fear. They hadn’t known true peace since the Hope Act was established, and the Voice rebelled and the island started its slow spiral into chaos. They hadn’t even known it in the years before that—the desperate rebuilding after the Break, the Break itself and the Partial rebellion, even the Isolation War that sparked the creation of the Partials in the first place. She had lived in a world of discord since the moment she was born, and the world before had been no better. They were on the brink of destruction, and everyone had their own solution, but Kira had been the only one to suggest that they might need the Partials. That they might need to work together.
That is, she’d been the only one until now. Now a Partial was suggesting the same thing.
“No,” she said slowly, suspicion creeping through her like a spider. “It’s too perfect. It’s like you’re saying exactly what I want to hear.” She shook her head. “I don’t believe you.”
“Why would we want anything else?” asked Samm. “It’s the most basic instinct of life—to outlive yourself. To build another generation that’s going to see tomorrow.”
“But you’ve never even known family,” said Kira. “You didn’t have families, you didn’t grow up, you have no idea what it’s even like. What if creation is just a phantom instinct, held over from some lost shred of DNA?”
Like a flash, Kira remembered a dog—it was giant in her memory, a growling mass of muscle and teeth. It chased her through a park or a garden, something green with grass and flowers, and she was terrified, and the dog was almost on her, and suddenly her father was there. He was not a strong man, he wasn’t big or powerful, but he put himself between her
and the dog. He was bitten, and she thought it was very bad. He did it to save her. That’s what fathers did.
“What do you think it says about us that we don’t have any parents?” She looked up and caught Samm’s eye. “I don’t mean us, I don’t mean kids, I mean no fathers at all—a whole society, two whole societies, with no parents at all. What do you think that’s done to us?”
Samm said nothing, but he held her gaze. There was a tear in his eye—the first time she’d ever seen him cry. The scientist in her wanted to study it, to take a sample, to find out how and why and what he was crying. The girl in her simply thought of the Hope Act and wondered if a law like that could ever pass if a voter knew it would be forced upon his own daughter.
Kira looked at the screen, seeing not the image but her memory of Manhattan: of the Partial attack; of Gabe’s body lying slumped in the hall where the Partials had shot him. If they were on a mission of peace, why did they shoot him? She frowned, trying to reconcile that event with Samm’s protestation of innocence. They didn’t even try to talk to us first. It doesn’t make sense.
She racked her brain for more memories, trying to call up anything that would support what she desperately wanted to be true. What was it the Partials said right before we blew up the apartment? She struggled to remember. “Which group is this?” She’d heard it clearly—at least she thought she had. Which group of what? Had they been expecting someone else, maybe a group of bandits or the Voice? Was it pure luck that they’d found Kira instead, the one human who seemed willing to listen?
Or was Samm simply telling her exactly what she wanted to hear?
The doors opened with a sudden buzz, and the decontamination blowers roared to life. Shaylon came through the tunnel, clutching a plastic syringe full of blood, and ran to her in a rush.
“The nurse said to give you this,” he said quickly, holding out the syringe. “She said you’d know what to do with it.”
“You’re not allowed in here,” said Kira.
“She said it was an emergency,” said Shaylon, then stopped and looked at Samm. “So that’s him?”
She took the syringe gingerly; the tube was still warm from the blood inside. “What is it?”
“She said you’d know,” said Shaylon. “It’s from the maternity ward.”
Realization dawned, and Kira’s eyes went wide. “It’s from a newborn! One of the mothers had her baby!” She rushed to the counter, pulling out slides and vials and pipettes in a flurry. “Do you know which one?”
“She said you’d know what to do with it!”
“I do know,” said Kira. “Calm down.” Please, God, don’t let it be Madison. She piped a drop onto a slide as quickly as she dared and dashed to the medicomp. “This is uninfected blood, do you understand? The babies are born healthy and then the virus hits them, and we have only minutes, maybe less, before the virus morphs and attacks.” She punched in the commands and raced back to the counter, preparing another slide. “There’s an airborne virus and a blood-borne virus, and I’m trying to catch them as they transform from one to the other. Turn on the microscope.”
“Which one’s the microscope?”
“This one.” She flew across the room with the slide in hand, opening the viewing chamber and slamming the slide home. She flicked on all the switches, drumming on the scope anxiously while it slowly hummed to life, and when the screen flickered on she started the viewer, telling the computer to search for viruses. A small ping told her it had already found one of the airborne forms, and she called up the image immediately. The tiny virus appeared on the screen, a red highlight in a sea of gray. It was already beginning to change, but it was a still image, trapped partway from one form to the next; the scope was advanced, but nothing could take moving video at this level of magnification. More pings sounded as the medicomp found more viruses. “If we get enough good pictures,” said Kira, “at different stages of the transformation, we can probably reconstruct the entire process.” She told the medicomp to take another image of the same area, to see if the airborne virus had completely converted to its larger form.
The computer popped up a small notice: Partial match.
Shaylon pointed at it, his voice terrified. “The baby’s a Partial?”
“No, it means the object it found only partially matches the records in the database.” Just like the Lurker, she thought. “We’ve got something that’s kind of RM-ish, but isn’t a virus.” She pulled up the image and stared in shock: She didn’t recognize it. “That’s not good.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a new form of the virus,” said Kira, turning it on the screen to get the best possible view. “The airborne Spore is supposed to turn into the blood-borne Blob—they’re the only two variations of RM in our entire database.” She looked desperately for anything she could understand. “This is new.”
She ticked her fingers across the screen, dissecting the image as best she could, pulling it apart to see what made it work. The computer was right—it was a partial match for the Blob, bearing many of the same protein structures in the same basic arrangement, but beyond that it was completely new—and unlike the Lurker, it was definitely viral. Is this because of Samm? Is this new virus a result of the Lurker? Kira tagged the image and told the computer to search its database again, looking for anything that matched it more closely. There were five hits, all in the archive of newborn blood tests: mostly premature babies, plus one stillbirth, all more than eight years ago. It didn’t show up enough to stand out, but it did show up, and years before Samm got here. That means it’s not Samm’s fault. But then where did it come from?
Kira tapped back into the main medicomp imager. If it’s not that common, she thought, then maybe it’s just a mutation. Maybe this is the only instance of it in the sample, and I just happened to pick exactly the wrong spot to start looking. She told the scope to find more of it in the blood samples, and it pinged almost immediately, then pinged again, then again and again and again, even more pings now than when it was searching for the airborne Spore. It’s everywhere. Kira called up image after image, the new virus filling every screen, multiplying like mad. Frantically she called up a new search, looking for the Spore again, but there was nothing. The computer had saved the original images, but the structure itself had disappeared from the blood. Every instance of the Spore had morphed into this one—this Predator—and they were still replicating.
Shaylon spoke slowly, his voice thin and nervous as he looked at Samm. “What is that?”
“I have no idea.” Kira gritted her teeth and dove into the growing pile of reports and scans and images, determined to find what she was looking for: the process of evolution from Spore to Blob, the details that would tell her how the virus functioned—the individual chemical steps behind every process. It was like trying to drink from a waterfall.
Shaylon froze, his finger on his earpiece, then dropped into a crouch. “Get down.”
“Why? What’s going on—”
“Get down!” said Shaylon fiercely, pulling her to the floor behind the metal bulk of the microscope. “There’s someone here, someone sneaking around. They think it might be a jailbreak.”
Kira glanced around the edge of the computer; Samm was watching them with interest. Is someone really coming for you? Her gun was on the counter, tucked safely in its holster, far out of reach from where she was hiding; if somebody came now, she wouldn’t be able to get it in time.
She glanced back to see Shaylon listening intently to his earpiece. “They think it’s outside,” he said softly. “You stay here, I’m going to look out the window.” He rose to a crouch and ran to the far wall, his body low, his rifle at the ready. Kira glanced at Samm, then at the door, then ran to the counter and grabbed the pistol, pulling it with her to the floor. She had cover from the window, but not from the door. Was the second soldier still out there? She drew the gun and tossed the leather holster into the corner, checking the clip and chamber to make sure she was ready.
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“I can’t see it,” Shaylon was saying. He stood carefully, looking out the window at the tightest possible angle. He had his hand to his ear, talking anxiously with Mkele. “I don’t see—wait, out in the cars. Are they still that far away?”
It doesn’t make sense to attack the hospital in daylight, thought Kira. The cars are good cover, and there are trees at the base of the building, but it’s hardly ideal. If they’re coming in through the wall, why not do it at night? Why not wait until they would have cover right up to the building?
Wait, she thought suddenly, if they’re coming in through the wall—
She jumped to her feet and ran toward Shaylon. “Get back! You’re too close to the—” and then the wall exploded, brick and metal and plaster caving inward like a giant bubble, the shock wave catching Kira and throwing her backward like an invisible hand. Shaylon flew to the side, hitting the wall and flopping down like a rag doll. Even Samm was blown clear, the force of the explosion tossing his operating table like a leaf. It slammed into Kira’s desk and toppled to the ground.
Kira hit the back wall with tremendous force, knocking the wind from her lungs and wrenching the gun out of her hand. She fell behind the massive DORD machine, already wobbling on its edge, and it crashed down with her, pinning her painfully to the floor. She screamed in agony, certain that her leg was broken, but forced herself to calm down.
Deep breaths, Kira, deep breaths. Get yourself under control. Slowly the world came back into focus; the pain in her leg coming clearer as she breathed. It’s not broken, it’s just pinned. I can push it off. She heard movement in the room, rubble falling and scattering. She looked around anxiously, but the DORD blocked her view of everything but the door. The plastic tunnel hung from the ceiling in tatters; a wave of rubble from the wall had shredded it and slammed into the door, blocking it shut. She felt a small electric shock in her pinned leg and saw that the plastic housing around the DORD machine had fractured. The machine is shorting out. I’ve got to get away from it. She heard more noises, definitely movement this time. Is it Shaylon or Samm? She pressed her arms and back against the wall, braced her legs against the machine, and pushed with all her strength.