Ruins

by Dan Wells

  Which was to be expected, he decided, when you found yourself tied up by a terrorist you went looking for in the first place.

  “This is what we get for trusting her,” said Marcus.

  “She was our only option,” said Galen.

  “She is also a convicted criminal,” said Marcus. He looked at the others with as bemused a grin as he could muster. “I kind of feel like we should have given that point more weight when we made our plan to find her.”

  “She was working with the Senate and Defense Grid,” said Woolf. “Since the start of the invasion she hadn’t done anything suspicious or illegal—that we knew about,” he added.

  Marcus closed his mouth, swallowing his snarky comment.

  Woolf shook his head. “Obviously if we’d known she’d managed to round up a nuclear warhead, we would have thought twice about it.”

  “If we’d known she had a nuclear bomb, we would have done exactly the same thing,” said Vinci. “We just would have handled the meeting a little differently. Infiltrating her army would have been the best bet.”

  “I suppose it’s too late for that now?” asked Marcus, looking at the guard on the other side of the room.

  The guard nodded. “Yes, it is.”

  “Bummer,” said Marcus. “Thought we had something there.”

  “Why is she doing this?” asked Vinci. “A bomb big enough to destroy the invading Partial army would kill almost every human on the island in the same instant. Ninety percent of both groups are in East Meadow—she can’t possibly consider that an acceptable loss.”

  “She won’t set it off on Long Island,” said Woolf. “She’ll take it north to White Plains, or as close as she can get it, and detonate it there. Even out the numbers, like she said.”

  “It’s genocide,” said Vinci.

  “You mean like RM?” asked the guard. “You mean like exactly what you did to us thirteen years ago?”

  “The Partials had nothing to do with RM,” said Vinci, his voice calm and matter-of-fact. He wasn’t arguing, Marcus realized, simply explaining. A quick glance at the seething guard showed just how unlikely he was to listen to reason.

  “You’re talking to a man ready to set off a nuclear device fifty miles from the last human survivors,” said Marcus. “Let’s just assume he doesn’t believe you and move on.”

  “The Partials need to be destroyed,” said the guard, lifting his rifle. “Every one of them. I can’t believe she hasn’t let us execute you yet.” He stood up, his face hard as stone, and Marcus pressed as far back against the wall as he could.

  “See?” said Marcus, trying to keep his voice from cracking with fear. “I told you this would be more fun.” The guard’s eyes were red with fury, and Marcus half expected him to shoot all four of them in one long burst of bullets.

  The door to their back room opened, revealing Delarosa flanked by Yoon and another guerrilla. Marcus breathed an audible sigh of relief. “You have awesome timing.”

  “Unless she wants us dead as well,” said Vinci.

  “Still good timing,” said Marcus. “It’d be a bummer if this guy shot us and she didn’t get to see it.”

  “No one’s going to shoot you,” said Delarosa. She stepped forward into the room and looked down at them, not arrogant or angry, but businesslike. “We’re not monsters.”

  “And we’re more valuable to you alive,” said Marcus.

  Delarosa cocked her head to the side. “How?”

  “Because, um . . .” Marcus grimaced. “I don’t actually know, I just assumed because that’s what people typically say at this point.”

  “You’ve seen too many movies,” said Delarosa.

  “I’ve never seen any,” said Marcus, shrugging. “Plague baby. But I’ve read a lot of spy novels: They don’t need batteries.”

  “Either way,” said Delarosa. “We have no reason to keep you alive but our own human decency, and nothing to gain from killing you but convenience.”

  “Is that a phrase?” asked Vinci. “‘Human decency’?”

  “You find it insulting?” asked Delarosa.

  “I find it confusing,” said Vinci. “Especially considering your plan.”

  “I’m not happy about it,” said Delarosa. “I’ve lost a lot of sleep trying to think of an alternative. The Partials are all dying—can I just wait a year and let them die, and free ourselves without lifting a finger?”

  “I vote we try it,” said Marcus. “Are we voting? Hands up, everybody, don’t leave me hanging here.” He moved his hands to raise them, and winced at the sudden stab of pain in his wrists.

  “That plan won’t work,” said Delarosa. “The occupying army in East Meadow is killing too many humans, and now they might not die at all because they’ve found Kira—”

  “Holy crap,” said Marcus, “they found Kira?”

  “They stopped the broadcasts,” said Delarosa. “The hostage scenario is over. The most likely explanation is that they got what they wanted.”

  “We need to go get her,” said Marcus.

  “The Partials think they can use Kira to cure their expiration date,” said Delarosa. “I don’t know how she’ll help them do that, but there it is. The longer we wait, the less likely it becomes that this situation will ever end—if we want to get rid of the Partials, we have to strike now, and with overwhelming force. We don’t have the army for it, so a nuclear weapon is our only choice; it can be delivered by a single person, under their radar, and finish them off in a single blow.”

  “The invading army will still be here,” said Galen. “A bomb on the mainland won’t end the occupation here.”

  “Vinci,” said Delarosa, “what will the Partial army do when White Plains goes up in a fireball?”

  “They’ll go back there,” said Vinci calmly. “They’ll try to find as many survivors on the mainland as possible.”

  “Even if they don’t leave, they’ll die a few months later,” said Marcus. “Any research they’ve done on a cure for expiration will be destroyed in the explosion, along with anyone skilled enough to continue it.”

  “It has to happen,” said Delarosa, “and it has to happen now. We upset the balance of nature when we created the Partials, and now we have to put it right.”

  “You can’t trigger that warhead remotely,” said Woolf. “Which of these brainwashed saps have you tricked into setting it off for you?”

  “I’m not a monster,” Delarosa said again. “This is my plan, and my responsibility.”

  “You’re going to do it yourself?” asked Marcus.

  “I came to say good-bye,” said Delarosa. “I don’t want to kill you, but we can’t transport you effectively without attracting too much attention. I’m leaving tonight, and I’m leaving Yoon Bak in charge of this outpost, with explicit orders that you not be harmed.”

  “Tell this guy, too,” said Marcus, nodding at the guard. “You heard her, right? No harm.”

  Vinci studied her. “Why are you leaving me alive if you’re just going to murder my entire species?”

  “Because it’s not about murder,” said Delarosa, “it’s about necessity.”

  “That doesn’t make it not murder,” said Marcus.

  “Why, Marcus,” said Delarosa coldly. “I thought all you did was tell jokes.”

  She turned and left, and Yoon stared fiercely at the guard with the rifle until he grudgingly sat down.

  “You’re alive,” said Yoon, “but you’re still considered enemy combatants. We’ll keep you in here, under guard.”

  “Until we die of old age?” asked Woolf.

  “Until you’re not a threat,” said Yoon. “Or until it doesn’t matter anymore.”

  “You can’t agree with this insane plan,” said Marcus. “You don’t want this nuke to go off any more than we do.”

  “There’s a lot of things I don’t want,” said Yoon. “Sometimes we have to accept them to get the things we do.”

  Marcus pleaded with her. “If getting what you want means
killing a ton of people, is that really worth it?”

  “I don’t know,” said Yoon. She glanced at Vinci. “Is it?”

  “I’m not ashamed of what we did,” said Vinci. “But eradicating your species was never part of our plan.”

  “You Partials keep saying that,” said Yoon, turning to look right at him. “Considering where we are now, do you think maybe it should have been?”

  Vinci was silent. Yoon stood and left the room.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Ariel planted herself in front of Nandita, refusing to budge an inch. “Tell us what that was.”

  “I told you,” said Nandita, “I don’t know.”

  “It knew you.”

  “I’ve never seen anything like that before in my life,” said Nandita. “Not here, not before, not anywhere.”

  “Something like that would have to have come from ParaGen,” said Kessler. “You made all kinds of genetic freaks before the Break—Watchdogs and dragons and who knows what else. And you’ve told us that all you people in the Trust gene-modded yourself to hell. Longer life, sharper brainpower, increased physical abilities. That twisted abomination sure looks like your handiwork to me.”

  Ariel considered Xochi and Kessler, who were usually fighting tooth and nail but at the moment were completely unified. They even stood alike, expressing their anger with the same fierce gestures and posture. They did everything they could to be different, yet here they were. Do Nandita and I look like this? Ariel wondered. For all my hatred, how much of me is just a reflection of her? She raised me for eleven years—more than twice as long as my real parents.

  Except they were never my real parents. I have nothing left that’s truly my own.

  Not even my anger.

  “I assure you,” said Nandita, “if I’d worked on a project like that, or even seen one, I’d remember it.”

  “You told us before that some of the Trust didn’t trust the others,” said Isolde. “You worked on projects without telling each other. What if it’s something like that?”

  “Some kind of proto-Partial?” asked Nandita. “A model one of the others miraculously kept secret for thirty-odd years? Impossible.”

  “Then somebody else,” said Madison. “Another genetics company, making their own version of the same technology?”

  “Then it wouldn’t know Nandita,” said Ariel. “This did, which means it came from ParaGen, which means she knows something she’s not telling us.”

  Nandita sighed, looking behind them. “If I talk while we walk, can we at least keep moving? We’re too exposed here.”

  “We have to cut south now,” said Kessler. “We’re coming into Commack, and we had two old farms in this region. We have to assume the Partials have a presence here, even if it’s just a few scouts.”

  “That means crossing the Long Island Expressway,” said Xochi, looking at her map. “If you don’t like how exposed we are now, that’s really going to get you.”

  “If we have to, we have to,” said Ariel, jogging to catch up with Nandita. “Now talk.”

  “That creature was almost definitely ParaGen,” said Nandita. “But I don’t recognize it, and I truly don’t know who had the skill to make anything like it. Furthermore, the fact that I don’t recognize it almost guarantees that it was created after the Break.”

  “Who has that kind of technology?” asked Ariel.

  “I didn’t think anyone did,” said Nandita, “but finding the facility at Plum Island has forced me to reevaluate. If that lab could continue, there may be other labs as well, remnants of the old green movement, designed to run entirely on self-sustaining power. The obvious first guess is the ParaGen facility itself.”

  “ParaGen was bombed pretty heavily in the Partial War,” said Kessler.

  “I know,” said Nandita icily. “I was there. But it was a rugged facility, and something may have survived. ParaGen had the equipment to make a creature like that—though in the old days we would have made the changes more subtly, more human-like—and also to do whatever else the creature was talking about. Fixing the world, the climate.”

  Ariel sneered. “How could ParaGen ‘fix’ the climate? You were a genetics company—you can’t just gene-mod the wind.”

  “You can use genetics to fix anything, given enough time and energy,” said Nandita. “Genetic engineering is the most powerful force on the planet. The ParaGen facility was built on an old radioactive materials site, and we built bugs designed to absorb the radiation and neutralize it; we made other bugs to nourish the soil and plants. By the time of the Break, it had become a paradise. I’m not saying this is what happened, because I don’t know, but someone with the time and the means could alter the climate by engineering bacteria designed to radiate or absorb heat, or to unlock water tied up in certain areas or aquifers. On a large enough scale you could change the weather patterns, and eventually the seasons themselves, but it would require an unbelievable amount of energy to create and distribute that kind of bacteria on anything less than a geologic time frame. ParaGen’s old facility might still have power, but they don’t have that much.”

  “So somebody made a bunch of germs to alter the weather,” said Isolde, “and a creepy monster thing to tell us about it. The fact that that sentence explains anything says a lot about how little sense the world makes right now.”

  “That doesn’t explain how it recognized Nandita,” said Ariel. “This wasn’t some random vat-born monster; it knew you. It had seen you before, and the way it talked, it was expecting you to recognize it.”

  “What if it was gene mods?” asked Xochi. “Not a new creature, but someone you used to know . . . modded up and . . . weirdified. You know what I mean.”

  “That many gene mods would drive a person mad,” said Nandita. “We’ve seen it happen before, and on a much smaller scale. Something that drastic would break the subject’s mind in half.”

  “That might actually explain it,” said Ariel. “Do you know who it might be?”

  “There’s the expressway,” said Kessler. They’d been following a trail at the base of some telephone poles, cutting a thin forest path between the homes and businesses on either side, but the trail had run out. The few telephone wires still attached stretched out over a wide gully, filled with asphalt and cars—Ariel shoved her way through the undergrowth to get a good look and counted ten lanes, plus four open shoulders separating them from the edges of the road. “Two hundred feet across, minimum,” said Kessler, “and not enough vehicles to provide any meaningful cover. If we go for this, we have to go fast and lucky.”

  “Last time we crossed this expressway, we went under it,” said Isolde. “I liked that better.”

  “There’s nowhere like that anywhere around here,” said Kessler. “Just bridges over it, like that one, which has no sides and leaves us probably more exposed than just running across here.”

  “I’ve done this before,” said Xochi. “We made it just fine.”

  “What do we get into if we stay on this side?” asked Madison. “Is crossing it really worth the risk?”

  “Partial patrols are more likely on this side,” said Kessler. She took Xochi’s map and held it open for the group to see. “On top of that, in another mile or two we’ll hit this interchange, and beyond that this entire area is a commercial district: wide roads next to wide parking lots. We’ll be more exposed there. If we cross now, though, we can lose ourselves in a string of residential areas, and camp for the night in this community college campus—it has some open areas, but they’re lawns instead of parking lots, so they’ll likely have plenty of foliage to hide us, and we never used them for farming, so there shouldn’t be any settlements or Partials in the area.”

  “The odds anyone will be watching this exact stretch of road at this exact time are low,” said Xochi. “Not as low as we’d like, but low. If we just go for it, all out, we can do this.”

  “Then let’s do it,” said Isolde. “Khan’s going to wake up soon; when he does, we�
��ll want to be as far away from Partial patrols as we can.”

  Ariel nodded, glancing at the sleeping baby—the sedated baby, really, as his constant screaming had led Nandita to start administering low levels of drugs for safety. But the sedatives wouldn’t last forever, and they needed to be well hidden by the time he got noisy again. The group shoved their way through the trees—heavier here, it seemed, than in the wooded track they’d just passed through—and worked their way down to the edge of the wide-open expressway.

  “Everybody ready?” Ariel whispered. She listened carefully as each other woman in the group said yes. She took a deep breath. “Go.”

  The group dashed out, backpacks slamming up and down against their spines, their feet slapping furiously across the asphalt. The edge of the road was cracked and broken, as the plants struggled to reclaim their ancient territory, but the road was so wide that the center remained smooth—covered with dead leaves and windblown dirt, but still one piece. They ran behind a delivery van, and then in front of a pickup. Three lanes across. Four lanes. Ariel was almost to the center barrier when she heard a shout, and looked up to see figures on the nearby bridge.

  “Partials!” she screamed. “Keep running!” She crouched down by the rusted hulk of an old SUV and started firing, trying to force the soldiers into cover. The figures disappeared, but Ariel kept her eyes on the bridge, ready to fire at the first head that popped up. “Just keep going!” she called. “We have to move south!”

  Xochi reached the barrier first and launched herself over it, then reached back to hold Arwen as Madison passed her over. Both girls ran for the southern trees, while Kessler, close on their heels, found more cover in the lee of a moving van and laid down another burst of fire.