by Dan Wells
The photo had been knocked off the table after the grass had already started to grow.
The act hadn’t been recent. The picture frame had enough dirt and muck on top of it, and around the edges, to show that it had lain there for several years. But it hadn’t been lying there the full eleven. The Break had come and gone, the building had been abandoned, the dirt and weeds had collected, and then the cubicle had been raided. Who could have done it? Human, or Partial? Kira examined the space under the desk, finding a handful of other cables but no clear evidence of who had taken the CPU they were connected to. She crawled into the next cube over, the other one that had been looted, and found similar remains. Someone had climbed up to the twenty-second floor, stolen two computers, and lugged them all the way back down again.
Why would someone do it? Kira sat back, puzzling through the possibilities. If somebody wanted information, she supposed it was easier to haul the computers down the stairs rather than haul a generator up. But why these two and none of the others? What was different about them? She looked around again and noted with surprise that these two cubicles were the closest to the elevator. That made even less sense than anything else: After the Break, there would have been no power to make the elevators run. That couldn’t be the connection. There weren’t even names on the cubicle walls; if someone had targeted these two computers specifically, they had to have inside knowledge.
Kira stood up and walked through the entire floor, going slowly, watching for anything else that looked out of place or looted. She found a printer missing, but she couldn’t tell if it had been taken before or after the Break. When she finished the central room, she searched the handful of offices along the back wall, and gasped in surprise when she found that one of them had been completely gutted: the computer gone, the shelves emptied, everything. There was enough corporate detritus to make it look like a once-functioning office—a phone and a wastebasket and various little stacks of papers and so on—but nothing else. This office had far more shelving than the others as well, all empty, and Kira wondered just how much, exactly, had been stolen from it.
She paused, staring at the empty desk. Something else was different about this one, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. There was a small desk organizer knocked onto the floor, just as there had been in the cubicles, which implied that the office had been raided with the same sense of anxious haste. Whoever had stolen these items had been in an awfully big hurry. The now-empty cables all hung in the same way, though the office had far more of them than the cubicles. She racked her brain, trying to figure out what was bothering her, and finally hit on it: the small office had no photos. Most of the desks she’d been scouring for the last two days had held at least one family photo, and many of them had more: smiling couples, groups of kids in coordinated outfits, the preserved images of families now long dead. This room, however, had no photos at all. That meant one of two things: first, that the man or woman who worked here had no family, or didn’t care enough about them to display photos. Second, and more tantalizing, whoever had taken the equipment had also taken the photos. And the most likely reason for that was that the person who’d taken the photos was the same person who’d once worked in the room.
Kira looked at the door, which read AFA DEMOUX, and below it in thick block letters, IT. Was “IT” a nickname? It didn’t seem like a very nice one, but her understanding of old-world culture was sketchy at best. She checked the other doors and found that each followed the same pattern, a name and a word, though most of the words were longer: OPERATIONS, SALES, MARKETING. Were they titles? Departments? “IT” was the only one written all in capital letters, so it was probably an acronym, but Kira didn’t know what it stood for. Invention . . . Testing. She shook her head. This wasn’t a lab, so Afa Demoux wasn’t a scientist. What had he done here? Had he come back for his own equipment? Was his work so vital, or so dangerous, that someone else had come back after to take it? This wasn’t a random looting—no one hiked up twenty-two stories for a couple of computers when there were plenty to be had at ground level. Whoever had taken these had taken them for a reason—for something important that was stored in them. But who had it been? Afa Demoux? Someone from East Meadow? One of the Partials?
Who else was there?
CHAPTER THREE
“This hearing is now in session.”
Marcus stood in the back of the hall, craning to see over the crowd of people filling the room. He could see the senators well enough—Hobb and Kessler and Tovar and a new one he didn’t know, all seated on the stage behind a long table—but the two accused were out of his sight. The city hall they used to use for these sessions had been trashed in a Voice attack two months ago, before Kira had found the cure for RM and the Voice had reintegrated with the rest of society. Without the hall, they’d taken to using the auditorium of the old East Meadow High School instead; the school had been closed a few months before, so why not? Of course, Marcus thought, the building is the least of the things that have changed since then. The old leader of the Voice was one of the senators now, and two of the former senators were the ones on trial. Marcus stood on his tiptoes, but the auditorium was packed, standing room only. It seemed like everyone in East Meadow had come to see Weist and Delarosa’s final sentence.
“I’m going to be sick,” said Isolde, clutching Marcus’s arm. He dropped down from his toes to stand flat on the ground, grinning at Isolde’s morning sickness, then grimacing in pain as her grip tightened and her fingernails dug into his flesh. “Stop laughing at me,” she growled.
“I wasn’t laughing out loud.”
“I’m pregnant,” said Isolde, “my senses are like superpowers. I can smell your thoughts.”
“Smell?”
“It’s a very limited superpower,” she said. “Now seriously, get me some fresh air or I’m going to make this room a lot grosser than it already is.”
“You want to go back out?”
Isolde shook her head, closing her eyes and breathing slowly. She wasn’t showing yet, but her morning sickness had been terrible—she’d actually lost weight instead of gained it, because she couldn’t keep any food down, and Nurse Hardy had threatened her with inpatient care at the hospital if she didn’t improve soon. She’d been taking the week off work to relax, and it had helped a bit, but she was too much of a political junkie to stay away from a hearing like this. Marcus looked around the back of the auditorium, saw a seat near an open door, and pulled her toward it.
“Excuse me, sir,” he said softly, “can my friend have this chair?”
The man wasn’t even using it, just standing in front of it, but he glowered at Marcus in annoyance. “It’s first come, first served,” he said lowly. “Now stay quiet so I can hear this.”
“She’s pregnant,” said Marcus, and nodded smugly as the man’s entire demeanor changed in seconds.
“Why didn’t you say so?” He stepped aside immediately, offering Isolde the seat, and walked off in search of somewhere else to stand. Works every time, thought Marcus. Even after the repeal of the Hope Act, which had made pregnancy mandatory, pregnant women were still treated as sacred. Now that Kira had discovered a cure for RM, and there was a real hope that infants would actually survive more than a few days, the attitude was even more prevalent. Isolde sat down, fanning her face, and Marcus positioned himself behind her seat, where he could discourage people from blocking her airflow. He looked back up at the front of the room.
“. . . which is just the kind of thing we’re trying to stop in the first place,” Senator Tovar was saying.
“You can’t be serious,” said the new senator, and Marcus focused his concentration to hear him better. “You were the leader of the Voice,” he told Tovar. “You threatened to start, and by some interpretations actually started, a civil war.”
“Violence being occasionally necessary isn’t the same thing as violence being good,” said Tovar. “We were fighting to prevent atrocity, not to punish it after the fact�
�”
“Capital punishment is, at its heart, a preventative measure,” said the senator. Marcus blinked—he’d had no idea that execution was even being considered for Weist and Delarosa. When you have only 36,000 humans left, you don’t jump right to executing them, criminal or not. The new senator gestured toward the prisoners. “When these two die for their crimes, in a community so small everyone will be intimately aware of it, those crimes are unlikely to be repeated.”
“Their crimes were conducted through the direct application of senatorial power,” said Tovar. “Who exactly are you trying to send a message to?”
“To anyone who treats a human life like a chip in a poker game,” said the man, and Marcus felt the room grow tense. The new senator was staring at Tovar coldly, and even in the back of the room Marcus could read the threatening subtext: If he could do it, this man would execute Tovar right along with Delarosa and Weist.
“They did what they thought was best,” said Senator Kessler, one of the former senators who’d managed to weather the scandal and maintain her position. From everything Marcus had seen, and the inside details he’d learned from Kira, Kessler and the others had been just as guilty as Delarosa and Weist—they had seized power and declared martial law, turning Long Island’s tiny democracy into a totalitarian state. They had done it to protect the people, or so they claimed, and in the beginning Marcus had agreed with them: Humanity was facing extinction, after all, and with those kinds of stakes it’s hard to argue that freedom is more important than survival. But Tovar and the rest of the Voice had rebelled, and the Senate had reacted, and the Voice had reacted to that, and on and on until suddenly they were lying to their own people, blowing up their own hospital, and secretly killing their own soldier in a bid to ignite fear of a fictional Partial invasion and unite the island again. The official ruling had been that Delarosa and Weist were the masterminds, and everyone else had simply been following orders—you couldn’t punish Kessler for following her leader any more than you could punish a Grid soldier for following Kessler. Marcus still wasn’t sure how he felt about the ruling, but it seemed pretty obvious that this new guy didn’t like it at all.
Marcus crouched down and put a hand on Isolde’s shoulder. “Remind me who the new guy is.”
“Asher Woolf,” Isolde whispered. “He replaced Weist as the representative from the Defense Grid.”
“That explains that,” said Marcus, standing back up. You don’t kill a soldier without making every other soldier in the army an enemy for life.
“‘What they thought was best,’” Woolf repeated. He looked at the crowd, then back at Kessler. “What they thought was best, in this case, was the murder of a soldier who had already sacrificed his own health and safety trying to protect their secrets. If we make them pay the same price that boy did, maybe the next pack of senators won’t think that kind of decision is ‘best.’”
Marcus looked at Senator Hobb, wondering why he hadn’t spoken yet. He was the best debater on the Senate, but Marcus had learned to think of him as the most shallow, manipulative, and opportunistic. He was also the one who’d gotten Isolde pregnant, and Marcus didn’t think he could ever respect the man again. He certainly hadn’t shown any interest in his unborn child. Now he was showing the same hands-off approach with the sentence. Why hadn’t he picked a side yet?
“I think the point’s been made,” said Kessler. “Weist and Delarosa have been tried and convicted; they’re in handcuffs, they’re on their way to a prison camp, they’re paying for—”
“They’re being sent to an idyllic country estate to eat steaks and stud for a bunch of lonely farm girls,” said Woolf.
“You watch your tongue!” said Kessler, and Marcus winced at the fury in her voice. He was friends with Kessler’s adopted daughter, Xochi; he’d heard that fury more times than he cared to count, and he didn’t envy Woolf’s position. “Whatever your misogynist opinion of our farming communities,” said Kessler, “the accused are not going to a resort. They are prisoners, and they will be sent to a prison camp, and they will work harder than you have ever worked in your life.”
“And you’re not going to feed them?” asked Woolf.
Kessler seethed. “Of course we’re going to feed them.”
Woolf creased his brow in mock confusion. “Then you’re not going to allow them any fresh air or sunshine?”
“Where else are they going to work at a prison farm but outside in a field?”
“Then I’m confused,” said Woolf. “So far this doesn’t sound like much of a punishment. Senator Weist ordered the coldhearted killing of one of his own soldiers, a teenage boy under his own command, and his punishment is a soft bed, three square meals, fresher food than we get here in East Meadow, and all the girls he could ever ask for—”
“You keep saying ‘girls,’” said Tovar. “What exactly are you envisioning here?”
Woolf paused, staring at Tovar, then picked up a piece of paper and scanned it with his eyes as he talked. “Perhaps I misunderstood the nature of our ban on capital punishment. We can’t kill anyone because, in your words, ‘there are only thirty-five thousand people left on the planet, and we can’t afford to lose any more.’” He looked up. “Is that correct?”
“We have a cure for RM now,” said Kessler. “That means we have a future. We can’t afford to lose a single person.”
“Because we need to carry on the species,” said Woolf with a nod. “Multiply and replenish the Earth. Of course. Would you like me to tell you where babies come from, or should we get a chalkboard so I can draw you a diagram?”
“This is not about sex,” said Tovar.
“You’re damn right it’s not.”
Kessler threw up her hands. “What if we just don’t let them procreate?” she asked. “Will that make you happy?”
“If they can’t procreate, we have no reason to keep them alive,” Woolf shot back. “By your own logic, we should kill them and be done with it.”
“They can work,” said Kessler, “they can plow fields, they can grind wheat for the whole island, they can—”
“We’re not keeping them alive for reproduction,” said Tovar softly, “and we’re not keeping them alive as slaves. We’re keeping them alive because killing them would be wrong.”
Woolf shook his head. “Punishing criminals is—”
“Senator Tovar is correct,” said Hobb, rising to his feet. “This is not about sex or reproduction or manual labor or any of these other issues we’ve been arguing. It’s not even about survival. The human race has a future, like we’ve said, and food and children and so on are all important to that future, but they are not the most important. They are the means of our existence, but they cannot become the reason for it. We can never be reduced—and we can never reduce ourselves—to a level of pure physical subsistence.” He walked toward Senator Woolf. “Our children will inherit more than our genes; more than our infrastructure. They will inherit our morals. The future we’ve gained by curing RM is a precious gift that we must earn, day by day and hour by hour, by being the kind of people who deserve to have a future. Do we want our children to kill one another? Of course not. Then we teach them, through our own example, that every life is precious. Killing a killer might send a mixed message.”
“Caring for a killer is just as confusing,” said Woolf.
“We’re not going to care for a killer,” said Hobb, “we’re going to care for everybody: old and young, bond and free, male and female. And if one of them happens to be a killer—if two or three or a hundred happen to be killers—we still care for them.” He smiled mirthlessly. “We don’t let them kill anybody else, obviously; we’re not stupid. But we don’t kill them, either, because we’re trying to be better. We’re trying to find a higher ground. We have a future now, so let’s not start it by killing.”
There was a scattering of applause in the room, though Marcus thought some of it felt obligatory. A handful of people shouted back in disagreement, but the tenor o
f the room had changed, and Marcus knew the argument was done; Woolf didn’t look happy about it, but after Hobb’s words he didn’t look eager to keep calling for execution, either. Marcus tried to get a look at the prisoners’ reactions but still couldn’t see them. Isolde was muttering, and he stooped back down to hear her.
“What did you say?”
“I said he’s a stupid glad-handing bastard,” Isolde snapped, and Marcus backed away with a grimace. That was not a situation he wanted any part of. She insisted that her encounter with Hobb had been willing—she’d been his assistant for months, and he was very handsome and charming—but her attitude had soured significantly in the months since.
“It doesn’t look like we’re going to be deliberating any further,” said Tovar. “I call for a vote: Marisol Delarosa and Cameron Weist will be sentenced to a life of hard labor on the Stillwell Farm. All in favor.”