Fragments

by Dan Wells

  She’d start with the same neighborhood they’d been investigating back then, and if he’d moved on—which seemed likely, after the massive firefight they’d held just a few blocks away—she’d look for more clues about where he might have headed next. There was somebody in this city, and she was determined to find him.

  Finding the source of the smoke plume was harder than Kira had planned. It wasn’t there anymore, for one thing, so she had to go by memory, and the city was so big and confusing that she couldn’t remember clearly enough without jogging her memory visually. She had to go back, all the way south to the bridge they’d crossed on, and find the same building, and look out the same window. There, at long last, the landscape looked familiar—she could see the long strip of trees, the three apartment buildings, all the signs that had led her to the Partial attack those many months ago. That was where she’d first met Samm—well, not “met him” so much as “knocked him unconscious and captured him.” It was strange how much things had changed since then. If she had Samm here, now . . . Well, things would be a lot easier, for one thing.

  But even as she thought it, she knew it was more than that. Staring out the window over the leafy city, she wondered again, for the hundredth time, if the connection she had felt between them had been the Partial link or something deeper. Was there any way to know? Did it even matter? A connection was a connection, and she had precious few of those these days.

  But this wasn’t the time to think about Samm. Kira studied the cityscape, trying to fix in her mind exactly where the smoke had been coming from, and how to retrace her steps to find it. She went so far as to pull out her notebook and sketch out a map, but without a clear sense of how many streets there were, and what they were called, she didn’t know how useful the map would be. The buildings here were so tall, and the streets so narrow, the city was almost like a labyrinth, a maze of brick-and-metal canyons. Last time they’d had scouts to lead the way, but on her own Kira worried that she’d get lost and never find anything.

  She finished her map as best she could, noting key landmarks that might help her navigate, then descended the long stairway and set out through the city. The streets were rough, filled with jumbled cars and spindly trees, their leaves fluttering in the soft wind. She passed an ancient car accident, a dozen or more vehicles piled together in a desperate bid to flee the plague-ridden city; she didn’t remember passing the pileup before, which made her nervous that she was following the wrong path, but soon she turned a corner and spotted one of her landmarks, and continued up the road more confidently. The center of each street was the easiest to travel in, less filled with debris than edges and sidewalks, but they were also the most visible, and Kira was too paranoid to leave the thicker cover. She hugged the walls and fences, stepping carefully through heaps of shifting rubble fallen down from the towering buildings. It was slow going, but it was safer, or at least that was what Kira told herself.

  Here and there Kira spotted a bullet hole in a car or a mailbox, and she knew she was on the right track. They had run through here with a sniper behind them; Jayden had even been shot through the arm. The thought of Jayden sobered her, and she paused to listen: birds. Wind. Two cats yowling in a fight. It was foolish to think that there would be a sniper here now, but she couldn’t help herself. She ducked down behind a crumbling stairway, breathing heavily, telling herself that it was just nerves, but all she could think about was Jayden, shot through the arm—shot through the chest in the East Meadow hospital, bleeding out on the floor where he’d sacrificed himself to save her. He’d been the one to force her through her fear, to tell her to get up when she was too afraid to move. She gritted her teeth and stood up again, moving forward. She could be afraid all she wanted, but she wouldn’t let it stop her.

  She reached the apartment complex when the sun was high in the sky: five buildings that had looked like three from her vantage point back in the skyscraper. It was the same place. There was a wide lawn around and between them, now filled with saplings, and she pushed through it carefully as she passed the buildings. This was the one we passed first, and this was the one we went into. . . . She came around the side and looked up, seeing the massive hole they’d blown in the wall three stories up. A vine wound around a dangling floor joist, and a bird perched on a crooked shard of rebar. The violence was gone, and nature was reclaiming it.

  They had come here looking for the source of the smoke, and they’d chosen that apartment building because it looked out on what they assumed was the back of the occupied house. Kira kept her rifle up as she walked, rounding the first corner, then the next. This would be the street, and if she’d guessed correctly on her map, the house she was looking for would be six doors down. One, two three, four . . . no. Kira’s jaw dropped, and she stared in shock at the sixth townhouse in the row.

  It was an empty crater, blown to pieces.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “This Senate meeting will now come to order,” said Senator Tovar. “We extend an official welcome to all our guests today, and we look forward to hearing your reports. Before we begin, I’ve been asked to announce that there’s a green Ford Sovereign in the parking lot with its lights on, so if that’s yours, please . . .” He looked up, straight-faced, and the adults in the room all laughed. Marcus frowned, confused, and Tovar chuckled. “My apologies to all the plague babies in the room. That was an old-world joke, and not even a very good one.” He sat down. “Let’s start with the synthesis team. Dr. Skousen?”

  Skousen stood, and Marcus placed his binder on his lap, ready in case the doctor asked him for anything. Skousen stepped forward, stopped to clear his throat, then paused, thought, and stepped forward again.

  “I take it from your hesitance that you don’t have any good news,” said Tovar. “I guess let’s move on to whoever’s ready to not give us the next bad report.”

  “Just let him speak,” said Senator Kessler. “We don’t need a joke in every single pause in conversation.”

  Tovar raised his eyebrow. “I could make a joke when someone’s talking, but that seems rude.”

  Kessler ignored him and turned to Skousen. “Doctor?”

  “I’m afraid he’s correct,” said Skousen. “We have no good news. We have no bad news either, aside from the continued lack of progress—” He paused, stammering uncertainly. “We . . . have had no major setbacks, is what I’m saying.”

  “So you’re no closer to synthesizing the cure than you were last time,” said Senator Woolf.

  “We have eliminated certain possibilities as dead ends,” said Skousen. His face was worn and full of lines, and Marcus heard his voice drop. “It’s not much, as victories go, but it’s all we have.”

  “We can’t continue like this,” said Woolf, turning to the other senators. “We saved one child, and almost two months later we’re no closer to saving any more. We’ve lost four more children in the last week alone. Their deaths are tragedies on their own, and I don’t want to gloss over them, but that’s not even our most pressing concern. The people know we have a cure—they know we can save infants, and they know that we’re not. They know the reasons for it, too, but that’s not exactly mollifying anyone. Having the cure so close, but still unattainable, is only making the tensions on this island worse.”

  “Then what do you propose we do?” asked Tovar. “Attack the Partials and steal more pheromone? We can’t risk it.”

  You might not have a choice soon, Marcus thought. If what Heron said is true . . . He squirmed in his seat, trying not to imagine the devastation of a Partial invasion. He didn’t know where Nandita was, or Kira, and he certainly didn’t want to hand them over to the Partials even if he could, on the other hand . . . a Partial invasion could mean the end of the human race—not a slow fade, dying off because they couldn’t reproduce, but a bloody, brutal genocide. The Partials had proven twelve years ago that they weren’t afraid of war, but genocide? Samm had insisted so fiercely that they weren’t responsible for RM. That they felt guilty
for causing, even inadvertently, the horrors of the Break. Had things changed that much? Were they ready to sacrifice an entire species just to save themselves?

  They’re asking me to do the same thing, he thought. To sacrifice Kira, or Nandita, to save humanity. If it comes right down to it, would I do it? Should I?

  “We could send an ambassador,” said Senator Hobb. “We’ve talked about it, we’ve chosen the team—let’s do it.”

  “Send them to who?” asked Kessler. “We’ve had contact with exactly one group of Partials, and they tried to kill the kids who contacted them. We tried to kill the Partial who contacted us. If there’s a peaceful resolution in our future, I sure as hell don’t know how to reach it.”

  They were the same arguments, Marcus realized, that he and his friends had bandied around in Xochi’s living room. The same circular proposals, the same obvious responses, the same endless bickering. Are the adults just as lost as the rest of us? Or is there really no solution to this problem?

  “From a medical standpoint,” said Dr. Skousen, “I’m afraid I must advocate—against my wishes—the . . .” He paused again. “The retrieval of a fresh sample. Of a new Partial, or at the very least a quantity of their pheromone. We have some remnants of the dose that was used on Arwen Sato, and we have the scans and records of the pheromone’s structure and function, but nothing can replace a fresh sample. We solved this problem last time by going to the source—to the Partials—and I believe that if we intend to solve it again, we will have to solve it the same way. Whether we get it by force or diplomacy doesn’t matter as much as the simple need to obtain it.”

  A rush of whispers filled the room, soft mutterings like the rustle of leaves. It wasn’t “we” who solved this problem, Marcus thought, it was Kira, and Dr. Skousen was one of her biggest opponents. Now he was advocating the same action without even crediting her?

  “You want us to risk another Partial War,” said Kessler.

  “That risk has already been taken,” said Tovar. “The bear, as they say, has already been poked, and it hasn’t eaten us yet.”

  “Being lucky is not the same thing as being safe,” said Kessler. “If there’s any way to synthesize this cure without resorting to military action, we have to explore it. If we provoke the Partials any further—”

  “We’ve provoked them too much as it is!” said Woolf. “You’ve read the reports—there are boats off the North Shore, Partial boats patrolling our borders—”

  Senator Hobb cut him off, while the audience whispered all the more wildly. “This is not the right venue to discuss those reports,” said Hobb.

  Marcus felt like he’d been shot in the gut: The Partials were patrolling the sound. The Partials had kept to themselves for eleven years—a quick recon mission here and there, like Heron had done, but always undercover, so much so that the humans hadn’t even known about it. Now they were openly patrolling the border. He realized his mouth was hanging open, and he closed it tightly.

  “The people need to know,” said Woolf. “They’re going to find out anyway—if the boats get too much closer, every farmer on the North Shore’s going to see them. For all we know small groups of them have landed already; our watch along that shore is anything but impenetrable.”

  “So our cold war’s heated up,” said Skousen. He looked gray and frail, like a corpse from the side of the road. He paused a moment, swallowed, and sat down with a barely controlled thunk.

  “If you’ll excuse me,” said Marcus, and realized that he was standing. He looked at the binder in his hands, unsure of what to do with it, then simply closed it and held it in front of him, wishing it was armor. He looked at the Senate, wondering if Heron was right—if one of them, or one of their aides, was a Partial agent. Did he dare to talk? Could he afford not to? “Excuse me,” he said again, starting over, “my name is Marcus Valencio—”

  “We know who you are,” said Tovar.

  Marcus nodded nervously. “I think I have more experience in Partial territory than anyone in this room—”

  “That’s why we know who you are,” said Tovar, making a rolling motion with his hand. “Stop introducing yourself and get to your point.”

  Marcus swallowed, suddenly not sure why he’d stood up—he felt like somebody needed to say something, but he didn’t feel at all qualified to say it. He wasn’t even sure what it was. He looked around the room, watching the faces of various gathered experts and politicians, wondering which of them—if any—was a traitor. He thought about Heron, and her search for Nandita, and realized that whatever he was trying to say, he was the only one who knew enough to say it. The only one who’d heard Heron’s warning. I just need to figure out how to phrase it without looking like a traitor myself. “I’m just saying,” he said at last, “that the Partials we encountered were conducting experiments. They have an expiration date—they’re all going to die—and they’re just as invested in curing that as we are in curing RM. More so, maybe, because it’s going to kill them sooner.”

  “We know about the expiration date,” said Kessler. “It’s the best news we’ve had in twelve years.”

  “Not counting the cure for RM, of course,” said Hobb quickly.

  “It’s not good news at all,” said Marcus. “Their expiration date is like pushing us out of the frying pan and into the . . . molten core of the Earth. If they die, we die; we need their pheromone to cure ourselves.”

  “That’s why we’re trying to synthesize it,” said Woolf.

  “But we can’t synthesize it,” said Marcus, holding up his binder. “We could spend a couple of hours telling you everything we’ve tried, and all the reasons it hasn’t worked, and you wouldn’t understand half the science anyway—no offense—but that’s beside the point, because it hasn’t worked. ‘Why’ it hasn’t worked doesn’t matter.” He dropped the binder on the table behind him and turned back to face the senators. Seeing them again, staring at him silently, made Marcus feel suddenly queasy, and he smiled to cover it up. “Don’t everybody cheer at once, I have some bad news, too.”

  Tovar pursed his lips. “I don’t know how you’re going to top the first bit, but I’m excited to hear it.”

  Marcus felt the attention of the entire room bearing down on him and bit back the urge to make another wisecrack; he cracked jokes reflexively when he got too nervous, and he was more nervous now than he’d ever been. I shouldn’t be doing this, he thought. I’m a medic, not a public speaker. I’m not a debater, I’m not a leader, I’m not . . .

  . . . I’m not Kira. That’s who should be here.

  “Mr. Valencio?” asked Senator Woolf.

  Marcus nodded, steeling his determination. “Well, you asked for it, so here it is. The leader of the Partial faction we ran into, the one who kidnapped Kira, was some kind of a doctor or a scientist; they called her Dr. Morgan. That was the reason they sent that Partial platoon into Manhattan all those months ago, and they kidnapped Kira because Dr. Morgan thinks the secret to curing Partials is somehow related to RM, which means it’s related to humans. Apparently they’d experimented on humans before, back during the Partial War, and if they think it will save their lives, they’ll kidnap as many more of us as they need, which might just be Kira again, but for all we know it’s all of us. They’re probably having the same meeting right now, on the other side of the sound, trying to decide how they can grab a few of us to experiment on—or if those reports you mentioned are true, they already had their meeting and might very well be putting their plan into motion.”

  “That’s classified information,” said Senator Hobb. “We need—”

  “If you’ll permit me to recap,” Marcus interrupted, holding up his hand, “there is a group of super-soldiers”—he put down his first finger—“trained specifically in military conquest”—he put down his second finger—“who outnumber us, like, thirty to one”—third finger—“who are desperate enough to try anything”—fourth finger—“and who believe that ‘anything’ in this case means ‘capt
uring human beings for invasive experimentation.’” He folded down his last finger and held his fist silently in the air. “Senators, the information might be classified, but it’s a pretty good bet the Partials will be unclassifying it a lot sooner than you think.”

  The room was quiet, every eye focused on Marcus. Several long, heavy moments later, Tovar finally spoke.

  “So you think we need to defend ourselves.”

  “I think I’m scared to death, and I need to learn how to stop talking when everyone is staring at me.”

  “Defending ourselves is not a viable option,” said Woolf, and the other senators stiffened in surprise. “The Defense Grid is well trained and as well equipped as a human army can possibly be. We have watches on every coast, we have bombs on every remaining bridge, we have ambush sites already mapped and ready to go at every likely invasion point. And yet no matter how well prepared we are, it will barely be a speed bump if a sizeable faction of Partials initiate an invasion. That’s an inescapable fact that cannot possibly be news to anyone in this room. We patrol this island because it’s all we can do, but if the Partials ever actually decide to invade, we will be conquered within days, if not hours.”

  “The only remotely good news,” said Marcus, “is that their society is, if you’ll pardon the comparison, even more fractured than ours. The mainland was practically a war zone when we were over there, which could be the only reason they haven’t attacked us already.”

  “So they kill each other and our problem solves itself,” said Kessler.

  “Except for the RM,” said Hobb.

  “Taking everything Mr. Valencio has said into account,” said Woolf, “we only have one real plan that has any hope of success. Step one, we sneak into that mainland war zone, hope nobody notices us, and grab a couple of Partials for Dr. Skousen to experiment on. Step two, we evacuate the entire island and get as far away as possible.”