by Dan Wells
The second floor was empty, but the signs of chaos were clear. A pattern of holes in the walls and blackout curtains showed that the latest round of Bouncing Betties had gone off exactly as planned, but there didn’t seem to be any bodies. The floor was dimly lit by the holes in the curtains, and a small flame flickered in the wall near the back. Kira waited, trying to remember what the last trap on the floor had been—something incendiary, she thought, and it obviously hadn’t gone off. The Partial was still inside.
Kira waited at the top of the stairs, her rifle aimed and ready. As soon as a Partial appeared in the doorway, it was as good as dead.
She waited.
Maybe I was too noisy, she wondered. It heard me coming and went the other way—or worse, it’s waiting for me. I could retreat back up the stairs, but then I lose my advantage. I can’t take both Partials at once. If there’s any chance I can ambush this one, I have to take it.
How far has the other one gotten? This is the service stairwell, but the other hall leads to the main stairwell. Has the Partial reached it yet? Did it go upstairs? Did Afa get away? She hoped that Afa had been smart enough to run, that he wasn’t sitting in the hallway with his finger on the trigger of the bomb, ready in his paranoia to destroy his entire life’s work—and he and Kira with it—just to keep it from the Partials. I need to get back up there, she thought, and I need to stay here, and I need to run away. I don’t know what to—
And then she knew, as firmly and as strongly as if she’d seen it with her own eyes, that there was a Partial creeping toward her on the third floor.
The third-floor doorway, like the second, had been cannibalized for Afa’s bunker. The door was open, and the Partial would have a clear shot at her as soon as it came around the corner. It’s the link, she thought, it’s the only way I could know this so clearly. It’s broadcasting everything we’re doing. I don’t have the full complement of sensors that Samm described, but apparently I have enough to sense where they are—and maybe enough to give myself away. She patted her jacket, wishing she had something she could throw—a grenade or even a rock to distract them with—but all she had was the rifle, and by the time she had a clear shot with that, it would be too late. She had to move. She shifted to the balls of her feet, ready to race down the stairwell to the first floor, when she got a second impression, as clear as the first, that there was another Partial in the stairwell below her. They hadn’t paused inside the doorway, waiting, they’d jumped ahead and completely encircled her. There was nowhere to go but into the second floor, still rigged with one last trap. She jumped to her feet and ran.
The Partial agents didn’t shout to each other, for the link warned them of danger in much more effective silence, but Kira still felt it in her head like a chemical scream: SHE’S RUNNING. Feet clattered on the stairs behind her, and Kira fired a burst from her rifle into the stairwell below, keeping the second Partial from sniping her as she raced past into the second-floor death trap. Kira tumbled through the open door and scrambled back to her feet, looking around wildly for the final trap, but Afa had hidden it too well. A Partial pounded through the door behind her and Kira spun, tracking shots across the wall in a deadly line headed straight for the attacker’s chest. The Partial—obviously a woman, but with her face obscured behind a visored helmet—paused when she saw Kira, then converted her charge into an acrobatic roll; she pulled her rifle in close to her chest, tucked herself into a ball, and somersaulted under Kira’s spray of bullets before Kira had time to correct its course. The Partial came up just feet away from her, firing almost immediately, and Kira had to dive to the side to stay clear. The Partial followed with uncanny speed, pressing the attack, lashing out with a devastating kick that knocked Kira’s rifle from her hands. Kira stumbled into a conference room, recovered her feet, and sprinted past the rotting wooden table to the second door at the far end of the room, just three steps ahead of the Partial. She came back into the hall and ran back to the door, only to collapse with a crash as the Partial tackled her from behind, knocking the air from her lungs. Kira fought for breath, wrestling madly with the Partial, managing to connect a solid elbow slam to the side of the attacker’s helmet. She reeled back and Kira rolled away, crawling another few feet before the Partial, already on her feet, kicked her thigh out from under her. Kira grunted in pain, falling to the side, and when she looked up the Partial was a few feet away, her boot raised over a tiny trip wire, her hand pointed to a spot above Kira’s head. Kira looked up and saw the nozzle of Afa’s incendiary trap, a flamethrower aimed directly at her head. All the Partial had to do was stomp down, and a jet of flame would roast Kira alive. She cringed, staring at the Partial’s featureless visor, and heard a male voice cry out.
“Kira!”
Kira froze. She’d know that voice anywhere. Her jaw dropped as he stepped out of the stairwell, his helmet in his hands.
“Samm?”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“I wasn’t going to kill her,” said the female Partial. She stepped away from the trip wire and took off her helmet, and Kira recognized her as well: jet-black hair, gorgeous Chinese features, and dark eyes that glittered with a terrifying genius. This was Heron, the Partial who’d captured her before and taken her to Morgan. The girl smirked dismissively, looking at Kira the way someone would stare at a lost kitten—someone who didn’t really like kittens. “I was only trying to scare her.”
Samm bent down to help Kira to her feet, and she rose uncertainly, still trying to process what was happening. “Samm?”
“It’s good to see you.”
“What . . . why are you here?”
“Because we finally found you,” said Heron, and pointed at the ceiling. “Everybody knows you’re on the radio, but we’re the only ones who’ve figured out you were in Manhattan.” She bowed with mock respect. “We chose to keep that information to ourselves.”
Samm retrieved Kira’s rifle from the floor. “We’ve known somebody was in this building for a few days, but we also recognized the signs of the same bomber who’d almost blown us up twice already, and so we took our time coming in. We didn’t know for sure that you were in here until”—he paused, tilting his head as if calculating—“thirty seconds ago. When I saw your face.” He handed Kira the rifle.
Kira took it, puzzled. “You didn’t—” She stopped herself, realizing that she’d almost blurted out, right in front of Heron, that she was a Partial. She was going to ask why they hadn’t felt her on the link, since she’d been able to feel them so clearly, but she didn’t know if Samm had told her or not. She would ask him later, in private.
Kira pushed those thoughts aside and looked back at Samm. “You could have just knocked. . . .” She sighed and shook her head. They couldn’t just knock, because if they were wrong, and this had been anyone other than Kira, they’d be exposing themselves to far greater danger: a rival faction of Partials, or Afa’s megaton booby trap. I wonder how far Afa got, if he got away at all.
“A better answer to your question,” said Samm, “is that we’re here because we needed to find you. You’re in danger.”
“Dr. Morgan is trying to find you,” said Heron, and paused just long enough to make Kira uncomfortable before adding, “We’re here to make sure she doesn’t.”
Kira looked back pointedly. “You’re not with her anymore?”
“I’m with myself,” said Heron. “Always.”
“But why?”
Heron glanced at Samm, almost imperceptibly, but didn’t answer.
“She’s helping me,” said Samm. “Dr. Morgan has put all her efforts into looking for you.”
Kira nodded, phrasing her next question carefully. “How much does she know?”
“I know you’re a Partial,” said Heron, “if that’s what you’re asking. Some kind of crazy Partial none of the doctors could identify.” She smiled slightly, raising her eyebrow. “I take it you’re still keeping this a secret? You never told your human friends before you left them?”
“It’s not that easy,” said Kira.
“It’s the easiest thing in the world,” said Heron, “unless . . . You’re still trying to play both sides, aren’t you? Partial and human at the same time? Trying to save both? Not gonna work.”
Kira felt herself growing angry. “You’re suddenly the expert on my life?”
Heron raised her hands in mock defensiveness. “Whoa, tiger, where’d all the hostility come from?”
Kira nearly snarled. “The last time I saw you, you were strapping me down to an operating table. You worked for Dr. Morgan then, and I don’t see why I should trust you now.”
“Because I haven’t killed you yet.”
“I don’t think you understand trust very well,” said Kira.
“You can trust her because I trust her,” said Samm. He paused. “That is, assuming you still trust me.”
Kira studied him, remembering how he’d betrayed her—and how he’d saved her. Did she trust him? A little, yes, but how much? She blew out a long breath of air and gestured helplessly. “Give me a reason.”
“I defected from Dr. Morgan’s faction when I freed you from the lab,” said Samm. “Heron followed us, waited for you to leave, and after we had discussed everything we’d seen, she proposed a plan: finding our own cure for the expiration date. That’s why we had joined Morgan’s faction in the first place, but her methods had become . . . distasteful.”
Kira raised an eyebrow. “That’s an understatement.”
“The expiration date is going to kill us in less than two years,” said Heron, and Kira heard a flash of cold anger in her voice. “Every single Partial in the world, dead. Faced with genocide, Morgan’s methods don’t seem quite so extreme.”
Kira glanced at Heron, then back at Samm. “And yet you still left her.”
“We left because of you,” said Samm. Kira felt a flush of warmth creep through her body, but listened quietly as Samm continued. “Discovering that you were a Partial changed everything, Kira—you are literally, right now, exactly what we’ve hoped to be for almost twenty years.”
“Lost?”
“Human.” Samm tapped the photo of her as a little girl. “You age. You grow. You aren’t enslaved to a chemical caste system. Dr. Morgan’s preliminary scans of your body suggest that you’re not even sterile.”
Kira furrowed her brow. “How do you know this?”
“We’ve been spying on her ever since you left,” said Samm, “trying to stay one step ahead. She’s looking for you everywhere—the entire Long Island invasion is a last-ditch effort to find you and finish her experiments.”
“But how can she not know what I am?” asked Kira.
“Dr. Morgan is convinced that the secret behind our expiration date has something to do with you,” said Samm. “She’s still experimenting on humans, but her main focus is on two things: She wants to find you, and she wants to find the Trust.”
“You mean the rest of the Trust,” said Kira. Samm frowned, confused, and Kira explained. “Dr. Morgan is part of the Trust,” she said. “McKenna Morgan, specialist in bionanotechnology and human augmentation. She worked at ParaGen for years—I’ve got her whole résumé upstairs.”
Samm frowned. “How could she work at ParaGen if she’s part of the Trust? They’re not human scientists, they’re Partial generals and doctors who stepped up to lead us after the Break.”
Kira pursed her lips. “We’d better go upstairs.”
Afa was gone, leaving nothing but a smoking hole in the wall of the eighth floor: He’d used a small shaped charge to blow a hole between this building and the adjacent one, and slipped out while Kira was fighting Heron and Samm. He’d taken his backpack, but he hadn’t blown them up, and Kira knew he’d come back soon—he couldn’t stand to leave his library for long. In the meantime she led Samm and Heron to one of the records rooms, a former sound booth with a wide table and a ring of co-opted filing cabinets. This was where Afa stored his most extensive, most valuable records about the inner workings of ParaGen, and Kira had been going through them steadily during her breaks from the radio. As the Partials grew more canny, and the human army retreated away from effective radio range, those breaks were getting longer and more plentiful.
“This one first,” said Kira, hanging her oil lantern on a hook in the wall, and setting out a printed sheet from an old company email. “It’s a meeting request from the financial manager to the top staff of the ParaGen labs. This part at the top is a list of email addresses—it’s like code names, kind of, that the computer system used to deliver messages to people.”
“We’re familiar with email,” said Heron.
“Hey,” said Kira, “this technology is all new to me—I was five when you blew everything up, remember?”
“Go on,” said Samm.
Kira looked at the two Partials, noting for the first time how different they were: Samm, like before, was straightforward; he didn’t say half of what he felt, but what he did say was simple and utilitarian. He’d explained his taciturn nature as a side effect of the link: It carried most of their emotional information, so their speech didn’t need to. Partials used their voices to convey ideas, and their pheromones to convey the social context of those ideas: how they felt about it, how nervous or relaxed or excited they were. For a human observer not connected to the link, it made the Partials seem cold and robotic. Heron, in contrast, was a remarkably human communicator—she used facial tics, voice modulation, slang, even body language in a way Kira hadn’t seen from any other Partials. Well, thought Kira, any other Partials but me. I can barely detect the link, though, and I grew up without any access to it at all. I talk like a human because I’ve been communicating with them my whole life.
What’s Heron’s explanation?
Samm was looking at her expectantly, and Kira turned back to the printout. “I’ve cross-referenced this email list with some of the other records Afa’s got in here, and I think these six people are the Trust—maybe not the whole Trust, but I’m pretty sure most of the Trust ringleaders were in this group.” She pointed to each address as she named them off. “Graeme Chamberlain, Kioni Trimble, Jerry Ryssdal, McKenna Morgan, Nandita Merchant, and . . .” She paused. “Armin Dhurvasula. Some of those names probably look familiar.”
“General Trimble runs B Company,” said Samm. “We’ve known for a while she was part of the Trust—but like I said, the Trust are all Partials, not humans. And this Dr. Morgan—there’s probably more than one Dr. Morgan in the world, there’s no guarantee this is the same one.”
“Take a look at her info page,” said Kira, handing him a stack of papers, “printed from the company website. There’s a photo.”
Heron took the stack, Samm reading over her shoulder as she flipped through it. They paused on the photo, studying it carefully; it wasn’t the best quality, but the image was unmistakable. Kira had only been with the doctor for a few minutes, but her face was scarred into her memory. It was the same woman.
Heron set down the papers. “Dr. Morgan is a Partial. She’s on the link—we’ve all felt it. She’s been with us since before the Break. She’s immune to RM. Hell, she survived a gunfight with Samm in close quarters back when you escaped—that’s a sure sign of heightened Partial reflexes. There’s no way she’s a human.”
Kira nodded and dug into another filing cabinet. “One of these records is a report from a corporate investigator; apparently some of the members of the Trust had been giving themselves Partial gene mods. The company leaders flipped out when they found out about it.”
“Partial gene mods?” asked Samm. “What does that even mean?”
“Before they got into the business of biosynthetic organisms,” said Kira, “ParaGen got its start in biotech, making genetic modifications for humans—they’d fix congenital defects, improve people’s strength and reflexes, even do cosmetic mods like breast augmentation. By the Break, nearly every person born in a hospital in America had some sort of genetic modification customs built by ParaG
en or another biotech firm. This report doesn’t go into detail, but it specifically says ‘Partial gene mods.’ I think some of the members of the Trust were using the same technology they made for you—us—on themselves.”
“They gave themselves the link and then used it to control us,” said Heron. Her voice dripped with venom.
“So they made themselves into . . . half-Partials,” said Samm. He didn’t show it as obviously, but Kira could tell he was just as disturbed as Heron was, though maybe not so angry. He paused, then looked at Kira. “Do you think maybe that’s what you are?”
“I thought the same thing,” she answered, “but there’s no way to know for sure without a closer look at the bioscan Morgan took of me. Every doctor in the room seemed pretty certain I was a Partial, though, not just a hybrid. They spoke of Partial-specific codes written on my DNA. But I’m not ruling anything out.”
Heron looked back at the list. “So Morgan’s part of the Trust. So is your friend Nandita.” She looked up, staring at Kira, and Kira got the sudden sense that she was being analyzed—not by a scientist, but by a predator. She half expected Heron to pounce forward and take a bite from her neck.
Kira looked down, too uncomfortable to hold the girl’s gaze. “Nandita left me a message,” she said. She fished the photo from her backpack pocket and handed it to Samm. “I found this in my house three months ago; it’s the reason I left. That’s Nandita, that’s my father, Armin Dhurvasula, and that’s me in the middle. Kira . . . Dhurvasula.” It still felt strange to say it. For all she knew, it might not even be her name. She’d never been officially adopted, as far as she could guess, because all the papers she’d read from the time period implied that Partials weren’t legally defined as people. She wouldn’t bear her father’s surname any more than a dog would, or a television.