by Dan Wells
“Are you trying to get yourself killed, Callie?”
“Never been hit yet,” said Calix, slapping him affectionately on the arm as she walked past. “Thanks for getting the door.”
“Anytime. These the travelers?”
Samm surveyed the lobby of the building, packed with eager onlookers. He looked back at the big man and nodded. “We are. We need a room for the night, if you have one.”
“He means ‘please,’” said Kira. “And thank you very much for your hospitality.”
“I have plenty of space,” said Calix, and pushed the button for the elevator.
Kira walked past her, looking for the stairs, and jumped slightly when the elevator doors slid open. “Holy crap.”
Calix raised her eyebrow. “You okay?”
“Where I come from I just . . .” Kira shook herself slightly and followed her gingerly into the elevator. “We don’t have enough juice to run elevators back home. I’ve never actually been inside one.”
“Neither have I,” said Samm, though Kira knew it was a lie. He was probably trying to avoid the inevitable question of why their past experiences had been so different. Calix pushed a button on the inside wall of the elevator—the highest floor—and the doors slid closed.
“This whole complex is powered,” said Kira. “Not just the hospital but everything. Where do you get the juice?”
“ParaGen had gone fully self-sustaining a few years before the Break,” said Calix. “We have power, running water, and of course the Preserve itself to protect us from the wasteland. There’s even enough land to ranch cattle, if we could find any live ones.”
“The chili at dinner had beef in it,” said Kira.
“Actually venison,” said Calix, and looked at Samm proudly. “I tracked the deer myself. I’ve been a full-fledged hunter for two years now.”
Samm nodded, which was a huge display of emotion for him. “Very impressive.”
Kira tried not to scowl. It wasn’t like Calix had hunted some monster, like that thing that had chased Kira back in New York.
The elevator let them off on the top floor, which Kira immediately recognized as an office block, though most of the cubicles had been cleared away. The remaining desks were set up along the walls, stacked with potted plants and piles of books and board games. A number of rubber balls sat idly in the corner. “This is our courtyard,” said Calix. “My place is back here: Conference Room Two.” Each office and conference room they passed had been remade as a small apartment, many of them occupied, and Calix waved familiarly at her neighbors as she passed each one. The neighbors gawked at the newcomers but didn’t approach them. Conference Room 2 was more sparsely decorated than most of the others, and Kira wondered if Calix was simply less of a decorator than the others, or less experienced, or if somehow she was poorer. Their society didn’t seem to use money, but she was beginning to realize that almost nothing here was what she expected it to be.
Like the fact that their doctor was a Partial.
There was a single bed, which Calix graciously offered to Kira, but Kira insisted on sleeping on the floor—on the other side of the room, where she and Samm could talk in private once their host finally fell asleep. After the first hour of excited questions about the world outside the Preserve, though, Kira realized that Calix was far more likely to outlast them than the other way around. After the second hour Kira was too sleepy to care, and felt her eyes closing as Samm continued to answer question after question.
She slowly drifted off to sleep in her tangle of blankets on the floor, only inches from where Samm sat. A few moments passed, her breathing becoming deep and even, and she felt something touch the back of her hand.
He’d placed his hand on top of hers.
She woke in the morning with a start, sitting up straight and reaching for something, though she couldn’t remember what it was. Sunlight peeked through the curtains in the window, and Calix’s bed was empty. Samm lay asleep, as straight as a corpse, on the floor next to Kira. Kira rolled to her feet, checked the hallway, then closed the door firmly and shook Samm awake.
“Samm!”
He woke up like a predator, whirling into a combat stance so swiftly Kira had to duck to avoid getting hit. He paused, scanning the room, then looked at Kira. “I’m sorry,” he said. “This place has me on edge.”
“Same here,” she said. “We need to figure out what’s going on; we’re alone for now, but I don’t know how long until Calix gets back.”
“The doctor’s not a Partial,” said Samm.
“You said he was.”
“He doesn’t match any Partial model I’ve ever seen,” said Samm. “I’ve been thinking about it all night—he’s not a general or a doctor or anything else, which means there are two possibilities. One, he’s a model like you, one we haven’t seen yet and wasn’t mass-produced. I think this is unlikely, most obviously because you don’t emit link data, and he does, and you age, and he clearly couldn’t be as old as he is if he started as a child seventeen years ago. The second, more likely scenario is that he’s like Morgan, a human with gene mods to use the link. Which leads to one pretty obvious conclusion.”
“He’s also a member of the Trust,” said Kira. “Given everything he said about his history with ParaGen, that makes a lot of sense; he’d worked for them since the beginning. He was probably one of their senior scientists.”
“It also means he can incapacitate me if he chooses,” said Samm. His voice was calm and matter-of-fact, despite the seriousness of his words. “He didn’t give me any orders last night, but if he ever does, I don’t know if I’ll be able to disobey him.”
“You disobeyed Morgan.”
“And it took me a few minutes to do it, and with extreme concentration,” said Samm. “Their control is almost impossible to break, the Trust even more so than the regular officers. If he really exerts himself, at close range, I don’t know that I’ll be able to do anything about it. Even in the best-case scenario, he can incapacitate me long enough to come after you.”
“And in the worst-case scenario,” said Kira, “he can control me, too. Assuming he even knows what I am.”
“Morgan didn’t,” said Samm. “But that doesn’t mean anything—obviously your father and Nandita knew that you were a Partial, but Morgan didn’t. We don’t know what Vale does or doesn’t know.”
“I’m beginning to realize the Trust couldn’t have been very . . . trusting,” said Kira. “It’s as if there were at least two different groups, with two different agendas.”
Samm nodded. “That explains some the existence of some contradictory evidence, but it doesn’t exactly explain what any of that evidence means. We need more information.”
“Which is probably in that center spire,” said Kira. “The building we were in yesterday seemed like it was exclusively medical. If Vale gives us the runaround again, that spire is our next priority.”
Samm nodded in agreement, then paused for a moment. “Did Nandita ever control you?”
“You mean with the link?”
“Yes,” said Samm. “Did you ever get the impression that you were being forced?”
“Not that I remember,” said Kira. She looked at him, feeling a pang of sadness for some of the things he’d been through. “What does it feel like?”
Samm let out a breath. “It can be hard to recognize,” he admitted. He paused, and the barest hint of a smile crept over his face. “Of course, for someone as pathologically independent as you, it might stand out a little more.”
Kira slapped him lightly on the arm. “I didn’t know Partials could tease.”
“I’m a good learner.”
“Either way,” said Kira. “I don’t think Nandita ever controlled me with the link, and I don’t know if Vale will even try.” She paused for a moment, suddenly concerned. “Whether or not he knows about me, though, he has to know you’re a Partial, right?”
“I can’t imagine he wouldn’t,” said Samm, “but then I can’t i
magine why he wouldn’t say anything about it, either. What does he have to gain by keeping it secret? Unless . . . maybe he knows we’re both Partials, but doesn’t know if we know he knows?”
Kira glanced at the door again, still closed. “It’s very possible. I think we need to operate as if he’s hiding something. Even if it’s just in his own self-interest. He couldn’t expose you as a Partial without exposing himself as one of the scientists who created us. These people aren’t as militant as we are in East Meadow, but they still don’t seem to like Partials, either. If they found out their doctor helped build the rebel army, they might not take it very well.”
“That’s the best guess I’ve come up with, too,” said Samm. “Either way, it’s bad news for us. He has a good thing going here, with a perfect little society, and our arrival—our very existence—threatens all of it. If the Partials follow us here, he’s done. If the humans follow us here, he’s done. If the truth about you or me or him ever gets out, all the secrecy falls apart and he’s done. His best possible courses of action would be to kill us or to keep us here indefinitely. Which is perhaps why he didn’t offer to help us understand the cure for RM yesterday.”
Kira frowned, troubled by the apparent inconsistency. “Unless he was being truthful earlier,” said Kira. “He said it wasn’t ‘portable.’ That might mean it needs to be refrigerated. Obviously we can’t haul something like that back across the whole continent. That said, at the very least he could give us the formula, or teach me the process. But he refused. Whatever’s going on, you’re right about the danger.”
“And we still don’t know where Heron is,” said Samm.
“Right.” Kira drummed her fingers on the floor, trying to sort through the mess of possibilities. “If she got too close, he’d detect her. He might have used the link to capture her.”
“Heron is much higher on the link hierarchy than most of us,” said Samm. “It’s part of the independence built into the espionage models.” He paused, thinking silently, then sighed—a distinctly human action that he must have picked up from so much time spent with Kira. She found it fascinating. “Still,” he continued, “she was subordinate to Morgan, and I imagine Vale is similar in his command of the link. He could have her imprisoned somewhere.”
“It’s also possible that she detected him first,” said Kira, “and stayed back. Knowing Heron, that seems more likely to me. For all we know, she might be trying to find the answers we’ve been looking for in another part of the compound.”
“The central spire,” Samm said again. “Since all the buildings here are apparently powered, she’d be able to access the computers pretty easily. That doesn’t mean she can access the information, though. Without Afa to hack through the security, I don’t know how any of us are going to do that.”
“Then she’d start with physical records,” said Kira. “Assuming Dr. Vale hasn’t just destroyed them all—if he’s trying to hide his identity, he might have destroyed a lot of old data.”
“Assuming he’s even trying to hide,” said Samm. “There’s always the chance that we’ve just completely misinterpreted everything about this place—maybe everybody knows who he is. We could learn a lot more if we had somebody here we could trust for straight answers.”
“I don’t trust Calix,” said Kira quickly, cutting him off before he could suggest it. “She’s clearly loyal to Vale.”
“He’s their leader,” said Samm. “Why wouldn’t she be loyal him?”
“That’s my point,” said Kira. “I’m not saying she’s a spy or anything, just . . . if we ask a lot of questions, it’ll get back to him.”
“And now you’re assuming there’s a conspiracy,” said Samm. “Just because Vale is shifty doesn’t make everyone here an enemy. The most likely scenario is that everyone here is just happy and oblivious.”
Kira shook her head. “Likely but not guaranteed. I don’t want to trust anyone until I know more of what’s going on.”
“That’s the one thing this society isn’t ready for,” said Samm. Kira looked up, and Samm smiled, just slightly, in the corner of his mouth. “You’re a rebel, Kira Walker. Even when there’s nothing to rebel against.”
Kira smiled back. “Maybe I was made this way. Are there any rebel-model Partials?”
“We started the Partial War,” he said simply. “Rebellion is the most human thing about us.”
The latch on the door clicked open, and Kira looked up in a rush, momentarily terrified about being caught before realizing that nothing they were doing was outwardly suspicious. Why wouldn’t the two newcomers be talking to each other? She only hoped no one had heard what they were saying.
Calix pushed the door open with her hip, carrying a pair of plates piled high with eggs and hash browns; both were liberally laced with red and green chili peppers, and after the chili last night, Kira got the distinct impression that whoever made the food around here liked it spicy. “You’re awake,” said Calix, setting the plates on a table by the wall—an oddly shaped remnant of the much larger conference table that once filled the room. She pulled forks from her pocket and gestured to the meal grandly. “Breakfast is served. And I invited a friend, if you don’t mind; I couldn’t carry everything by myself anyway.”
As if on cue there was a soft knock on the door, and Calix opened it to reveal a short young man with a broad face and a wicked grin. His arms were full of thick plastic cups and a hefty jug of water. “Thanks, Cal. Hey, guys, I’m Phan.”
“Hey,” said Kira. Her stomach growled audibly, and she grimaced in embarrassment. “Sorry. We haven’t had real food in months—this looks delicious.”
Phan laughed. “No problem, dig in.” He unscrewed the jug and started pouring cups of water. Kira realized that despite his height he was about her same age. “Sorry to barge in on your breakfast, but you’re kind of the most amazingly interesting thing that’s ever happened here in the history of ever.”
Kira chuckled. “I could say the same about you. We’ve always hoped there were more survivors, but we’d never been able to contact any.”
“Sit down and eat,” said Calix, guiding Samm to the table with a light touch on his arm. “Don’t worry about us, we already ate.”
“Take turns eating so one of you can talk,” said Phan, passing out the water. “Start with how on earth you were able to cross the wasteland—none of us has even made it as far as Kansas. We figured if we ever found a settlement it would be west, across the mountains.”
Kira swallowed her bite of potatoes—incredibly spicy, but nothing Nandita’s cooking hadn’t prepared her for—and asked a question of her own. “Has anyone crossed them?”
“They’ve never come back if they have,” said Calix. “We’ve gone far enough to know that the toxic wastes don’t go very far west. The mountains stop the wind, keeping most of the bad stuff out here on the plains, but even without the acid storms, the mountains are pretty dangerous. You’ve got to cross some pretty high passes to get over them, and a lot of the roads have washed away.”
“The best bet would be an excursion up north,” said Phan, “through Wyoming and around the tip of the range, but Vale won’t approve it. It’s as empty up there, and there’s no good place to hide from the storms. He has to make rules like this, since people like Calix are dumb enough to try it.”
“Shut up,” said Calix, throwing a wadded sock in Phan’s face.
“Do you always have to do what Vale says?” asked Kira. “I thought Laura was the mayor.”
“I didn’t become a hunter by ignoring good advice,” said Phan. “Vale, Laura, the other adults, they’re all just trying to keep us alive.”
Samm popped a thick slice of pepper in his mouth, apparently unfazed by the heat. “You’re a hunter, too?”
“I taught him everything he knows,” said Calix.
“And then I improved on it,” said Phan with a grin. He nodded toward Samm. “How about you?”
“We don’t really have hunters,” said Samm,
“at least not as a caste. I’m a soldier.”
Calix frowned. “Is it really that bad? With the Partials, I mean—do they attack you so often you need full-time soldiers?”
“We have to maintain some sort of defensive force,” said Kira, jumping in, “but most of us are other things—farmers and medics and stuff like that. We don’t have the cure, like you do, so a pretty big chunk of everything we do is dedicated to finding one.”
“How are you alive if you don’t have the cure?” asked Phan.
“Same as you,” said Kira, “we’re just immune. It’s the newborns who need the cure.”
“You’re just automatically immune?” asked Calix. “Just like that?”
Kira frowned. “You’re not?”
“Everyone in the Preserve was inoculated twelve years ago,” said Calix, “right after the Break. We’ve never heard of a . . . natural immunity. I though RM just killed everybody.”
It still boggled Kira’s mind that the people here had had a cure for so long—not that there’d been any way to get it from them, but just knowing that it was out there, that all the infants she’d watched die could have been saved, nearly broke her heart all over again.
“If people are naturally immune, there could be survivors everywhere,” said Phan. “We could bring people in from all over the continent—all over the world.”
Kira stole a glance at Samm, then looked back. “Would you let new people in? If we could bring people here?”
“Are you kidding?” asked Phan. “That’s like a dream come true. We’d probably make a red carpet just so we could roll it out for you.”
“They never let us explore too far, though,” said Calix. Her face and voice were more somber, suddenly, and she looked at Kira as she spoke—the first time she’d addressed her instead of Samm practically since they’d arrived. “We keep pushing for more expeditions into the Badlands, the younger generation especially, but the leaders don’t like it—they want us to stay close, where it’s safe. They say the Preserve has everything, but . . .” She gestured at Samm and Kira. “You’re the proof that it doesn’t. That’s why you need to tell us what’s out there, and who’s out there, so we can convince them to let us explore. Paradise or not, we can’t stay here forever.”