Partials

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

It was nearly midnight before they got far enough from East Meadow to feel comfortable speaking freely; a wide forest beyond the highway, away from the press of ever-present houses.

“There’s a cluster of farms to the north,” said Jayden, hiking carefully through the underbrush, “near a pair of old country clubs. One of them has a harbor, and we’re sure to find a boat there.”

“On the North Shore?” asked Kira. “There’s not a lot of settlements up there.”

“It’s tucked down into a bay,” said Jayden, “and relatively close to the Grid base in Queens. Not that we should have any trouble with them,” he added quickly, “but the closer to Queens we get, the shorter our distance across the sound.”

“Do you know the name of the bay?” asked Samm.

Jayden shook his head. “Does it matter?”

“I want to get a sense of where we’ll land on the other side.”

Jayden looked at him oddly. “How well do you know our island?”

“We’ve sent scouts, of course,” Samm answered, “but never very far inland, and obviously the maps we have from before are all uselessly out of date.”

“‘Never very far,’” said Xochi. “I told you no one was infiltrating the island.”

“I said we haven’t been,” said Samm quickly. “That doesn’t mean nobody is.”

“Who else could there be?” asked Kira. “There’s you and there’s us, right? Everyone else is dead — you said so yourself. Unless — are there more humans alive on the mainland?” She felt her heart leap at the thought — it was stupid and impossible, but just for a second, before she could catch herself, she wished that it was true.

Samm shook his head. “There are no other humans.”

“Then who?”

Samm glanced over his shoulder again. “We can talk about this later, right now we have to keep moving.”

“No,” said Jayden, standing in front of him and halting the group. “We just betrayed our own species to bust you out of jail, so you can cut it with the secretive crap and tell us what you know, now.” He stared Samm firmly in the face, and Kira became acutely aware of the rifles each young man was holding at his side. Samm stared back, his dark eyes analyzing Jayden like an insect pinned to a wall. He sighed.

“There are no other humans,” he said again. “But there are other groups of Partials.”

“What?” cried Marcus. “I thought you couldn’t make new ones?”

“Not new Partials,” Samm clarified. “We’re just … we’re not exactly unified anymore.”

Kira couldn’t read his expression in the dark, but she could tell the admission made him profoundly uncomfortable.

“This would have been good to know before we broke our own island in half,” said Marcus.

“But the link,” said Kira. “You have a chemical communication system that normalizes emotion and behavior — how can anyone ever rebel from that?”

“They have a hive mind?” asked Jayden.

“It’s not like that,” said Samm, “it’s like a … we don’t think the same thoughts, we just share them.”

“Let’s walk while we talk,” said Marcus. “We’re still being chased, you know.”

Samm nodded and started walking, and the others fell into step beside him. “The link is… I still don’t know how to describe it to you. It’s a sense. It’s like describing sight to someone who was born blind.”

“Is it a network device?” asked Jayden. “An implant? I thought we took everything when we bagged you in Manhattan.”

“Not a device,” said Samm, holding out his hands. “It’s just a … link. We’re all linked together.” He nodded slightly at the houses around them. “If we were a team of Partials, walking through these ruins at night, we’d all know, intuitively, how all the others were feeling. If Kira saw something that made her wary, she’d register that chemically, and we’d all sense it, and within seconds we’d all be wary: Our adrenaline would increase, our fight-or-flight response would prime, and the entire group would be ready for something only one of us saw. If someone in our group got hurt, or captured, we’d all be able to sense what was wrong and follow that sensation to wherever that soldier was.”

“Probably don’t get lost very often, then,” said Marcus. “If I could tell where the rest of you were, I wouldn’t ever wander off.”

“No,” said Samm firmly, “you wouldn’t.”

“Sounds like it could also tell you friend from foe,” said Jayden, nodding. “That would come in pretty handy.”

“It doesn’t work on humans,” said Samm, “because you don’t carry any data. But yes, it does help us identify other Partials who aren’t in our unit, which makes telling my faction from the others pretty simple. It also makes it easy for other factions to find me, which might be a problem.”

“But that’s the part I don’t get,” said Kira. “The link tells you friend from foe, it tells you one unit from another — it stands to reason it would carry authority as well, right? You were created as an army, with generals and lieutenants and privates and all that: Does the link tie into that command structure?”

Samm’s answer was stiff. “It does.”

“Then how could you split into factions? It doesn’t make sense.”

Samm said nothing, stomping irately through the underbrush. After a long pause he said, “After the—” and then stopped again almost immediately, standing in the middle of the road. “This isn’t easy to talk about.”

“You have disagreements,” said Kira simply. “Everyone has those, all the time—”

“We don’t,” said Samm. His voice was even, but Kira could sense an undercurrent of … frustration? “Is disobedience really so common among humans that you can’t understand why we’d want to obey? We’re an army; we obey our leaders. We follow our orders.” He set off down the road again. “Anyone who doesn’t is a traitor.”

“We’re coming up on a bridge,” said Xochi.

The group slowed, studying the terrain in the moonlight, then stopped to confer.

“A river?” asked Samm.

“Only in a really bad rainstorm,” said Kira. “That bridge goes over the expressway; most of these roads pass over it.”

“We want to follow it west,” said Jayden, “but probably not directly. Too easy for anyone following to find us.”

Kira wondered how long it would take Mkele to figure out what their plan was; as soon as he did, he’d be right on their tail. Sneaking off the island wouldn’t be the first thing he’d suspect, which might buy them some time. She set down her bags and stretched her back, twisting from side to side to pop out the kinks. “Do we want to cut west now, or after we cross?”

“Definitely after,” said Jayden. “It’ll be the least cover we pass through until we reach the water, so let’s get it out of the way.”

Kira pulled on her pack and shouldered her shotgun. “No sense waiting around then.”

They crept forward through the trees, eyes scanning the bridge ahead, ears alert for anything that stood out from the ambient sounds. This was beyond the reach of the old urban areas, just thick forests and old-growth trees. Lighter foliage on the right probably led to an old mansion, the grounds now overgrown with kudzu and hundreds of tiny saplings. The bridge was wide ahead, easily double the width of the back road they’d been following. They crossed another narrow road and ran through the trees to the thick cement barrier at the edge of the bridge.

“Nothing to do but do it,” said Marcus. They gripped their packs and guns, took a deep breath, and ran.

The bridge was shorter than the waterways they’d crossed on their trip to Manhattan, but her fear and tension gave Kira the same feeling of dangerous exposure. The expressway stretched out for miles in either direction — anyone looking would be able to see them. We just have to hope we made it here first. They plunged back into the trees on the far side, panting from exertion, taking quick stock of the area.

“Clear,” said Samm, lowering his rifle.

“I didn’t see anyone out there,” said Xochi.

“Doesn’t mean they didn’t see us,” said Jayden. “We can’t stop until we cross the sound.”

The road continued just a short way before hitting a T, and here they turned west to follow the curve of the expressway.

Marcus jogged forward to walk by Kira’s side. “How’s your leg?”

“Hardly worth mentioning, all things considered.” In truth it itched like mad, the aftereffects of the regen box, and it was all she could do not to roll up her pants and start gouging it with a stick. She couldn’t help but worry whether she’d overdone the treatments and ruined the tissue, but she forced herself not to think about it; there was nothing she could do out here anyway. “How are you?”

“Out on a moonlight stroll with the girl of my dreams,” he said, then added, “and Xochi, and Jayden, and an armed Partial. So pretty much my secret fantasy come true.”

“Tell us more about the—” Xochi started, but then a horse whinnied, and the group stopped abruptly.

“Now I’ve made the horses jealous,” said Marcus, but Jayden shushed him with a gesture.

“It came from over there,” he whispered, pointing to the north side of the road. “One of the farms I told you about.”

“So we’re close?”

“Not nearly, but we’re on the right track. We follow this road west until … until we smell seawater, I guess. If you’d told me we were coming out here tonight, I’d have brought a map.”

“West, then,” said Kira, “and quietly.”

They followed the winding road until it reached a new stretch of buildings, though even here the road was still heavily forested, and the buildings removed from the road. They rose empty and ominous from the trees, too far from arable land to be useful as farms, yet too close to the North Shore to be useful as anything else. Even bandits stayed away from here.

They continued in silence. A mile or so later the road crossed a major street, and the old world had commemorated the occasion with a strip mall, now cracked and crumbling. They debated heading north, but Jayden insisted they stay west for another mile at least.

“If we go north too soon we could get trapped in the middle of the farms, away from the water,” he said. “What was your plan, just go north until you ran out of land?”

“Pretty much,” said Kira. “There are boats everywhere.”

They heard a low rumble from behind them; an engine.

“They’re closer than I thought,” said Jayden, “and that engine sound means they’re using the jeeps. They must really be serious.” He paused, sucking in a breath. “They have maps and we don’t, they have the advantage. I admit that. But I promise you: If we go north now, we’ll get trapped between the soldiers and the farms. Someone is bound to find us.”

“This looks like it used to be a housing development behind the strip mall,” said Marcus. “We can weave through there and avoid most of their patrols.”

“Are you sure they’re not tracking us?” asked Samm. “They should be going slower than this if they’re stopping to search.”

“They don’t have to search for us, they know where we’re going,” said Xochi, echoing Kira’s thoughts from earlier. “They’re trying to reach the water first.”

“Then we go north,” said Samm. “We need to stay ahead of them.”

“You’re the boss,” said Jayden, but she could tell he didn’t like it. They stuck to the main road now, practically jogging to keep the right pace. The wide street was relatively clear, and they could move quickly even in the dim light. Xochi and Marcus were breathing heavily, struggling to keep up, and Kira was wincing with every other step, feeling lances of pain through her burned leg every time it hit the ground. Soon they heard more engines behind them, getting closer each minute, and the next time Kira turned, she saw lights behind them like glowing eyes.

“Get off the road,” she grunted, and the group dove into the greenery, burying themselves behind tree trunks and kudzu. Three small jeeps roared past, engines snarling like wild animals. Kira counted four or five soldiers in each one.

“They’re not even looking for us,” said Kira.

Marcus leaned out to peer back down the road. “Nothing behind them. You think it’s a coincidence?”

“They’re trying to cut us off,” said Samm. “The only good news is that them being here means we’re probably on the right path.”

“Doesn’t do us any good now,” said Jayden. “We have to go west.”

“We don’t know what’s west of here,” said Kira. “For all we know we’d be running straight into the Grid army. These could just be outriders.”

“It’s smarter to stay on the path northward,” Samm agreed. “At least this way we know what we’re getting into.”

“Okay,” said Marcus, “but we stay in the trees. Now that they’re ahead of us, they could be waiting somewhere and watching the road.”

The trees slowed them down, and they moved almost by feel through the thick woods. Several times they had to cross side streets, and every time Kira held her breath, certain they would hear a cry of alarm, or worse yet a gunshot. Nothing came. When they reached a long stretch of ruins — old shops and offices — they crossed the main road to the far side, sticking to the cover of the woods.

Eventually even those woods thinned, and Kira looked out across a wide expanse of streets and cross streets and flat, empty parking lots. Squat buildings rose up like fat, sagging mushrooms, and the pavement was cracked and dotted with weeds and trees, but even so it was terrifyingly open.

“Another strip mall,” she whispered. “We can’t cross this.”

“You want to go around?” asked Marcus, crouching down to catch his breath. “Or just turn west? We’ve been walking north for miles now, surely we’re close to the bay Jayden was talking about.”

“That or we’ve gone too far,” said Jayden, “and we’re about to run straight into the farms.”

“I don’t know how much longer I can go,” said Xochi. Kira could barely see her face in the darkness, but her voice was starting to slur with exhaustion.

“We can’t stop,” Samm insisted.

“We don’t have your endurance,” said Jayden. “I’ve trained for this, but they could collapse at any moment. We’ve been running for what, nine miles? Ten?”

“Eight point four,” said Samm. He didn’t even seem tired.

“I’m fine,” wheezed Marcus, but Kira thought he looked ready to fall over. Xochi could barely even talk.

“We go west,” said Kira. “The sooner we get into a boat, the sooner we can rest.”

Xochi nodded and lurched forward, pained but determined. Samm jogged forward to take the lead, and the rest fell into a slow, limping line behind him.

The side road slanted west around the strip mall, then slowly curved south again. Samm gave another signal and then dropped into the bushes, waiting in tense, rasping silence as a pair of horses clopped past them. They waited longer, giving the horses time to get far ahead, then crawled to their feet and pressed forward, shambling painfully on legs too tired to move any faster. Kira’s burn was agonizing now, an unrelenting fire deep inside her leg. She curled her hands into tight fists, taking short breaths and trying not to think about it. I just need to make it to that tree. Just that one tree, and then I’ll be fine. Just a few more steps. Now that tree, just beyond. That’s all I have to do. One tree at a time.

“I can smell the ocean,” said Samm, and soon Kira could as well — salty and heavy, cool and bracing in the night air. They redoubled their efforts, panting loudly, no longer caring about stealth but simply trying not to stop. The trees gave way to another shopping center, and another beyond that. Marcus walked closer to Kira now, shaky as well but doing his best to support her. She clung to his arm and hobbled forward.

“This way,” said Samm, turning north on the next road. Moonlight glistened on a silver expanse of water, smooth as black glass, and Kira looked eagerly for a boat. There was nothing.

“It’s too shallow here,” she panted. “We have to keep going.”

“‘Boats all over the North Shore,’” Jayden muttered. Kira didn’t have the breath to respond.

Samm led them through a wide courtyard, wading through waist-high saplings with buildings on every side. They heard more hoofbeats on the road behind them, and they collapsed into the underbrush with abject exhaustion. This time the riders stopped, their horses slowly turning as they examined the area.

“Think it was them?” said one.

“That or a cat,” said the other. They eased their horses closer, still looking around. Moonlight glinted faintly off the long metal lines of their rifles.

“Too much noise for a cat,” said the first. “Give me the light.”

Kira didn’t dare to move or even breathe. The second rider pulled a flashlight from his saddlebag and handed it to the first, who clicked it on and shined it at the building on their left — a church of some kind, broken and leafy. Samm moved his rifle into position, sighting carefully at the first rider, but Kira shook her head: We can’t afford the noise.

We can’t kill our own people.

There was a soft knock on a far wall, and the riders looked up in unison. They shined the light on the building, but Kira couldn’t see anything. They led their horses toward it, and Xochi whispered softly.

“I threw a rock. Let’s get out of here before they come back.”

They crept backward through the brush, inch by inch, always keeping their eyes on the riders. Marcus stood and hurled another rock, farther this time, and the riders paused, listened, and finally followed it. Kira stood as well, leaning on Samm as she rose, and the group backed around the corner of the ruined church.

“There’s more over there,” Samm whispered, pointing west toward the bay. He looked at Kira, his eyes lost in shadow. “Sooner or later we’re going to have to shoot someone.”

Kira closed her eyes, trying to clear her head. “I know this is dangerous, and I know it might come to guns — that’s why we have them. But I don’t want to shoot anybody if we can get away with it.”

“We might not have a choice,” said Samm.

The bushes rustled behind them, and Kira heard the stamp and snort of the horses. Samm raised his rifle, but Kira stopped him again.

They waited, holding their breath, praying for the soldiers to move on. An eternity later, they did.

“They’re moving south,” Samm whispered. “Don’t waste it — move.”

The group was practically running now, watching the ground in front of their feet because they couldn’t see any farther. The road plunged into forest, and soon the dark shape of a massive house rose out of the trees beside them.

“There,” said Kira. “A lot of these mansions have private docks.”

They swerved to the left, through the grounds and around the house to the harbor. The yard behind was a maze of exotic plants and flowers that must have once been a giant garden. They followed a winding, overgrown path to the edge of the sound, black water lapping softly against the shore, but there was no dock and no boat. The ground was soft and marshy, and they slogged north to the next mansion, their heavy shoes becoming even heavier with mud. The next house had a narrow wooden walkway that turned into a dock, and their feet clumped loudly as they ran out over the water to a large white boat.

“Hallelujah,” Kira whispered, but Samm shook his head.

“The water level’s dropped, or the shore’s been packed with sediment. It’s sitting up on mud.”

Kira looked again and saw that the boat was listing slightly to the side, pushed up out of the water and tilted over toward one edge. “What do we do?”

“The marsh goes on forever,” said Samm, looking north. “It’s this or nothing.”

“Then we push it out,” said Jayden. He stowed his rifle over his shoulder and jumped into the water with a splash. It reached almost to his waist. He put a hand on the boat and rocked it; it didn’t move easily, but it moved. “Everybody get in here.”

Kira glanced over her shoulder nervously before jumping into the sound, gasping in shock at the cold water. The others followed, bracing their shoulders against the hull and heaving in unison. It tilted but didn’t move; Kira slipped in the mud, barely catching herself before falling face-first in the icy water.

“Again,” said Samm, setting himself firmly against the side. Everyone got into position. “One, two, three, push.” They strained against the slick side of the boat, pushing with all their strength. It moved a few inches. “Again,” said Samm. “One, two, three, push.” They shoved against the boat with everything they had, moving it another few inches — farther this time, but not far enough. “Again,” said Samm. “One, two—”

A light clicked on, blinding them — a bright white beam from a flashlight on the dock, shining against the white boat and lighting up the entire group. They froze, blinking, too shocked to move. The holder of the flashlight said nothing, simply staring, twenty yards away.

I have my gun, thought Kira, feeling its weight on her back. I can pull it around in seconds. But will it do any good? We can’t push this out before backup comes looking — we can’t get away even if we fight back.

Nobody moved.

The light clicked off.

“Clear!” the silhouette shouted. It was a girl’s voice. Yoon. “There’s nothing here. I checked out the sound; just an old boat shifting in the waves.” The silhouette waited, watching, then turned and walked away. Kira realized she’d been holding her breath, and let it out softly.

“Was that the girl who went to Manhattan with you?” asked Marcus. “I think we owe her a cookie.”

“I think we owe her a whole damn bakery,” said Xochi. “If I wasn’t hip deep in mud, I would kiss her on the mouth.”

“Shut up,” said Jayden. “They heard us before, they’ll hear us again.” He braced himself against the boat one more time and mouthed, One, two, three. They pushed, moving the boat nearly a foot this time. They pushed again, then again, over and over, dragging the boat nearly twenty feet through the shallow marsh. Forty feet. Eighty feet. They could see more lights on the shore, more searchers. They pushed the boat again, forcing it through the mud, praying the soldiers wouldn’t hear them.

The water got deeper as the harbor opened up, and soon the boat was floating freely, they pushed it even farther, toward water deep enough to take their added weight. Samm helped them into the boat, then climbed in himself. Marcus and Jayden found oars, and they pushed north toward open water.

“We’re safe,” Kira sighed. Xochi was already asleep.

“Safe from your people,” said Samm, looking north toward the mainland. “Now we have to face mine.”

CHAPTER THIRTY

“We’re going to land near Mamaroneck,” said Samm. He squinted at the sky, then back at the distant shore. “I think.”

The bay they had left was long and thin, and they didn’t dare to try the boat’s motor until the shores on either side fell away and the dark blue sound opened up around them. It worked fitfully, but it worked, and they headed north as straight as they could until the sky began to lighten and the featureless horizon became tinged with the green and brown of the mainland. They angled toward it, curving west. Kira hoped the motor would last until they got there; she was far too tired to row.

“Mamaroneck?” asked Jayden. “That might actually be a sillier name than Asharoken.”

“Mamaroneck is a good spot,” said Samm. “It’s a little farther south than I’d like to be, but nobody’s stationed there. We should be able to land without being seen.”

“How important is it that we aren’t seen?” asked Marcus. “These different factions — are we talking about differing movie opinions or full-scale holy war opinions?”

“If they see us, they’ll attack us,” said Samm. “I’ll be imprisoned and used for leverage in one dispute or another, and I don’t know what they’ll do to you.”

Kira looked up at the stars. “I take it not all the factions are as friendly as yours.”

“Mine isn’t especially friendly either,” he said quickly. “Just because they sent a peace proposal doesn’t mean they’ll open their arms to any human that walks in. Our disagreements with the other factions are … heated, and that’s made us cautious, and over time that’s made us suspicious. We still have to approach carefully.”

“How can we tell the factions apart?” asked Xochi. “Do you have different uniforms, or… I don’t know, different-colored hats?”

“I don’t know if you can without the link,” said Samm. “My faction is called D Company, and most of us still wear that insignia, but honestly by the time you’re that close it’s probably too late. We’re talking about a war zone.”

The motor cut out again, sputtering to a stop. Jayden stood up, yanking on the pull cord a few useless times, then hit it with a wrench and yanked again. The motor came back on with a sound even feebler than before.

“Old gas,” said Jayden, throwing the wrench back into the bottom of the boat. “It’s either killing the engine or running out. Either way we’re going to end up rowing the last mile or two.”

“Who are we going to run into?” asked Kira, looking at Samm. “How much of a war zone are we talking about?”

“The main group of rebels is north,” said Samm, “in a place called White Plains, and beyond that in Indian Point. They’re the ones who run the reactor.”

“Whoa,” said Xochi, “a nuclear reactor?”

“Of course,” said Samm. “How else would we get our energy?”

“Solar panels,” said Xochi simply. “That’s what we use.”

“And it’s probably sufficient for your needs,” said Samm. “The nuclear plant in Indian Point used to power hundreds of millions of homes before the war — now that there’s not much more than a million of us left, it generates more than enough for anything we could ever need. The rebels maintain it. D Company found a way to tap into it a few years ago, and they still haven’t noticed.”

“But nuclear power is dangerous,” said Xochi. “What if something happens? What if it leaks or melts down or whatever?”

“A lot of them did,” said Samm. “When RM hit and the humans started dying — when you really started to disappear, and we knew there was nothing we could do to stop it — we found as many nuclear plants as we could and then shut them down safely. There’s another one in Connecticut, just sixty miles away from you guys across the sound.” He pointed to the northeast. “If that had gone into meltdown, you’d probably all be dead.”

“Right,” said Jayden derisively. “The noble Partials trying to save mankind.”

Samm nodded. “Haven’t you ever wondered why the world isn’t more messed up than it is? Why the cities aren’t burning, why the air isn’t black with nuclear fallout? You died too quickly — some of you had time to shut off the power plants and the factories before you disappeared, but not everyone, and all it takes is one unattended reactor to cause a lethal meltdown. Even when we realized what was happening, we couldn’t shut them all down; we lost one in New Jersey, and another in Philadelphia, and more and more as you move west across the continent. That’s why we tend to stay east of the Hudson. Other parts of the world had even more reactors than we did, but without an army of Partials to step in and stop them, we think a lot more of them may have gone critical. Maybe as many as half.”

Nobody spoke. The coughing buzz of the motor filled the boat. We always wondered if there were more survivors, thought Kira. The RM immunity would have left the same percentage alive in other countries that it left in ours.

Is it really possible that everyone else is dead?

“The question about what to do with you is what eventually split us apart,” Samm continued softly. “Some wanted to just finish you off, but most of us, like I said, wanted to save you. Even then, we couldn’t agree on the best way to do it. The arguments grew … heated. To say the least. And then the first wave of our leaders started dying, and it all fell apart. D Company is practically all that’s left of the truly obedient Partials — the only ones with a direct link to the Trust.”

“And what’s the Trust?” asked Kira.

“The senior command,” said Samm, “the generals of the Partial army, and probably from advanced genetic templates, because none of them have died. Well — none of them have died from an inherent expiration date. There were eight of them, men and women, but I think the rebels may have killed two, or at least captured them.” His voice changed as he said this, and his expression grew dark. “It was the Trust that told D Company where to make our base, and when to approach the humans.”

“I’m getting the impression that D Company is relatively small,” said Marcus. “That’s wonderful — we finally form an alliance, and it’s with a persecuted splinter group just as messed up as we are. This’ll make the rest of the Partials even more determined to kill us.”

The engine died again, and this time no amount of yanking and beating and swearing could get it running again. Samm and Marcus took the first turn at the oars, pulling hard toward the shore, and soon the green line became dotted with white: a wide harbor filled with boats. They reached the first line in just half an hour: large yachts anchored far from shore, covered stem to stern with seagull droppings. Kira wrinkled her nose in disgust.

“I was hoping to trade up for a new boat, but these are unusable.”

“They’re too big anyway,” said Samm, stowing his oars as their boat bumped gently against the stained hull of another. “We can’t row them, and I assume none of us knows how to sail.” They shook their heads. “At the very least we can stop and look for supplies.”

“Okay,” said Kira, “but not this one. I don’t want us getting … bird flu, or bird diarrhea, or whatever that stuff will give you.”

Samm nodded.

They rowed to the next boat, then the next, working their way farther into the harbor until finally finding a yacht that looked clean enough to board — still filthy, but not as bad, and their options were running out. They maneuvered around to the back, where the name Show Me the Money III was emblazoned across it in faded letters. Marcus gripped the stern while Samm climbed aboard.

“The rest of you wait here,” said Samm. He climbed over and descended into the depths of the yacht, and Marcus leaned close to Kira.

“What do you think?” he whispered. “Do you still trust him?”

“He hasn’t done anything to change my mind,” said Kira.

“Not directly, no,” said Marcus, “but that story was… I don’t know. It’s a lot to take in.”

“At least it’s plausible,” said Jayden. “We’ve always wondered why the Partials turned around and left eleven years ago, and why they’ve never attacked us since. If they’re too busy fighting one another to bother with us, that makes a little more sense.”

“I’m still suspicious,” said Marcus. “Something about this place doesn’t feel right.”

Samm emerged with an armload of objects from the yacht. “Bad news,” he said. “According to the boat’s harbor papers, we’re in Echo Bay, not Mamaroneck, which means we’ve gone a lot farther west than I thought. There’s a map here that should help us get back on track.” He handed the items down to Kira, who took them carefully into their boat: a map, a pair of binoculars, a deck of cards, and a pile of clothes and blankets. “I haven’t had a change of clothes since you captured me,” said Samm, stripping off his rumpled uniform. “Plus this yacht is filthy.” Kira couldn’t help but stare at his chest and arms, more chiseled than she would have expected after two weeks of being tied to a chair. She looked away after a second, feeling foolish, while Samm stripped down to his underwear and dove into the water. Marcus glanced at Kira, giving her his You can’t be serious look, but Xochi watched the athletic Partial surface with obvious appreciation. He climbed back into their boat, dried himself as best he could with a blanket, and slipped into a new set of clothes.

Kira unfolded the map, searching the sound for Echo Bay. “You’re right,” she said. “This is a lot farther west than I thought. Where is D Company?”

Samm looked over her shoulder, pointing at a spot along the coast. “Greenwich; like you, we built our city around a hospital. Looks like it’s about twelve, thirteen miles away.”

“That’s not bad,” said Jayden.

“It’s not,” said Samm, “but that route goes through rebel territory, here.” He pointed at a spot about halfway along. “We could search for another boat and try to skirt the coast, but I don’t recommend it. Our engine barely made it here, and I think there’s a storm coming.”

“I don’t exactly want to travel through enemy territory, though,” said Kira. “We won’t be able to hide, thanks to your link — as soon as they get close, they’ll know exactly where you are.”

“Also true.” Samm nodded.

“We’ve still got gas,” said Jayden, checking the engine. “That means the problem’s with the motor itself.”

“Then let’s find a new boat,” said Kira. “The longer we can go before walking, the better. Our nine-mile run last night almost killed us.”

They rowed through the harbor, searching for a boat they could handle, and finally found one docked on the side of a much larger yacht — a lifeboat, maybe, or a backup designed for emergencies. Samm climbed aboard, peeled off the cracking canvas cover, and fired up the motor. It started on the fourth try and purred much more evenly than their first boat. He and Marcus and Jayden managed to unhook it from the yacht and dump it into the water, and then the five travelers transferred their gear from one boat to the next. It was much smaller — a rowboat with a motor, not the fancy motorboat they’d been riding in thus far — but it held them, and the engine worked, and Marcus steered them back out of the harbor and north toward D Company.

“Farther out from the shore,” said Samm. Marcus steered away from land, deeper into the sound, and Samm watched the shore with nervous eyes. “Farther.”

“Too much farther and we can’t see the shore at all anymore,” said Marcus. “We’ll get lost again.”

“I can see the shore just fine,” said Samm. “Which means anyone on the shore can see us. Go farther.”

Marcus frowned and glanced at Kira, but steered farther out into the water. The mainland was a distant line on the horizon now, barely even visible. Samm watched it intently, giving Marcus minor course corrections when necessary. Kira and Xochi and Jayden lay in the bow, draped uncomfortably over the fiberglass benches, trying to get some sleep.

It was Marcus who first spotted the storm.

“How long have we been out here?” he asked, his hand still guiding the rudder. “Is the sky supposed to be that dark this early in the morning?”

“Wind’s picked up as well,” said Samm. “It’s cooler than it was a few minutes ago.”

“I’ve seen a few of these sound storms from the shore,” said Jayden, sitting up. He looked worried. “They get pretty heavy out here, or at least it always looks that way.”

“I’ll turn toward shore,” said Marcus, but Samm stopped him.

“We’re passing rebel territory right now,” he said, looking at the map and then peering back out to the north. “It’s not safe.”

“Have you seen the sky?” asked Marcus, pointing to the thick gray clouds. “That’s not exactly safe either.”

“This boat barely fits us,” said Kira. The water was choppy now, bucking the boat gently as they plowed forward through the waves. “If it gets too rough out here, we’ll flip right over.”

“We can’t go in,” Samm insisted. “It’s too dangerous.”

“Then everybody hold on,” said Marcus. “This is about to get a lot more exciting than we’d planned for.”

The storm raced toward them, and they to it; Kira felt fat drops of rain on her face, mingling with the salty spray of the sea. They pulled out their blankets and cowered under them for shelter, but the rain seemed to be coming almost horizontally with the wind. The sky grew dark above them, an eerie half-light, and the small boat started rolling with the waves.

“I’m going closer to shore,” said Marcus, turning the rudder before Samm could protest. “It’s impossible to see in this storm anyway — no one’s going to spot us.”

The storm grew worse, the drops giving way to thin, slashing knives of rain. Kira gripped the side of the boat tightly, holding on to Xochi with her other hand, certain that each new wave would be the one to dump them over the side. She was soaked to the bone. It was nearly as dark now as it had been last night.

“Get us closer to shore,” she shouted to Marcus, grabbing Xochi’s arm even tighter as another wave lurched the ship up and sideways.

“I’m going straight toward it already,” shouted Marcus. “Or at least I was last time I could see it. I’m just afraid the ocean’s trying to turn us around.”

“We’re too heavy,” shouted Jayden. “We have to lighten the load.”

Kira tossed her backpack over the side, keeping her guns and strapping her medkit tight around her shoulders. Xochi dug through her bag and Marcus’s, salvaging what ammunition she could, then threw the rest over after Kira’s. The boat rocked violently until it seemed to Kira that they were being tossed around almost at random. She had no idea what direction they were pointing, or where they were going, when suddenly a giant rock appeared through the rain ahead of them. Marcus swore and turned to the side, trying to miss it, but another wave of rain slashed down and covered it again, plunging them back into the same gray chaos as before. She thought she saw a tree to her left — a tree, in the middle of the ocean — but it disappeared so quickly she couldn’t be sure. We must be near the shore, Kira thought, it’s the only explan— and then a giant white shape loomed out of the water beside them, slamming into them with a boom that nearly tipped the boat. It was another yacht, straining against its anchor before being pulled back under the waves. A surge of water picked them up, nearly throwing them through the air, and Kira heard herself screaming, felt herself choking on rain and seawater splashing up from over the side. Water sloshed madly in the bottom of the boat, but they were still upright.

“Hold on!” she shouted, useless and obvious, but she felt powerless and had to say something. The wind roared in her ears and blew mad shapes through the rain around them. Another yacht reared up, missing them by half an arm’s length, and then they were once again lost in the roiling limbo of the open sea.

Marcus was shouting, but she couldn’t hear the words. He pointed, and she turned to look; the rain was so fierce she could barely see, squinting her eyes almost shut to keep out the rock-hard pellets of rain. She saw it too late, but doubted there would be anything she could have done anyway — a massive black wave, as high as building, crashing toward them from the side. She had just enough presence of mind to take a breath and hold it, and then the wave struck and the world went away.

Space became meaningless — there was no up or down, no left or right, just force and pressure and acceleration, ripping her through a cold, seething nothingness. She lost her grip on Xochi’s arm, then found it again, clinging desperately to the only solid thing in the universe. The wave carried her farther, dragging her through the formless void until she thought her lungs would burst, and suddenly she was in the air, tumbling. She took a breath just in time to hit a wall of water and have it knocked out of her again. She held fiercely to the arm, never letting go, irrationally certain that it was the only thing keeping her alive. The second wave passed and she bobbed up from the water, sucking in a long, desperate breath half mixed with seawater. She choked and breathed again. Another wave crashed down, and she was gone.

Rocks. Heat. Kira woke with a start, trying to get her bearings, disoriented by the sudden change from angry ocean to solid ground. She coughed, spitting up slick, salty water.

“You’re alive,” said a voice. Samm. She looked around, finding herself in some kind of marsh next to a low rock wall. Samm knelt against it, looking out with the binoculars. Beyond the wall, the sea lay still and placid.

“We’re on land,” said Kira, still trying to process the situation. “What happened?” She looked around in sudden panic. “Where are the others?”

“Over there,” said Samm, pointing across the water. Kira crawled toward him, her legs too weak to stand, and clambered up to lean against the wall. “The big building, just to the right,” he said. He handed her the binoculars. “I wasn’t sure it was them at first, but it is.”

Kira searched for the big building he’d pointed to, then looked to the right, probing slowly across the landscape. She saw movement and snapped onto it, looking carefully: three people. She couldn’t see them clearly, but she was fairly certain she recognized their clothes.

“We’re all alive, then,” she said, staring at the one she thought was Marcus. “I grabbed someone underwater. I thought it was Xochi.”

“It was me,” said Samm simply, still scanning the horizon.

Kira crouched next to him. “What is that, an island?”

“The other side of the bay,” said Samm. “It looks like the storm dropped us right where we needed to go — though obviously in two separate groups. I guess we can’t complain too much.”

“This is Greenwich?”

“Close enough,” said Samm. “If I’ve got our location right, your friends are actually closer than we are.”

“We need to signal them,” said Kira. “They keep looking out to sea — they don’t know we’re over here.”

“Too dangerous,” said Samm. “Even if you could shout that far, any Partials in the area would hear you first and get to us first as well.”

“We can’t just let them wonder.”

“If they’re smart, they’ll head inland, looking for anything that can tell them where they are. We can go up around the bay and find them.”

“We can find another boat and row over there—”

“No we can’t,” said Samm firmly. “This is close to Greenwich, but it’s south, and that means rebel territory. They watch these waters, looking for D Company — the only reason they didn’t see us come in was the storm concealing us. If we row out across the bay, we’ll be spotted for sure.”

“Then won’t they be spotted as well?”

“Not if they wise up and get out of the open,” said Samm. “They’re actually safer here than we are — I’ll automatically link to any other Partials in range, but you humans are effectively invisible. No one expects to find humans on the mainland, so we don’t look for them; we rely too heavily on the link. If those three stay smart, they can move through the entire area without being caught.”

“Great for them,” said Kira, still watching her friends through the binoculars. “How are we going to get past the rebels?”

Samm held up a waterlogged blanket, one of the ones they’d found in the old yacht, and started ripping it into strips. “The link data is transmitted primarily through our breath. If I cover my mouth and nose tight enough, I should be able to mask my presence. A little.” He frowned.

“Are you going to be able to breathe?”

“That’s why this isn’t a perfect solution,” he said. “A gas mask isn’t perfect, but it’s much better. I don’t know how much the rebels know about the mission we launched in Manhattan, but it’s conceivable that things have escalated, and if so, that’s what their scouts will be wearing. They’re the ones we’ll have to be careful of, because I won’t know they’re coming until it’s too late.” He wrapped the wet black cloth around his face, covering his mouth and nose and tying the ripped blanket tightly behind his head. He took a deep breath, trying it out, then tied another strip over the first to give it more grip.

“This should work for a while.” His words were muffled, only barely discernible. Kira nodded and followed him back through the grounds of an old manor house, wishing she’d managed to keep hold of her guns in the shipwreck. She didn’t like the prospect of meeting other Partials without them.

The manor house turned out to be on a small, rounded promontory, connected back to land by a series of narrow asphalt lanes. They crossed each one at a run, crouching low and then ducking behind the nearest spray of foliage, looking for signs that they’d been spotted. If there were other Partials watching, they kept themselves hidden. Kira looked back across the harbor whenever she could, hoping to catch a glimpse of her lost friends, but they were hidden as well. She doubled her pace, desperate to round the harbor and find them before they wandered too far away.

Samm led her through a small shipyard, full of dry, cracking boats and rusted tracks leading down into the water. Beyond that was an old park, overgrown with trees and kudzu, yet originally big enough, Kira estimated, to have made for a series of good-size cornfields. It surprised her that the Partials hadn’t planted it, but she supposed a war zone wasn’t the best place, and this was, as she understood it, the outskirts of the Partial civilization. Perhaps all their farms were farther north? Or did they get food by some other means she couldn’t guess at? It bothered her, suddenly, how little she really knew about the Partials: Here she was, in unknown territory, trusting the enemy she’d been raised to hate. The reason she was an orphan. The reason she’d learned to fire a gun at eight years old.

Do I really know what I’m doing?

Samm led her away from the water’s edge, into the wooded park where they’d be harder to see. He moved quickly but carefully, his eyes darting back and forth, examining not only their flanks but the ground and the trees above them. Kira fell into rhythm beside him, watching for ambush, avoiding fallen branches. They passed a funeral home, and she studied it solemnly. Death seemed to hover in the air.

Beyond the trees they came to a highway, flanked on the far side by another row of thick trees. It cut through the forest like a hallway, and Samm peered down it in both directions — flat to the west, and climbing a small hill to the east. “We’ll make better time on this than next to it,” he said. “It doesn’t take us through the town, just around the edge, so there might not be anybody watching.”

“Will it take us to Marcus and the others?”

“They’ll have to cross it, too.” Samm nodded. He pointed toward a curve in the road, far to the east. “That’s the end of the peninsula, if I’m remembering correctly. If they haven’t already crossed, we can catch them there.”

They ran quickly, making up for lost time; the highway was raised, with extra layers of asphalt between it and the dirt below, and nothing had managed to grow through. No one crossed their path, ahead or behind them. Soon the road began to rise, and Kira realized with shock that the rest of the country wasn’t rising with it — it wasn’t a hill, just an elevated road. Smaller roads began passing underneath it.

“Stop,” she said. “We may have already missed them.”

“I was thinking the same thing.”

“We need to find them.”

“We’re almost to the base now,” said Samm, shaking his head. “We should go straight there and then send out a search party — they’ll find your friends better than we can.”

“Unless someone else finds them first,” said Kira. She looked out from the elevated road, trying to see through the gaps in the trees below. “We can’t just leave them out here for the rebels to find.”

“I don’t think they will,” said Samm, tapping his face mask. The link.

“Then you go,” said Kira, “and I’ll look for Marcus. Your search-and-rescue team can find me just as easily as they can find them.”

“We can’t split up again,” Samm insisted. His voice was low, barely audible through his makeshift mask. He seemed jumpy for the first time, and Kira felt herself grow nervous at the sight of it.

“What’s wrong?”

She heard the roar of an engine, a distant echo through the trees, and she went pale.

“You use cars, too?”

“Electric, mostly, but yes. There’s an oil refinery farther north.”

Kira glanced up and down the highway, trying to pinpoint the sound. “Behind us?”

“I think so.” He started jogging forward. “We have to run.”

“We don’t have time,” said Kira, peering over the edge of the sidewall. It was at least twenty feet down, but the trees were crowded close, and she thought she could reach one. “We need to climb down.”

“We can’t go down,” said Samm fiercely, rushing back to grab her arm. “We have to move forward.”

“The engines are getting closer, we don’t have time to—”

“There are rebels down there,” he whispered urgently.

Kira dropped to her knees, crouching behind the wall. “You’re linking with them?”

“I can’t help it.”

Which means they know we’re here. Kira stared at him, studying his eyes. We don’t have weapons. We can’t fight. The enemy already knows we’re here.

Do they know my friends are here as well?

“How close?” Kira whispered.

Samm grimaced. “It’s not that precise when it’s muffled like this, but I can tell they’re close. Seventy, eighty yards.”

“That’s pretty precise,” said Kira. “You think they heard us talking?”

Sam shook his head. “They’re on alert, but it might not be for us. We have no way of knowing until they’re closer, and then if we’re wrong, it’s too late.”

Kira punched the concrete with the side of her hand, swearing under her breath. I’m not going to let them get captured. She took a deep breath, shaking her head at her own stupidity, and stood up. “We’re going down.”

“We can’t go down.”

She jogged to the spot with the closest tree, looked at the underbrush two stories below, and clambered onto the sidewall. Samm pulled her back, and she shook him off. “I’m not leaving my friends,” she said firmly. “You can either come with me or go for help.” She climbed back up, balancing carefully, and tried to gauge the distance. Seven feet. Maybe ten. That’s long for a standing jump, but I’ll get extra distance as I fall.

Which is not very encouraging.

“Don’t do it, Kira.”

She jumped.

She kept her hands wide and wrapped her arms around the biggest branch she could, catching it with her elbows and swinging wildly beneath it. The tree caught her as she caught it, and the rough branches dug sharply into her skin and clothes. The tree shook with a second shudder, and she saw that Samm had followed her. She smiled. “Thanks.”

“You’re crazy,” he muttered.

“That’s what everyone keeps saying.”

They climbed down quickly, hearing the roar of the engine grow louder and louder. The sound split as it neared, becoming two engines, then three, then four. Kira dropped the last few feet to the ground and raced into the underpass, crouching in the shadow of a thick concrete pillar. Samm threw himself down beside her, and they listened as the cars rumbled overhead, streaking away to the east and slowly fading into the distance.

Kira whistled. “That was close.”

“Not as close as it’s going to be,” said Samm. His voice was stiff and strained.

“Are you hurt?”

“No,” he grunted, “just … what’s your plan?”

“They can’t sense me coming, right? So I’m going to jump one from behind and take his gun.”

“They can’t sense you on the link, Kira, but that doesn’t mean you’re invisible.”

“How much can they sense from you?” she asked. “Thoughts? Motive?”

“Not exactly,” he said, “more like health, proximity, emotional state. Things like that. I won’t be able to glean anything from them that would help you grab one.”

“I don’t want you to read their minds,” said Kira, looking out at the wide, tangled lawn. “I want you to be bait.”

“Whoa.” He held up his hand. “Are you serious?”

“It’s okay,” she said. “I’ll stop them before they hurt you.” She grinned. “You said they rely too much on the link, right? So if the link tells them there’s a Partial hiding around one corner, they won’t even bother to look around the other.”

He shook his head. Kira could see that his breathing was accelerated; his face twitched and scowled. “As soon as you jump one, the link will tell the others he’s in trouble.”

“Then we hit fast and be gone before they show up.” She pulled him farther behind the pillar. “I know it’s dangerous, but my friends are in the same danger — worse, even, because they don’t have you.” Her voice softened. “We can do this.”

“That’s great,” said Samm, “but you’re talking about finding a scout trained and equipped to avoid being found. It’s not going to happen.”

“Keep your voice down,” Kira whispered. “It already has.” She gestured around the edge of the pillar, and Samm carefully peeked out. He ducked back and pressed his mouth to her ear.

“Forty yards out.”

“He probably heard us fall out of the tree,” Kira whispered. “I don’t think he’s seen us yet — he’s not trying to hide, just checking something out.” She pointed to the far side of the underpass. “You crawl over there. He’ll see you and walk right past me.” Samm seemed nearly rigid with tension, like he was clenching every muscle in his body; he’d been like that for a while. The other Partial’s too close, she thought. I don’t have time to see if he’s injured. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Fine,” he grunted. He turned and crawled through the underbrush, working his way to the far pillar, then across to the next in line. Kira nodded, impressed at the tactic. This way the rebel scout won’t pass as close to my pillar, she thought, so he’ll be less likely to look behind it. Samm moved stiffly, almost painfully, and she wondered again if he’d hurt himself in the jump to the tree. But no — he was already acting strange on the road above. What’s going on?

“Hold it,” said a voice, and Kira was shocked to hear that it was female. She froze in place, hoping her plan had worked and the Partial wouldn’t notice her. Samm stopped as well, pausing on his hands and knees in the thin weeds below the bridge. He didn’t speak. Kira heard footsteps behind her, to the side, then held her breath as the Partial walked past in a straight line toward Samm. Seen up close she was obviously female: thin in the waist, round in the hips and chest, a bun of jet-black hair done up behind the strap of her gas mask. Her eyes had a marked epicanthic fold, like she was Chinese, which Kira couldn’t puzzle out — the Chinese were the enemy in the Isolation War. Why make a Partial the other soldiers might mistake for an enemy? She held a menacing rifle trained on Samm’s back, the muzzle tipped with the fat black cylinder of a suppressor. Kira recognized it as a sniper rifle.

The girl stopped just a few yards away, maybe two good strides if Kira sprinted — probably not enough time for the girl to react. Kira nodded, gearing herself up for the attack. She’d learned a little hand-to-hand in school, though not much; the Defense Grid figured if a Partial got that close you were screwed anyway, since they were so much stronger. Kira hoped it wasn’t true, and rose to the balls of her feet.

“Don’t say anything,” said Samm. His voice was strained, like he was speaking through teeth clenched as tight as he could make them. “Don’t speak.” He put his hand to his face, covering his mouth and nose. Kira stood, placing her feet carefully, coiling her muscles for a charging tackle.

Small of the back, she told herself. Hit low and hard. Pin her arms. Strike at the base of the skull to knock her—

“Samm,” said the girl, and Kira froze.

She knows his name? Is that part of the link?

Or is she part of his company?

“Don’t speak,” Samm growled, but already Kira’s thoughts were flying, connections snapping together in her mind. If this girl knew Samm, that meant they were part of the same faction, which meant the nearby soldiers were Samm’s own comrades. Samm’s own officers. He’d said the link was also used to enforce the chain of command: They could sense Samm was here, and they were ordering him to respond. That’s why he was moving so stiffly — it was taking every ounce of his strength to resist them.

But why is he hiding from his own people?

“Talk to me, Samm.” The woman stepped forward, keeping the rifle aimed squarely at his back. “We thought you’d been captured.”

Samm lowered his head, nearly collapsing into the dirt. He won’t hold on much longer, Kira thought. Go! She pelted forward, arms spread wide, shoulder down to nail the Partial in the small of the back.

And then the Partial whirled around.

Kira was already inside the range where the long rifle would be useless as a gun. Instead the Partial brought it down like a club, slamming the heavy stock into the side of Kira’s face just as Kira wrapped her arms around the girl’s waist and knocked her solidly to the ground. Both girls gasped in pain at the impact, but Kira’s head was still ringing from the rifle blow, and the other girl recovered first. She dropped her gun and grappled Kira with cold efficiency, twisting one arm behind her back and kneeing her painfully in the stomach. Kira fought wildly, clawing at the Partial’s face and neck and very nearly escaping from her grip, twisting just enough to keep it from becoming a true submission hold. Suddenly Kira felt the cold metal edge of a knife on her throat, and the girl spoke calmly in her ear.

“Stop moving now.”

Kira froze; there was nothing she could do. If she’d had just two more seconds to work with, maybe, but somehow the Partial had known that Kira was there.

“Let go of her, Heron, she’s with me.”

“She doesn’t link.”

“She’s human.”

Heron’s voice was surprised, but she didn’t loosen her grip. “You captured one? The mission was a success? Where’s the rest of your team?”

You captured one? thought Kira. She loosened the girl’s grip on her throat and shouted loudly at both of them. “What the hell is going on?”

“They’re dead,” said Samm, stepping closer to Heron, “but it’s not what you think. You can let her go — she’s not a threat. She’s on our side.”

Kira couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “Were you planning this all along?” she asked. “Was this whole thing just a trick to get me back here?”

“It’s more complicated than that,” said Samm quickly. He was in front of her now, the mask ripped off. “Kuso, Heron, let her go, she came willingly!”

“So there was no peace proposal?” Kira demanded. She felt herself grow hot, felt her eyes begin to tear, felt a rush of shame and anger that she had ever trusted this thing. “No truce?”

Heron smiled. “A truce? I’m impressed, Samm; you may have a future in espionage.”

Kira saw a flash in the corner of her eye, the glint of light on a hypodermic needle. She screamed and felt it prick into her neck. The effect was almost instant: Her eyes grew heavy, her mind seemed to warp and bend. The world grew dark and thick, and Kira had time for one last thought before she fell unconscious.

I’m going to die.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Beep. Pssssssssh.

Beep. Pssssssssh.

Kira was heavy — before she perceived anything else, she could feel her own weight, her body too weak for her muscles to move. She was lying down.

Beep. Pssssssssh.

There was a noise, rhythmic and soft, somewhere near her head. Near? Yes, she was sure of it. Wherever she was, the noise was nearby. She tried to roll her head, but her neck wouldn’t turn; tried to open her eyes, but her lids were too leaden to move.

Beep. Pssssssssh.

There was another noise, a white-noise buzz in the background of her perception. She focused on it, tried to parse it, to understand it. Voices. A low murmur.

“… the subject…”

“… burn mark…”

“… tests positive…”

They were talking about her. Where was she?

Beep. Pssssssssh.

She was in a hospital. She remembered being under the bridge, Samm betraying her, the girl, Heron, injecting her with something. Was she being healed? Or studied?

“… all normal except…”

“… ready to proceed…”

“… preparing first incision…”

Kira moved her hand, a herculean effort, dragging ten tons of flesh and bone across three inches of table. The voices stopped. Her hand hit a barrier, a leather restraint; she could feel one on her other hand as well. She was tied down.

“She moved. Didn’t you sedate her?”

Kira opened one eye, then squinted it shut again at the brutal shock of bright lights. She heard a rustle and a sharp metal crash.

“Get those out of her face, she’s waking up.” Samm’s voice. She opened her mouth, suddenly aware of a plastic tube stretching past her tongue and down her throat. She gagged, coughing, trying not to retch, and the tube slid out like a long, slick snake. She coughed again, swallowed, cracked one eye the tiniest fraction.

Samm was standing over her.

“You,” she coughed, “bloody bastard.”

“We have to begin,” said a voice.

“Stop,” said Samm. “She’s awake!”

“Then we sedate her again. With a bigger dose this time.”

“You bloody”—she coughed again—“bastard.”

She could see better now, her eyes adjusting to the light. She was surrounded by women in hospital robes and surgical masks. She was in some kind of operating room, but it wasn’t like any operating room she’d ever seen. Metal arms hung from the ceiling like the limbs of a giant insect, scalpels and syringes and a dozen other instruments poised mere inches from Kira’s face. The walls were glowing with a muted, multicolored light — computer screens, the walls were computer screens, alive with graphs and charts and scrolling numbers. She saw her heartbeat, the thin line spiking in perfect unison with the pounding in her chest; she saw her temperature, her blood oxygen level, her height and weight in precise thousandths of a measurement. She turned her head again and saw her own face, scrubbed and topped with a plastic hat, her body stripped and bare, strapped down to the flat metal table. Her eyes were wide with terror. She gasped and the image gasped with her, the wall-size face twisting into a rictus of fear, a live camera feed of her dying moments filling the room like a horror show. She panicked; her breathing accelerated; her heart pumped; the graphs scrawled mad, thumping lines three feet high across the walls.

“I’m sorry,” said Samm. “I tried to tell them you came willingly—”

“You were not asked to bring a volunteer,” said a stern voice. A woman stepped forward. Her blue mask hid her face, but her eyes were the color of polished gunmetal, cold and unfeeling. “You have succeeded where your entire squadron failed. Do not risk your commendation now by interfering.”

Samm turned back to Kira. “They’ve asked me to be here, to talk to you, so you’d have someone you trusted—”

“I don’t trust you!” she shouted. Her voice echoed through the operating room, raw and ragged. “I helped you! I rescued you! I believed everything you said! Every word about surviving together or not surviving at all — and it was all a lie?”

“I was telling the truth,” said Samm. “When we reached the mainland, I was trying to keep you away from them until I could explain things — that you’d come to try to help us.”

“Then let me go!” Kira sobbed. The face on the wall sobbed with her, a mockery of her despair. She moved her legs, struggling against the restraints; she pulled on her arms, vainly trying to cover her chest and groin. She felt exposed and vulnerable and helpless. “Get me out of here.”

“I…” Samm’s face went rigid again, the same concentration he’d shown before — she could almost see his body seize up as the link took hold, forcing him to obey his superior officers. “I can’t.” He let out a breath, the tension gone, his muscles relaxing. “I can’t,” he repeated. “I obey my orders.” His expression darkened.

“Very good,” said the woman. She stepped forward, and one of the metal arms swung around with her, shining a light in Kira’s face, blinding her again. “Samm says you came willingly?”

“I did,” said Kira. “I came to help you.”

“And you think your dark-age technology is of any value to us? You barely understand how your own genetics work, let alone ours.”

“It doesn’t matter anymore, it was all lies.”

“Some of it was,” the woman agreed, “some of it was not. I am surprised Samm told you about our plight, our ‘expiration date,’ but that much, at least, was true. That’s why you’re here.”

“I’m a medic,” said Kira. “I’ve focused my studies on pathology and reproduction, trying to find a cure for RM. I can use that knowledge to help you.”

“Your human studies are worthless,” said the woman. “I assure you our needs lie in a completely different area.”

“I’ve studied Samm, too,” said Kira, “not like this—” She paused suddenly, thinking how much of Samm’s experience had been like this. How much of it had been worse. “My people did not treat him well,” she said slowly, “and I’m sorry for that, but I helped him. I studied him noninvasively. I was humane.”

The woman smirked. “Humane? Even the word is an insult.”

“You have a genetic deficiency that we don’t,” said Kira. “You’re immune to RM and our babies are not.” She pleaded with the woman. “We need each other.”

“The last time Partials and humans tried to work together, it didn’t work out so well,” said the woman. “I think we’ll take our chances on our own.”

Another metal arm swung into place, a bright hypodermic needle gleaming at its tip. Kira started to protest, but the needle darted forward like the tail of a scorpion.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

The needle pierced Kira’s chest, a sharp sting almost instantly dulled by the slow, spreading numbness of a topical anesthetic.

“You can’t put me under again,” Kira insisted, trying to sound stronger than she felt. The steel-eyed doctor shook her head.

“We’re not putting you under, girl, we’re prepping you for this.” She held up a syringe in her white-gloved hand, much bigger than the other, with a thick needle nearly four inches long. Kira shuddered at the sight of it, inching away as far as she could in her restraints. “Don’t worry,” said the doctor, though her voice carried no hint of compassion. “That anesthetic is excellent; you won’t feel a thing. It’s important that you be awake for this test so we can observe your responses — we were going to wait, and perform a different experiment first, but since you’ve woken up early, we may as well get started.” The doctor turned away, and another arm of the spiderlike medical robot swung down and pricked Kira’s thigh, drawing a vial of blood into a clear glass syringe.

Kira’s heart was racing. “What was that?”

The doctor spoke idly over her shoulder as she studied one of the wall screens. “Since you’ve proven somewhat resistant to our sedatives, we’re going to analyze your blood and mix one custom. We need you awake for now, but it wouldn’t be good for anyone if you wake up during the next test.”

Kira fought against her tears, irrationally determined not to let these monsters see her cry. I am stronger than my trials. She saw movement from the corner of her eye and cringed as a sudden fluid shape blotted out the light. She bit back a scream, but the shadow moved past her face and settled over her body; it was Samm, spreading a blanket to cover her.

“We need her chest exposed for the injection,” the doctor snapped.

“Then you can move it,” said Samm. “If she’s going to be awake, at least give her some dignity.”

The doctor paused, studying Samm with narrowed eyes, then nodded. “Fine.”

Samm leaned in close to Kira’s face. “I tried the captain on a radio, but Dr. Morgan is outside the command structure — she’s on special assignment from the Trust. She’ll be hard to stop.”

“Go to hell,” said Kira.

Samm looked down, no longer meeting her eyes, and walked away silently.

Kira could hear the other doctors discussing in low tones, manipulating one of the wall panels with their fingertips.

“… other subjects … pheromone… RM.…”

Kira’s ears snapped to attention, all her energy focused on trying to hear exactly what the doctors were saying. She couldn’t see past them to the image they were looking at, but as she concentrated, their words became clearer.

“… so we’ll inject her, and see how she reacts. We’re looking for the time it takes the particle to be absorbed, the range and coverage it achieves, and any hint of necrotic activity.”

It’s their last-minute prep, thought Kira.

But what are they going to inject me with?

Dr. Morgan hefted the big syringe and turned toward Kira; the others moved with her, spreading out around the table. The medical spider spun into place, grippers and pincers and lights and scalpels all hovering above her like a spiky metal nightmare. As the doctors left the wall panel, Kira saw the images they’d been looking at — recognized them immediately from her own study of Samm: a magnified picture of the Predator, the stage of RM that appeared in the newborn’s blood, and beside it the Lurker, the one she’d found in Samm that shared so much of the Predator’s structure.

Dr. Morgan pulled back the sheet, exposing the top of Kira’s chest. “We have reason to believe that this is going to make you very sick, very quickly.” She held the syringe over Kira’s heart. “We’ll be monitoring your vital signs, of course, but we need you to tell us anything else you may experience: pain in your joints, shortness of breath, loss of vision or hearing. Sensory details our instruments can’t detect or interpret.”

“You’re injecting me with the Lurker,” said Kira, already feeling her body starting to panic, and struggling to keep her breathing even and calm. “The particle you produce, the inert version of RM. What are you expecting it to do?”

“A version of RM? I told you your knowledge was useless to us.” She plunged the needle into Kira’s chest — she could feel it sliding in, pain and pressure and a horrifying sense of invasion. The anesthetic isn’t working! Dr. Morgan pressed down on the plunger, and Kira gasped at the sudden flood of fire in her chest, pumping directly to her heart and from there to the rest of her body, filling her in seconds. Her breath caught; her hands grasped involuntarily at the edge of the table, scrabbling for anything solid to hold on to. The injection seemed to take ages, and when Dr. Morgan finally pulled out the needle, Kira whimpered, imagining she could still feel the fluid as it coursed through her.

“No reaction yet,” said a masked doctor, her eyes fixed firmly on the wall. Another shined a light in Kira’s eyes, checking her dilation with one hand and her pulse with the other.

“Everything normal.”

“We’re not sure how quickly this works,” said Dr. Morgan, watching Kira closely. “We haven’t experimented on humans since just after the Partial War.”

Kira breathed deeply, summoning her control after the violation of the injection. The particle still rotated slowly on one of the screens. Am I going to die? She said the Lurker’s not a new version of RM — then what is it? And what are they expecting to see?

She remembered one of their snatches of overheard whispering and looked back at the images on the wall: the virus and the Lurker, so similar and yet so unlike a virus. It had always confused her, dealing only with her own incomplete information, but here with the Partials she knew more. She had heard them talking about it.

“You called it a pheromone,” said Kira.

Dr. Morgan paused suddenly, looking at Kira quizzically. She followed Kira’s eyes to the images on the wall, then looked back at Kira. “You know this particle?”

“We thought it was a new stage of RM, because it looked so much like the other, but you called it a pheromone. That’s why Samm was producing it — it’s part of your link data.”

Dr. Morgan glanced to the side of the room, beyond Kira’s field of vision, and Kira could tell from her eyes that she was frowning. She looked back at Kira. “Your knowledge is more extensive than I expected. I confess that when you — a human, of all things — told me you were a medic, I didn’t really take you seriously.”

Kira fought down a wave of nausea, still reeling from the pain of the injection. She composed herself again and looked at Dr. Morgan. “What does it do?”

“That’s what we’re trying to find out.”

“Is it part of the link?” asked Kira. “Is the whole RM virus just a side effect of your abilities?”

“Over the past twelve years I’ve catalogued every pheromone the Partials produce,” said Dr. Morgan. “I’ve isolated every particle, I’ve tracked them back to the organ that produces them and the stimulus that triggers their production, and I’ve determined their precise purpose and function. Every one of them.” She nodded at the image on the wall. “Except that one.”

Kira shook her head. “Why would you have a pheromone with no purpose? Everything about you was built with a purpose.”

“Oh, there’s a purpose,” said Dr. Morgan. “Everything at ParaGen had a purpose, as you say. One of those purposes was a fixed time of death, and it is our suspicion that this pheromone might somehow be related to it. If we can study certain reactions, we might be able to combat it.” She gestured at the images behind her. “As you can see from the wall screen, the pheromone doesn’t react with other Partials, and it doesn’t react with humans. It reacts with RM.”

Suddenly Kira saw the two images in a new light: not as versions of each other, but as a combination. The Predator didn’t just look like the Partial pheromone, it was the Partial pheromone, with an airborne RM Spore wrapped around it. That was how the Spore became the Predator — not on contact with blood, but on contact with the pheromone. On contact with blood, the Spore turns into the Blob. Kira’s mind filled with the image of the newborn baby’s blood, the bizzarre Predator virus multiplying like mad and yet not causing any damage to the cells. Samm was right there: he’d been breathing the Lurker into the air for days. It got into the sample, attached itself to the Spore, and rendered the virus inert.

That was the secret of RM. That was the cure. A tiny little particle inside their greatest enemies.

“When the humans fell, we began to research the question of Partial sterility, to see if we could undo it.” Dr. Morgan seemed oblivious to Kira’s shock — or was interpreting it as uneducated bewilderment. Kira struggled to hide her emotions as the doctor kept talking, suddenly terrified at the prospect of this cold, calculating woman in possession of so powerful a secret. If Dr. Morgan was concerned about Kira’s reaction, she didn’t show it. She walked to the wall, tapped the screen, and called up a series of other files — other faces, other human girls, as pale and wide-eyed as Kira, strapped to the same table and subjected to the same experiments. “We needed a nonsterile control for our experiments, and naturally this led us to the study of humans. It was only after the last girl died that we noticed the link between our pheromone and RM: Somehow the virus is absorbing the pheromone into itself, though how and why we have no idea. Eventually we were caught up in … other concerns, but when the crisis of the expiration date began to surface, we realized we needed to take up the studies again.” She turned back to Kira, idly playing with the empty syringe in her hands. “And here you are.”

Kira nodded, bursting with her secret, trying not to give it away. I need to get out of here. I need to get home.

I can save Madison’s baby. I can save them all.

“Still no change,” said another doctor, monitoring Kira’s vital signs. “If the reaction is occurring, it’s not having any measurable effect.”

“It’s not occurring,” said another doctor in a completely different tone. “And it’s not going to.” Everyone in the room looked toward her, even Kira. The doctor tapped a panel, and it expanded to fill the whole wall, showing lists of acronyms and abbreviations that Kira immediately recognized as a blood test. “She doesn’t have any of the virus in her blood.”

“That’s impossible. Even humans immune to the symptoms carry the virus.”

“You’re right.” The doctor paused. “She has the coding.”

The room went silent. Kira looked at the doctors’ faces, registering their shock. In the space behind her she heard Samm’s voice dripping with confusion. “What?”

“Let me see that,” said Dr. Morgan, stalking across the room to the wall screen. She tapped it furiously, dragging charts across the wall and zooming in and out on a rapid flurry of images. She stopped on a strand of DNA, not a scoped image but a graphical re-creation, and stared at it with enough intensity to burn a hole through the plating. “Who performed the scan?”

“The computer did it on its own,” said the other doctor. “We asked for a full analysis, and it’s part of the package.”

“She’s not on the link,” said Samm. Kira’s heart flipped in her chest, the implications of their words starting to come clear.

“What are you talking about?” she asked. She tried to sound strong, but her voice cracked.

Dr. Morgan turned to face her, ripping off her mask and looming over Kira’s bed like a tower of seething stone. “Who sent you?”

“What?”

Morgan screamed it again. “Who sent you?” Kira didn’t answer, and Dr. Morgan threw the empty syringe across the room, shattering it against the picture of the DNA. “Who’s trying to infiltrate my plans now — Cronus? Prometheus? What are they planning? Or maybe it’s not me they’re after,” she said, turning away with wild eyes. “Maybe they’re planning something else, and now that I’ve stumbled onto it I can use it against them.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Kira protested.

“You were with the humans until Samm brought you here,” said Dr. Morgan, crouching over Kira with her eyes wide and her teeth bared. “Tell me what you were doing there. What was your mission?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“You’re a Partial!” Dr. Morgan shouted. “It’s all right there on the wall! You have no RM in your bloodstream, you have bionanites sweeping your blood clean of our sedatives, you have the damn ParaGen product tags coded into your damn DNA. You are a Partial.” She stopped suddenly, staring down at Kira; on the wall screen behind her Kira saw her own face twisted in shock and confusion. The doctor’s expression changed slowly from anger to fascination, and her voice dropped to a whisper. “But you didn’t know that, did you?”

Kira opened her mouth, but no words came out. A chaos of protests and realizations and questions ran madly through her head, starting and stopping and derailing one another uselessly until her mind was a white noise of abject terror. She heard a loud boom, saw Dr. Morgan shouting at her through a haze of confusion, heard another boom, then Samm’s voice cut through the chaos.

“Explosions. We’re under attack.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Dr. Morgan looked up wildly, screams and gunshots echoing from beyond the closed door. The doctors scrambled; the medical insect reared up, knives and other lethal attachments clicking and rotating and locking into place. Samm rushed to the door, securing it tightly, then stood back.

“They’re here for Kira,” he said.

“Of course they’re here for her,” Dr. Morgan snapped, “but who are they? Which faction?”

“We need to get out of here,” said one of the other doctors.

“We’re not armed,” said Samm, shaking his head. “We’re not prepared for an attack. Our best plan is to stay here and hope the other soldiers repel it.”

“This room doesn’t seal,” said one of the doctors, nodding at the heavy door. “Anyone who passes will link us.”

“They’ll know we’re here,” said Dr. Morgan, “but not her. That could buy us precious time.”

“That’s what doesn’t make sense,” said Samm. “How can she be a Partial if she doesn’t link?”

“Only the military models link,” said Dr. Morgan. “At least, the way we’re used to. It was part of the soldier enhancement package. But ParaGen made other Partials for other purposes.”

Kira was shaking her head, only dimly aware of what anyone was saying. I’m not a Partial. Once again, faced with a problem, her mind seemed to split in two: on one side a scientist, counting all the reasons she could never be a Partial. I age, and they don’t. I don’t link, and they do. I don’t have their strength or reflexes, and I definitely don’t have their miraculous healing. But even there she had to stop herself, suddenly unsure. My leg recovered abnormally quickly from the burn, without any of the expected side effects from the regen box.

She shook her head. More than anything else, I don’t remember being a Partial — I grew up in a human house, I have a human father. I went to school in East Meadow for years. I’ve never been contacted by Partials, approached by Partials, nothing. It makes no sense at all.

And yet even as she analyzed her life, behind it all was the other side of her, the emotional side, the lost child crying in the darkness: Does this mean I never had a mommy?

The sounds of battle were getting closer.

“It’s ridiculous,” said one of the doctors. “Why bury a Partial agent in the human population? One who doesn’t even know what she is? What possible reason could there be?”

“Maybe it was an accident,” said one of the doctors. “Maybe she got lost in the chaos, fell in with the refugees, and ended up on the island without knowing why she was there?”

“Everything had a purpose at ParaGen,” said Dr. Morgan. “Everything. She isn’t an accident.” She looked up. “If we can figure out what she’s supposed to do, we can use her against them.”

The room shook with the sound of a gunshot against the door; doctors yelped and jumped back; Samm and Dr. Morgan stayed as firm as iron.

“They’re here,” one of the doctors said, panicked. “What do we do?”

“Get me down from here,” said Kira, still strapped to a table in what was about to become a battlefield. “Untie me!”

“Get behind the spider,” another doctor hissed, moving to the far corner of the room. The others followed, eyeing the spiky arms warily, slinking around the outside of the room.

“There’s no one in the hall,” said Samm, confused.

“Yes there is,” said Dr. Morgan. “Humans.”

Another gunshot rocked the door, blowing it off its hinges. Marcus appeared in the doorway with a shotgun, and Kira called out, “Get down!” just as the medical spider swung a vicious surgical razor at his neck. Marcus dropped, rolling under the blade, then raised his gun and blasted the spider at close range. Kira shrieked, feeling the heat from the gunpowder, the rain of shrapnel cascading down from the damaged robot. The sound of the blast nearly deafened her.

“She’s in here!” shouted Marcus, calling over his shoulder, then turned and nodded at her. “Hi, Kira.”

Xochi stepped in behind Marcus, already crouched low, training a pair of semiautomatics on the doctors in the corner. “I just reloaded,” she said, “so feel free to make any sudden moves.”

“Get them,” snarled Dr. Morgan, but Samm seemed frozen in place.

Jayden came last, dodging another scalpel from the spider and crouching inside the door. Marcus fired again at the spider, disabling it, then rushed to Kira’s side and began untying the restraints.

“You’re a hard girl to find,” said Marcus, forcing a smile.

“They’re close behind us,” said Jayden. “Don’t take any longer than you have to.”

“Can I shoot the doctors?” asked Xochi, running her pistols back and forth across the line of them.

Jayden fired into the hallway. “And now they’re here; I told you to hurry. We’re pinned down.”

“Samm, stop them,” said Dr. Morgan, but still Samm didn’t move, his body tensed, his face frozen with some intense, invisible effort.

“How did you get in here?” asked Kira. Marcus finished her first arm, and she instantly used it to work on her other arm while Marcus moved down to her legs.

“We saw you get captured,” said Marcus, shooting a venomous glance at Samm. “We followed you here, ran out of ideas, and then another group of Partials attacked the hospital. When the outer defenses fell, we just kind of … slipped in the back.”

“We heard them talking,” said Xochi, “and Samm was lying: All D Company does is crazy research, like this, on humans and Partials alike. The other group follows something called the Trust.”

“We follow the Trust,” said one of the doctors. Kira shot a glance at Dr. Morgan, but the cold woman stayed silent, her face revealing nothing.

Marcus finished untying Kira’s feet while Kira finished her second hand, and when she was free she clutched the sheet to her chest and sat up. Jayden fired again into the hallway.

“Do you have a plan to get back out?” asked Kira.

“Honestly, I’m kind of shocked we made it this far,” said Marcus. “Are you okay?” He noticed her bare shoulders and frowned. “Are you…”

“Yes,” said Kira, looking around for her clothes. There was nothing in the room but a tray of syringes and some debris from the broken spider. She pointed at one of the doctors. “You, give me your lab coat.”

“They’re getting closer!” shouted Jayden.

The doctor didn’t move, but a grim gesture of Xochi’s pistol encouraged her to take off her surgical smock. Dr. Morgan shouted with rage.

“Damn it, Samm, stop them!”

Samm’s hand came down on Marcus’s shotgun, discarded on the table where he’d left it to help with Kira’s ties. Kira swore, diving away from Samm off the far side of the table, but the Partial soldier simply stood there, staring straight ahead.

“Samm,” Dr. Morgan began, and suddenly Samm brought up the shotgun and fired — not at Kira or her friends, but at Morgan. She dodged, shockingly nimble, and the wall screen behind her exploded in sparks and shards of glass. Xochi began firing as well, but Morgan was too quick; round after round tore into the wall screens while the doctors screamed and cowered on the floor. Dr. Morgan danced ahead of the bullets, all too quickly working her way toward the door. Samm leaped across the room, fired and missed again, and the third time the shotgun clicked on an empty chamber. He spun it around, gripping the barrel with a roar, and drove it into the back of Morgan’s skull as she made a final dive for the hallway. The doctor slumped to the floor, and Xochi pumped a round into her thigh.

“And stay down!”

“She was too strong,” said Samm, and grabbed the ammo belt from Marcus’s shoulder. “I’m sorry that it took me so long. How many are outside?” He slid a shell into the chamber, then another and another, quickly and methodically.

Kira rose to a crouch, watching Samm in wonder. Is he really on our side? Jayden turned warily, sizing him up, then looked back at the open door.

“Just four,” he said, “around that near corner. The main body of their force is tied up with the rival Partials.”

Samm checked his gun quickly, making sure the safety was off. “Cover me.”

Jayden fired out with his rifle, clearing the hall, and Samm dove past him in a blur, rolling to the far wall and then dashing down the corridor toward the enemy position. Jayden stopped firing, and the Partials peeked out just in time for Samm to come barreling into them, shotgun blasting.

Kira took the doctor’s offered surgical smock and pulled it on, wrapping the back all the way closed with a pair of ties around her waist. For good measure she took the doctor’s mask and hairnet as well, and finally her shoes.

Samm came back, his face and shoulder bleeding. “Hallway’s clear. I think we can make it to the jeeps, but we have to go now.”

“I’m getting really sick of trusting this guy,” said Xochi.

“He’s coming with us,” said Kira. There’s something I have to talk about, that I can’t talk about with anyone else. She gave him a long glance, wondering what it meant now — if she was really a Partial, if she was really an agent, if she was really everything they thought she was.

“We have to go,” urged Marcus.

“One thing first,” said Kira. She scooped up the last syringe from the tray in the corner: a sample of the Partial pheromone.

The cure for RM.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Samm drove, the only one of the five who really knew how. Marcus examined Kira’s wounds in the backseat: It seemed the Partials had done little more than give her a few shots, draw some blood, and prep her for a surgery that never happened. The burn on her leg was almost fully healed, but the sight of her own shin, nearly scarless, seemed suddenly strange and alien; a sign not that the regen box had worked better than normal, but that her own body was healing well beyond the human standard. Just like Samm.

She looked at him, saw him looking back at her in the rearview mirror. Their eyes locked for a moment, silent. The others didn’t know, and Kira and Samm had said nothing.

Am I really a Partial? How could I not have known? Partials heal quickly, but this is the first major injury I’ve ever really had, so I’ve never had a chance to see my own healing abilities in action. I’ve never really been sick, either — does that mean anything? She racked her brain for anything else she knew about them. Partials are sterile, and that’s never come up. Partials are fast and strong and agile, but is that only the soldiers? She remembered Dr. Morgan, screaming frantically about secret Partial designs and some kind of inter-faction war. If I’m not a soldier, what am I? How many groups are out there, and what do they want? And why would any of them plant a Partial agent in a group of human refugees?

“You’ve been quiet,” said Marcus.

“I’m sorry,” said Kira. “I’ve had a lot to think about.”

This time it was Marcus who glanced at Samm, studying him silently, thinking. He looked back at Kira, then down at her leg. “Looks like you’re doing great. You’re sure they didn’t do … anything else?”

Kira felt caught; she felt claustrophobic in the back of the car, even with the windows down and the wind gusting wildly. “What do you mean?”

Xochi raised an eyebrow. “We find you buck naked, strapped down to a table. What do you think he means?”

“Nothing like that,” said Kira quickly.

“You said they knocked you out, how do you know they didn’t do something while you were—”

“Nothing happened,” said Samm. His jaw was hard, his eyes cold. “I never left her side for a second. They didn’t do anything to hurt her.”

“But they were going to,” said Marcus, “and you didn’t really do a whole hell of a lot about it until we showed up.”

“I did everything I could!”

“Stop arguing,” said Kira. “It’s the link — he couldn’t disobey them.”

“That’s not making me any happier about having him here,” said Jayden. He was in the other front seat, watching the passing ruins with the shotgun ready for action.

“I helped you this time,” said Samm. “I helped you get away. What more do you want from me?”

“Everybody just calm down,” said Kira. “I’m pretty sure we have more important things to worry about right now.”

“More important than whether we can trust the enemy soldier taking us who knows where?” asked Xochi.

“I’m driving east,” said Samm, “away from the controlled zones.”

“And into the uncontrolled zones,” said Marcus. “That sounds safe.”

“Our people aren’t like yours,” said Samm. “We don’t have the Voice and bandits and all these little outlying … nonconformists. If there’s no faction of the army out here, there’s nothing out here. Everything west of here is full of people trying to find us, so we’re heading east until we think we’ve lost them. Then we’ll… I don’t know what we’ll do then. Hide.”

“We’ll find a boat and go back to East Meadow,” said Kira. Marcus looked at her in surprise.

“Are you serious? After what we did when we left?” He shook his head. “They’ll kill us.”

“Not when they find out what I’m bringing back.” Kira glanced down at the syringe in her lap, and Marcus’s eyes followed. He frowned at it, then looked back at her in shock.

“You don’t mean…”

Kira nodded. “I’m ninety-nine percent certain.”

“What?” asked Xochi.

“The cure for RM,” said Kira. Jayden turned around, eyes wide, and even Samm lost control of the car for just a split second, swerving and regaining direction. Kira held up the syringe. “I found a particle in Samm’s breath that bore a resemblance to RM, though it wasn’t a virus. It turns out it’s one of their pheromones that they don’t have any use for — all it does, literally its only function, is to bond with RM. The RM particles I saw in the newborn’s blood is really an inert form of RM created through interaction with the pheromone.”

Marcus furrowed his brow. “So the infants die because we don’t have any Partials around?”

“Exactly. But if we can get this into their system early enough — right at birth, maybe even before birth through some kind of intrauterine injection — they’ll resist the virus and we can save them.” She gripped the syringe tightly. “Madison was close to delivering when we left East Meadow, and Arwen might already be dying. But we can save her.”

Marcus nodded, and Kira could see the wheels turning in his head, parsing all the data to the best of his ability. After a moment he looked up. “This might be true.” He nodded again. “Based on what I’ve seen of your work, which is admittedly little, it does sound … possible. But are you willing to stake your life on it?”

“Are you willing to stake our species against it?”

Marcus looked down. Xochi caught Kira’s eye but said nothing.

The trees broke, and the road rose up to a bridge across a narrow inlet from the sound. “There are boats down there,” said Jayden, but Samm shook his head.

“We need to keep going. They’re going to send someone after us as soon as they finish with the other group of Partials; for all I know both groups are going to come after us. We need to put as much distance behind us as possible before they get organized enough to follow.”

“What we need is to get out of this car,” said Jayden. “Make some distance first, yes, but then we hide this thing and never look back. It’s too loud — they’ll be able to hear us halfway across the continent.”

“She’ll still be able to find us,” said Samm.

Marcus looked up. “Who?”

“Heron. Special Ops. No matter what we do to cover our tracks, she’ll find us.”

The car made good time — not too speedy, because the roads were buckled and treacherous, but still faster than they could have gone on foot. Across the bridge they joined a major highway, taking the time to glance back for pursuers, but there was nothing they could see. Several miles later the road turned sharply north, and they left it to drive south through a rural, wooded suburb. The roads were narrow and twisty, curving back on themselves in unpredictable patterns, and soon they gave up on the car and left it on a side street nearly buried in overhanging foliage. Kira stopped to scour the closest house for clothing, but the area was thick with humidity, and everything inside was rotted and unusable.

Samm could smell the ocean, but none of the humans could; Kira swore she could smell it too, a salty bite on the edge of her perception. She didn’t tell anyone. They cut a path south and west, winding carefully through already sparse neighborhoods now almost fully reclaimed by nature. Saplings grew up not just around but in the houses, kudzu and mold and moisture breaking them down until their roofs were caved in and their walls were sagging with untended life. Flowers sprouted from porches; weeds sprang up from furniture half glimpsed through shattered windows. When they reached the harbor, Kira breathed deeply, as if freed from an airless cavern.

“We’re on the wrong side,” said Marcus, pointing. “Houses over here, wharf over there.”

“Looks like bigger houses to the south,” said Jayden. “One of them’s bound to have a private dock.” They skirted the waterfront, half searching for a boat and half watching behind for an ambush. Kira had seen Heron in action; she’d lost a fight to her in seconds. She didn’t want to have to fight her again.

“There,” said Xochi, and they broke into a run. A long white dock stretched out from the shore, beaten by the elements until it was practically driftwood, and at the end bobbed a wide motorboat with a tattered canvas awning. Jayden leaped in, looking in the dashboard compartments for a set of keys, while Samm searched the dock itself for extra tanks of gas. Neither found anything, and they cursed and ran to the next house along the shore. This one had a small sailboat, which none of them could pilot, but it had a small motor, and the keys were in the ignition. The engine turned over on the seventh try. Samm found gas cans, but they were empty.

“You’ll need extra just in case,” he said. “We’re much farther east than our last crossing, and the sound here is two or three times as wide.”

He took the cans toward the house, ready to take gas from the cars, but Kira stopped him. “What do you mean, you’ll need gas?” she asked. “You’re not coming?”

Samm shook his head, looking out at the water, up at the house, anywhere but at Kira. “Your people will kill me.”

“The Partials will kill you, too,” said Kira. “You’re a traitor now. At least with us you’ll have … something, friends, I don’t know. We can help each other.”

“You’re a wanted terrorist,” he said. “Lot of good we’d do each other.” He began moving toward the house.

She watched him, then looked back at the others. “I’m going to help him with the gas.” Marcus glowered at the dock but said nothing.

Samm and Kira trudged up the short hill to the house, which turned out to be some kind of beachhead resort. The parking lot was filled with cars, one of them even sporting a skeleton, and Samm got to work crawling underneath and puncturing their gas tanks with his knife, letting the degraded, sludgy fuel drip down into the cans. Kira wanted to talk to him, to ask him about what she was — just to say it aloud, I am a Partial, but she didn’t dare. She paced uselessly, hemming and hawing, starting and stopping, so afraid to talk that she could barely even think. Finally she gave up, and she let the old habits take over, eyeing the old cars for anything she could salvage. Most of the cars were packed with luggage — people fleeing the virus? Fleeing the country? — and the tightly sealed suitcases revealed clothes in much better condition than the rags she’d found before. She found clean underwear, rugged jeans that mostly fit, and an armful of shirts and socks that she brought with her just in case.

“So,” said Samm. He was sitting on the ground, the gas cans scattered around him.

Kira paused, holding the clothes. “So.”

Kira looked at him, at his face, at his eyes. She’d felt so close to him, and now… Was it the link? Maybe she really could do it, in some smaller way, and that’s what she’d been feeling. She shook her head, lost in conflicting emotions. Had their connection been nothing but some kind of Partial biological quirk, or had it been real?

If it was only the link, did that make it less real? And if she could connect that deeply with someone, did it really matter how?

“You really didn’t know?” He squinted at her in the fading sunlight. “You really thought you were…” He trailed off, and Kira felt grateful he hadn’t said it out loud.

“I had no idea. I’m still not convinced.”

“You’re definitely not like me,” he said, “but you’re”—he nodded at her friends—“not like them either. You can’t link, and yet I almost feel like you can, like there’s something between us that… I don’t know. I don’t know what you are.”

Kira opened her mouth to respond, but she didn’t know either. “I’m Kira Walker,” she said finally. “What else is there to know?”

Samm said nothing, merely gathered the gas cans.

“You can come with us,” she said. “We can hide you somewhere, in the farms or some little community. You’ll be safe there.”

Samm looked at her now, brown eyes as deep as wells. “Is that really what you want? To hide and be safe?”

Kira sighed. “I know even less about what I want right now than about who I am. I want to be safe. I want to know what’s going on.” She felt her resolve stiffen. “I want to find who did this, and why.”

“ParaGen,” said Samm. “They made us, they made you, and if your theory’s right about the pheromone, they made RM too.”

Kira smirked. “You always said you didn’t do it.”

The corner of Samm’s mouth turned up, just a bit, in the tiniest hint of a smile. “When did you start to believe me?”

Kira looked at the ground, kicking at a rock with the toe of her shoe. “I said what I want.” She looked up. “What about you?”

“What do I want?” Samm paused, considering the question with his typical solemnity. “The same thing as you, I guess. I want to know what’s going on, and why. And I want to fix it. After everything that’s happened, I’m more convinced than ever that peace—”

“Isn’t possible?”

“I was going to say that it’s the only chance we have.”

Kira laughed dryly. “You really do have an amazing knack for saying exactly what I want to hear.”

“You learn what you can,” said Samm, “and I’ll do the same. If we ever see each other again, we’ll share.”

“We’ll share what we’ve learned.”

“Yeah.”

They waited a moment longer, watching each other, remembering each other, and Kira thought for a moment she could even feel the link tying them together like an invisible wire. They walked back below, lugging the clothes and gas. Samm set them heavily in the boat.

“This should get you across,” he said, “assuming the motor holds.”

Jayden fired it up again, and the boat roared to life. He shook Samm’s hand. “Thanks for your help. I’m sorry for the way I treated you before.”

“Not necessary, but thanks.”

Xochi shook his hand as well, and then Marcus, though he never met his eyes. Kira climbed into the boat and offered around the shirts and socks to anyone who wanted a change. Marcus stepped in last, untying the ropes as he came.

“Where are you going from here?” he asked.

“I thought I’d try to hide,” said Samm, “but I figure it’s too late for that now.” He glanced back at the trees. “Heron’s right there.” Kira and her friends started, reaching for their weapons, but Samm shrugged. “She hasn’t attacked, so I don’t know what her game is.”

“You’re sure you’ll be okay?” asked Kira.

“If she wanted me dead, she’d have done it by now.”

Jayden gunned the motor and pulled away from the dock.

Kira watched Samm as he slipped into the distance and slowly disappeared from view.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Their motor gave out more quickly now than on the first crossing, and despite their extra gas, they found themselves rowing most of the way across. The currents carried them east, and they saw the island long before they managed to pull in close and land the boat. Night had fallen, and they took shelter in an old beach house, grabbing a few hours of sleep before moving on. At first light Kira scoured the place for food, but the cans in the pantry were bloated, and the food inside smelled rank when they opened them up. They set them aside and searched instead for a map, eventually finding an atlas near a collapsed bookshelf. There was no detailed section for Long Island, just a larger map of New York in general, but it was better than nothing — she recognized enough of the names to know where they were going, and hoped that some of the road signs outside would help them discover where they were.

They parceled out the guns they had left — a rifle, a shotgun, and two pistols — and traveled quietly, wary of the Voice and Defense Grid patrols. Kira cradled the syringe as carefully as she could, wrapping it in a ball of extra shirts and strapping it around her waist for protection. She said a silent prayer that there would still be time to save Arwen, and watched the shadows for danger.

After barely an hour of walking, Kira began to recognize the terrain — so much of the island looked alike, crumbling houses buried in kudzu and surrounded by trees, but something about the road itself seemed familiar. The way it curved, or rose, or fell; she couldn’t place it. After a moment she stopped scanning the forested road with a frown.

“We’ve been here before.”

“We haven’t even turned,” said Jayden. “How could we have been here before?”

“Not this morning,” said Kira. “I just … there.” She pointed to a house set back from the road. “Do you recognize it?”

The others peered at it, and Marcus’s eyes went wide with surprise when the realization hit him. “Is that the drifter’s hideout? Tovar?”

“I’m pretty sure,” said Kira. “Maybe he has some food stashed in there.”

As they approached, it became more obvious — they’d only seen the front at night, in the rain, but they’d seen the back more clearly, and they recognized it immediately. Kira tried the doors, trying to remember which one the old drifter had left unblocked, but froze in place when she heard the click of a gun hammer.

“Just stop right there,” said a voice. It was definitely him. Kira took her hands from the doorknob and held them up to show they were empty.

“Owen Tovar,” said Kira. The others were standing silently, guns raised, searching for wherever the voice could be coming from. The drifter had a knack for staying hidden. “It’s me, Kira Walker. Do you recognize us?”

“The four most wanted criminals in Long Island?” he said. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure we recognize you.”

We, thought Kira. Who else is in there?

“‘Most wanted,’ huh?” asked Marcus. “My mother always said I’d be famous one day. Or at least I assume she did.”

“I’m going to ask you to set your weapons down now,” said Tovar. “Nice and easy, right at your feet.”

“We came here because we thought you were a friend,” said Kira. “We need food — we’re not here to rob you.”

Tovar’s voice was lean and cold. “Is that why you drew your weapons and tried the door without knocking?”

“We didn’t want to wake Dolly,” said Marcus. There was a pause, and Tovar laughed; Kira thought it was coming from a vent near the top of the wall, but she couldn’t be sure.

“I forgot how much I liked you,” he said. “Looks like you’re not being followed, so go ahead and put down those guns, and you can come on in for a chat.”

Kira looked at Jayden, who shrugged and set down his rifle carefully by his feet. Marcus and Xochi followed, and Kira did the same. If we’re about to get robbed…, she thought, then shook her head. We have nothing — surely he can see that. The only valuable we have is the cure, and nobody knows about it.

“There you go,” said Tovar. “Now, say hello to my friends.” A bush moved to the left and Kira flinched, and then another bush moved, and a boarded-up window swung open, and suddenly the backyard was filled with men and women in various forms of camouflage and homemade armor, all of them armed.

“Easy,” said the woman in front, and Kira thought she recognized the voice. “Keep your hands in the air and step away from the guns.”

“Gianna,” said Kira, realization dawning. “You were with us last time we came here — you were on the salvage run that found the bomb.”

“Kira Walker,” said Gianna with a smile. She glanced at Jayden, and her expression soured. “And the fascist plague baby. Keep those hands where I can see them.”

“What is this?” demanded Kira. “Are you … the Voice?”

“The very same,” said Tovar, stepping out of the back door with his fat black shotgun on his hip. “The new regime is out in force, rounding up refugees and runaways. I don’t know if it’s good luck or bad that we found you first.”

“You’re the Voice,” said Marcus, as if still trying to get his head around it. He laughed. “That might be the weirdest thing I’ve ever heard — and you,” he said, turning to Gianna. “Were you the Voice back then, too?”

“Not until after,” she said. “I get testy when I’m detained without cause.”

“Still, though,” said Jayden, “you were a sympathizer. I was right not to trust you.”

“Even a paranoid clock is being followed twice a day,” said Tovar. He gestured to the open door. “Come inside so we can reset our trap. If the Grid does drop by, I don’t want to be caught in the open flapping my gums.”

They filed inside while the Voice went back into hiding. Tovar led them down one hall while Gianna locked the door and took their guns down another. Inside, the house was more or less as Kira remembered it, including the laconic camel in the living room.

“Hello, Dolly,” said Marcus. “Long time no see.”

Xochi offered her hand to Tovar. “Looks like you know everyone else. I’m Xochi.”

“Xochi Kessler,” said Tovar, ignoring her hand as he searched in his wagon for food. “Or should I say ‘the infamous Xochi Kessler.’ Your poor mother is worried sick.”

“My poor mother can go and hang herself.”

“She’d much rather hang you,” said Tovar, handing her a can of ravioli. “I’m still looking for the can opener.” He turned back to the wagon. “I did mention that you’re wanted criminals, yes? Bounties on your heads, posters in the town square, the whole bit. Here it is.” He turned back to them, pointing at Kira with a rubber-handled can opener. “She’s the great betrayer, the Partial-lover, the ringleader of the whole thing. These two are the dupes who went along with it.” He pointed back at Xochi. “You’re the ungrateful daughter: the symbol of how anyone can believe the Voice lies and go traitor.” He handed her the can opener. “I’ll look for spoons.”

“Who’s in charge now?” asked Kira. “What happened after we left?”

“After you personally threw the island into anarchy, you mean,” said Tovar, handing her a set of mismatched silverware.

“How much did they say about us?” asked Kira.

“That you were in league with the Voice, who are in turn in league with the Partials. That you broke into the hospital and broke a Partial agent out of Grid imprisonment, and are currently either hiding in the wild or escaping to the mainland to aid in a Partial invasion. How much of it should I believe?”

Kira spoke carefully. “I guess that depends on how you feel about Partials.”

Tovar sat on the couch across from her, watching Kira carefully. “Aside from murdering everyone I know, the Partials haven’t really been a big part of my life. Consider my opinion ‘generally very poor.’ That said, I figure if they wanted us dead, we’d be dead, so if you have another perspective, I’m listening.”

Kira nodded. “Do you consider yourself an open-minded man, Mr. Tovar?”

“I’d like to think so.”

“It’s going to have to open really wide to swallow what we’ve got to tell you,” said Marcus. “Number one: The Partials didn’t create RM.”

“And they’re not looking to destroy us. At least not all of them,” said Kira. “At least not yet. Which leads us to number two: Yes, we were in league with a Partial. We broke him out and took him off the island, and then he helped us get back here.”

“Mother of mercy,” said Tovar. “And that caused the riot?”

“It’s the other way around,” said Kira sheepishly. “We started the riot as a distraction for the jailbreak.”

Tovar whistled. “You don’t mess around.”

“No, we don’t.”

“Is that everything?” he asked.

“For now,” said Jayden. “Now it’s your turn.”

“Where to start,” Tovar mused. “Two nights ago you spread your rumor, started your riot, and left right when it was getting interesting. The coliseum burned, though not to the ground; the town hall also burned, with more than a handful of senators inside it.”

Kira went white, thinking of Isolde. We thought it would be safe there. Did she die inside it? “What about the hospital?”

“The hospital was never set on fire, though I can’t say as much for the houses across the turnpike. The hospital was, on the other hand, the home of the biggest riot of the night, and the body count was, shall we say, high.”

“Are the mothers okay? How many people died?”

“Maternity was untouched,” said Torvar. “And I’m afraid I don’t have exact numbers — probably less than the Senate is reporting, probably more than you’d expect.”

“What is the Senate reporting?” asked Kira.

“Two hundred.” Tovar’s voice was as hard as flint. “A very high price for a Partial life.”

It was worth it, Kira swore, though it broke her heart to think it. Two hundred. She looked up at Tovar, still not sure she trusted him enough to explain why they’d be willing to go to such an extreme. They were still prisoners, after all; he’d offered them nothing but information, and promised them nothing at all.

“Who’s left of the senators?” asked Xochi. “Apparently my mother, but who else?”

“It might be more accurate to ask what’s left of the Senate,” said Tovar. “The few senators who lived through the night declared a state of emergency, declared martial law, and filled the city and the countryside with soldiers from the Grid. Elections to replace the fallen have been postponed until ‘a state of peace and equilibrium is reached,�� which is an awful lot of syllables for ‘never.’ It’s totalitarianism in all but name.”

“Yes,” said Kira, “but who are we talking about specifically? Which senators?”

“Oh, you know,” said Tovar with a shrug, “the real hardliners, like Kessler and Delarosa. Hobb’s a weasel, so of course he’s in there as well, and the one from the Grid — Senator Weist. That’s how they got the military’s support so quickly.”

“The same ones who’ve been running this from the beginning,” said Kira. Her skin went cold, and she gripped Xochi’s hand for support. “They planned this entire thing — Samm, and the explosion, and even the riot. This isn’t a provisional government in the wake of a national disaster, this was a planned and calculated coup.”

“They couldn’t have planned Samm,” said Marcus. “They had no idea you were going to go out and get him.”

“Who is Samm?” asked Tovar.

“The Partial,” said Kira. “And they didn’t have to plan his capture, just what to do with him afterward. They’d probably been planning some kind of power grab for a while, and then when we showed up with Samm, we gave them the means to pull it off.”

“They’re only in charge until the city gets back on its feet,” said Jayden, “and they’re only doing it because of the riot we caused. What else were they supposed to do?”

“Do you actually believe that?” asked Xochi.

“They responded too quickly,” Kira protested, feeling the rage build up inside of her. It was so familiar now, so much a part of her, that it filled her easily. “They had to have a plan already in place, to deal with exactly the kind of situation we forced them into — we started a riot, and they went to Plan F or whatever and seized the whole island. Even when we thought we were stopping them, they were still ready for us.”

“They’re trying to save the species,” said Jayden. “Yes, they’re being extreme about it, but maybe that’s the only way to make it work — a solid grip on the island, with a single vision to lead it and army to enforce it.”

“Remember where you are,” said Tovar.

“I don’t like it any more than you do,” said Jayden, “but they don’t have the—” He stopped, glanced at Kira, and started again. “For all they know this is the only way to save us from RM: to take the Hope Act to its natural extreme and ranch us like cattle until someone’s born immune.”

“Delarosa used to be a zookeeper,” said Kira softly, thinking of all her friends still trapped inside the city.

Tovar snorted. “No kidding?”

She nodded. “She saved endangered species. I guess we’re just another bunch of rare white rhinos.” Kira swallowed her rage and took a long, deep breath. “Mr. Tovar,” she said, looking up to meet his eyes. “We need to get back to East Meadow.”

“Then you’re crazy,” he said.

“Crazy or not,” she said, “we need to go. And you need to take us there.”

“Then you’re crazy and stupid,” said Tovar. “In three days, when all my forces are gathered, we’re going to launch our biggest offensive yet. It’s like your friend said — when the entire species is at stake, people are willing to go to extremes. We’re going to take that government down and you do not want to be anywhere near it when we do.”

“Three days?” Kira’s mind raced. “That might be all we need. If you can get us there without being seen, actually inside the city, we might not need a war at all.”

Tovar frowned. “I’m not an assassin, Kira, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“Of course not.”

“And I’m not a martyr either. Getting you or anyone else into East Meadow would be extremely dangerous. When I die it’s going to be for a pretty damn good reason.”

“A good reason is not the problem,” said Kira, and held up the syringe. “We have the cure for RM.”

Tovar stared at it, his mouth open, then laughed out loud. “And you expect me to believe that?”

“You believed all the crazy bad stuff,” said Xochi, “why not the crazy good stuff, too?”

“Because crazy bad stuff is well within the realm of my experience,” said Tovar. “Curing RM is in the realm of magical pixies and talking dogs that piss whiskey. It’s impossible.”

“It’s real,” said Marcus, and looked at Kira. “We’ll stake our lives on it.”

“Suppose it is,” said Tovar. “What do we do with it? Walk into town, hold it in the air, and wait for the magical pixies to make everything right again?”

“If the Senate taught me one thing,” said Kira, “it’s that power comes through the people — the only reason they have control is because the people have given it to them.”

“Also because they have guns,” said Marcus.

“They don’t have guns,” said Xochi, “they have the allegiance of people with guns.”

“Exactly,” said Kira. “If we can change that allegiance, we can free everyone in the city — everyone on the island. If we show them a live human baby, the purest, simplest proof that our way works and the Hope Act doesn’t, the people will rise up so fast your head will spin. We can restore freedom and unite the island, all without firing a single shot.”

“Say your cure works,” said Tovar, “and we can actually show them, as you say, a live human baby.” Tovar’s voice nearly broke, and Kira could practically see the emotion running through him as he said the words. “You’ve already been in league with the Partials — you’ve crossed the sound and met them in person. Won’t people just assume it’s a Partial trick of some kind? A baby Partial, or an engineered … doppelganger or something?”

“The mother will have to be an East Meadow regular,” said Marcus, “someone people will recognize as one of their own.” He glanced at Jayden. “His sister is about to deliver — she may already have.”

Kira nodded. “It’s not enough to just show up with a baby: we have to go in, grab Madison, and get her out. Right under the Grid’s noses.”

Tovar looked at Kira. “I get the distinct impression that nothing is ever easy where you’re involved.”

“Welcome to my life,” said Kira. “How many soldiers do you have?”

“Ten.”

Kira raised an eyebrow. “I saw a lot more than ten in the backyard alone.”

Tovar’s voice hardened. “Are you asking about soldiers, or armed civilians with more guts than training?”

“Point taken,” said Kira.

Tovar studied them carefully, his eyes flicking from one face to the next as he thought. “We may — may — have a way to get you inside. Are you sure you can do it?”

Kira grinned. “Haven’t you heard? I’m the most wanted criminal on the island. I think it’s about time I start living up to my reputation.”

“Hell, yes,” said Xochi.

Tovar paused, studying her, his brow furrowed. Finally he broke into a smile. “When you put it that way,” he said, “I’m pretty sure I heard a talking dog just last week. Didn’t drink its piss, though.” He stood up. “It’s still midmorning, and the weather’s with us; if we start now, we can get you beaten and in police custody before dinner. I have a few tricks up my sleeve, though. I’ll round up the troops.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

One of the tricks up Tovar’s sleeve turned out to be uniforms: dozens of Defense Grid uniforms stolen from the depot they’d raided in the old East Meadow High School. “We stole a mountain of ammunition and trail rations, too,” he said slyly, “just to make it look like we were after their supplies, but this was the real prize. Worth a thousand bullets each if you use them right.” Kira nodded and shrugged one on over her normal clothes.

The living room, already cramped, was now packed with an assortment of Voice leaders. Kira studied them as they talked, poring over makeshift maps of the island; they were determined, at the very least, and appeared capable enough, but they lacked the smoothness she had seen with the Defense Grid. The Grid was better organized, even for something as simple as a salvage run. One person laid out the plan, while the others listened attentively. The Voice could not have been more different.

“This is Farad,” said Tovar, pointing to a stern man with a fiery shock of red hair. “The uniforms are nice, but he’s our real secret weapon: a Grid soldier, so newly defected to our cause that the Grid leaders, we hope, don’t even know he’s left.”

Farad glanced around the room nervously, visibly uncomfortable in a room full of people who were so recently his enemies. “I tried to hang on after the riot,” he said softly, “and the new rules, but… I just can’t anymore. They’ve taken this too far.”

“Farad was a driver,” Tovar continued, “and it just so happens that we’ve recently, ah, liberated a jeep from a Grid outrider.” He turned to Kira. “Probably one of the same ones that tried to chase you down after the riot. It’s in good condition, has a covered back with the official Grid logo, and Farad knows the passwords to get it through the border.”

“He knew the passwords,” said a large man by the wall; he was old, with gray hair and a beard, but his arms were thickly muscled. “They might have changed them — they will have changed them if they’re smart.”

“But they don’t know I’ve left,” said Farad. His voice was thin and cracking. “I mean, they can’t know, right? Not this quickly?”

“As far as they know you’re still on a scouting mission,” said Gianna. “Of course, if you run into anyone who knows you’re supposed to be on a scouting mission, it won’t matter how many passwords you have.”

“Even in these uniforms they’re going to recognize us,” said Jayden. “Kira and Marcus at the very least once we get to the hospital — everyone there knows them.”

“And they’re the ones who know the hospital,” said Tovar. “None of us do, at least not well enough. Here’s the plan: Farad drives you back and gets you through the border, while the more notorious members of your band stay in the back and keep your eyes down. It’s risky, but if you’re careful you can make it work. You drive to the hospital, to that rear service door you were telling me about.”

“The same one we slipped out of the night of the riot,” said Kira. “There’s a big ramp leading down to it, which will make us hard to see — any guard around the building will know we’re there, obviously, but they won’t have a good look at anyone who gets in or out of the jeep.”

Tovar nodded. “Make your way through the lower levels, up to maternity, and grab your friend. This is the trickiest part.”

“Which is why I’m going,” said Gianna. “Once you guide us through the back hallways, I can get in and out of maternity without raising eyebrows — nobody knows me, and with this uniform I’ll look official.”

“You hope,” said the bearded man.

“Seriously, Rowan,” said Tovar, “is this really the time? Do we have to argue with every little step of the plan?”

“Your so-called plan is just ‘good luck and don’t act suspicious,’” said the bearded man. “You’re sending them into the heart of enemy territory, I’d like to think you’d have something a little more workable.”

“I don’t even want them to go,” said Tovar, throwing up his hands. “I’m trying to plan a full-scale assault of this city, and this is the best I could come up with given my time and resources.”

The bearded Rowan turned to Gianna. “Are you willing to risk your life for ‘the best he could come up with’?”

“We’re willing to risk it for this,” said Kira, and held up the syringe. “This is not an abstract concept, this is an actual cure — an actual injection that will save a child’s life. Can you even imagine that? A living, breathing child that lives for a week, a month, a year; a child that laughs and crawls and learns to talk.” Her voice cracked. “I would die for that in a heartbeat.”

The room was silent.

Rowan stirred first. “Being worth the risk doesn’t justify a risky plan.”

“This plan will work,” said Tovar fervently. “Farad has the codes, and our informants in the city have fed us the full rundown of hospital security. We can get them in, and we can get Madison Sato out. We’ll take her to the eastern farms, she can deliver there, and the baby will live.”

“I’m going to split the cure into three separate doses,” said Kira. “One stays with Tovar, here in the back lines, to be used on Madison’s baby Arwen. The second goes with us, just in case Arwen has already been born; depending on how advanced the virus is, we have to inject her on-site.”

Tovar pointed at Rowan. “The third goes with you, east to Flanders or Riverhead or somewhere the Grid presence is weakest. Inject every newborn you can find.” He looked at the syringe in Kira’s hands. “The cure is too important to risk on a single mission.”

Kira nodded, but a niggling voice in the back of her mind posed the question: Do I have the pheromone? If I’m really a Partial, can I cure RM too? She almost didn’t dare to consider it — didn’t dare to hope — it would be too easy, and nothing so far had been easy. As soon as I get the chance — as soon as I have the right equipment — I have to test myself.

Gianna whispered reverently. “We’re pinning an awful lot of hope on this.”

“I know,” said Kira.

“So that’s the team,” said Rowan, “Gianna, the new guy, and these two medics.”

“And us,” said Jayden. “Madison’s my sister.”

Xochi nodded. “And Kira’s mine.”

Kira felt a pang of conscience, as stark as if she’d willfully betrayed them all. What would they do if they knew what I really am?

The car died two miles northeast of East Meadow. Gianna and Farad spent nearly an hour under the hood, cursing and banging and trying to get it started; Kira and Marcus sat by the curb and planned their route through the hospital: where to go, how to get there, and what specific medical phrases to teach Gianna to help get Madison out of the nurses’ sight. Kira had kept the syringe in her own gear, carefully wrapped and cushioned and strapped to her waist. She touched it reflexively, making sure it was safe. Farad walked over tiredly and dropped a chunk of oily black metal on the road beside her.

Marcus looked at it. “Bad gas?”

“The gas is the cleanest I’ve seen in a while,” said Farad. “This is the starter — it’s not cracked or bent or gummed up, it’s just … old.” He flopped down on the curb beside them. “Of all the things that could have gone wrong, I never would have guessed this.”

“But you can still get us in,” said Kira, “right?”

“I could get me in,” said Farad, shaking his head. “You’re too famous, and without the jeep to hide in I just don’t see it working. And even if I could get in, one guy wandering home alone is going to raise a lot more eyebrows than a full squad with a vehicle. I’d certainly be questioned, probably detained, and in any case would never be able to get to your friend in time. I definitely couldn’t get her out.”

“Let’s look at our options,” said Jayden. “We can’t just give up, and we don’t have time to go back.”

“We could find another Grid patrol and steal their jeep,” said Xochi.

“I meant realistic options.”

“We could probably get one of these other cars running,” said Gianna, but Farad shook his head.

“They’ll know the difference between a fleet vehicle and a salvage,” he said. “With enough time and the right equipment, maybe, but we have to do this now if we want to stop Tovar from a frontal assault. He hasn’t given us much leeway.”

“We’ll have to cross on foot,” said Kira. “That’s never been hard before — the border’s too big to patrol the entire thing.”

“East Meadow’s never been under martial lockdown before,” said Gianna. “We have informers on the inside, and we’ve scouted the perimeter. It’s as tight as a drum.”

Kira looked at the sky, guessing at the time of day — late afternoon. “We’ll try to slip through in the dark. Does your radio pick up the Grid channels?”

“Of course,” said Gianna, “just like their radios pick up ours. Anything important will be in code.”

“And I don’t know them all,” said Farad.

“Then we’ll have to make do,” said Kira, standing up. “Let’s find a weak spot in the border.”

They struck south on what a battered street sign eventually identified as Walt Whitman Road. They passed a long shopping mall on one side, and a few hours later a deeply wooded park on the other. Once, across a wide parking lot, they saw a group of Grid soldiers investigating a tall, shattered-glass office building. The soldiers waved and shouted a greeting, the noise echoing emptily across the expanse, and Farad waved and shouted back. The soldiers turned and went back to their work. Kira kept a steady pace until they got out of view, then hurried the group along to put as much distance between them as she could. They saw more border patrols as they drew closer to the eastern edge of the city, security getting tighter and tighter, until finally they saw in the distance a road completely blocked by cars — more than just the detritus of eleven-year-old traffic, these cars had been hauled into place and braced with sheets of wood and metal. Kira shook her head, muttering lowly.

“They’ve barricaded the city.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

“That’s Gardiners Avenue,” said Jayden. “We’re very close.” He paused. “How far do you think the wall goes around?”

“It doesn’t make sense to build it here and nowhere else,” said Gianna. “Otherwise they’d just build a fort and guard the intersection.”

“Either way,” said Xochi, “we can sneak past them mid-block somewhere. They can’t have guards along the whole length of it.”

The others agreed, and they picked their way through the overgrown yards of a sprawling residential neighborhood. They worked their way down to a spot halfway between cross streets, and when Kira peeked out through the kudzu-covered fence, she saw that the barricade was lower here — just cars in a line, with no reinforcing boards or boxes. They haven’t had time to finish the whole thing. As if to balance it out, the far side of the street was not a row of houses but a strip mall with a wide parking lot — anyone watching from a post at either intersection would have that much more time to see them as they pelted across the extra open space.

“Curse this wretched island and its strip malls,” said Kira. “Everything on this island is covered with trees — how can there be this much open ground?”

“There’s some underbrush,” said Xochi, “but probably not enough to hide us all the way across.”

“Look down there,” said Gianna, pointing south. “That next clump of soldiers is at least two blocks away. The gap between guards is actually pretty big — when it gets dark, we’ll have a pretty good chance.”

Kira looked south, then north again, gauging the distance. “Flip around the radio and see if you can find what channel that checkpoint is using.”

Gianna started clicking the knob, tic, pause, tic, pause, tic, pause, searching for an active frequency. Each time she heard voices she stopped, listening for street names, and Kira felt a surge of relief when they heard a man mention Gardiners Avenue.

“That’s us,” said Kira, tapping her fingers on the wall. “Keep monitoring all three channels; we’ll set a watch, lie low, and wait for dark.” She peeked back through the fence, sizing up the distances to either guard post. At night, if we stay down, they shouldn’t see us at all.

Each hour that passed, Kira felt her stomach twist further into knots. What am I? Why am I here — and who put me here? Do I have the pheromone? Do I have something worse? A hundred thousand questions swirled madly through her head, and she was desperate for answers. She forced herself to forget them, to think about the task at hand, but that was even worse. When she thought about Madison and Arwen, it was all she could do not to run straight to the hospital. She patted the wrapped syringe on her waist, and forced herself to be patient.

When darkness finally fell, Farad pulled more planks from the fence and pushed a small hole through the kudzu. They shouldered their gear, strapped it on tightly, and poised on the brink in a thin line: Farad, Xochi, Jayden, Gianna, Kira, and Marcus. Kira gripped her rifle and took a deep, slow breath.

“Keep the radio on,” said Kira, “as quiet as you can make it. If the Grid sees us crossing, I want to know about it.”

Gianna smiled thinly. “Already done.”

“Then we go,” said Kira. “Stay down, stay silent, but if they spot us just run for it.”

Farad bounced loosely on the balls of his feet. “Ready … set-y … spaghetti.” He dropped to his stomach and slipped out, pushing silently through the weeds toward the makeshift wall of cars. The others followed, trying not to rustle as they went. There were a few long seconds of desperate silence, and suddenly the radio burst into cries and shouts and static.

“There! There! South of Twenty-Three!”

A bullet slammed into the asphalt barely ten inches from Kira’s hand.

“Stealth is over,” she said. “Just run.” They leaped to their feet and charged across the street, vaulting the wall of cars; Kira planted her right hand on a broad metal hood for leverage; it scalded her skin, still hot from a day in the sun, but she jumped up and tromped across it, two quick, clanging steps before leaping back down to the ground beyond. The radio was screaming alarms, and she heard warped, echoing gunfire — first over the radio, then in real life as the sharp reports finally reached her ears. Farad was across now, sprinting through the parking lot toward a gap in the strip mall buildings, when suddenly Gianna dropped like a stone, a puff of thick mist hanging in the air above her.

“No!” Kira screamed, following so close behind Gianna that she tripped over her body and crashed to the broken asphalt. She found her feet and tried to rise, turning to help Gianna, but Marcus grabbed her as he passed and pulled her to her feet, dragging her forward.

“Keep going!”

“We have to help her.”

“She’s dead, keep going!”

Kira wrenched her arm from his grip and turned back, hearing a bullet slam into the ground somewhere dangerously close. Gianna lay facedown in a puddle of blood. “Forgive me,” Kira whispered, and grabbed not the girl but her radio. This is too important to leave behind.

Kira felt her body twist with an impact, but she kept her feet and ran again toward Marcus and the others. Where was I hit? She catalogued every limb as she ran, trying to identify the pain, but felt none. Too much adrenaline, said the scientist in her head, strangely calm and analytical. You’re going to bleed out and die without ever feeling the bullet. She reached the shelter of the alley and ran on while Marcus cursed her wildly from behind.

“Are you trying to get killed?”

“Shut up and run,” said Xochi, pulling them through a broken gate that listed sadly on one rusty hinge. The space beyond was a backyard, dense with weeds, and they fought through them to the shattered back door of a sagging house, the paint peeling off in long, faded strips. This close to the edge of the city the houses were still uninhabited, and they dropped to the floor in a skeleton’s living room. Jayden turned back with his rifle to cover the door.

“I’ve been hit,” Kira said, dropping the radio to pat herself, looking for blood. Farad snatched up the radio, thumbed the switch, and barked into it, “Checkpoint Twenty-Three, this is Patrol Forty. We’re right here, but the Voice have not come through the houses. Repeat, they have not come through the houses. Do you have visual contact? Over.”

“Negative, Forty,” squawked the radio. “Still searching. Over.”

“Understood, we’ll keep searching as well. Over and out.” He clicked off the radio and threw it back to her. “You risked your idiot life for that thing, we may as well use it.”

“What’s Patrol Forty?” asked Xochi.

“They’re stationed on the north side,” said Farad, “which is a different radio channel. That gives us maybe ten minutes before they figure it out. Now we’ve got to get out of this house before a real patrol comes chasing us in here.”

Before he even finished whispering, they heard footsteps and voices in the yard behind them. Jayden grabbed his gun and ran to the back door, crouching behind the sagging wall.

“This is the Long Island Defense Grid,” Jayden shouted, glancing back at the others and gesturing for them to pick up their guns. “You are ordered to drop your weapons and surrender immediately.”

There was a small pause, and Jayden listened with his head cocked. After a moment a voice shouted back, “Is that you, Patrol Forty?”

Jayden smiled wickedly. “Yes, it is. Is that Checkpoint Twenty-Three?”

Kira heard the men outside cursing. “Don’t tell me we lost them!”

Farad pulled on his uniform cap and stepped carefully out of the back door. Kira watched through a tiny gap in the crumbling wall.

“We checked this whole area,” he said. “They haven’t come through.”

“What do you mean they haven’t come through?” asked the soldier. “We chased them right down this alley.”

“I’ve got men in half of these houses,” said Farad, gesturing around him, “and none of them have seen anything.”

“How could you let them get past you?”

“Listen, soldier,” said Farad, “you’re the ones who let them get past the border — we’re trying to clean up your mess here, not ours. Now spread out. We’ll check these houses, you check those, and don’t forget to leave someone here to guard this alley. The last thing we need is more of them crossing your checkpoint.”

The other soldiers muttered a bit, and Kira heard them tromp away to the next house. She exhaled, then continued checking herself for a bullet hole. Finally finding it — in her backpack. She hadn’t been hurt, but her equipment was destroyed.

Farad stepped back inside, whistling lowly in relief. “Let’s get out of here.”

“I can’t believe that worked,” said Xochi.

“It won’t work for very long,” said Jayden. “They’re going to search Gianna eventually, and they’re going to see she’s wearing a Grid uniform. We’ve got about sixty seconds to disappear.”

They worked their way to the front of the house and slipped from there into the next yard, then the next, moving deeper into East Meadow and as far from the infiltration site as they could. As they walked, the city became more populated, the houses better tended, and at last Kira saw the glint of window glass. I’m home. And yet even as the city looked familiar, it looked wrong; the houses were occupied, but the doors were all closed and the glassed-in windows were all curtained or even boarded up. On a nice summer night like this, even after sunset, the streets should be full of people talking, chatting, enjoying themselves, but now the few people who walked the streets did so quickly, eager to get back inside again, avoiding eye contact with everyone else. Groups of Grid soldiers and Mkele’s special police patrolled the city at regular intervals, and Kira saw more than one of the scared, furtive citizens stopped and questioned in the streets. They’re looking for us, she thought, but they’re punishing the wrong people.

They reached the Turnpike and took shelter in a ruined storefront, looking across at the hospital that had practically become a fortress. There were guards on the doors, but more important there was a perimeter of guards all around the grounds. The rear door they’d been planning to use was probably still available, but without their Grid jeep they couldn’t get to it safely, let alone get out again with Madison.

“This is going to be interesting,” said Xochi.

“No kidding,” said Jayden. Farad merely shook his head.

“Bad news,” said Marcus, and motioned them over to the radio. They clustered around him, and Kira heard a staticky voice shouting an urgent warning: “… I repeat, the Voice has Defense Grid uniforms. They are already inside the city, and there may be more coming. Full identification checks are now mandatory for all encounters, code protocol Sigma.” The message repeated, and Marcus shook his head. “This just keeps getting better and better.”

“I don’t know code protocol Sigma,” said Farad, pacing nervously in the ruined building. “Some of it, maybe, but not enough. We won’t get past anyone now.”

Kira stared at the hospital, willing herself to find something, anything, that she could use to get in. I’m a wanted criminal with a face well-known by every single person in that building. If I get in, it will be because I’m in chains. She shook her head, forcing herself to think it through. I am stronger than my trials, she thought. I can use my trials to help me; I can make them serve my own ends. Don’t say, “I’ll never do it,” say, “How can I turn this situation in my favor?” She studied the building more closely, counting the guards she could see, estimating the number of guards she couldn’t, drawing a detailed mental picture of the inner hallways to guess where each soldier would be stationed. She counted the windows, determining the exact location of every good entrance point, and found to her dismay that each one had been blocked by cars or reinforced with sheets of metal and planks of wood. It’s too well defended. They’ve thought of everything — they’ve anticipated every plan we could use.

She glanced up at the snipers on the roof, commanding a matchless view of the land around the hospital. Partial or not, they could still shoot me down no matter how fast I try to run—

She paused, her eyes caught by a gleam of light from a window. That’s the fourth floor — the only people who use that floor are the Senators. Are they meeting right now? Is there any way that could help me?

“Even if we get in,” said Jayden, “I don’t know how we’d ever get out again — not with Madison. They barely let her out of her bed, they’d never let her out of the hospital, and we don’t even have the jeep to hide her in.”

“You are just a little ray of sunshine,” said Marcus. He stood up. “This is fantastic — we can’t get to the hospital, we can’t get out, we probably can’t even get out of East Meadow. Our uniforms don’t even help us anymore — we have literally nothing.”

“That’s not true,” said Kira, looking back at the hospital. There was definitely light on the fourth floor. “You have me.”

“You’ll excuse me for not jumping with joy,” said Farad.

“See that light?” she asked, pointing at the lit upper windows. “That’s the Senate, and you’re going to bring them the one thing they want more than anything in the entire world: me.”

“No, we’re not,” said Marcus hotly, echoed by all three of the others.

“Yes, you are,” said Kira. “Our plan is destroyed, we can’t get Madison out, but we can still give her the shot — if we can get inside. You don’t need me to be there when you do it, and I was serious about giving my life for this. If Arwen lives, I don’t care what the Senate does to me.”

“We’re not going to give you up,” said Xochi.

“Yes, you will,” said Kira. “You pull down your hat brims, march up to the door, and tell them you caught me trying to sneak across the border. It’s the most believable story we could possibly come up with, because any soldier smart enough to be listening to his radio will know people have been hitting the border all day. They won’t even ask for ID, because why would Voice spies turn in one of their own?”

“Good question,” said Xochi. “Why would we? That doesn’t gain us anything.”

“It gets you inside the hospital,” said Kira. “Just hand me off to the guards inside, they’ll take me up to the Senate, and you head to maternity.”

“We don’t have to hand you off,” said Marcus, “once we’re in we could just … make a break for it.”

“And set off every alarm in the building,” said Kira. “If you turn me over, you can work in peace.” She took Marcus’s hand. “If this cure works, humanity has a future; that’s the only thing we’ve ever wanted.”

Marcus’s voice cracked when he spoke. “I wanted it with you.”

“They might not kill me outright,” said Kira, smiling weakly. “Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

Marcus laughed, his eyes wet with tears. “Yeah, our luck’s been awesome so far.”

“We’ll need to call ahead,” said Farad, hefting the radio, “just like we did with the checkpoint. If they hear us before they see us, we stand a much better chance of making this work.”

“We can’t risk the same trick twice,” said Jayden. “Someone who knows exactly how many patrols there are, and where they’ve been assigned, is going to be listening. It won’t take long to figure out we’re lying.”

“We can’t just show up without calling in first,” said Farad. “How suspicious would that look?”

Xochi drew her pistol, screwed on a silencer, and shot the radio squarely in the center; Kira and the others leaped back with a chorus of startled yelps. “Problem solved,” said Xochi, holstering her weapon again. “The evil terrorist Kira Walker shot our radio during the fight. Now: Kira is my best friend in the world, but she’s right. Her plan is the best, fastest way to get us inside that hospital, so take her weapons away and let’s do this.”

Kira pulled out her weapons and other gear, stripping herself of almost every piece of equipment she had; the men in the group eventually started helping, resigned to the fact that the decision had been made. Marcus wasn’t happy about it, but he wasn’t doing anything to stop it, either. The last piece of equipment was the syringe, wrapped tightly and padded with old shirts, tied firmly to an extra belt inside every other layer of clothing. She took it off, held it a moment, and handed it to Marcus.

“Take care of this,” she whispered.

“I don’t want you to do this.”

“I don’t either,” she said, “but it has to be done.”

Marcus stared into her eyes, saying nothing, then took the belt and tied it carefully under his shirt. He made sure his clothes covered it, then smeared his face with dirt, altering his complexion enough that the nurses at the hospital might not recognize him. Might. Jayden and Xochi did the same, and Kira hoped it would be enough. I just have to make sure everyone is looking at me.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Kira twisted and pulled, screaming as they carried her toward the first row of guards. “You have to let me go! I’m trying to help you, you idiots, can’t you see that?” The time for stealth was long past: Her job now was to be as visible as possible so that no one looked closely at her friends. She ripped her arm loose from Farad’s grip and attacked Jayden with it, trying to make it look as convincing as she could; he responded in kind by slugging her in the side of the head, then curling her arm behind her in a sudden choke hold that held her completely immobile. “Oof,” she grunted, “nice one.”

“Shut up, Voice.” He dragged her around and cursed at Farad. “That’s how you hold a prisoner, blowhole. Now don’t let go again.”

“I think you’re breaking my arm,” said Kira.

“Good,” said Xochi, loud enough for the nearest group of soldiers to hear it. The group called out, but Xochi stepped up before they could say any more. “We caught her!” she said, waving the broken radio like a trophy. “Hurry, clear us a path to the Senate — I don’t want any civilians getting close enough to try anything.”

The sergeant of the other group hesitated. “Who do you have?”

“Kira Walker,” said Xochi. “In the flesh — she was part of that group that tried to jump the border. See for yourself.” She gestured to Kira, who stared back proudly.

“Holy crap,” said the sergeant, coming closer and peering at her carefully. It wasn’t anyone Kira knew, but he nodded. “That’s definitely her.” He paused a moment, then spit in her face. “My best friend was killed by the Voice, bitch.”

Marcus stepped up quickly to stop him. “Stand down, soldier. This is a prisoner, not a dog.”

“She attacked the hospital,” said the soldier. “What are you defending her for?”

“We’re taking her to the Senate,” said Marcus. “They’ll decide how to punish her, not us. Now you heard her — clear the way!”

The other squad glared at him angrily, and Kira held her breath, praying they didn’t ask for identification. She kicked Jayden in the shin, trying to look as dangerous as she could, and he swore and twisted her arm again — painfully enough that she didn’t have to fake her reaction. Apparently the show was enough.

“Let’s get her up there, then,” said the sergeant, and led them toward the hospital, clearing a path through the crowd of soldiers.

“We’re getting into the real danger zone now,” Jayden murmured. “I used to work with some of these guys.”

“Me too,” said Marcus, scanning the gathering crowd with his gun at the ready. He nodded faintly to the left. “That one, for instance.”

“Then we steer right,” said Jayden, and angled just slightly away.

I need them to look at me, not my escort, thought Kira, and launched into another tirade. “The Senate is lying to you! They’re the ones who brought the Partial here, and they told me to study it and I found a cure! I found a cure for RM, and the Senate tried to destroy it! Your children don’t have to die!” It was working: More and more soldiers were watching her now, every eye fixed on her face. They were almost at the front doors. Just a few more steps, Kira thought, just a few more.

The soldier leading them stopped, staring at the door, then turned toward Kira. His eyes were dark and clear. “Do you really have a cure for RM?”

Kira paused in surprise, not knowing what to think. Was he just curious? Did he really care? The question seemed loaded with extra meanings, little hints and messages and signs she couldn’t hope to interpret because she didn’t know anything about the man giving them. Was he on her side? Did he support the Senate? She looked past him to the front lobby of the hospital, open and ready; all her friends had to do was get inside, turn right, and follow the hall. They could save Arwen. They could do it.

But the people have the real power, she thought, remembering her conversation with Torvar. These are the people we’re trying to reach, the people who will follow us or stay with the Senate. How many of them are like Jayden, like Farad, wanting to rebel and just needing that final push?

Can I give them that push?

She turned back to the soldier and looked him straight in the eye. “Yes, I do,” she said. “I have a cure for RM. But the Senate would rather kill me than let you have it.”

“Give it to me,” the soldier whispered, leaning in close. “I can use it — I can’t save you, but I can use the cure and save the children.”

Was he telling the truth? Was he bluffing? Was he trying to trick her? She couldn’t give it to him without blowing Marcus’s cover, and the entire group’s, but what if she could — what then? Who in the crowd would attack her, and who would leap to her defense? Who would believe her, and would they believe her enough to let her into the maternity wing? It wasn’t enough for the soldier to promise to help — she had to see it, right here, or she couldn’t take the risk.

She whispered back, searching his eyes for some hint of understanding. “You can’t be half a hero.”

“ID challenge,” said another soldier to the side. He took a step closer, and Kira’s heart sank. “We’re supposed to ask everybody, even soldiers, and you’re not getting into this hospital unless I know exactly who you are.”

The crowd of soldiers stood breathless, watching the exchange, straining to hear. In the background Kira could see soldiers gripping their weapons, shifting their weight, getting ready for a firefight. I don’t know who to trust, she thought wildly. If people start shooting, I don’t know who to hide from, who to attack, I don’t know anything. I don’t even know what this soldier wants. Jayden reached down with his free hand and undid the snap on his holster, freeing the pistol for an easy draw. The soldier in front of her did the same—

— and turned to the side, putting the ready pistol just inches from Kira’s fingers.

“Hey, Woolf,” he called, addressing the soldier who’d challenged them. “Do you have a pair of handcuffs? There are a lot of sympathizers in this crowd, and I want to make sure she’s bound before we take her upstairs.”

A lot of sympathizers, thought Kira, staring at the gun in front of her. That might be a message for me — he’s ignoring the ID challenge and offering me a gun. He has to be on our side. But what is he doing? If he’s going to fight for us, why not just fight? What does he expect me to do? The crowd of soldiers watched carefully, poised on the brink of whatever her decision would be. Who’s with us? What am I supposed to do? She looked at the soldier in front of her, quickly running out of a good reason to be standing sideways. He’s giving me the choice, she realized. He’s not fighting yet because he wants to know if I’m serious or not — if I’m really ready to die for this, or just full of hot air. Anything we start here is going to be bloody. A lot of us are going to die.

He’s waiting for me to make the first move.

“I said ‘ID challenge,’” said the other soldier, stepping in closer. His rifle was ready in his hands; if he got too suspicious, he could kill them all in seconds. Kira made her decision and looked sharply to the left, past Farad and out into the crowd. The soldier followed her eye line, and she grabbed the waiting pistol in a single motion, pulling it around, flicking off the safety, and firing at the suspicious soldier’s head. He dropped like a sack of fish, and she shouted at the top of her lungs.

“Fight for your future!”

The crowd erupted in screams. Kira ducked, and Marcus pulled her heavily to the ground. “You’re going to get shot up there!”

“I’m going to get shot everywhere!” she shouted, and turned back toward the hospital doors. The soldier who’d given her the pistol went down, and Kira quickly traced the path backward and shot the man who’d fired the bullet, firing twice. The ground before them began to clear, and Kira jumped up, dragging Marcus with her as she dashed ahead to the doors; Jayden and Xochi followed close behind. Almost as soon as they entered the building, Kira heard a burst of gunfire echoing down the corridor and dove to the floor behind a tall information desk.

“This is plywood,” said Jayden. “It’s not going to stop any bullets.”

“And the crowd outside is not entirely in our favor,” said Xochi. “I don’t like lying on the floor in full view of a revolution. We need a strategy.”

Jayden laughed grimly. “Press the attack and hope for the best.”

“Hope is not a strategy,” said Kira.

“It’s not plan A,” said Jayden, “and it shouldn’t be plan B, but it is every plan C that has ever been made.”

Kira nodded and took her shotgun back from Farad. “Then I’ll cover you — somebody with an effective range take out those shooters.” Before she had time to think better of it, Kira leaped to her feet and started firing down the hall, blast after blast from the shotgun. It was a long-barreled, single-shot weapon, useless in close quarters, but at medium range like this it laid down a devastating hail of buckshot that sent the loyalist soldiers ducking for cover. Jayden popped up beside her with his rifle, sighting carefully and taking quick, precise shots every time an enemy raised his head or stuck out his gun. Marcus and the others used the time to run ahead, staying well out of Kira’s line of fire, and when her trigger clicked on an empty chamber, she called out to Xochi, who took up position in a doorway and continued the barrage on her own. Kira and Jayden ran forward to join the others, and Kira threw herself into the room next to Marcus.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Same old, same old,” he said, clenching his teeth at the thundering booms that shook the walls and ceiling. “How about you?”

Kira nodded. “The cure’s okay?” She felt for it on Marcus’s waist, brushing his fingers briefly as he did the same. The syringe was intact and the padding was dry; nothing had broken or leaked out. She left her hand there for a moment longer, looking into Marcus’s eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she said softly. Xochi screamed defiantly behind them, ducking back to reload while Farad took up the fight.

“What, this?” asked Marcus, gesturing around. “Don’t worry about it — happens all the time.”

“You wanted to live in peace,” said Kira, loading fresh shells into her shotgun. “That’s all you’ve ever wanted, just the two of us together, and I wanted it too, but I—”

“I know,” said Marcus, all joking gone from his voice. “I wanted everything to stay the same, but you wanted things to be better. And you were right, and it’s going to be better, it’s just … going to be a whole lot worse for a while first. And I think I knew that, and I was scared of it.”

Farad grunted behind them, not a scream but a soft, guttural moan, and his body fell to the ground. Xochi cried out, and Kira turned pale at the sight, dragging him back out of the line of fire. Marcus felt his neck for a pulse, bending close to listen for breathing, but there was too much blood — there was no way he was still alive. Marcus shook his head, confirming her fears. “He’s gone.”

“What now?” asked Jayden. The hallways was eerily quiet now that no one was shooting, though faint sounds drifted in from the distance: muted screams and pops of gunfire from the outer grounds; wails of patients trapped and helpless in the hospital; desperate screams of tiny infants, burning alive as the fever ate their bodies. The four friends crouched in the room, trembling and terrified. Kira looked through the door, but all she could see were a few narrow feet of the opposite wall. Not knowing what was out there made her feel blind and deaf. Jayden reloaded his gun quickly and efficiently, though Kira could see his fingers shaking with fatigue and adrenaline. “One more on our list of failed plans,” he said. “We couldn’t sneak in, we’re sure as hell not sneaking back out again, and there’s no point dragging you up to the Senate. Straight to maternity?”

“Straight to maternity,” said Marcus. He grimaced, shaking his head. “Kira was ready to die so that we could give Arwen the shot; I think we should be ready to die for it, too. It’s only two more doors down — if we can get in and inject her, even if we never get back out, we’ve won. The baby will be saved, and thanks to our display outside, everyone will know who did it.”

Xochi took a breath. “You think we’re going to make it?”

“Only one of us has to,” said Jayden.

Marcus stood up, undoing his shirt and removing the belt with the cure. He looked at Kira, then picked up his rifle. “If only one of us lives through this, I’d kind of prefer it to be you. Are we ready for this?”

“No,” said Xochi, “but that’s never stopped us before.” She grabbed a rolling chair and waited just inside the door, looking back. Kira and the others checked their weapons and nodded, and Xochi pushed the chair out into the hallway.

A burst of gunfire filled the hall, and the four friends leaped out after it, firing wildly at the surprised gunmen who were aiming at the wrong moving object. Xochi led the way, stumbling as a round took her in the arm, but she was already to the maternity room and slammed into the door; it didn’t budge, so she stepped back, shot the lock, and fell through as the door swung open. Marcus followed more slowly, either aiming very poorly or missing on purpose, trying not to kill the enemy soldiers but to scare them into cover. It seemed to be working, and Kira and Jayden did their best to keep up a steady barrage as they jogged forward. Suddenly Xochi screamed, and Kira heard a gunshot. Marcus sprinted through the maternity door a moment later and Kira heard more shots, and then suddenly she was down, a sharp pain in her leg like nothing she’d ever experienced.

“Get up,” growled Jayden, firing wild bursts into the end of the hall. “I’m almost out — I can’t keep them down forever.”

Kira struggled to stand, but her leg felt limp and useless; blood soaked her pant leg and pooled around her on the floor. “I’ve been shot.”

“I know you’ve been shot, just get out of the hallway!”

Kira lunged forward, crawling on her hands, dragging her leg behind her. The pain was growing now, and she could feel her own consciousness fading as her blood pumped eagerly onto the floor. Jayden cursed and fired more carefully, saving his shots, trying to keep the soldiers at bay one bullet at a time. Kira pulled the cure from her shoulder and held it up.

“Take it and run,” she said. “Leave me here and save Arwen.”

“You know, Kira,” said Jayden, firing his last bullet and throwing down the rifle, “I don’t think you know me very well at all.” He stooped, grabbed her by the shoulder and waist, and heaved her up to her feet, surging backward toward the maternity door, keeping himself between Kira and the enemy. The soldiers fired, and Kira felt his body shake with one impact, then another; his breathing grew ragged, his pace slowed, but he never stopped. Kira clung to him, calling his name desperately as he groaned and cursed and wheezed. At last he tumbled sideways into the maternity door, and they collapsed to the floor.

“Jayden!” screamed a voice. Kira turned to see Madison crouching protectively over an intensive care incubator, and her heart sank. She’s already born. Are we too late?

Beside her was Haru, wild-eyed and disheveled, clutching a gun. He aimed it at Kira. “Drop your weapons.”

“Jayden!” Madison screamed again and tried to rush forward, but Haru stopped her with an iron grip on her arm.

“Stay here.”

“He’s hurt!”

“I said stay here!” Haru’s voice was like thunder, and Madison pulled back in fear. “We are not letting them near our baby.”

“Jayden,” Kira whispered, “stay with me.” She looked around quickly, seeing Xochi and Marcus both standing straight against the wall, their guns on the floor and their arms in the air. Marcus moved to help her, but Haru roared at him to stop.

“Do not move!”

“My brother’s dying!” screamed Madison. “Let them help him!”

Kira struggled to sit up, careless of her own wound, and carefully examined Jayden’s back; he’d been hit by multiple rounds. A moment later Marcus joined her, carefully removing Jayden’s backpack to see how much damage had been done. Kira didn’t see if Haru had let him move, or if he’d just come anyway.

The soldiers from the hall were in the doorway now, guns trained on them.

“She…,” said Jayden, though his voice was almost too quiet to hear, “has … the cure.”

“What did he say?” asked Madison.

“He said idiot Voice lies,” said Haru. “Don’t even listen to him.”

“He said I have the cure,” said Kira. She turned painfully, dragging her bloody leg. Was it just her imagination, or was the wound already starting to heal? She clutched the cure in her hand and held it up. “It’s right here.”

“You’re not getting anywhere near my daughter,” said Haru.

“I’m going to save her,” she said again, grabbing the wall and pulling herself, inch by agonizing inch, to her feet. She rested her weight on her good leg and tried to ignore the other, willing herself to stand through sheer mental force. “I have sacrificed everything I had, and everything I am, to save your daughter. Are you really going to be the one to stop me?”

“You’re a Partial agent,” said Haru. “You’re in league with them — God only knows what you’re trying to do to my daughter, but I will die before I let you do it.”

“I’m fine with that plan,” said Xochi.

“He’s dead,” announced Marcus, falling back from Jayden’s body. He looked up at Haru, gasping for breath and reeling from exhaustion. “He died for this, Haru. Don’t do this.”

Madison wailed in despair, and the child in the crib wailed with her, an incoherent cry against a world that brought nothing but pain. Kira stared at Haru fiercely. “You have to let me try.”

“Try?” asked Haru. “You mean you’re not even sure?”

Kira paled, thinking of all the ways she could be wrong, all the ways the injection could fail. What if I’ve done all this for nothing? What if I’ve killed my friends and destroyed my world for nothing more than a sloppy experiment and some bad guesses and my own stubborn pride? The Senate warned me about this: They said I was risking thousands of lives and the future of the human race for one overriding obsession. Is it because I’m a Partial, driven to destroy everything just because that’s how I’m made? Thanks to me, the entire nation is in chaos, thousands are dead, and without a cure, we may never recover. Without a cure, it won’t even matter.

But with a cure…

“I don’t have any data for you,” she said. “I don’t have any facts, my studies were all lost when the lab exploded, and the cure itself has never been tested. I don’t have anything that can prove to you that what I’m doing is right. But Madison,” she said, looking her adopted sister straight in the eye, “if there is one thing you know about me, one thing at all, it’s that I always try to do the right thing. And no matter how painful this has been, no matter how much hell we’ve been through and how many of us have died, this is the right thing to do.”

“Shut up!” screamed Haru, shoving the pistol forward. Kira ignored him, keeping her eyes on Madison’s.

“Madison,” she said again, “do you trust me?”

Slowly, tearfully, Madison nodded. Kira held up the cure, still wrapped on the belt, and Madison stepped forward.

“Madison, stay back,” growled Haru. “I am not letting you give our baby to that traitor.”

“Then shoot me,” said Madison fiercely. She planted herself squarely between Haru and the incubator; his hand quivered, faltered, and dropped to his side.

Kira collapsed to the floor, and Marcus ran to the cupboards on the wall to find a needle for the syringe. The soldiers in the doorway didn’t move, watching the whole thing with their guns pointed at the floor. Xochi helped Kira to her feet and took her to the incubator; Kira could feel the heat from the tiny body’s fever like a pit of dying coals. Marcus handed her a needle and swabbed the child’s arm with disinfectant.

Kira prepped the injection, hesitating over the red, screaming body. Right now the Blob virus was roaring through her like a pack of wild dogs, ripping and tearing, eating her from the inside. This syringe, this pheromone, would save her.

Kira leaned forward. “Hold her still.”

Madison held the baby close, Marcus and Xochi stopped moving, even Haru fell silent in the background. The entire world seemed focused on this single moment. Arwen’s thin, hoarse crying filled the room like smoke, the final, desperate sparking of an engine about to fail. Kira breathed, steadied her arm, and gave the baby the shot.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

“We have discovered a cure for RM.”

Cheers rang through the coliseum, applause and shouts and cries of joy. It wasn’t news — something so world-shaking could hardly be contained, and the news of Arwen’s recovery had spread like wildfire — but still the people cheered. Senator Hobb smiled at the crowd, his giant holographic head mimicking the expression in the air above him. Kira sat neatly on the stand behind him, crying again and wondering, as she had a thousand times in the last week, if it was all really true. If it was all really happening. She caught Marcus’s smile from the audience, and smiled back. It was real.

Hobb raised his hands to call for order, smiling indulgently as the crowd continued to celebrate; they wanted their chance to cheer, and he seemed happy to give it to them. Kira marveled at the man’s capacity for change — not two weeks ago he was helping to turn the island into a totalitarian state, and it had collapsed catastrophically around him, and yet here he stood, smiling and clapping. Kessler had managed to maintain her seat as well, and Kira stole a glance at her on the other end of the stand. The other members of the subcommittee had not been so lucky.

Hobb quieted the crowd again, and this time they followed, growing hushed as Hobb prepared to speak. “We have found a cure for RM,” he said again. “We found it, of all places, in the Partials — in a chemical they excrete in their breath, which reacts with the virus to nullify it completely. We learned this thanks to a series of tests performed by our local hero, Ms. Kira Walker, under the supervision of the Senate.” Scattered applause filled the hall, and Hobb waited patiently for it to die down. “These tests were performed, as the rumor mill has already told you, on a live Partial subject obtained as part of a secret mission by members of the Defense Grid. We admit, shamefaced but honest, that we were not as open with you about these tests as perhaps we should have been. We feared a violent riot, and in the end that is exactly what we got. Rest assured that in the future the Senate will be much more transparent about our goals, our plans, and our methods for carrying them out.”

Kira blew out a long, nervous breath, watching the crowd for signs of unrest. Everything Hobb was saying was, technically, true, but the way he said it felt so … greasy, at least to Kira. He admitted just enough to seem repentant, while taking credit for much more of the process than the Senate had truly been a part of. The crowd wasn’t cheering him, but they weren’t booing him either.

“Arwen Sato is doing fine,” said Hobb, “more fit and healthy than we had dared to hope. We didn’t want to risk taking her from the hospital, where she is under the strictest care of both the doctors and her mother, but we did record this holo so that you could all see her.”

Hobb sat down, and the holo-image in the center of the coliseum changed from a close-up of his head to a scene from the maternity center; Kira, even knowing exactly what the movie was, couldn’t stop herself from crying as Saladin, the youngest human alive, stood beside the red-faced baby in the hospital crib to whom he was passing the honor. The sight of the child sent a gasp of awe through the audience, and Kira let herself get drawn up in it: the first human baby in eleven years that wasn’t sick, wasn’t screaming, wasn’t dying or dead.

The holo stopped and Hobb stood up, his eyes brimming with tears. “Arwen Sato is the future,” he said, echoing Kira’s thoughts. “That child, that precious little girl, is the first of a new generation — the inheritors of a world that will, we hope, be better than the one we have known for the last eleven years. Our scientists are working around the clock to replicate the compounds that saved Arwen’s life, so that we can begin applying them to other children, but that is not enough. If we want a brighter tomorrow, we must tear down the shadows of yesterday. That is why I am pleased to announce that the Hope Act is now and forever officially repealed.”

The audience cheered again, though not as unanimously. Many of the people in East Meadow still supported the Hope Act, saying that the existence of a real cure only made it more important to have as many children as possible, but the Senate had chosen to repeal it as a peace offering to the Voice. The same peace offering had included the resignations of Alma Delarosa and Oliver Weist; between them they had managed to soak up most of the blame for the city’s rapid dip into martial law. Skousen had also left, not in ignominy but to focus his time on replicating the cure. In their place the people had elected Owen Tovar, newly pardoned of his crimes with the Voice. The new Senate was a combination of East Meadow and Voice, both their ideas and their ways of thinking, and the island was finally at peace again. At least in theory. Kira looked down the row of Senators on the dais, seeing gaps and holes as each one sat closer or farther from their neighbors; this one avoided that one’s eyes, and that one whispered conspiratorially in the ear of the next. The crowd in the coliseum mirrored this behavior on a larger scale: they were united, but there were still deep rifts running just below the surface.

“We have not yet decided a course of action,” said Hobb, his voice rich with earnest sincerity. “Our medics and researchers are working to unlock the secrets of the cure, and once they do we will begin synthesizing more. This is our plan for the time being, but should things change, rest assured that your votes will decide what steps we take next. Our society will work together, or not at all.

“But there is one thing more.” He paused, a purely theatrical moment that Kira saw worked marvelously well: The crowd hushed and leaned forward. Hobb raised his finger, tapping it gently in the air, and finally resumed his speech. “There is one thing more that we discovered in our experimentation on the Partial. Something that will change the course of our lives, and of the entire world.” He took a breath. “The Partials are dying, rapidly, and there’s nothing they or anyone else can do to stop it. In a year, our greatest enemy will be gone forever.”

The cheer that rose from the crowd shook the coliseum to its core.

“We can’t synthesize it,” said Kira. Marcus had walked her home after the town hall meeting, and they were sitting in her living room. Kira knew the truth, and it burned inside her like a white-hot coal: The cure, the Lurker, could not be replicated artificially, and her own private tests had shown that she did not produce it. If she was truly a Partial, as Dr. Morgan and the others had claimed, her purpose and her origins remained a mystery she could only guess at.

She prayed it was not sinister.

“We can’t make it, we can’t fake it, we simply don’t have the tools,” she continued. “I’m not even sure the tools exist — maybe ParaGen had something, and whoever made the virus in the first place, but they’re gone now. The only way to get it is from the Partials themselves.”

“Isolde says the Senate is preparing for the possibility of an attack on the mainland,” said Marcus.

Kira nodded. “A contingency plan.” She was the island’s expert on the subject and consulted with the Senate often, but she worked more closely with Skousen; she knew they were planning something, but she didn’t know the details. “Did Isolde say anything about a timeline?”

“A few months, maybe.” Marcus shrugged helplessly. “It was one thing to watch the newborns die before, but now that there’s a cure… Three more have died since we saved Arwen, and the women Tovar injected with the other two doses haven’t given birth yet. We don’t know what’s going to happen, but regardless, the people aren’t going to sit still once things go back to the way they were. And now that they know the Partials are dying, it’s only a matter of time before they start calling for a new plan. There are proposals for peace talks and envoys, too, not just war, but with the state of things we saw over there…” He shook his head. “Any ambassadors we send are as likely to get shot as deliver a treaty.”

“Just like what we did to them.” She frowned. “Maybe.” She still wasn’t sure what to think about Samm — had he been lying the whole time? Was peace with the Partials even possible?

“Kira,” said Marcus, and instantly she heard the change in his voice: a deep breath, a softer pitch, a searching tone that filled her name with a deep and portentous meaning. She knew exactly what he was going to say, and she cut him off as gently as she could.

“I can’t stay with you.”

Even as she said it, she saw Marcus deflate — first his eyes, the brightness bleeding out of them, his head hung low. His face fell, his shoulders drooped.

“Why?” he asked.

Not “why not,” thought Kira, but “why.” It’s such a different question. It means he knows I have another reason — not something pushing me away from him, but something pulling me toward something else.

“Because I need to go away,” said Kira. “I need to find something.”

“You mean someone.” His voice was rough, tears close to the surface. “You mean Samm.”

“Yes,” said Kira, “but not like … it’s not what you think.”

“You’re trying to stop a war.” He said it simply, a statement rather than a question, but Kira could sense the same question underneath it: Why? Why was she leaving him? Why wasn’t she asking him to go? Why did she need Samm when he was right here? He didn’t ask, though, and Kira wouldn’t have been able to answer him anyway.

Because I’m a Partial. Because I’m a question. Because my entire life, the entire world, is so much bigger than it was a few months ago, and none of it makes sense, and everything in it is dangerous, and somehow I’m at the center of it. Because groups I didn’t even know existed are using me for plans I can’t possibly comprehend. Because I need to know what I am.

And who.

“Now it was her turn to cry, her voice cracking, her eyes growing wet. “I love you, Marcus, I do, and I always have, but I–I can’t tell you this. Not yet.”

“When?”

“Maybe soon. Maybe never. I don’t even know what it is I can’t tell you, I just … just trust me, Marcus, okay?”

He glanced at her bag, packed and ready by the inside of her door. “Are you leaving today?”

“Yes.”

“Now?”

She hesitated. “Yes.”

“I’ll come with you,” he said. “There’s nothing keeping me here.”

“You can’t come with me,” said Kira adamantly. “I need you to stay here.” I’m not ready for you to learn the things I want to learn about myself. I’m not ready for you to know what I am.

“Fine, then,” said Marcus. His words were short and clipped, trading sadness for anger and only barely concealing either. He stood slowly, walked to the door, opened it. Waited.

“Thank you,” said Kira. “For everything.”

“Good-bye,” said Marcus.

Kira blinked back a tear. “I love you.”

Marcus turned and walked away. Kira watched the empty doorway long after he was gone.

Nandita had never returned, and the house was cold and empty. Kira assembled her things: her bag of clothes, a bedroll and camping supplies, a new medkit; a rifle over her shoulder, and a semiautomatic at her hip. She looked around her house one final time, straightening the sheets on the bed, and her eye caught the gleam of a reflection on the nightstand. A framed photo. Kira frowned and walked toward it. That’s not mine.

It was a photo of three people, standing in front of a building. It was upside down, and she turned it around slowly.

She gasped.

Standing in the middle was her, as a child, barely four years old. On her right was her father, exactly how he looked in her memory. On her left was Nandita. Behind them, on the high brick wall of the building, was a single word.

ParaGen.

In the corner of the photo someone had written a small message, the letters jagged, the handwriting hurried and desperate:

Find the Trust.