Ruins

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

“General.”

Shon looked up from his maps, trying to plan the next wave of their hunt for the human terrorists. The resistance had ramped up their attacks over the last few weeks, striking harder and in more places than ever before, only to fade away like ghosts into the forests and ruins. They were getting bolder, too: His camp had spent the night and morning pinned down by sniper fire. He looked at the messenger with weary eyes. “What news?”

“We found the sniper’s nest, but no one was there—just a rifle rigged up to an alarm clock.”

Shon raised his eyebrow. “You’re kidding.”

The messenger’s link was completely sincere, blended with disbelief. “I saw it myself, sir. The trigger had been removed and connected to the gears of an alarm clock—one of the old wind-up ones, sir, completely handmade. We think it was set to fire into the camp at regular intervals, and the tripod was loosened just enough that the recoil adjusted the aim with each shot, so it wasn’t hitting the same spot over and over. The scouts think no one’s been up there since the first shot last night.”

Shon clenched his fist, linking his rage so fiercely that the messenger staggered back.

“That explains why no one was actually hit, sir,” said the messenger. “We thought it was just because humans are bad shots, but . . . now we know, I guess. It wasn’t even aiming, just firing every half hour or so. Maybe they just set it up and hoped they got lucky.”

“All they were hoping to do was slow us down,” said Shon, “which they’ve done brilliantly. Just when I thought we’d figured out these White Rhinos’ tactics, they switch them up completely.”

“That’s the other thing, sir,” said the messenger. “We don’t think this was the Rhinos—or if it was, it was some kind of splinter group. There was a note.” He stepped forward and handed it to the general.

Shon frowned, taking the wrinkled piece of paper. “They’ve never left a note before.”

“Exactly, sir. Everything about this strike is different from what we’ve seen before.”

Shon read the note: “‘Sorry we couldn’t wait around. We have some more surprises to set up. Love and kisses, Owen Tovar.’ What on earth?”

“We don’t know who Owen Tovar is yet,” said the messenger, “but we’re working on it.”

“He was one of the senators,” said Shon. “We thought they’d all gone into hiding. But why . . .” He stared at the note, turning it over in the halfhearted hope of finding another clue on the back. There was nothing. “Why identify himself? Is it just a taunt, or is there a deeper message to it?”

“Maybe he’s trying to rile us up?” asked the messenger. “After all those sniper shots into the camp, the soldiers are ready to burn the forest down to find them.”

Shon sighed and rubbed his eyes, feeling the strain of the long day more keenly than ever. “What’s your name, soldier?”

The messenger straightened to attention. “Thom, sir.”

“Thom, I want you to follow the scouts trying to track whoever set up that rifle. Report to me immediately when you find who’s responsible. You have a radio?”

“I can get one from supply, sir. Our battery packs are dwindling, though.”

Shon nodded. “We have prisoners hand-cranking the generators twenty-four hours a day, charging new ones.” And with any luck, we’ll get new orders from Morgan any day now, calling us home. Until then . . .

“May I ask a question, sir?”

Shone considered him a moment, then nodded. “Yes.”

“Why not flush them out with more hostages, sir? There are more guerrillas in these woods almost every day, but we still have East Meadow locked down. If we threaten to kill a few of them, it might get these rebels to stop—”

“We’re not murderers, soldier.” Shon’s words were accompanied by a harsh sting across the link, and he noted with satisfaction that Thom flinched when he sensed it. “The rebels are enemy combatants, and fighting enemy combatants is literally in your DNA. We were built to win wars while protecting innocent lives, and if you can’t do the one thing you were designed to do, maybe you’re not fit for this army.” It was a ferocious counterattack, the cruelest insult a Partial could give to another, but Shon had seen this same attitude growing in the ranks and he was determined to stamp it out. Thom recoiled, his link data a mixture of shock and shame, but barely a moment later his data was overpowered with rage, and he shot back a comment of his own.

“Dr. Morgan had us killing civilians, sir, and she had more right to her authority than some jumped-up infantryman—”

“Soldier!” He sent his anger thundering across the link, so powerful that his guards came in from the room beyond, hands on their guns and ready for trouble. “Have this man court-martialed,” said Shon, “and held in custody for the duration of the occupation.”

The guards linked their shock at the order but obeyed without question, taking Thom’s weapons and leading him away. Off to one of the cages, Shon thought. Out here in the wilderness, the modified trucks were the only form of prison they had. We’ve never used them to lock up one of our own before. The way things are going, that might become a lot more common.

Shon looked at the note again. Why the name? Why the flippant attitude? And what, in the end, was their plan? The day full of sniper shots had kept the entire camp on eggshells: hiding from the shots, searching for the shooter, returning fire when they could—fruitlessly, he realized now. But what purpose did that serve? The recent string of guerrilla attacks had been almost deliberately random, apparently not even decoys designed to lead them in a certain direction. But of course not, Shon realized. If we could tell that they were trying to lead us in one direction, we’d go directly in the other, and they know that. They’re not trying to lead us anywhere, just keep us busy. So it is a decoy tactic, but for what?

Keep us busy long enough, he thought with a sigh, and sooner or later the whole army’s going to fall apart. We have insurgency in the ranks, the bioweapon’s still destroying our patrols, and we haven’t heard from Morgan in weeks. I don’t even know if my messages to her are getting through. All we have are the same old orders, the last orders she ever gave us: contain the population, and hold the island. No explanation of what we’re holding it for, just . . . hold it. It doesn’t make sense.

According to his scouts, the mysterious giant creature had finally left the island—he’d moved north, talking to everyone he could, and when he’d reached the North Shore he’d just . . . walked into the sound, still heading north. That’s one less thing to worry about, he thought. And maybe if Morgan sees it for herself, she’ll realize how disordered things have become over here. Maybe she’ll finally take command again, tell me something about what I’m supposed to be doing here. Anything.

But I’m not Thom, he thought. I don’t question my orders. She told us to hold this island, so we’re going to hold it.

Or die trying.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Kira woke to the sound of dripping water. She tried to move, only to feel handcuffs on her hands and feet. The small chains rattled as she scraped her limbs across the floor, struggling to sit upright. Her face and body were wet, pressed onto something soft and damp, like a layer of slimy growth. The scent of mold filled her nose. She opened her eyes, but it was too dark to see.

She coughed, hacking up water, and tried to right herself. Her hands were trapped behind her back, and when she rolled faceup to get a real breath, her fingers squished deep into the soft something covering the floor. She coughed again, staring around wide-eyed yet blind. Dark shapes emerged as her eyes began to adjust: a wall, a window, a dim blue star. She looked away from it, trying to penetrate the inky black corners of her prison.

Something moved, slow and heavy.

“Who’s there?” Kira’s voice was barely a whisper, the words rasping from her throat with another cough and a spurt of filthy water. She retched and backed away, only to realize that she didn’t know where the sound was coming from; she might be backing blindly toward it. “Who’s there?”

Another movement, closer now. A dark black shadow moving in the darkness.

Kira tucked her legs up close to her chest and scooted her bound hands down past her hips and around to the front of her body. Her feet were cuffed too tightly to properly stand, so she crawled on her hands and knees to the wall with the window. Something was coming after her, moving much more quickly than she could. She stood up and found the window glassless and open. She braced herself against the sill, ready to vault out, but a pair of thick hands grabbed her from behind, one on her stomach and one on her mouth, clamping down over her scream, dragging her back to the floor. She kicked and thrashed, and felt hot breath on her ear.

“Stay down and be quiet. They’ll hear you.”

Kira kept kicking, fighting as hard as she could to get away. The man holding her was strong, and his arms were like iron bands.

“I’m on your side,” the man hissed. “Just promise me you’re not going to scream.”

Kira couldn’t escape, so she tried to hold still despite her pounding heart and the adrenaline surging through her like fire. She clenched her hands into tight fists, forcing herself to concentrate. Her mouth was covered, but she took a deep breath through her nose.

FEAR

The room was saturated with it. The man was a Partial, and he was just as scared as she was. She tried to slow her breathing, and finally nodded her assent.

The man let her go. She rolled away instantly, but only a few feet, and stayed out of view from the window. With her eyes better adjusted to the dark she could see him now, a standard Partial infantry model. His uniform hung in tatters, and his face, while difficult to see clearly, was covered in grime.

“You’re human,” he said.

She didn’t bother to correct him. “You’re not in handcuffs.”

“They don’t care about the cuffs,” he said dismissively, holding up a small metal key. “They just use them to transport us.”

“They don’t care if we escape?”

“Where you gonna go?” he asked. He scooted toward her, and after a moment she held out her wrists for him to unlock. “You’ll understand when you look outside. But be careful—if they see you awake, they’ll come back.”

He unlocked her, and she rubbed her wrists while he opened the cuffs on her ankles. “They want us unconscious?” she asked.

“They don’t care either way,” he said again. “But you’re new—if you’re awake, they’ll come for you. We may as well put that off as long as we can, right?”

He unlocked her ankles, and she drew her legs in close, suddenly chilly in the damp air, her clothes wet and her body soaked to the bone. She took a moment to feel for her equipment—all gone—and looked around to see that she was in a house, just like any other wealthy pre-Break home; the damp, squishy surface that had disgusted her so much was just a carpet, completely saturated with water, and indeed the entire building seemed suffused with extra moisture—the corners were shaggy with moss, the walls were ringed with mold stains, and even the ceiling seemed to sag and drip.

“Where are we?” she asked.

“Come take a look.” He crawled across the floor to a set of squishy stairs and led her up to a second and then a third floor. It was drier up here, though it still showed signs of water damage. The room at the top of the stairs had windows on three sides, all covered with blankets, and a hallway on the fourth led to more rooms. There was a low wall around the open stairwell, and Kira glanced over to see a long drop down to the second floor. The wooden furniture had all been broken down, stacked like firewood in the corner, and it seemed like every mattress in the house had been shoved against the walls. Kira guessed it was for insulation; it was colder here than she’d expected.

“I live up here,” said the Partial. “So did the others, before they were taken. You can peek out the windows, but be careful—move the cloth too much and they’ll see it. With a newbie in here, they’re bound to have someone watching.”

Kira walked slowly to the nearest window, putting a hand on the stiff blanket and pulling it just slightly to the side, barely wide enough to peer through the gap. There were trees outside, just below the level of the windows, and beyond that the dark black water of the lake. Tiny wavelets reflected the starlight. She couldn’t see the ground, and guessed that the lake came almost to the base of the house. The view from the other windows was the same, and when he led her to another room to look out the last side, she realized they were on an island—no roads, no bridge, just water. The front side of the house looked across to another island, maybe two hundred feet away, and the back window showed another at least three times the distance. The water between was dark and ominous, and Kira remembered the pale, gilled man bursting up from the deep. She shivered and sank to the floor.

“That’s why they don’t tie us up,” said the Partial. “No one is dumb enough to cross that water.”

“Have people tried?”

“And died.” His voice was barely a whisper in the darkness. “We figure this was some rich human’s vacation house, a mansion on a tiny little island. There’s a dock outside and everything, but of course the boat’s gone.”

“I suppose we’re lucky,” said Kira. “This island is the best prison around, whether or not there’s a house on it.” She shrugged. “At least this way we get a roof.”

“I guess so.”

She crawled to the side window and peered out again, seeing the faint white glimmer of a dock on the far shore. She couldn’t tell if it was the same one she’d been pulled from. She sat back down and looked at the Partial, a man-shaped outline in the darkness. “What’s your name?”

“Green.”

Kira nodded toward the wall and the dark black lake beyond it. “Let’s start with the obvious question: what the fat holy hell?”

Green laughed dryly. “The things that captured you are Partials, but some model we’ve never seen before.”

Kira frowned. She’d run into gilled Partials before, and Heron hadn’t known what they were either, assuming they were Morgan’s “special operatives.” “They’re not on Morgan’s side?”

Green shook his head. “I’ve been with Morgan practically since the Break, and I’ve never seen anything like them. She’s done some interesting gene mods on select Partials, heightened senses and things like that, but never gills.”

Kira remembered the short entry about the Ivies in Morgan’s files, now more sure than ever that she had no clue what they really were. “They actually live in the lake?”

“They have some kind of modified temperature regulation system in their bodies, so they can stand the cold. I think they prefer it.”

Kira frowned, trying to parse the information. “Some kind of amphibious soldier, then? The Isolation War kicked off with two different ship-to-shore assaults; maybe this was a special model, designed specifically for those battles.”

Green cocked his head to the side. “You’re not nearly as overwhelmed by this as I expected.”

“I’ve been around.”

“Apparently,” said Green. “I didn’t think humans ever left Long Island; you’re pretty far from home.”

Kira smiled. “This is nothing. What would you say if I told you this isn’t even the first time I’ve seen gilled Partials?”

“I’d ask where you saw them.”

“Chicago.”

Green whistled softly. “Now I know you’re either lying or—” He stopped abruptly. “What did you say your name was?”

“I didn’t,” said Kira. “And I don’t know if I should. Are you still with Morgan?”

“Not since I went AWOL.”

“In that case, hi.” She extended her hand. “I’m Kira Walker.”

“That explains a lot. Last I heard, Morgan had found you.”

“Her experiments didn’t pan out,” said Kira. “I left her labs a week ago.”

Green’s voice was quiet. “Damn. AWOL or not, I was still hoping she’d find a way to cure expiration.”

“Why’d you leave?”

“My whole squad left,” said Green. “We figured we’d join one of the other factions still holding out from her authority, and the Ivies seemed like a good choice. You can see how well that turned out.”

“But why?” asked Kira. “You’d been with her for so long.”

Green didn’t answer.

Kira drummed her fingers on the damp carpet. “I found another Partial out there,” she said, “on a dock on the lake’s edge. I assume he was one of yours.”

“Still alive?”

“Only barely. Probably not anymore.” She put her hand on his. “I’m sorry.”

“That might be Alan,” said Green. “He tried to swim for it about five days ago. I saw them pull him under, and then . . . well, he was the last one. I’ve been alone since.”

Kira couldn’t bear to tell him the grisly details. “I tried to help him, but it was too late.” She sat up suddenly, remembering his final words. “He tried to warn me—he said something about ‘the Blood Man.’”

“That’s what we call him,” said Green, nodding. “The gilled soldiers seem to obey him, though he’s not one of them, as far as we can tell.”

“That’s a pretty dramatic name,” said Kira. “I didn’t realize Partials were superstitious.”

“We’re not,” said Green. “We call him the Blood Man because he literally takes blood from us. We think he collects it.”

“What does he look like?”

“We’ve never seen him,” said Green. “The Ivies, or whatever they are, came and took some of our group, one every few days. Our sergeant, our driver, and one of the infantry.”

“One each of the surviving Partial models,” said Kira.

“Exactly.”

“That sounds like he’s collecting DNA,” said Kira. “And no one’s ever talked to him? The Ivies didn’t say anything about him?”

“Just that he needed their blood,” said Green. “And then they told us he’d left to find more.”

Kira’s heart sank. “Don’t say he went south.”

“Where else?” asked Green. “They told us he had all the Partial blood he needed, and it was time to visit the humans.”

“He’s going to hunt humans now? Why does he need their DNA?”

“Why does he need anybody’s?” asked Green, his calm exterior cracking with fear and frustration. “He’s a psychopath with a blood fetish, and an army of super Partials to back him up.”

“We have to stop him,” said Kira, but her words froze in her throat when she heard a loud, sharp click from somewhere below.

“That’s the door,” Green whispered. “They’re here.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Kira looked to Green with wide eyes.

FEAR.

“Come out,” a voice called from downstairs. “We only want to talk.”

“What do we do?” Kira whispered.

“They’ll be armed,” said Green. “And probably wearing body armor.”

Kira nodded, remembering the fight in Chicago. “They’ll link you and know we’re up here. Is it worth trying to fight?”

“If they wanted you dead, they would have killed you already.”

“Or they’ll kill me after they interrogate me,” said Kira. “With the Blood Man gone, they have no reason to keep us alive.”

“That we know of,” said Green. “They haven’t killed me yet.”

“So you’re just waiting until they do?”

“Don’t make us look for you,” said another voice. “You know that only makes us angry.”

“What am I supposed to do?” Green hissed. “Even if we can overpower multiple armed soldiers, what then? For all we know, this whole lake is crawling with them—there could be hundreds more just under the water.”

A stair creaked, loud and haunting. They’re coming up to find us, Kira thought. We’re running out of time and they’ll have guns and—

“Wait,” said Kira. “You said they’re armed, right?” She thought back to the soldiers in Chicago, who’d been carrying both tranquilizer darts and standard assault rifles. “The Ivies might be fine underwater, but their guns aren’t. Normal firearms can’t fire when wet.”

“We had waterproof rifles in our armory in the Isolation War,” said Green.

“Have you seen any since then?”

“Maybe these guys have them all.”

“Or maybe those weapons are too rare, and the Ivies are carrying the same thing as everybody else.” Kira grabbed his shoulder, whispering urgently in his ear. “They have to store them on land, and they’ve got to transport them somehow.”

Another creaking stair. Green stared at her. “You think they came in a boat? Sometimes they have one when they move prisoners, but—”

“Not only do they have a boat,” said Kira, “but any more of them watching from underneath the water won’t think twice when they see that boat leave the island. We only have to make it what, two hundred feet, to the other island? There’s a causeway from there to the mainland, if I remember the map right. Then we’re on solid ground again and we can make a run for it.”

“Until they realize what’s going on, and the whole lake rises up to get us.”

“Do you want to escape or not?”

A gun clicked, a slide racking back. They sound close enough to be on the second floor now, and almost to the final set of stairs. Green’s link was boiling over with terror. “What do we do?”

Kira didn’t have time to plan; she had to wing this as best she could. She put her face against his ear, whispering softly so the Ivies couldn’t hear. “They can’t link me. Lead them out the window.” She pushed away from him and slipped away on all fours, her toes and fingertips barely touching the floor as she stole around the corner to the hallway. Green hesitated, but seemed to understand her plan; he jumped up suddenly and ran to the window, tearing down the blanket and climbing out onto the slanted roof beyond. He disappeared past the edge of the window frame just as the first Partial came into view up the stairs.

“They’ve gone out the window,” said one.

“Check it.”

Kira pressed herself back against the wall, out of sight around the corner, trying to tell how many Ivies there were. She’d heard only two speak, but without looking there was no way to tell for sure. She had to act fast. This part of the hallway contained more broken furniture, neatly stacked like firewood, and the room beyond held the disassembled metal shell of a dryer, which the prisoners had folded out into a flat platform to contain their fires. A table leg in the pile of wood looked like it might make a good weapon, but Kira knew she had no chance in a club-versus-assault-rifle fight. She needed something better, something that used the only advantage she had right now: surprise. There was a large, ornate mirror leaning against the wall, which would be deadly but far too unwieldy to fight with, and an old 3D projector, which would be too lightweight to do any damage. She swore silently and reached for the table leg, knowing she was running out of time.

“They’ve jumped down to the balcony,” said a voice from near the window. They were talking softly, rather than coordinating over the link, but that made sense: They were chasing Partials, so the link would give them away. They didn’t know Kira was listening in. “I’ll follow—you go back down and cut them off.”

Kira saw the scene clearly in her head—one Partial gone out the window, the other walking back down that deep well of a staircase. She made her decision in a flash, grabbing the giant mirror with both hands and heaving it up, holding her breath to keep from puffing with the effort, padding across the floor as fast as she could without making any noise. The frame weighed at least forty pounds. She reached the wall around the staircase and hefted the mirror up and over, pausing only half a second to aim before letting go. The Partial heard her, or saw the motion, but it was too late; he looked up and the mirror crashed into his face, the full forty pounds focused in on a single edge right on the bridge of his nose. His faced caved in, his body crumpling to the stairs below, and Kira raced down after him.

DEATH

Already the link was broadcasting his death; even outside the building, his partner would know. Kira grabbed his gun and turned to look back up the stairs, bringing the rifle in tight to her shoulder. The starlight through the open window made a small trapezoid of light, and she watched it intently, her finger hovering over the trigger, waiting for the other Partial to come into view.

WHAT HAPPENED?

She didn’t know if that was Green or the gilled Partial; the cold blast of FEAR that followed could have been either as well. She thought about Green, trapped outside with a scared, angry warrior, and moved slowly backward. After a few steps away from the stairs the window disappeared from view, and she spun around to confront any other horrors lurking in the darkness. No one had approached her from behind, so she assumed there were only two Partials—or that any others were waiting in the boat. The hallway was dark, with few openings to the light outside, and after the starlight upstairs, her eyes had to readjust. She held still, listening for footsteps or breathing, trying to sense on the link who might be lying in wait beyond the next shadow. All she could feel was the lingering DEATH, bitter as old metal on her tongue.

She looked into the first room she passed; a bedroom, she guessed, the furniture gone and the clothes piled up in the corner. A little girl’s clothes, pink and frilly and eaten through by worms. The next room was an office; the next another bedroom. The house was empty and silent and choked out the light.

A tendril of link data tickled her nose: SOMETHING’S HERE. She moved swiftly to the next room in the hallway, a master bedroom leading out to the balcony. The wide glass doors were all broken, but the curtains still hung across them, thin and frail as ghosts. They billowed gently in the night air, and Kira almost fired her rifle when the shadow of a figure passed across one. The silhouette of a man outside on the balcony, too ill-defined to distinguish.

“Don’t move.”

Another shadow, facing the first. Neither seemed to be holding a gun; either could be wearing a helmet. She moved her rifle back and forth, locked in indecision. Which one is Green?

“Don’t shoot me.”

“Where is the other?”

“I don’t know, she ran ahead.”

“She is in the house.”

“I said I don’t know.”

Kira brought the rifle to her cheek, holding it tightly, focusing her aim. She only had one shot—she had to pick the right target, and she had to hit it. The curtains billowed again, and she realized with shock that she didn’t even know where the men were standing; depending on where the moon was, those shadows could be cast from anywhere. She stepped backward quietly, retreating to the hall. She had to find another vantage point. She stood a moment at the top of the stairs leading down to the first floor, but backed away from those as well; she didn’t want to give up the high ground. But she didn’t want to give the last soldier an open path to the boat, either, so she crept back up the hall toward the third-floor stairs. Stepping around the dead Partial, linking once again to the powerful DEATH particles, she remembered the link data she’d felt on the border marker two days before. It had completely overpowered her, the liquid pheromone so concentrated she’d barely been able to function until the smell of it cleared from her nose. A real Partial, with a more sensitive link mechanism, would be even more affected. She glanced behind her, set aside the rifle, and pulled the dead soldier into the little girl’s bedroom.

“I’m very sorry about this,” she whispered. She pulled off her shirt and wrapped it tightly around her face, already gagging from the body odor and mildew, but hoping desperately that they’d be enough to protect her. The face is too mangled, she thought. I’ll have to go in another way if I want to find the right spot. She pulled the soldier’s combat knife from the sheath on his belt and thought back to her medical training, picturing the diagram of the nasal cavity and calculating the approximate location of the pheromonal glands. She placed the knife gently in the corpse’s mouth, lined up the tip against the center of the soft palate, and shoved.

FEARBETRAYALDEATHBLOODRUNHIDEDEATHSCREAMFEARBLOOD

The link data overwhelmed her, a rush of thoughts and feelings and even memories that threatened to drown her in a dead man’s mind. She held her breath, trying to control her own brain, focusing on her own thoughts, her own movements. She pulled the knife out of the soldier and found it covered with liquid—blood and lymph and dark brown data, the liquid form of a dozen different pheromones jumbled chaotically together. The air seemed to vibrate, shapes and colors and smells and voices flickering madly across through the darkened room. She staggered to her feet and back down the hall.

“What’s that?”

The voices were closer now, but they weren’t the only one in the house, not anymore—

The bombs were falling now, she was back on the beaches of the Isolation War—she was sleeping in the water, looking up at the moon melting shapelessly on the surface of the lake.

DEATH

RUN

HELP ME

She heard a gun clatter to the floor. The hallway laughed at her, shadows twisting into faces telling her to RUN HELP STOP GO KILL. Voices screamed, but she couldn’t tell if they were from the present or the past; real or hallucinations. She stumbled into the master bedroom and saw them, the gilled Partial and Green, clutching their heads and sobbing and shouting and there was her father between them, his hands dripping blood, and she blinked and he was gone.

“Garrett,” sobbed the Partial. Link data slid from her dagger in dark drops of liquid thought, so thick in the air she could hardly see. She walked forward, pushing aside the haze of nerve gas from a Shanghai bunker, the artillery smoke from an assault on Atlanta, the bloody mist from the White Plains coup. She wanted to cower behind the trees, to hide behind the wall, to dive back into the cold, dark lake where she could be safe.

I am Kira Walker, she told herself. Identities ran through her mind like streams, rushing and blending and thundering together. She looked at the two men, now writhing on the floor, and couldn’t tell which was the enemy. I am Kira Walker, she thought again. I will not lose myself. Green is my friend. She found the other Partial, gills flapping wildly on his pale, wet neck, and drove the knife home through the gap in his body armor right beneath his arm. The linked declaration of DEATH barely registered in the haze of super-concentrated madness. Kira fell to the floor, crawling toward Green, and dragged him out the door to the balcony. Fresh air rushed in like a healing angel, and she felt her mind begin to clear. Wooden stairs led down from the balcony; they wouldn’t have to go back inside.

“I don’t want to,” Green mumbled. “I don’t want to.”

“It’s okay,” said Kira, her voice still muffled by her makeshift mask. She looked across the yard to the low stone dock on the island’s edge, where a boat, half-obscured by shadows and trees, rocked gently in the water. Her theory had been right. There really was a boat. And it was empty.

“It’s going to be okay,” she said. “We’re leaving.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Dark shapes moved in the water. Kira helped Green into the boat, pulling it as close to the little stone dock as possible before easing him down into the center. The night air was slowly clearing her head of the concentrated pheromones, but Green was still lost in chemical memories, curling into a fetal position down in the aluminum belly of the boat. Kira stepped over the slim black line of the water, but stopped with her foot in midair before turning, gritting her teeth, and walking back to the house. She needed a weapon.

She clambered back up the wooden stairs to the balcony, took a deep breath, and ran into the bedroom, feeling her way through the sudden darkness. The dead Partial lay on the floor, his rifle beside him, and she grabbed it and ran back out. She didn’t dare to breathe until she was back down the stairs, and sucked air greedily in the cool darkness of the wooded yard. When she reached the boat Green was still lying on the floor and panting, but his eyes were open. She stepped in carefully, trying not to think about what might be lurking in the water beneath.

“Where am I?” asked Green.

“Outside, on the boat,” said Kira. “Stay quiet.” She picked up an oar and dipped it gently in the water, all the time expecting a gilled Partial to grab it and yank, pulling her over the side. She untied the boat and it drifted away from the dock—ten inches, twenty inches, five feet, ten. The shore fell away sharply, the inky lake deep and impenetrable. Who was down there, watching? How many of them? What did they see or think? All it would take was one Partial, one pale and clammy hand, to reach up and tip the boat, and then both she and Green would be in the water, sinking and helpless, dragged down by dead-eyed monsters. She rowed carefully, evenly, not daring to rush. If the enemy Partials got suspicious enough to come up and check, they’d link their dead companions immediately, and Kira and Green would be exposed. The interrogators had rowed out to the island, and she had to make the others think that now they were rowing back, returning their weapons to dry storage before diving back down to their home.

Why would they live under the water at all? she wondered. They can obviously survive on dry land, at least for a while. Morgan and Vale had both told her that heavy gene mods can degrade a person’s sanity. Was that what had happened here—Partials living underwater, killing other Partials and nailing their hands to pikes like savages? How much of their minds is man, and how much is . . . something else?

Two hundred feet to the closest island. One hundred. Fifty. Twenty. A small wooden dock sat low in the water ahead of them, and beyond it another house lost among the trees. Her map was gone, and all her equipment, but she remembered the bay’s basic geography; if this was the large central island she thought it was, there would be a causeway about two miles down connecting it back to the western shore of the lake. They could cross there . . . if the causeway was still up.

Ten feet left. Five.

The boat bumped up against the dock and Kira leaped out, looping the rope around a short pole and reaching out a hand for Green. The wooden planks under her feet and the dark black water all around her brought back sharp, terrifying memories of the dock where she’d been captured, and she imagined another pale Partial bursting up from the lake to seize her outstretched arm, but nothing did. Green grabbed her hand and stood up, steadier now than before. She checked the rifle slung over her back, nervously reassuring herself that it was still there, and led Green up toward the house. The path here was well-worn, further proof that the Partials stored their water-sensitive gear on dry land nearby.

Which means there might be more of them waiting here, she thought. Kira tried to feel them on the link, but without the heightened awareness that came with combat or terror, the data—if any existed—was too weak for her limited abilities to detect. She whispered to Green. “Can you link anyone up here?”

“Not right now,” he said softly, “but they come here often.”

“Tell me if it gets stronger,” said Kira, and pressed forward. The path led up from the dock through a wooded backyard, a former lawn now thickly overgrown with weeds and vines and saplings. The home there was large, old and once luxurious, now sagging and decrepit but obviously used by the Ivies; the windows were boarded over, and the footpath through the underbrush led straight to the door. Green didn’t alert her to any Partials hiding inside, and she could sense none herself but chose not to enter, just in case. They were clear now; their best plan was to put as much distance between them and the lake as they could before the Ivies realized they were gone.

They left the trail to give the house a wide berth and broke through the trees onto a cracked asphalt road that wound north through a parade of faded lakeside homes. By silent agreement they broke into a run, the only sound their shoes slapping wetly against the road. They ran half a mile before Green risked speaking.

“Do you know where we’re going?”

“Sort of.”

“That’s good enough?”

“I had a map before I was captured,” said Kira. “There’s a causeway up here—if we’re on the right island.”

“And if we’re not?”

“Then we have to cross the water again,” said Kira. “So let’s hope we’re on the right island.”

They ran in silence for a moment, and then Green asked another question. His voice was dark and worried. “What happened back there?”

“In the house?”

“I thought I was back in China again. Like, I literally thought I was there, in the middle of the Isolation War, in one of the subway tunnels we used to take their larger cities, except . . . I never had to fight in those tunnels. Other units did, but not mine.”

“I got the drop on the first guard because they didn’t know I was there,” said Kira. “The only way to get the second was to use the link against him.”

“I thought you weren’t on the link.”

“It wasn’t my data,” said Kira. She hesitated. “I borrowed it from the other dead Partial.”

He shot her a probing look. “Borrowed?”

“Extracted via combat knife,” said Kira. He looked horrified, and she felt queasy at the memory. “Look, I wish I didn’t have to do it, but it was the only way. Normally you don’t link the data until it’s out in the air, diffused, but inside the pheromonal glands it’s still liquid, and intensely concentrated.” She shrugged helplessly. “Apparently his unit did fight in the subway tunnels, and we remembered it through his link data.”

“Who—” said Green, stopping abruptly. Kira checked her steps, almost tripping, and looked back at him. He peered at her in confusion. “Did you just say ‘we’ remembered it?”

Crap, thought Kira. It wasn’t that she desperately needed to keep her nature secret, it was just that she hadn’t told him before, and she didn’t want it to look like she’d been withholding something from him. She cleared her throat.

“You’re not on the link,” Green insisted. He walked toward her, furrowing his brow. “Maybe it’s the concentrated data, like you said—when it’s that strong, maybe humans can sense it too?”

This could be a way into recruiting Green to my cause, she thought. If he thinks humans can sense link data, even only in a case like this, he could see a stronger connection between the species. He might be more open to helping me, helping the humans.

Except it’s not true. If we’re going to work together—the two of us, or the two species—we have to trust each other. We can’t start that relationship with a lie.

She shook her head. “I’m not a human.”

“You said you were.”

“I thought I was,” said Kira, “for my whole life. I grew up with them. I still feel human. But I’m a Partial.”

“Partials link,” he said simply. “Partials don’t age. You don’t look like any Partial model I’ve ever seen.”

“I was a new model,” said Kira. “A prototype for a new line, after the war. That’s why Dr. Morgan wanted to study me, because she thought my DNA would help her cure expiration. But it didn’t work. I don’t have any of your heightened abilities—none of the strength, none of the reflexes, maybe some slightly accelerated healing. And I can link, sort of, but only one way.”

Green looked shocked. “You mean you can . . .” His mouth hung open, and he covered his mouth and nose with his hands, almost like he was protecting his breath. “You mean you can link me but I can’t link you? You can feel everything I do, without giving anything back?”

“Not all of it,” said Kira, though she was definitely linking him now: a confused mixture of shock and disgust. She realized that as naked as she felt knowing Green knew her secret, he must have felt even worse knowing that she could shamelessly, imperceptibly, unstoppably eavesdrop on his every emotion. The Partials were accustomed to sharing everything with one another, living in a permanently communal emotional state, but to have that state invaded by an outsider—one who didn’t share her own emotions in return—must feel like a violation.

“I’m sorry,” said Kira. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I should have.”

“Just . . . run,” said Green, breaking back into a jog as he ran past her up the road. “We need to get out of here before anyone notices we’re gone.”

Kira followed him but kept a respectful distance where she couldn’t link him. Even so, running in his wake, she caught the occasional whiff of confusion or sadness or fear.

Samm never reacted like this, she thought, but he had time to get used to it. We practically lived together for weeks before we found out I was a Partial. And Heron . . . who knows what Heron thinks about anything? She used to deal with humans all the time, so maybe it’s not a big deal for her.

But it is a big deal. To Green, and likely to others.

They reached the causeway a few minutes later, and Kira practically shook with relief to see it still intact. They kept to the center as they crossed, staying as far from the water as they could. As a gesture of goodwill, Kira deferred the next decision to Green.

“Where to now?”

Green grunted softly as they jogged past a boathouse with an open parking lot. “If we cut south, we’ll have miles to run before we’re clear of the lake,” he said. “Obviously they can come up on land just fine, but I figure the more we can avoid water, the better.” Sure enough, the road curved more and more to the left, before finally just turning sharply and leading them straight south. The road appeared to be the edge of the little lake community, with nothing but forest on the far side, and the two of them plunged into the trees to cut across and leave the lake behind.

“Watch out for border markers,” said Kira. “I found them on my way in—they used link data, concentrated like in the house, to set up a perimeter and warn people away. If you start to get freaked out for no reason, that’s the reason.”

Green said nothing but nodded in acknowledgment.

They picked their way silently through the thick forest, and it wasn’t long before they reached another road, but soon this, too, turned south, and they set back off into the woods. They crossed two more hills and a narrow stream before the sun began to come up, and when the next road turned out to be a wider, two-lane highway, they decided to risk a little southward travel. Almost immediately, though, the road cut back east toward the lake, as if the land itself was determined to twist them around and lead them back to danger. They struck out into the trees once more, but Kira was exhausted and starving and cold. Finally she stopped them in the backyard of an abandoned house.

“We need to figure out where we are.”

Green nodded toward the house. “Think they have a map?”

“You check the bookshelves, I’ll check for a den or an office.”

Green shook his head. “You never look in a house for a map, you look in the cars.” He led her around to the front, where two cars sat in the driveway. Kira started toward them, but he shook his head. “Too nice—all the rich humans had maps on computers, especially in their cars, and a lot of the middle-class ones, too. You want to find a paper map, find the oldest, nastiest car you can see.”

Kira thought the plan was ridiculous, but Green was talking to her again, and she didn’t want to ruin it. She followed dutifully down the wooded residential road, him on one side and her on the other. The houses in this neighborhood were all large, and set back from the road, which made the cars harder to see; it also made Kira despair of finding an older-looking car, but she persevered. The road turned south, as all of them seemed to, but they were miles from the lake, and they were making better time here than in the trees. Finally she spotted one—no more rusty than the other cars, but with a notably different shape; longer lines and squarer corners. She caught Green’s attention and the two trotted over.

“I’ve been scavenging old-world ruins for as long as I can remember,” said Kira, “but I’ve never bothered with cars.”

“Humans practically lived in their cars,” said Green.

Kira nodded. “Sure, but we were always looking for food and medicine. Sometimes you get lucky and find a survivalist who died halfway home with a trunk-load of canned food, but it was rarely ever worth our time.”

“Watch and learn.” Green walked to the passenger side and leaned in the window, pressing a button on the dashboard to pop open a small box. “This is called a glove compartment,” he said, rifling through it. “Aha.” He pulled himself back out and held up a folded Connecticut road map, in better condition than Kira had ever seen. “The compartment has a watertight seal, so the items were protected from the weather. Let’s figure out where we are.”

“Rita Drive,” said Kira, reading a weathered road sign. “A little horseshoe street off a larger road.”

Green spread the map on the hood of the car, and after some searching finally found it. Kira’s heart sank when she tapped the spot.

“We’re surrounded by lakes.”

“They’re all over this area,” said Green. He traced a winding path. “I think our best bet is to cut across this field, then follow this road, this road, and . . . this road. We might have to jump some fences, but we’ll be clear of the lakes without getting close to any of them.”

“One problem,” said Kira, and tapped her finger on a portion of his proposed route. “I came in through this gap here, trying to avoid the major roads, and that’s where I ran into the very first border marker.”

“That puts the border a lot farther from the lake than I expected,” said Green.

Now that they were out of combat, Kira’s link sense was dulling again, and she couldn’t tell how he felt about their situation—frustrated? Scared? His voice was impassive. “I wondered why we hadn’t run across any yet.”

“Be grateful that we haven’t.”

“Maybe this way,” said Green, “off the edge of the map. We can find a New York map when we cross the border.”

“That’s no good,” said Kira, thinking back to the map she’d had before. “West of here is just more lakes—there are hundreds of them. I don’t know if the Ivies patrol them, but I want to avoid them just in case. Our best bet is south.”

“South to where?” asked Green. “We may as well have this conversation now, if we’re planning our travel. I’m a deserter, so I can’t go near Morgan’s territory, and after the Ivies I’m a little leery of trying to meet up with any of the other factions.”

“I know how you feel,” said Kira. “My plan was to visit as many of the smaller factions as I could, but now . . .” She hoped the others weren’t as violent as the Ivies, and hoped even more that none of them had anything as creepy as a “Blood Man,” but how could she be sure? Should she risk it? If even one more faction captures me for some kind of . . . ritual sacrifice . . . is it worth it?

I’m trying to save the world, she thought. That’s worth anything.

She looked at Green. “I’ve never told you why I came here.”

“I was wondering about that.”

“Dr. Morgan is dangerous,” said Kira. “I assume I don’t have to tell you that, seeing as how you ran away from her.”

Green said nothing, and Kira continued. It was the first time she would propose her plan to anyone, and she was grateful it was just one person instead of a big group. She didn’t know how to present it. She already felt weird about starting with Morgan, and backtracked a bit.

“The humans are dying of RM,” she said, “and the Partials are dying of expiration. What I discovered while studying Morgan’s files is that the cure for one is the same as the cure for the other: Partials produce the cure for RM, and humans in turn are able to produce a particle that inhibits expiration in Partials. Both of the cures were engineered this way. So the only way to save both species is to live together. In peace, preferably.”

Green’s silence betrayed his skepticism. Kira went on.

“I mean we have to coexist, closely. Live in the same area, work together . . . basically just act like we’re one species instead of two.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“I’m trying to explain it,” said Kira. “The transmission of the particles would be almost impossible to replicate in a lab, not on the scale we’re talking about—tens of thousands of humans and hundreds of thousands of Partials. The two species can cure each other, but they’d have to be constantly breathing the same air. They’d have to live together without fighting.”

Green said nothing, thinking. After a moment he looked at her again. “And Dr. Morgan?”

“What about her?”

“You started this by saying she’s dangerous.”

“Right,” said Kira. “When I figured this out I left, because I didn’t trust her. She’s more likely to enslave humans than work with them.”

“So you didn’t trust Morgan, and you came out to try to find other groups of Partials who’d be more amenable to the idea of coexistence.”

“Exactly.”

Green paused for a long moment. “You’re sure that this process you’re describing works? That it’s really all this simple?”

“I crossed the entire continent looking for the people who built RM—the same ones who built the Partials—and the only thing I learned for sure is that everything they did was part of a plan. That plan has gone horribly, terribly wrong, and the people who made it have all gone crazy or just . . . given up. But the plan is still there, written on our DNA. And it’s all we’ve got.”

“So Partials cure humans and humans cure Partials.” He looked at her. “Where does that leave you?”

Kira took a breath, feeling a shadow of the same despair she’d felt in Morgan’s operating room, convinced that she was useless. “I can’t cure anything,” she said softly. “And I don’t think I expire. I don’t know where that leaves me.”

Green looked up at the sky, the blue growing lighter as the sun rose. “We need to rest, but I don’t want to stop before we get out of Ivie territory.”

“That’s probably wise.”

“We’ll go west, like I said before—maybe there are lakes over there, but if the Ivies have marked a border around this lake, I’m hopeful that means the others are safe.”

Kira felt leery of the idea, but she had to admit that cutting straight west was the fastest route away from their captors. “Maybe west for now,” she said, “but as soon as we’re out of danger, I have to get back to this mission. With or without you.”

He folded up the map, not saying anything. “Do you know where you’re going next?”

“As much as I want to talk to the other factions, I lost everything in that lake,” said Kira, “all my maps, all my notes, everything. I don’t know where any of the other factions are, and even if I did, I don’t know if I can spare the time to walk to where they are. Some of them are weeks away.”

“That’s not an answer to my question,” said Green.

“What I’m saying is that I have to go back to Long Island,” said Kira. “I don’t trust Morgan, but her soldiers might listen to reason. The ones in the occupation have already been living with humans for months now—perhaps they’re even seeing the effects of the process I just told you about. If I can convince anyone, it’s them.”

“And the humans?”

“They’ll be just as hard to convince,” said Kira, nodding. “But either way, they’re on Long Island. I have to go there.”

“You realize this isn’t taking us out of danger,” said Green. “We’ll have to go through Morgan’s territory, and into a war zone. We won’t even be getting away from the Ivies, because they’re headed in the same direction. The Blood Man said he was going after humans next.”

“Then I’ll stop him too,” said Kira, but paused. “Wait. Did you say ‘we’?”

“You’re talking about saving the world,” he said simply. “Of course I’m coming.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Owen Tovar ran through the streets of Huntington, heedless of making noise, trying only to get as far from the coffee shop as he could. His bad foot made him lope along unevenly, and he pushed himself to go faster. The Partials had hunted most of his group to nothing; he’d sent Mkele east with what soldiers they had left, and stayed behind to draw the Partials away. It was a strategy that had worked well so far, but it wouldn’t work much longer. They had no men, no time, and no explosives.

Technically I have a ton of explosives, he thought, pelting between the cars. Partial soldiers had seen him now, and a few bullets whipped past him. But that’s all going to change in three, two, one—

The coffee shop behind him exploded, the force of the shock wave so great that it threw him to the ground, even a block and a half away. The Partials behind him were shredded by the blast, and Tovar rolled onto his stomach, covering his head with his hands as shrapnel rained down around him. His ears rang, leaving him temporarily deaf; he gambled that the Partials couldn’t hear either, and scrambled to the nearest side street before standing up and bolting off again. The soldiers would be too preoccupied to chase him for another few minutes at least; he needed to use that time to get as far away as he could.

Even as he ran, though, he knew he didn’t have any options. Delarosa’s forces had survived against the Partials through guerrilla tactics—harassing their flanks, hitting their supply lines, and then fading away into the wilderness. Tovar had needed to do more to get their attention, to draw them away from the human refugees fleeing south, and thus he had been more aggressive. And now they’d chased him all the way to the North Shore for it. He was surrounded on three sides by water, and on the fourth by Partials. He had nowhere left to run.

If I can make it to the water, I might have a chance, he told himself. Maybe I can find a boat, or a piece of driftwood big enough to keep my head above water. Maybe I can just hide somewhere, and stay there for a week or whatever it takes. He chanced a look back over his shoulder and was encouraged to find that he was still alone. They would find him eventually, but finding him would hold their attention. That was the goal. Anything that keeps them here, on me, so the others can get out of East Meadow and off the island.

I knew I was going to die when I signed up for this, he thought. Dad always told me never to volunteer for anything—you’d think I’d learn to listen—

A light flared in front of him, bright and white and blinding. He stumbled on his bad foot, turning to flee, but something slapped into his back, sharp and painful like a sting from a giant bee. He dropped instantly, his body convulsing as a jolt of electric current ran through it. When his mind cleared he was lying on the ground, his face in a grassy gutter, his limbs twisted like a rag doll and completely immobile. He tried to talk, but his mouth felt like lead.

The Partials don’t use stun guns, he thought. Who has the electricity to spare for a stun gun?

A pair of hands, surprisingly gentle, turned him over. The man standing over him was a dark silhouette, framed by the bright lights behind, and Tovar couldn’t discern any features. “I want you to know that this is not an attack,” said the man. His voice was soft, with a nuance of expression that marked the speaker as human. Tovar tried to answer, but his jaw moved feebly, and no sound came out. “This will hurt you,” said the man, “but it will save you, in the larger sense. ‘You’ as a people. The human race.”

The man set a plastic case on the ground next to him, opening it with a click. Tovar couldn’t see what was inside, but the shadowy man pulled out a glass jar and unsealed the lid. “Everyone is going to die. I assume that’s not a surprise.” He set the open jar on the ground and reached back into the case to pull out a long, sharp knife. Tovar tried to move, but he was still paralyzed. “I say that to let you know that you dying right here, right now, is an honor. You were going to die anyway, but it would have been meaningless in any other circumstance. This way you can be a part of the new beginning. The new life that will replace the old. Little sting here.” The man placed the knife on Tovar’s hand and pressed down, chopping off his longest finger. Tovar screamed in his mind, the pain burning through him like a fire, but no sound came out. The man dropped the finger into the jar, and went to work on another one. “There was a plan, you realize, for everyone to survive.” Chop. “Not just survive but prosper—human and Partial, everyone together. It wouldn’t have been hard. But that plan’s gone now, and I’ve had to adapt.” Chop. His voice remained calm the entire time, as if he were simply talking to a toaster while methodically taking it apart. “Now, this is the part that’s going to hurt the most. Speaking biologically, I mean—I don’t know if it will cause more pain than the fingers, but it will certainly cause more damage. This is the part you won’t live through, is what I mean to say.” He held up the jar and shook it gently, rattling the three fingers at the bottom. “I need to fill the rest of this with blood.”

Tovar’s voice returned just in time for him to scream.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Kira was colder than she’d ever been. They’d stopped in a town called Brewster Hill for rest and new clothes, and then again in North Salem for warmer clothes and jackets, but even that wasn’t proving to be enough. Green was more resistant to the effects of the weather, and faster on the road, but even he was feeling it now. They’d gone nearly thirty miles in three days, all the way to Norwalk, and in that time the temperature had dropped twenty degrees at least. Kira was accustomed to a bit of a chill in the winter months, but nothing like this. Her breath came out in visible puffs, and her nose felt numb as she rubbed it with red, tingling fingers.

The streets of Norwalk were a deep metal canyon, just like Manhattan had been, but now there was frost on the deep-green kudzu that covered the buildings and crept in through the long-broken windows. She held out as long as she could, enduring the cold in silence, but finally decided that it wasn’t worth it—getting to Long Island one day or even one hour earlier wouldn’t do her any good if she died of hypothermia. At the next clothing store they passed, Kira led them in and they searched for heavy coats, but there were none to be found anywhere in the building.

“I guess the Break came in the summer,” said Kira. “Nobody’s stocked for this kind of weather.” She paused. “That never occurred to me before, but I guess I’ve never needed a coat before.”

Green shook his head, looking out the broken windows at the dark-gray clouds. “When was the last time you remember it being this cold?”

“Never,” Kira admitted. She recalled Vale’s wistful thoughts about the old winters, the real winters, and shivered. “Do you think it’ll last?”

“If it does, we might even see snow.” Green turned back from the window. “We need to find a hardware store—they’ll have work gloves at least, which is better than nothing, and then maybe a furniture store so we can burn some tables for warmth. I don’t want to cross the sound until this clears up.”

“What makes you think it’s going to clear up?”

“We haven’t had a storm like this in my entire life,” said Green. “Weather patterns that long-standing don’t reverse overnight. We might get a freak storm, but that’ll be it.”

“I hope you’re right.” Kira hopped down from the counter where she’d been sitting and walked back out into the frigid street. The wind had picked up, and blew her hair wildly around her head. “You know where to find a hardware store?”

“No idea. Seems more likely outside of town than in it, though.”

“That means backtracking,” said Kira. “There’s nothing ahead of us but the city and the sound.”

Green shook his head. “I don’t want to backtrack—we’re better off finding a boat and sitting out the storm in the building nearest to it. Then as soon as things are back to normal, we can jump in and race across the water.”

Kira nodded. “Keep your eyes open for parks, playgrounds, and schools. Anywhere with grounds had groundskeepers, which means they’ll have a shed or a garage somewhere with tools and work gloves.”

“Clever.”

“You know how to find maps, I know how to find gardening tools. My adopted mother was an herbalist.” The thought of Nandita quelled her cheerful mood. Nandita had helped create Kira, she knew everything about her, and yet she’d never said a word. Why? Why deceive her? Had she just hoped that the problems would all go away on their own, and that Kira would grow up and grow old and die, and never have to face the truth about who she was and where she came from? If she’d really cared, thought Kira, she’d have given me something to go on. Some help or guidance or advice that would help me to deal with all of this. She would have told me what I was built for, and why, and what I was supposed to do.

With a flash she remembered an old conversation—nearly two years ago now, one of the last times she’d ever seen Nandita before the old woman disappeared. Kira had just come home from the salvage run in Asharoken, the one where they’d triggered a bomb, and Nandita was putting away her herbs. I was troubled about something, thought Kira, probably the bombing, and Nandita said . . . Kira shook her head in disbelief, the words flooding back to her. She said exactly what I needed to hear—not then, but now. Every life has a purpose, Kira. But the most important thing you can ever know is that no matter what your purpose is, that’s not your only choice.

“Groundskeeper,” said Green. Kira looked up and saw a large brick building, the white gabled roof now cracked and yellowing with age; all around it was a wide green lawn, now overgrown with bushes and weeds and a loose forest of ten-year-old trees. There was a sign buried in the middle of the foliage, but it was too vine-choked to read.

“Looks like a government building,” said Kira. “City hall or something. They don’t always have groundskeeping equipment on site, because they handled all their properties from a central location.”

“Maybe this is the central location,” said Green. “Doesn’t hurt to check.” They walked around the side and back, finding a parking lot but no toolshed. Behind the building there was a baseball field, but this, too, had no tools or gloves or anywhere to store them. They made their way back to the main road, ready to press on and look for another park or a school, but Kira stopped in front of a house. Green shook his head. “Too fancy; they didn’t do any of their yard work themselves.”

“Not yard work,” said Kira, “but look at the sign. ‘Home Theater Design and Installation.’ I don’t know what a home theater is, but I bet they used gloves to install them.”

They started their search in the front room, moving quickly through the building; it had been converted from a home to a business and was mostly empty. The back room held a lost fortune in holovid projectors, but those were useless now. She’d have traded the entire thing for a single pair of gloves. Finally in the back parking lot they found a rusted white van, weeds growing up around the flat, deformed tires, with the company’s logo faded and peeling off the side. Kira wrenched the door open and found the back full of power cords and old projector parts, and four pairs of canvas work gloves in the top drawer of a tool chest. They pulled on two pairs each and jogged back to the main road to make up for lost time. The sky was darker now, far darker than it should have been for the time of day, and the wind was practically howling.

“We need to find shelter,” said Kira.

“We need to find a boat,” said Green. “I told you before, the instant this clears up we need to get on the water.”

“Are you afraid it’s going to start up again?”

“I’m afraid that we’re running out of time.”

“Look,” said Kira, “I’m every bit as anxious about this as you are, but we’re not going to do any good if we’re dead of exposure. It feels like it’s dropped another five degrees in the last few hours—this weather is well below freezing, and Partials or not, we’re in a very real danger of hypothermia.”

“We don’t have time to sit around waiting,” Green snapped, and picked up his pace.

“We’ll live a lot longer if we get inside—”

“Really?” said Green.

Kira stopped, trying to figure out what he meant, and the answer hit her like a fist to the gut. She wrapped her arms tightly over her freezing chest and ran to catch up with him.

“How long do you have?”

His voice was emotionless—all the more eerie considering his words. “It just now occurred to you to ask?”

“I’m sorry,” said Kira. “I’ve been focused on expiration as a concept, as an enemy to overcome. . . . You left Morgan’s army. Does that mean you didn’t think she was going to cure it fast enough to matter?”

Green walked silently, head down.

“The youngest batch has seven months left,” said Kira. Samm’s batch, she thought. She swallowed nervously, feeling tears creep up behind her eyes. “Do you have half that?” Green didn’t answer, and she felt her heart sink. “Two months?”

“One,” said Green. “I’ll be dead by the end of the year.”

“That might be enough time to help you,” said Kira quickly, practically racing through the words. “The sooner we get across and find humans, the sooner we can—”

“Then stop arguing with me and look for a boat.”

Kira fell silent, trying to imagine what it would feel like to know you were going to die in one month—and worse, that you knew there was nothing you could do about it. But we can, she thought. This plan will work.

I think.

Green stopped suddenly, putting up his hand to stop her too. “Do you feel that?”

Kira concentrated on the link but felt nothing. “What is it?”

“I have no idea,” said Green. “Something big—like a whole squad’s worth of link data, that kind of signal strength. It’s just that . . . it feels like a single person.” He turned his head slowly, as if trying to pinpoint the exact source of the data. “This way, come on.”

Kira ran a few steps to catch up with him. “Wait, you’re going to look for it?”

“Of course.”

“But we’re in a hurry,” said Kira. “We don’t have time to stop and maybe get captured by a patrol squad.”

“I’m telling you, it’s one Partial,” said Green, still walking.

“But you’re dying,” said Kira. “What changed?”

“Don’t you see? We have to find it because . . .” His voice trailed off, and he shook his head. “Because we have to. Because he has something to tell us.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“How can it not make sense?” Green sounded almost frustrated, as if he were explaining that that water was wet to someone too thick to understand.

Kira shook her head. “Green, listen to me. This is the link—whatever you’re sensing right now is luring you in, on purpose.”

“Maybe. We can handle it.”

“No, we can’t,” said Kira. She thought about Morgan’s arrival in the Preserve, when she and Vale had used their own fierce control over the link to force the nearby Partials to obey them. “I’ve seen this kind of intensity in the link before, and it only comes from a member of the Trust. The people who made the Partials. There are two of them in this area—Dr. Morgan and Dr. Vale—and we don’t want to meet either one of them.” She planted herself in front of him. “If you keep going, we’ll be caught and imprisoned, maybe executed. You do not want to do this.”

He pushed past her and started running.

“Green, wait!”

She took off after him, but he was running at full speed now, arms pumping at his sides, and she struggled to keep up. Kira had something of a Partial’s physical prowess, but she wasn’t trained like he was. She sucked in breaths of freezing air, feeling her arms and chest grow sweaty with effort, and shivering almost immediately after as the sweat cooled and evaporated.

They approached an underpass and Green swerved right, scaling a stepped stone wall and then pelting onto the railroad tracks above. Kira followed, desperate to reach him and stop him, until a gust of wind brought the link data rushing into her lungs, coursing through her brain, stronger than she’d ever imagined, and then she was racing not after him but with him, convinced above all else that she needed to go now, to find this person, to hear his message. They ran along the tracks and then swerved off, down a hill and through a parking lot, crossing streets and jumping fences, until at last a vast field opened up before them. An ancient park, trees shaking in the freezing wind, and beyond it the roiling gray sea. They ran past benches and bushes and old baseball diamonds, barely visible in the new growth that had reclaimed the park. Beyond the field was another road, and beyond that a strip of sand rimmed with rocks and crashing waves. They’d run nearly a mile from where Green first felt the command. Others had apparently felt the same, for a ten-man squad of Partials sat scattered on the rocks, their expressions blank, their link data as stunned as Green’s.

At the front of the group, staring out at the ocean, sat a giant creature, dark red, with skin like rhinoceros hide. Kira slowed to a stop, the sight a shock to her senses, momentarily giving her clarity as her brain fought to determine which feelings were her own and which were coming from the link. It was a clarity that she alone experienced; the rest of the Partials stood in rapt attention.

“You’re just in time.” The thing’s voice rumbled. “It’s starting now.”

Green staggered forward, rubbing his chest to keep warm, taking up a position in the same loose semicircle as the other ten Partials. Kira walked forward as well, not stopping in the circle but pressing through it, approaching the creature directly.

“Who are you?”

“I’ve called you here to warn you,” said the creature. She couldn’t see its mouth move, but felt its voice rumbling powerfully in her chest. “I warned the people on the island, and the Partials in White Plains, but they did not heed me.”

“You’ve been to White Plains?” asked Kira. “You’ve seen Dr. Morgan?”

“It was not a happy reunion,” said the thing, and looked down at its chest. Kira followed its gaze and found that the creature’s chest was riddled with bullet holes. One arm hung uselessly at its side, and the other clutched a gaping wound in its gut. “This body can regenerate most of the damage it takes, but not this much all at once. I am dying.” It turned to look at her, and Kira saw a pair of nearly human eyes buried deep in the thing’s monstrous face. “But I have delivered my warning.”

Kira stepped forward, trying to see the wounds better. “What warning?”

“I have repaired the climate,” said the creature. “I’ve fixed the planet we broke so long ago. Now the world can heal again.”

Kira shook her head, barely understanding what he was trying to say. “You’re saying you’re the one who made it cold?”

“I cleansed the air, the water, the atmosphere. Earth’s protective layers. Undid all the damage from our weapons in the old war. I’ve restored balance. We’ll have seasons again. The first winter will be hard, and none of the people are ready. I warned them to help them survive.”

“You’re one of the Trust,” said Kira. She ran through her mental list, cataloguing every member she knew and which ones she didn’t, to puzzle out who this might be. There were only two unaccounted for, and one was her father, Armin Dhurvasula. Her mind reeled at the thought that this impossible creature—so altered by gene mods that he’d lost his humanity completely—might be her father.

She tried to speak, but her voice was lost. She coughed, shivering in the cold spray of the ocean sound, and tried again. “Who are you? What’s your name?”

“No one has used my name in . . . thirteen years.”

She stared at the wounds, at the dark blood seeping out onto the cold gray rocks below. She barely dared to speak it. “Armin?”

“No,” said the creature. It watched the coming storm with sad, wistful eyes. “My name was Jerry Ryssdal.”

Kira felt a rush of emotion—loss and sadness, that the man she’d found was not her father, and joy, that her father was not this thing dying slowly on the beach. Guilt, that she took joy in any aspect of another man’s death. She wondered if some of those emotions were his—his sadness at dying, his joy at fixing the weather. His guilt for destroying the world.

Jerry Ryssdal was the one she knew the least about; Vale had said he lived in the south, near the eternal fires of old Houston. He’d changed himself, Vale said. Kira had never known what to make of that, but it was obvious now. A brutal barrage of gene mods to help him survive in the toxic wasteland. He’d dedicated his life to restoring the world—not the people in it, but the world itself. Somehow, impossibly, he’d done it.

The first winter will be hard, she thought, repeating his words. She’d never known a real winter; very few people had. There hadn’t been one since the old war, before the Isolation War, when buttons were pushed and hell was unleashed and the world had been changed forever. Not forever, she thought. It’s changing back now. But any change this drastic will be painful to endure.

She looked up and saw the first snowflake fall.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

“It’s not enough to go after Delarosa,” said Marcus. “We have to warn the rest of the island as well.”

“Agreed,” said Vinci. “We need to do both.”

“You can’t do either one,” said the guard. “You’re still handcuffed and locked in the back of an old supermarket.”

“Um, you’re not really a part of this conversation,” said Marcus.

“I’m sitting ten feet away from you.”

“Then plug your ears,” said Marcus. “And sing to yourself for a few minutes, too. We’re about to discuss our plans for escape.”

“Shut up, Valencio.” Woolf sighed and turned to the guard. “Soldier, if you’re in a talkative mood, I’d love to hear your justification for going along with all this. I don’t care where Delarosa sets off that nuke, it’s going to kill what few of us are left.”

The guard glowered at them and returned to his former silence, leaning back in his chair and folding his arms with a frown.

“How about this,” said Marcus, still addressing the guard. “You’re stuck here guarding us, which isn’t helping our plans or yours. How about we find some common ground: Let’s all start traveling south, to warn everyone about the nuke, and we promise we won’t slow you down or cause any trouble. Even as a loyal fan of the nuclear solution, surely you agree that people need to be warned.”

“We’re not going to just warn the humans and ignore what Delarosa is going to do to the Partials,” said Vinci.

“Well—” Marcus stopped, trying to find the right words. “I was—that was kind of going to be the part of the scheme I didn’t tell him out loud. Like, he would come over to free us because he was swayed by my brilliant and well-considered plan, and then when he got close you could jump up and . . . knock him out or something.”

Woolf groaned.

“You’re a Partial,” said Marcus. “You could beat up a guy while still in handcuffs, right?”

“That was a terrible plan,” said Vinci. “I can say without exaggeration that that’s actually the worst plan I’ve ever heard.”

“That’s not entirely fair, though,” said Marcus. “All the other plans you’ve ever heard have been designed by Partial strategists, and I’m just like a regular . . . guy.”

“The worst part,” said Vinci, “was when you revealed the entire plan right in front of the guard. You were intending to trick him, and then I asked you one question and you said everything out loud, right in front of him.”

Marcus stuttered, trying to protest.

“Maybe that was actually the best part of the plan,” said Vinci, “since it meant that we never attempted to carry out the actual plan, which as I mentioned was terrible. This way you just look stupid instead of all of us getting killed.”

“None of us would get killed,” said Marcus. “It was a great plan.” He made vague karate-style movements with his hands, though no one could see them with his hands still cuffed behind his back, and the raw skin on his wrists burned from the effort. “Super Partial combat prowess, you could totally have—”

“Will you please shut up!” said the guard. “Holy hell, it’s like listening to my little sisters.”

“You have little sisters?” asked Marcus.

“Not anymore,” said the guard, “thanks to that mongrel sitting next to you.” He pointed at Vinci, his face growing tenser and angrier. The room fell silent for a moment, but then Marcus spoke softly.

“Technically, he’s less mongrel than anyone else in this room. He was grown in a lab from custom-engineered DNA; he’s like a perfect . . . specimen, and all the rest of us are the mo—”

The guard leapt to his feet and crossed the narrow room in a single step, lashing out with the butt of his rifle to crack Marcus hard across the side of his face. Marcus reeled back from the blow, bright lights flashing behind his eyelids, his skull ringing, his entire consciousness focused on the intense, mind-ripping pain.

Somebody slapped him, and he struggled to open his eyes. Woolf knelt in front him, his hands free; behind him the guard lay unconscious on the floor, and Vinci and Galen were stripping him of his weapons and gear.

“Holy crap,” said Marcus. “How long was I out?”

“Just a minute at the most,” said Woolf, examining his head. “You’re going to have a massive bruise here. If you remember back when we made this plan, Vinci was the one who was supposed to get hit in the face. He heals faster.” He reached behind Marcus and unlocked his handcuffs.

“Vinci didn’t take it far enough,” said Marcus, examining his chafed wrists before touching the side of his head gently. It was already swollen, a rigid band of raised blood and tissue as hard as bone. “We got him all riled up and ready to pounce, and then Vinci didn’t step up with the final insult. The moment was passing; I had to do something.”

“You didn’t have to push him quite that far,” said Woolf. “That little speech about a Partial being a ‘perfect specimen’ would have gotten you punched in a nunnery.”

“I didn’t realize he needed further incentive,” said Vinci, checking his rifle. “I’m sorry. I suppose I’m not very good at insulting humans.”

“Marcus is a damned expert at it,” said Woolf. He claimed the guard’s sidearm, a semiautomatic pistol, and gave the combat knife to Galen. “Now let’s get out of here before he wakes up.”

“One thing first,” said Marcus, crouching back down by the guard’s feet. His head swam slightly as he did, and he paused a moment while the room stopped spinning.

“What are you doing?” asked Vinci.

Marcus began untying the guard’s shoelaces. “Buying us an extra thirty seconds.” He began tightly knotting the shoelaces back together, tying one shoe to the other; Galen groaned as soon as he realized what Marcus was doing.

“Oh, come on,” said Galen, “it’s taking you at least thirty seconds just to do that. You’re not buying us anything.”

“I’m buying a happy memory,” said Marcus. “I didn’t like this guy even before he tried to crack my skull open.” He looked at the fallen guard and grinned. “Have fun falling down idiotically twice in one day.” He stood, reaching out a hand as the world swam again. Woolf grabbed him and held him firm. “Tell me about the first time he fell,” said Marcus. “I missed it.”

“Vinci swept his legs and then head-butted him on the way down,” said Galen.

“Was it awesome?” asked Marcus. “Tell me it was awesome.”

“Both of you shut up,” said Woolf. “We’re leaving now.” He put a hand on the back door—it was locked, but the guard had held the key in his shirt pocket. The guard took the prisoners out through it at regular intervals to pee, which had given the three others their brief time alone to plan this escape. Woolf listened cautiously at the door, slid in the key, and turned it with a scrape and a rusty click. They froze, listening again for any sign that the noise had been noticed, but there was nothing.

Marcus shivered, ignoring the pain of the air brushing the skin around his wrists. “Are you sure I was only out a few minutes? I’m freezing—it feels like it’s already night.”

“One minute only,” said Vinci. “It’s late afternoon.”

“But it is cold,” said Woolf. He turned the creaky handle, as slowly as he could, and pulled the door open. “Holy . . .”

The parking lot outside was half-filled with cars, old and rusted, the pavement run through with seams and cracks as plants pushed up from underneath—and over it all, white and ethereal, was a gauzy curtain of falling snow.

“What on earth?” said Galen.

“Well, now we know one thing,” said Marcus. “That crazy story about the big red giant was apparently true.” He made a face, staring at the snow. “Actually the big red giant was easier to believe than this part. Is this really snow? I’ve never even seen it except on old holovid shows.”

“This is the real thing,” said Woolf. “Now come on.” He stepped out into it, leaving a boot print in the thin layer of white that covered the ground.

“That’s going to make us easy to follow,” said Vinci.

“Only if they’re right behind us,” said Woolf. “Another few minutes and our tracks’ll be completely covered. We couldn’t have asked for better conditions.”

“Then let’s get going,” said Marcus. “I want to be at least a hundred yards away when Yoon’s giant panther hunts me down like an alley cat.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

The Preserve sat against the base of the Rocky Mountains, on the outskirts of the Denver ruins. Before the Break, the sprawling city had become a megalopolis stretching all the way from Castle Rock to Fort Collins, from Boulder to Bennett. In the years since, it had become an acid-drenched hell, the western edge of the vast poisonous Badlands that consumed the Midwest. Every gutter and depression was filled with cracking salt pans, smoldering phosphorus, or the scattered dust of crystallized bleach. Not a single living plant or animal remained.

Samm and his group set out early in the morning on their journey back to East Meadow—back to bring the humans the cure, and the incredible news that the cure was self-sustaining. He worried about how, if at all, they would convince the humans and Partials to work together, but he supposed their group was a good demonstration: himself, Heron, Ritter, Dwain, and two more recovered Partials named Fergus and Bron; Phan had come with them as well, and Calix on one of their two horses. The Preserve had no horses of its own, just the two that Samm and Heron and Kira had brought with them from New York. Kira had named them, and Samm allowed himself a brief, wistful moment to think of her. The other Partials looked at him, immediately aware of his thoughts through the link. He thought of the horses again, worried about their ability to find food in the Badlands. Calix was riding Bobo, Kira’s horse, and following behind her on a lead was Oddjob, Afa’s curious, disobedient mount, now relegated to a pack animal. He’d always hated being ridden, stubbornly going his own way and ignoring their commands, but he seemed content to follow Bobo. Samm hoped it would last.

Thinking of Oddjob made him think again of Afa, the childlike genius they’d brought with them through the wilderness, the only human on their journey out—and, not coincidentally, the only one who hadn’t made it. He’d been injured in Chicago and finally died in the toxic fields of Colorado. Samm still didn’t know if any human could survive the journey, and Calix was particularly at risk. Her injury made her slower and tied up her body’s resources in healing; if anything happened to her it would slow down the entire group, making them all more vulnerable. Worse still . . . I would miss her, he thought. Afa was my responsibility, but Calix is my friend. If it becomes a question of abandoning her or dying myself . . . I don’t know if I’ll be able to make that choice.

He glanced at Heron as they walked through the corroded city. Several times during the Isolation War he’d envied her detachment, her ability to let all her pain, both physical and emotional, slide off her like she was changing clothes. She had lived through the worst that war had thrown at them, and the worst times since; she could face any problem they came up against, and could make any decision she needed to survive. Even if all of them died crossing the Badlands, she would live. She would make it home, because that was the mission. She was frightening, even to Samm sometimes, and she was hard to understand and even harder to befriend, but she was the group’s best hope. He would have to talk to her in private and put together a contingency plan.

It took them three days to cross the city, and when they reached the eastern fringe, the Badlands spread out before them as far as the eye could see: flat, featureless, and dead. Here and there a bone-white tree twisted up from the poisoned soil, murdered by the rain and baked brittle by the sun. No longer forced to weave between buildings, they were able to pick up speed, and their first day east of Denver they traveled nearly as far as they had in the first three days combined. Heron took the lead, ranging far ahead to scout out the territory. Phan kept up admirably, not quite as resilient as Samm but still managing to show more endurance than the four Partials still healing from their comas. The horses were the slowest, built not for speed but for distance; they fell behind in the morning, Calix and Dwain staying with them, but then gradually caught up again as night began to fall. The group had been traveling northeast all day, following I-76 as it curved to follow the path of the South Platte River, and Samm couldn’t help but notice that the night air was abnormally cold. Calix caught up to the others along the side of a foul-smelling river. She was shivering.

“We need to camp soon,” said Dwain, accompanying the statement with a silent link message: THIS HUMAN’S NOT DOING WELL.

“It’s cold,” said Phan. “Much colder than usual. We’ll need shelter.”

“We’ll need shelter from more than just cold,” said Heron. “If we’re caught outside when it rains, we’ll be dead in minutes.”

“It’s not going to rain,” said Calix. “I’ve been reading these skies since I was four.”

“Color me unconvinced,” said Heron. “We go forward or we go back; we’re not staying outside.”

Now that he’d stopped walking, Samm felt the chill air creeping through his arms and chest. “Is it supposed to be this cold?”

“No,” said Phan. “The last few weeks have been cooler than usual, but this is like nothing I’ve ever felt. Is this always like this out in the Badlands?”

“It wasn’t when we came through here before,” said Samm.

“The horses need to stop,” said Calix. “They can’t keep this pace much longer.”

“We should have stopped in the last town,” said Ritter. He looked at Heron sharply, his displeasure strongly evident on the link. “Too bad our scout led us into the middle of nowhere.”

“This is the Midwest,” said Heron. “Everywhere is the middle of nowhere. The next town is only another two miles, maybe less if we can find an outlying farmhouse.”

“Keep moving,” said Samm, and the group fell back into step. They kept an even pace with the horses now, tired and thirsty and rubbing their arms in the cold. The temperature seemed to plummet even further as they walked, and when they finally saw a row of low houses, they left the road eagerly, numb and exhausted. The highway was on a slight elevation, and the hill running down to the buildings was covered with dry, brittle grass that crunched like eggshells under their feet. It was an old farming community, like Heron had predicted, the fields now barren and desolate. The first house in the row was too ruined to serve as a proper shelter—a sliding glass door in the back had broken years ago, and a decade of windstorms had filled the interior with toxic dirt and dust. The next house was better, but too small to house them all. Samm left the Partials there, telling them to seal the doors and windows as well as they could, and took the horses and humans to the third house down. Heron followed him, and he sighed. She was never good with orders.

“You need to show them how to cover the gaps,” said Samm. “I can show Calix and Phan.”

“They’re big boys,” said Heron. “They can deal with it.”

“So you want to deal with the horses?”

“I want to see if this godforsaken hole has anything resembling a downtown,” said Heron. “We’ll use almost all the water we packed just on the horses, and we need to find more.”

“Take Ritter,” said Samm. “We shouldn’t go anywhere alone.”

“I’m taking you.”

Samm glanced at Calix, but she was apparently too tired to have been paying attention. Even Phan seemed ready to collapse. “I need to take care of the horses.”

“So take care of them,” said Heron. “Just don’t take all night.”

Samm linked his frustration, but said nothing and got to work. If Heron wanted to get him alone, it was almost certainly because she wanted to talk, and given how rare that was, he decided it was a good idea to know what she was thinking. He took Phan and Calix inside and set them up in the basement storage room—there was no food or water, but more important there were no exterior windows, and the surfaces were clear of toxic buildup. The horses he set up in the living room, doing his best to cover the floor with plastic tarps—not to keep them from fouling the carpet, but to keep them from eating it. He found some metal pans in the kitchen and filled them with the water they’d brought with them, then wearily unloaded their packs and saddles while they drank. It was more than half an hour later when he trudged back outside; the sky was dark and starless, and the freezing air bit at his nose and cheeks.

“This way,” said Heron, hopping down from the hood of the rusted van she’d been sitting on. “There’s a school about a mile down the road, with three big plastic jugs of water in the teachers’ lounge.”

“I told you not to go anywhere alone,” said Samm, walking beside her down the road. “What if you’d gotten injured and nobody knew where you were?”

“If I get injured in an empty town a thousand miles from any possible enemy, I deserve to die.”

“Well . . . we wouldn’t leave without you.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

Samm linked his exasperation. “I assume I’m here because you wanted to talk about something.”

“Interesting,” said Heron. “What do I want to talk about?”

“I have no idea,” said Samm. “Since you’re playing coy, I’ll start with the items on my own agenda. I need to know how dedicated you are to this mission.”

“I’m here,” said Heron simply.

“Here for how long?” asked Samm. “Here until something flips your loyalties backward again?”

“The Third Division survived for thirteen years because something in that Preserve kept them alive,” said Heron. “Whatever it is—maybe Williams, maybe their life support system, maybe the microbes in the dirt that keep the plants healthy—could keep me alive as well. The secret to my survival is back there, in the Preserve, along with all the food and water and shelter I could ever need. And yet I’m here.”

Samm understood. Survival was all she cared for, and for her to leave that behind was more meaningful than he’d given her credit for. “You’re here,” he agreed. “You wouldn’t have left the Preserve if you weren’t truly dedicated to something even more important.” His emotions wrestled inside him, guilt and etiquette warring with the importance of his mission, until finally the latter won out. “Heron, I doubt it comes as much of a surprise to you when I say that I rarely have any idea what you’re thinking and what you are trying to accomplish. But I still trust you, and most of the time that’s good enough. Right now, though, I need to know what you’re trying to do by accompanying us. Maybe you want to help us on our mission to save the species, or maybe you just want to get back to Dr. Morgan. Maybe you’ll use us to get through the Badlands and then abandon us as soon as we’re back on safe ground. Maybe you’ll do something else I haven’t thought of yet. But . . . this is important. The information we have might save the human species, and you might be the only one strong enough to deliver it. What I need to know is if you will.”

Heron was silent a moment, and Samm sensed nothing through the link. He marveled once again at her ability to hide her emotions so completely. Why would the espionage models even need to do that? Why give them the power to deceive their own companions, when they were designed to deceive humans? Only after she turned a corner, and they started eastward down a long, bare stretch of road, did she speak.

“Badlands is a Preserve term,” said Heron.

“Excuse me?”

“We called it the toxic wasteland before,” said Heron. “That’s what Afa called it, and it’s the most descriptive term. Badlands is the term the humans in the Preserve use, and now you use it.”

“Are you saying I’m becoming one of them?” asked Samm. “Is that what’s bothering you?”

“I never said anything was bothering me.”

“Then why are you acting so strange?” asked Samm. “You wanted me to hurry, but you wouldn’t help me with the work; you brought me out here alone, but you don’t want to talk.”

“We’re talking.”

“Does this count?”

“I don’t know.”

Samm’s link crackled with frustration. “What is that supposed to mean?”

They walked a moment in silence, the dark clouds blotting out the moon. “You’re cold,” said Heron. “Let me help you stay warm.” She put her arm around him.

Samm was too surprised to speak, and faltered a step as he walked. He was acutely aware of Heron’s body against his, her arm around his shoulders, the side of her breast pressed softly by his arm. The cold breeze lifted her hair, black strands wafting across his face and ear. He slowed to a stop.

“What are you doing?”

She curled around in front of him, keeping one arm behind his back and encircling him with the other. She pulled him close and kissed him, her lips soft and moist, her fingers twining gently in his hair. He froze, too stunned to move, then grabbed her arms and pushed her away.

“What are you doing?” he asked again.

“It’s called a kiss,” said Heron. “You did it to Kira once, so I know you know what it is.”

“Of course I know what it is,” said Samm, his link data a jumbled mess of confusion and shock and arousal. “Why are you doing it to me?”

“I wanted to know what it felt like,” she said. Her link data was as blank as ever. “Calix said you kissed her, too.”

“Calix told you that?” Calix hated Heron; that was almost as unbelievable as the kiss.

“I can be very persuasive.” She turned east again and started walking. “I was trained to use whatever means I could to extract information from humans—male or female. None of those techniques even work on Partials, because you never developed the ability to read the same cues.”

Samm ran to catch up. “Heron, tell me what’s going on.” He grabbed her arm. “We’ve known each other for almost twenty years, and that . . .” He looked at the clouds. “I don’t even know what to say.”

“Your decisions are stupid,” said Heron. “Our only operational goal is survival, by any means necessary, and you’ve had that in your hands a dozen times now just to throw it away. Your plans don’t lead toward that end; your tactics don’t support it. You’re dying in seven months if you don’t do something, and yet you’re leaving behind your best chance to stay alive. Now Calix says you’re in love with Kira, and that’s the only thing that explains anything you’re doing. They taught us in our training that love makes you stupid, that we could use that against our enemies, but you . . .” She turned to face him. “You’re not even happy. You’re throwing away your own life because you love someone who’s not here anymore, and you hate it, and it’s killing you. Love is the worst thing that ever happened to you, but you still love her.”

She paused just long enough that Samm thought she was finished, and then spoke again.

“I . . . ,” she began. “I wanted to see what that felt like.”

Heron fell silent, but her eyes never left Samm’s, and his mind swam. He didn’t know how to respond or where to start, or even what he felt about Kira or Heron or anyone else.

“Kissing isn’t love,” he finally mumbled.

“Crossing the wasteland is?”

“Maybe,” said Samm. “Heron, love isn’t a weapon.”

“Everything’s a weapon.”

“Everything can be used as a weapon,” said Samm, “but that’s not the same thing. Love is when you have the opportunity of turning someone’s feelings or trust or vulnerability against them, but you don’t. You make promises you don’t want to keep, but you keep them because they’re right; you help people who can’t help you back.” He turned up his palms, trying to describe something he could only barely define for himself. “You . . . call it the Badlands instead of the wasteland.”

“You kill yourself,” said Heron.

“You lose yourself,” said Samm. “Love is when you find something so great, so . . . necessary, that it becomes more important to you than your own goals, than your own life—not because your life has no meaning without it, but because it gives your life a meaning it never had before.”

“Life is its own meaning,” said Heron. “We live because otherwise we die. There is no meaning in death, no hollow gestures, no glorious sacrifices. Love ruins your ability to make those decisions properly.”

Samm shook his head. “Do you realize I used to envy you? I used to think how great it would be if nothing ever got to me, and I never got sad and I never lost anything I loved, and my heart never broke over any of the stupid, meaningless tragedies that have defined our entire existence. Did you know ParaGen built us to love? To empathize? They gave us emotions specifically to make us value human life, to love them. All it did was make it hurt that much more when we finally realized they didn’t love us back. And you . . . you never let that or anything else ever bother you. I used to think that was something to strive for. But you’ve pushed your emotions so deep inside that I can’t even feel them on the link. Tactical data, health data, location and combat, that’s all there, but your emotions are gone. You’re like a black hole, Heron, and that’s not good. That’s not healthy.”

“The espionage models were built differently,” said Heron. “You don’t feel my emotions because I don’t feel them either. And you’re right about me—I’m a black hole. I’m a hollow shell. You think I’m being mysterious but I’m just . . . confused. I thought that maybe if I kissed you, if I felt what Kira felt, or Calix, then maybe . . .” She turned away. “It didn’t work.”

Samm stood in shock, trying to process what she’d said. “Why would anyone do that?” he asked. “Why make a person, and then take away everything that makes them a person?”

Heron’s link data was as empty as always. “Because it helps us survive.”

CHAPTER THIRTY

Some of the Partials Kira met by the seaside were from Morgan’s faction, out on patrol; by the time Jerry Ryssdal died and the first great snowflakes fell, they were all deserters like Green, too shocked by what they’d seen and felt to ever go back again. The world had changed, pivoting too far, and at too violent a velocity, to ever be the same again. Some of them fled east, trying to find old friends from other divisions who’d already joined the outlying factions. Three others joined Kira, swayed by her promise of a cure for expiration. She was open with them, and with Green, telling them that no matter how certain she was, there was still a chance that her plan wouldn’t work. The leader of the squad, a soldier named Falin, simply scratched his head and looked out across the sound.

“If it doesn’t work, and we die, at least we tried.” He looked at Kira. “I don’t know that we can expect any better than that. Not now, not ever.”

“Not everyone’s going to be so open-minded,” said Kira. “The humans are just as likely to resist this as the other Partials.”

“The sooner the better, then,” said Falin. “I’m only one batch away.”

One batch away, thought Kira. Green will die in a month, and Falin the month after.

How much longer does Samm have? Will I ever even see him again?

They buried Ryssdal by the side of the ocean, laying him in a shallow grave and covering him with rocks. It took long enough that he was already blanketed with snow by the time they finished. Kira wondered how long the storm would last, but she didn’t dare to wait any longer. The park Ryssdal had called them to sat at the head of a long, narrow bay leading out to the sound, and a quick run across a bridge brought them to a large pier crowded with boats. Many of them had long ago come loose from their moorings, and the years of waves had washed them into a massive pile on the edge of the wharf, or out into deeper water where they dotted the bay like tiny white shipwrecks. Several were still tethered tightly to the docks, but none of them looked seaworthy enough to risk sailing. They walked through the vast lot of beached boats, safely stored for an off-season that had lasted thirteen years, and cut off the tight plastic wrapping that covered them, searching for one that would suit their needs. No one in their group knew how to sail, but one of the larger yachts, sixty feet at least, was equipped with wide, black solar panels, and a console that leapt dimly to life almost as soon as the panels were uncovered.

“We’re not going to have much sun to rely on,” said Green, looking up at the clouds. “It’s late afternoon already, and those clouds aren’t going anywhere.”

Falin looked in the gas tank and waved his hand in front of his nose as the foul stench rose up. “The gas is almost completely settled out—mostly resin now, probably won’t even turn the motor. The solar panels will still work until nightfall, but that’s probably not enough to get us across the sound.”

“Let me show you a little trick I learned,” said Kira with a smile, and pointed across the lot to a tall AUTO BODY sign a few blocks away. “If that place has any turpentine, we’re good to go.”

“Paint thinner?” asked Falin.

“What do you think gasoline resin is?” asked Kira. “Come on.”

Falin glanced at Green, who only laughed. “Trust me, she knows her stuff.”

The auto body shop did indeed have turpentine, and they brought it back in heavy metal cans and pushed the boat down the ramp into the water. It took them an hour to get through the press of broken and overturned boats, clambering over them and cutting them loose while the snow grew heavier and wetter. When they reached open water Kira cranked the engine up to full power, pulling from both the panels and the gas tank, and roared out into the bay.

“Stay away from the exhaust vents,” she called back, “and be careful if the wind changes and starts to blow it toward us. That turpentine smoke is poisonous like you wouldn’t believe.”

The mouth of the bay was choked with small sandbars and islands, and they maneuvered through them carefully. By the time they reached the sound it was already night, and they were forced to rely solely on the gasoline as they thumped through the choppy water. The boat had a convertible canvas awning that raised up over the pilot’s station, but the years had not been kind to it, and it cracked nearly in half when they tried to unfold it. Green found a baseball cap belowdecks and gave it to Kira to keep the snow out of her eyes while she steered, and when she needed a break she passed both controls and hat to him. They steered slightly westward as they drove, and made land in Huntington Bay sometime around midnight. The beach was wide and pebbly, and they beached the yacht carefully in case they needed to use it again, tying it to a sturdy upright log that had once been part of a dock.

The snow was getting thicker, and with the storm clouds blocking out the moon, they could barely see enough to walk. They took shelter in a massive mansion just off the water, sleeping soundly in a small bedroom with all five of them huddled together for warmth. In the morning they scoured the house for canned food, finding some garbanzo beans that hadn’t gone bad yet, and shared the meager fare before trudging back outside into the snow. The world was covered with a thick, white carpet, with more still falling in a slow, steady curtain. They didn’t walk far before Falin stepped on a small bump and jumped back with a curse.

“That’s a body.”

Kira looked up quickly, glancing around to see if there was danger she hadn’t registered yet, perhaps some ambush from the storefronts, but she saw nothing. She walked to the group, clustered around the prone body, and knelt down next to it. Now that she was looking closely, she could tell it was a vaguely man-shaped outline, lying on his side in a fetal position.

“Not a Partial,” said Green. “No death stamp on the link.”

Kira brushed away the snow and frowned as she uncovered more and more dark, frozen blood. Whoever it was had died violently. She wiped the snow from the dead man’s face and gasped in horror.

“You know him?” asked Green.

“His name is Owen Tovar,” said Kira. “He was a member of the group that rebelled against our government a couple of years ago, and then a senator after his rebellion was successful. I didn’t know him well, but . . .” She shook her head. “I liked him. He was a good man.”

“He’s missing three fingers,” said Falin, clearing away the snow from his hands. “And it looks like the kill shot was in the gut. No reason for a Partial to have done any of that.”

“No reason for a human, either,” said Kira.

“What I’m saying is that a Partial’s more accurate,” said Falin. “We would have hit him up here, in the chest or the head—”

“There’s no exit wound,” said Green. He was crouching on the other side, by the body’s back, and Kira stepped over to look. “That looks like a gunshot in his stomach, but whatever it was didn’t come out the back. I don’t even know what would make a wound like this. The entry hole’s too big for a knife.”

“Oh no,” said Kira, and tried to roll him over to see the wound; he was frozen to the ground, so she scrambled back around to examine it more fully. She felt her heart sink. “Oh no.”

Kira could sense their alarm on the link; they were already fanning into defensive positions, cued by her words that something was wrong. Green crouched next to her. “What is it?”

“I’ve seen this kind of wound before,” she said. “Once. On your squad mate I found on the dock back at Candlewood.”

Green held her gaze for a second, his mind adding up the ramifications, and he came to the same conclusion she had. “The Blood Man.”

“I’m not saying it is,” said Kira, standing up. “It could be a coincidence.”

“Who’s the Blood Man?” asked Falin.

“We don’t know,” said Kira. “Some kind of . . . murderer? Collector? We escaped from a group of modified Partials that seemed to take orders from him, but we never saw him. He killed a bunch of Partials and drained their blood, and the last Green heard he was headed south to do the same to humans. We don’t know why.”

“Modified Partials?” asked one of Falin’s soldiers.

Green placed his hands on either side of his neck, and flapped them up and down. “Gills.”

“There are only two good reasons to collect blood,” said Falin. “One is you’re crazy, and two, you need it for a transfusion or something. Maybe he’s dying.”

Kira shook her head. “If all he needs is a transfusion, he wouldn’t hop around taking a pint or two each from a dozen different people. He’s definitely collecting it, almost like he’s curating it, trying to get a variety of different samples. In Candlewood he took at least one each of the three Partial models he had access to.” She looked up. “I’ve done a lot of blood tests in my work as a medic, and experiments and all kinds of things. Maybe he needs it for that?”

“Whatever’s he’s doing, and for whatever reason he’s doing it, we need to get out of the open,” said Green. He waved them toward the sidewalk, out of the snow-covered road. “Stick to the storefronts, and keep your eyes open for trouble.”

“We can’t just leave him here,” said Kira. “I knew this man.”

“He’s frozen to the street,” said Green, “and we don’t have time.”

Kira struggled to move him again, but he was as solid as ice. When she finally managed to budge his arm, it was only by leaving a patch of torn skin frozen to the pavement below him. She winced and let go.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, touching his frozen hair. “I’ll come back.” She looked up, feeling a dark foreboding. “I’ll try to come back.”

They ran down the street, leapfrogging from one secure position to the next, and several blocks later found the rubble of a recent explosion, now soothed by a blanket of snow. “Somebody hit a Partial emplacement,” said Falin, examining the debris around the site. He picked up the barrel of a Partial-issued rifle, torn and twisted by the blast. “Maybe your friend back there.”

“Probably,” Kira admitted. She looked down the road, past a storefront with a faded yellow duck, and another that looked like a castle. “There’re tire tracks in the snow,” she said, pointing. “Not fresh, but they were made since the snow began. Whoever made those tracks might have stayed to clean up and not left until after the storm started.”

“Then it’s time for us to make a decision,” said Green. “If Kira’s right, we’re only a few hours behind a platoon of Partials, which looks like it’s headed east; that means they’re not going home, likely because they’re chasing a group of human rebels. We could follow them, or we could stay on course for East Meadow and meet up with them there.”

“East Meadow will be safer,” said Falin. “Humans and Partials who are actively shooting each other at the time might be a bit less receptive to our plan of reconciliation.”

“The Blood Man’s probably headed to East Meadow as well,” said Kira. “If he’s really after a wide range of human samples, that’s where he’s going to find them.”

“Then we go,” said Green. “Move out.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

It had been snowing for a week. Wet mounds of it weighed down the trees, cracking the branches, and deep drifts of it piled three feet high in the streets, with no sign of stopping. It’s like something out of a fantasy novel, Ariel thought. The world looked unfamiliar and alien. She and her group moved from house to house even slower than before, slogging barely twenty miles through bitter cold and waist-deep snow. In each new shelter they hacked up the furniture to build as big a fire as they dared, ever wary of Partial patrols, and then peeled off their cold, wet clothes and put on new ones, desperately scavenged from whatever the house had available—a grown man’s pants, shoes that didn’t fit, summer dresses layered until they were warm. Ariel remembered her early days with Kira and Isolde, running giddily from house to house in the post-Break wasteland, finding cute new clothes in a hundred different styles, trying on rich women’s jewelry, collecting shoes of every shape and color until their closets couldn’t hold them. Now she raided old men’s dressers for moldering jeans, and cut them in half to use as extra sleeves to save her arms from frostbite. The few good jackets they found they gave to Isolde, and wrapped the baby in old flannel shirts and blankets. Their one heavy coat, pulled from deep storage in the back of a rest home, was rotated between all six of them, and painstakingly dried each night by the fire.

The fires were easier to build, obviously, in homes with fireplaces, but thirteen years of neglect had left the chimneys clogged and useless, and even with the windows open, the rooms would fill with smoke. They lay on the floor, where it was easier to breathe, and hoped that no one was close enough to see the smoke and come looking—Partials were the main worry, but Ariel was just as concerned about desperate humans, starving and freezing, who would see a group of women and get all kinds of thoughts. Even with the dangers, though, it was simply too cold to forgo a fire completely. They kept their guns close and ready, and always had at least one person on watch. In spite of the fact that they disliked him—or perhaps because of it—Senator Hobb always took a double watch.

The conditions, though, did nothing to deter them from their mission to find the lab Nandita spoke of, and the first week of winter brought them as far as Middle Island, a small community that was exactly what the name implied: halfway between the west end of the island and the east.

“This is good,” said Isolde. Her eyes were bloodshot, rimmed with black circles, and she stroked Khan’s blistered cheek as he screamed feebly. “We’re halfway there, baby. You’re going to be just fine.”

“Halfway from Brooklyn,” said Ariel. “We started in East Meadow, so we really haven’t come that far.”

“Thanks for the pep talk,” said Isolde, too exhausted to manage much of a glare.

“We only made it two miles today,” said Xochi. The baby was slowing them down. “The farther east we go, the worse the snow is going to be; the rain was always worse farther out on the island, at least, and I imagine the snow’s going to be the same.”

“We won’t give up,” said Hobb firmly. “This is my son we’re talking about.”

Ariel and Xochi gave each other a look, but said nothing.

“We’re almost to Riverhead,” said Kessler. “Another fifteen miles or so; a week at the most.”

“We’ve made worse time every day,” said Xochi. “Who knows how long fifteen miles could take us?”

“Riverhead is the largest community outside of East Meadow,” said Kessler. “The Partials relocated everyone during the occupation, but their supplies might still be available—clean water, stored grain, smokehouses full of fish. At the very least we’ll find houses with good windows, working chimneys, and clean clothes.”

“We’re not planning to stay there,” said Xochi.

“I’m just saying we’d have the option,” said Kessler. “A few days to recuperate and get our feet back under us, or a few weeks to sit out this storm.”

“We don’t have a few weeks,” said Hobb. “There is a nuclear bomb—”

“This storm will hinder Delarosa’s progress just as much as ours,” said Ariel. “There’s no way she’s going to make it to White Plains and set that thing off.”

“That only makes it more likely that she’ll set it off early,” said Hobb. “That she’ll set it off closer.”

“But if the storm ever breaks—” said Kessler, but Nandita cut her off, speaking up for the first time that evening.

“This storm isn’t going to break,” she said. “You heard the giant as clearly as I did—this isn’t a freak storm, it’s the return of winter; the first great backswing of Earth’s pendulum, struggling to rebalance itself. And as far as that pendulum swung in one direction, it’s going to have to swing just as far in the other. This winter could last a year or more, and this storm? I shudder to think of it.”

“All the more reason to push through to Riverhead,” said Xochi. “Kessler’s right about their supplies, and we’ll need all the help we can get if we’re going to make it to Plum Island.”

“You could at least call me ‘Erin,’” said Kessler, “since apparently ‘Mother’ is too much to ask for.”

“If Riverhead’s such a strong community, the Partials will be holding it,” said Ariel. “It’s the best place to set up an outpost on the eastern half of the island, especially since we did all the work for them. Our best course is to avoid it altogether.”

“We’ll starve,” said Kessler. “We can barely feed ourselves as it is. This house didn’t have a damn thing we could eat, and unless you’re volunteering to go fishing—”

“We can scrounge in stores along the way,” said Ariel. “We can send out pairs to forage while the others build the fire. Anything to avoid walking into a base full of Partial soldiers.”

“It would be easy enough to deal with them,” said Kessler. Her voice was different, and she stole a glance at Khan.

“No,” said Isolde, “I do not want to have this conversation again.”

“He wouldn’t be at any more risk than he already is,” said Kessler. “What, you think they’re going to take him somewhere in this weather? We’ll show up, they’ll ‘take us prisoner,’ which will essentially just mean they feed us and lock us somewhere warm, and then a few days later they’ve died of whatever Partial plague they catch from him, and we have the place to ourselves.”

“And killing an entire group of people, just like that, doesn’t bother you?” asked Ariel.

“They’re Partials,” said Kessler, “and no, you’re not the same thing, so don’t look at me like you’re offended. No matter where you came from, you grew up human, with human morals, and you didn’t lay siege to an entire species. They attacked us in the old world and they attacked us again in this one, and now they’re sitting in houses we rescued, eating food we grew and caught and stored, and I’m supposed to feel sorry for them? The hell I am.”

“I don’t care how good your reasons are,” said Isolde, “my baby is not a bomb.”

“Then we use you instead,” said Kessler, “or Ariel, if she’s so keen to get up close and personal with them.”

Ariel spread her arms wide, waving her fingertips to beckon Kessler closer. “You wanna go, bitch? Let’s do this.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” said Hobb, positioning himself between them. “How are we supposed to use Ariel or Isolde in the same way? They’re Partials—you keep saying that—but they’re not sick. Are they carriers?” He scooted away from Ariel almost imperceptibly.

“They’re the source of the disease,” said Kessler, “which is how Isolde’s baby got it. It’s latent inside their bodies, but Nandita has a chemical that can trigger it.”

Nandita’s hand went to her chest, clutching the small bag that she wore on a chain around her neck. When she saw that all eyes were on her, she looked calmly at Senator Hobb.

“The reason I gathered the three Partial girls was because I knew they might have something inside them, waiting to be unlocked. I thought it was the cure for RM, and I spent their entire childhood trying to find a way to trigger its release. That’s where I went last year—I found the facilities on Plum Island and used the equipment there to finish my research.” She held up the bag, staring at the small outline of a vial faintly visible in the folds of the fabric. “But the cure was never part of the genetic code for the new models, as Kira proved, and the trigger I found is for the disease.” She looked up. “If we give this to Isolde, she’ll start producing the pathogen in her lungs, and spread it to kill every Partial she comes in contact with.”

“Does she just drink it?” asked Kessler. “Does it have to be injected?”

“Injection only,” said Nandita. “The formula’s too fragile to survive the digestive system.”

“Why Isolde?” asked Ariel. She remembered all the lies and deceit and experimentation, an entire childhood as a secret lab rat in this woman’s hands. “Why didn’t you say me?”

“I thought you didn’t want to do it,” said Xochi.

Ariel roared at her without looking away from Nandita’s face. “Of course I don’t want to do it! But I want to know why she thinks I can’t.” She pointed at Nandita. “That wasn’t an accidental omission—you know something about me.”

“Your child died,” said Nandita. “Khan isn’t the first Partial-human hybrid, he’s the first one who lived; the plague processors in Isolde’s DNA made him immune to one disease, but cursed him with another. Your baby . . . simply died.”

“So you don’t think I have the Partial disease in my genes.”

“I don’t,” said Nandita. “I don’t know about Kira. Isolde, as far as I know, might be the only one.”

“So all the experiments,” said Ariel, “all the horrible things you did to us as kids, the herbs and the physical tests and the ‘alternative medicines’ you gave me to try to figure this all out, that was all for nothing? You treated me like a test subject when I lived with you, and a liar and a pariah when I tried to run away, and it was all for this? So I could just turn out to be completely normal, and everything you were looking for wasn’t even there?”

“Negative results are still results,” said Nandita. “You have more knowledge than you did before. More truth.”

“Yeah,” said Ariel. “The only true thing you’ve ever told me.”

The group mostly fell quiet after that, discussing Riverhead only briefly and deciding to follow Ariel’s plan of cutting north around it. There was no more mention of diseases, or of using Khan as a living weapon, and lots of murmured worry about the worsening storm. It was becoming increasingly likely that they might never make it to Plum Island at all, though no one dared to say it out loud, and Ariel wondered what would happen then. Khan would die, at the very least. Isolde would fall apart. Hobb might very well abandon them.

And I can shoot Nandita, Ariel thought. Helping Khan is the one decent thing she’s tried to do with her life, and if she can’t do that? The world will be better off without her.

Xochi took the first watch, and Ariel slept fitfully by the fire, one side too hot and the other still freezing. She dreamed of flowers, and the garden she used to keep as a child in Nandita’s house. She’d been so proud of them, and when she’d moved away she’d started a new garden: daylilies and salvia and geraniums; joe-pye weeds and black-eyed Susans. All dead now under three feet of snow.

She woke in the middle of the night to find the fire burning low; Nandita was awake, taking her watch. Ariel kept her eyes slitted, faking sleep while the old woman added more scraps of the old kitchen table to the fire. Nandita stood there a moment, warming her hands, and Ariel felt a crazy, almost overwhelming compulsion to shoot her now, right here; to rid the world of her manipulations, and save the group from their useless trek to Plum Island. They’d never make it. Killing Nandita would only hasten the inevitable and give them time to escape from the island before dying of cold or the nuclear explosion. It made so much sense. Ariel reached for her pistol, mere inches from her head, so slow and so quiet the old woman would never even notice.

Nandita pulled out the bag from around her neck, staring at it in the firelight. Ariel froze. Nandita didn’t move, simply looking at the bag, until at last she reached up with her other hand and opened it, tugging apart the strings that held it closed and pulling out the small glass vial. Inside was the plague trigger, dark brown and glistening in the firelight. Nandita unscrewed the rubber cap, dumped the liquid in the fire, and watched it disappear in a hiss of bubbles and steam. Ariel watched with her. Nandita re-stoppered the vial and tucked it back in the bag, and Ariel closed her eyes again before the old woman turned around and walked back to her window to keep watch.

Ariel watched the fire for the rest of the night.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Green heard it first, stopping in midstep and raising his head to listen. The other Partials stopped an instant later, warned by the link that something was happening. Kira tried to listen as well, but when the Partial soldiers all dropped to the ground in unison, taking cover and pulling up their rifles, she realized that her ears weren’t nearly as finely tuned. She pulled up her own rifle, crawling to the snow toward Green.

“What happened?”

“Gunshot,” said Green, and pointed down the road to a wide-open parking lot. “Two so far. Long gun, medium caliber by the sound of it. Sniper, but he missed what he was shooting at.”

“How can you tell all that?”

“If it was a real gunfight, they wouldn’t have been single shots, and we would have heard more than one gun.” He looked at her. “And if the sniper had hit what he was aiming for, he wouldn’t have had to shoot a second time.”

They crept down the road toward the sound, until the residential street gave way to a four-lane road with a massive shopping center on the other side. The closest building was a restaurant with a silhouette of a lobster on its sign; the parking lot was mostly empty. Looks like everyone in Hicksville decided to die at home, thought Kira. Beyond the restaurant was a strip mall, with a few of the storefronts blackened from a decades-old fire. Well, thought Kira, everyone but the looters.

“It came from over there,” said Falin, pointing past the strip mall to a multistory shopping mall two parking lots away.

“That’s good open ground,” said Kira, “easy to defend. Someone in a top window could shoot anyone who gets too close.”

“The shot came from inside,” said Green. “Which means I don’t know what this means.”

“It means it’s easier to avoid,” said Falin. “Back up a block, and we go south with cover and forget it ever happened.”

“I’d like to know what it is,” said Green, watching the mall with sharp eyes. “But I don’t need to. On the very small chance whatever it is comes after us, we’re better off out there than approaching a sniper’s nest.”

“What if it’s someone who needs our help?” asked Kira.

“If I die before expiration,” said Green, “it’s going to be because you said somebody needed our help.”

“I know,” said Kira. She scanned the parking lot, looking for anything out of the ordinary. “If you both say it’s safer to turn back, we turn—” She stopped suddenly. “Wait.”

“I see it too,” said Green. “A body, in the snow by that stand of trees.”

“We have to check it out,” said Kira.

Green sat silently, deep in thought. “It should be safe,” he said at last. “We can advance under cover of that restaurant without anyone in the mall seeing a thing. Jansson can cover us from here in case of an ambush.” They conveyed their plan quickly and efficiently between them, the link doing most of the work, and then Green and Kira ran forward, feet kicking up thick tufts of snow. The trees and the body beside them were just beyond the cover of the restaurant—a small strip of dirt and grass that had once separated the parking lot into traffic lanes now served as home to a full line of young trees. They glanced back, got the okay from Falin, and ran forward again to sink down in the shadows of the miniature grove.

The body lay on its stomach, barely covered with snow; he had fallen recently. Kira reached for his neck to feel for a pulse and recoiled with a disgusted curse when her hand touched a cold, wet hole.

“What is it?” asked Green.

“Gills,” said Kira, recovering from the shock. She rubbed her fingers compulsively, as if she was trying to physically wipe away the memory of accidentally sticking her fingers inside them.

“Interesting,” said Green. “Apparently the Blood Man brought some of his toadies with him and one of them got snagged by that sniper.”

“So the sniper might be inside that mall,” said Kira. “Now we have to go in.”

“I know,” said Green, though the slight pause before he spoke showed how reluctant he was. “I told you you were going to get me killed.”

“I have three more weeks,” said Kira. “Give me a chance.”

Green signaled to the others, and they regrouped by the back wall of the restaurant, well out of sight of the mall. Green explained the situation and mapped out a plan to approach the mall safely. They ran slightly to the right, around a bank and through the strip mall to another residential street beyond; this gave them cars and fences and houses to hide behind, and when they reached the larger mall they were already behind it, running across a narrow loading zone to a windowless blue wall. One of the loading bays was open, and they climbed through to the darkened warehouse.

At this point their communication became entirely nonverbal, and even with her adrenaline pumping Kira had to concentrate as hard as she could not only to detect all the link data but to interpret it. Emotional cues as simple as SEE and SUPPORT seemed to have much deeper meanings, sending one Partial ahead and another to a flanking position. The team moved seamlessly through the aisles and shelves, and eventually to the mall and the storefronts beyond, and Kira simply followed Green, stopping when he stopped, hiding when he hid. The link data sounded an alarm in her nervous system, and Kira found herself raising her rifle before she even understood why, firing down a hallway as a figure she hadn’t even seen dove smoothly into cover. Falin took up a firing position by the base of an escalator, and Jansson did the same in some kind of café across the hall. Green and Kira and the final soldier, a man named Colin, raced down the hall toward the fleeing shape, only to dive to the floor and scramble for cover when the entire mall seemed to explode into gunfire, bullets flying in all directions at once. Kira crawled into a clothing store, past the racks of snarky T-shirts to the sturdier wood of the counter, and covered her head with her hands. The soldiers started firing back, and Kira was deafened by the noise, until suddenly the shooting stopped and she heard a voice echoing through the halls.

“Whoa! Whoa! Everybody stop shooting . . . everybody else. This was a carefully calibrated ambush that was not intended to catch what looks like . . . an entire squad of Partial soldiers? What? What are you even doing here?”

Kira raised her head. She recognized the voice.

“Look, fellas,” said the voice, “we are trying to engage in a deadly game of cat and mouse with a psychotic murderess right now, so if you’d all just keep your noses out of other people’s business, we could get back to the nightmarish hellscape that our lives have become. Or you could just help us find her. Unless you’re working with her, in which case I really ought to stop talking, and we can all get back to shooting each other—”

“Marcus?” Kira shouted, standing up and edging carefully into the hallway. Green and Colin were both there, in cover positions of their own, linking their confusion. “Marcus Valencio! Is that you?”

There was a long moment of silence, and then she heard him again, his voice shocked and uncertain.

“Kira?”

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Kira looked up and saw Marcus on an upper balcony, leaning over with wide eyes and his jaw hanging open in abject surprise. He looked like he’d been living in the wilderness for weeks, his bronze skin flushed with sweat and adrenaline.

“Kira!”

“Marcus!”

He ran back toward the escalators, and she did the same, racing to meet him, and he clattered down them and dropped his rifle and flung his arms around her, kissing her joyously and lifting her in the air. She clung to him, laughing and weeping and kissing him back.

“I thought you were dead,” he said, over and over in her ear. “When the messages stopped and the Partials stopped looking, I thought they had you.” She felt his tears on her cheek. “What has it been, a year? A year and a half? How are you even alive?”

“What are you doing here?” she demanded, too happy to let go of him. Marcus, her best friend for years, her boyfriend for some of them. Last time she’d seen him he’d been skinny and pale, a medical intern so focused on his studies he barely left the hospital, and now he was toned and lean, quick and alert, as at home in his weathered combat fatigues as he’d ever been in his scrubs. She kissed him again. “What are you doing here?”

“Quiet down,” said Falin. “Didn’t you say something about an ambush and a murderer?”

“Crap, yes,” said Marcus, and pulled Kira down behind the escalator. “Also: murderess. Don’t be sexist, women can murder people too.”

Falin looked at Kira. “You want to tell us what’s going on here?”

“Marcus is one of my best friends in the entire world,” said Kira. “And he’s here apparently . . .” She looked at him and trailed off, waiting for him to fill in the rest.

“We were trying to find Senator Delarosa,” said Marcus. “I’ll get to that later. While passing through here, we got jumped by two Partials: They got three of us, we got one of them, and then we managed to set up what we thought was a pretty solid trap. A better one than we’d planned, it turns out, since we only hoped to catch one Partial, not . . .” He looked at Kira. “Six.”

Her heart tightened, twisting into a nervous ball. The count of six only worked if Marcus knew her secret: the murderess he’d been hunting, the four Partials Kira was traveling with, and Kira herself. She swallowed nervously. “So you know.”

“Yeah.” He closed his mouth tightly, looking at the floor. “I didn’t know for certain until just this moment, but we had kind of put all the pieces together last year.”

Kira let out a long breath and gave a dry, humorless chuckle. “I guess that saves me the trouble of finding a good way to tell you.”

“Actually I would love for you to find a good way to tell me,” said Marcus. “Knowing that it’s true and actually understanding anything about it are two completely different things, and this . . .”

“I wish I knew what to tell you.”

“How long have you known?”

“Since Morgan captured me,” said Kira. “The first time, when we broke Samm out of prison and crossed over to the mainland. When you rescued me from her, I . . . didn’t know how to tell you. You hated Partials—everyone did.”

“He seems fine enough working with Partials now,” said Falin.

“Meeting one you can work with makes all the difference,” said Marcus. “He’s a buddy of mine, and he’s chasing Delarosa right now, which is something else we need to talk about—”

“Movement!” shouted a gruff, older voice.

Marcus looked up sharply. “Is it the other Partial?”

“Don’t know who else it would be.”

“That’s Commander Woolf,” said Marcus. He grabbed his rifle from where he’d dropped it and shouted a question to the vast, empty mall. “Are we all pretty clear on the issue of friends and enemies? I don’t want anyone getting all excited and shooting the wrong person.”

“A friend of Kira’s is a friend of mine,” called Green.

“And a friend of Marcus has my sympathies,” called Woolf. “But no, I won’t shoot them.”

“She just went off the link,” said Green. “She probably put on a gas mask.”

“Damn,” said Kira. “That’s going to make this a lot harder.” She brought up her rifle and checked the barrel, making sure it was loaded and ready and safe. “You said you had an ambush planned?”

“We have snipers on the upper floor,” said Marcus softly, “bait down there and there.” He pointed along the main hallway, terminating in a clothing-filled department store, and then along a perpendicular hall that led toward a food court. “She took the main hall, probably going after Woolf, since he was the bait in that one, but he’s still talking, so he’s obviously okay. She must have got past him when you showed up and we all started shooting each other.”

“We’ll help you catch her,” said Kira. “We’ve got some questions of our own.” She stood up and jogged down the hall toward the department store, keeping close to the wall with her rifle pointed down. Falin followed close behind her, and she felt the combat coordination flare back to life on the link. Marcus followed behind, running to catch up. “Are there any other exits?” she asked him.

“Two ground-floor doors, but we have people outside both of them.”

“So we won’t go outside,” said Kira. “Let’s keep this among people who’ve already learned not to shoot at us.”

A gunshot rang out from the department store, and Falin muttered, “Tell that to her.”

“Woolf’s in trouble,” said Marcus, and surged forward, but Kira held him back.

“This is the third exit,” she said, pointing to the mouth of the department store. “If we go in there and she gets around us, she’s coming straight back here. Don’t let her past you.”

Marcus nodded. “I’m glad we could have our tearful reunion before I crapped my pants from fear.”

She grinned and slapped him on the back, and he ran to find a good watch position while Kira and the soldiers swarmed into the department store. They walked carefully, watching one another’s backs, clearing each new section and display and rack of clothes before moving on to the next one. The clothes in the store were old, but relatively well preserved; some animals had been in here, and spiders had covered the shelves and corners with gauzy white webbing, but the mannequins still stood, posing proudly, ancient sunglasses perched jauntily on their featureless, yellowed heads.

“Commander Woolf?” Kira called out. “Are you still here?”

There was no answer, and Kira proceeded grimly; the man was either dead or a prisoner. The center of the department store was a tall, open area, three stories of balconies connected by a crisscrossing series of escalators. She caught a flash of movement on the third floor, somebody jostling a rack of suits, and pointed it out to Green. He relayed it silently through the link, and soon the entire group was moving—not toward the escalators, but to the staircase in the back wall.

“The escalators are a death trap,” Green whispered. “They’re long and straight with no cover; she could pick us all off on the first one.” He turned to Jansson. “You stay here and point out any movement you see on the link—our target’s got a gas mask on, so she can’t listen in.” He and Falin and Colin opened the door and moved quickly up the stairs, checking each corner carefully, and Kira followed, still trying to keep up with the rapid link commands. She expected them to bypass the second floor, since the movement had been on the third, but they stopped and did a sweep of that floor as well, leaving Colin to watch the stairs and make sure the shooter didn’t sneak past them on the way down. They were hemming her in, slowly but surely, clearing every possible hiding place and backing her into a final, inescapable corner. They stayed away from the edges of the balconies, but they could still feel Jansson on the link, watching out for them from below.

MOVEMENT ON THE THIRD FLOOR, came the message. She was still up there.

They moved quickly back to the stairs and went up. Kira felt her trepidation grow and was grateful that she wasn’t broadcasting her fear across the link. She needed to be strong. She followed Green out onto the third floor with her rifle up, crouching low to reduce her profile, watching each corner and shadow with her heart in her throat. The gilled Partial assassin could be anywhere, lying in wait for them, cornered and desperate and deadly.

Kira glanced toward the balcony railing and the wide center shaft beyond, looking for the rack of suits she’d seen earlier. There, she said, locating herself mentally. That means I’m facing left of where I was before, and Jansson is over there—

The suits moved again. She froze in surprise, just for a split second, before dropping to the floor. She wanted to call out to the others that she’d found her, but she didn’t risk it; if the assassin didn’t know she’d been spotted, Kira could sneak up on her. A moment ago she was glad to not be on the link, and now cursed the fact that she was unable to silently communicate what she’d seen. She waved at Green, getting his attention, and pointed at the suits. He nodded, acknowledging that they were the same suits she’d pointed out below, and she shook her head, pointing at them more firmly. He stared back, uncomprehending, and she gritted her teeth in frustration. Right now! she mouthed. She’s there right now!

He stared at her a second longer, then suddenly the link flooded with understanding, and the group of soldiers began maneuvering toward the suit display, converging on the single point with brutal efficiency. Kira followed, but a new doubt was creeping into her mind: Why hadn’t the shooter moved? Why stay in one place for so long? The most obvious answer was that she’d taken up a sniping position, but she didn’t seem to have a good view of anything; the railing was solid, more of a low wall, so she couldn’t shoot or even see through it. That led Kira to the next most obvious answer, and she shouted a warning as soon as she realized what was really going on.

“It’s a trap! She’s trying to draw our attention; it’s a trap.”

The Partials responded immediately, fanning back out, combing over the third floor even more cautiously than before, not taking a single step forward until every step behind them had been checked and secured and cleared. When they finally turned the corner to the far side of the railing, Kira looked at the rack of suits and saw an old man, his arms and legs bound tightly with plastic ties, his mouth gagged, his body lashed to the rack. Each time he moved, the suits shook.

“It’s not a trap,” she growled, “it’s a decoy.” She ran forward and pulled the gag from the man’s mouth. “Where is she?”

“Escalators,” the man gasped. “She crawled down the escalators.”

Kira swore, out loud this time, and stood up to peer over the edge. The escalators were such an obvious death trap that they hadn’t even considered them, and their only pair of eyes watching the center of the room was Jansson, far below, where a body slithering down them would be completely hidden. A sniper up here, in her position by the suit rack, would kill everyone who tried to climb them, but their sniper at the bottom hadn’t seen a thing.

And then the link data wafted up: DEATH.

“Jansson’s down,” said Green. “She’s gotten behind us.”

Kira ran, screaming as she went. “Marcus! Marcus, look out!” A gun fired, and then another, bullets roaring back and forth by the entrance to the mall, and Kira clattered down the escalators as fast as she could, desperate to reach him in time. I just found him, she thought. I can’t lose him again, not now, not like this, I have to help him—

The gunfire stopped, and Kira dropped to the jagged metal steps, rifle at the ready, listening. Was she too late? Was he already dead?

“Somebody better get over here,” said Marcus, and Kira closed her eyes, so relieved she could barely hold her head up. “I think it’s still alive.”

Kira ran down the last few stairs, creeping carefully through the bullet shells strewn on the ground floor until she saw the Partial assassin lying prone on the tiles, her rifle several feet from her hand. There was blood everywhere. Her head was turned to the side, a gas mask obscuring her face, but her pale gills flapped feebly in her neck, opening and closing in a slow, silent gasp for air. Kira approached the downed monster carefully, still terrified of what she could do, half expecting her to leap up and stab her, or bite her, consuming every last bit of life she could before death dragged her screaming down to hell.

Instead the Partial reached up and pulled off her gas mask, panting for air. She was just a girl, Kira’s age, but smaller. Her eyes, dull from blood loss, focused loosely on Kira, and she moved her mouth, trying to speak.

“Who are you?” asked Kira. She kept her rifle trained on the girl, stepping slowly toward her. “Who do you work for?”

“My . . .” The girl’s voice was a ragged whisper, every word a struggle. “My name is Kerri.”

“Who do you work for?” asked Kira again. Her rage was slowly deflating into pity, but she fought to keep it burning hot. “Why are you killing us?”

“You need . . . to be preserved.” The girl moved her finger feebly, her body still flat on the ground, her head resting on the cold, bloody floor. “We don’t want to . . . lose you. When the world ends.”

“The world already ended,” said Kira.

“It’s ending again,” said Kerri, and her finger stopped moving. The life disappeared from her eyes.

Blood seeped out in a widening pool, hot and red and lost forever.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

“There’s definitely someone there,” said Ariel, dropping back down behind a tree-lined snowbank. The snow was worse now than it had ever been, a blizzard so thick and windblown they could barely see one another at more than fifty feet. They were north of Riverhead, slogging through wide, flat farmland, and hadn’t heard the noise until it was practically on top of them. “I don’t know who it is, or if they’ve heard us as well.” Ariel shook her head, checking her rifle; it was covered with snow, but it seemed like everything still worked. She wouldn’t know until she tried to fire it. “We need to find better cover if this turns into a fight.”

Xochi scanned the area, though there was little to see. “We passed a farmhouse a ways back, or a church or something. Looked small, wood construction.”

“Not the best defense,” said Isolde. Khan was strapped to her chest, and she covered him protectively with her arms. “We’re on the main road—maybe they’re just passing through. If we get off it, they might not notice us at all.”

“And if they follow us, who knows where we’ll end up?” said Kessler. “You can smell the seawater, even through the storm—too far north and we have our backs against the ocean.”

“I think they’re coming toward us,” said Hobb, running back from his position at the front of the line. “I can take a few shots now, try and get lucky, but that’s only likely to make them mad.”

“We don’t even know if they’re aware of us,” said Nandita. “I can’t feel anything on the link, but who knows how the blizzard’s disrupting that?” She grimaced. “North, then, away from the road. We’ll take shelter in the first suitable structure we find.”

They trudged across the snowy field, Ariel shielding her face with her hands just to be able to see. The world was a white void, unshaped and unmade. Slashing pellets of ice bit into her skin. Slowly the world in front of her grew darker, a patch of gray slowly coalescing to black, and then a building appeared, wraithlike in the snow. It was stone, at least three stories high, with a heavy wooden door flanked by thick stone pillars. It felt unnatural to Ariel, like a castle made real in a realm of dreams, but she ran to the door and heaved against it. It didn’t open. A plaque on the door identified it as the Bluff Hollow Country Club.

“Over here,” said Xochi, “through the window.” They ran to the side, where a row of tattered red curtains blew fitfully through the empty windowpanes, and crawled through to the faded opulence of the clubhouse. The curtains had done little to keep the wind and weather outside; the floor was scattered with leaves and dirt, and the front edge was mounded with snow. The wooden floor was warped and discolored from long years of water damage, and the once-elegant rugs were molding and frozen.

“I think I saw them following us,” said Kessler, helping Isolde through the window before tumbling in after her. “I’m not sure.”

Ariel looked around the room: overstuffed chairs, embroidered couches, central fireplace, stonework bar. “Through that door,” she said. “There’ll be a restroom or something back there—no windows, no snow, and as soundproof a shelter as we’re likely to get. We don’t want Khan to give us away.”

“What’s our plan?” asked Isolde. Khan was fussing, but feebly. He was too sickly now even to scream, pale and skeletal, and Isolde’s eyes looked equally drained.

“Don’t get shot,” said Xochi. “Or captured, or separated, or anything bad.”

“Does besieged count as bad?” asked Hobb. “If they know we’re in here, the restroom will be the worst place we can hide—we need an exit.”

“The kitchen, then,” said Ariel. She jogged across the room, feeling her muscles protest, and looked through the door behind the bar. “It’s small, but there’s a back door, and a large central counter we can duck behind if anyone starts shooting.”

“If anyone starts shooting, we’re dead,” said Kessler. “A kitchen counter won’t protect us from an armed squad of Partials.” Even so, they all hurried to the back room, crowding in among the old steel bowls and copper pans. Ariel closed the door behind them and checked the door to the back; the view was as ghostly as the one they’d just walked through, and she couldn’t see anything at all past forty feet.

“We can talk to them,” said Nandita. “They might not be gathering refugees for East Meadow anymore—the storm could have changed that. Certainly they won’t want to take us there themselves, not in this weather. We’ll be reasonable, and maybe they’ll leave us alone.”

“Maybe,” said Kessler. “I don’t like any plan that relies on ‘Partial mercy.’”

“They’re not evil,” said Xochi, “they’re just the enemy.”

“That’s a meaningless distinction,” said Kessler.

“Quiet,” said Ariel. “I think they’re here.”

She heard voices, dim and distant over the howling wind, and listened closely. She thought maybe she could detect something on the link, but it was too weak to tell for sure—or she was simply too unpracticed. She closed her eyes instead and tried to rely on her ears.

They’re coming in the window, thought Ariel, listening to the sound of scuffling feet, thumping boots, and low, muttering voices. I could open this door right now and take them by surprise, kill two or maybe three before they know I’m here. Except . . . Except she didn’t want to. Every Partial she’d ever met had been an enemy, like Xochi had said, but for all she knew, they were evil. They’d never done anything to show her otherwise. They’d invaded her home, killed her friends, and hunted them like animals; they’d harried Ariel and the rest of them at every turn, and for no reason she could possibly guess. What do they gain from attacking us? What do they want, and how does rounding us up like prisoners possibly help them to get it? They used to want Kira, but they found her, and they haven’t left, they’ve just . . . stayed. Like robots, or trained dogs, mindlessly following their last known orders.

I’m one of you, she thought. I’m a Partial, but I don’t want to be a robot. I don’t want to be evil. Show me you can be good.

I don’t want to be alone.

“This is the worst storm yet,” said one of the Partials. His voice was muffled by the door and bore the same odd passivity that marked the other Partials she’d listened to. Without the link to convey their emotions, they really did sound like robots.

“We’re due to report back in an hour,” said another. “With the radio down, the sergeant’s going to think something’s happened.”

“Something has happened,” said a third voice. “At least we get to wait it out in style. Who knew this place was here?”

They weren’t searching for us, thought Ariel. They were just getting out of the storm. In the middle of that blizzard, they might not even have seen our footprints. She looked at the others, noting from their expressions that they’d heard the same thing and come to the same conclusions. All we have to do is wait it out, thought Ariel. Eventually they’ll leave, and if we’re quiet, they’ll never even know we were here.

“Do you have anything to eat besides this crap?” asked one. “I’ve had enough smoked fish to last me till expiration. It’s like the only thing the humans ever ate in that town.”

So they’re based out of Riverhead, thought Ariel. Just like we thought. Once we get farther east, we might be—

“Check the kitchen,” said another. Ariel froze, her fingers clutching her rifle in terror. “There might be some canned . . . I don’t know, what did rich humans eat out of cans? Caviar?”

She heard footsteps and took a silent step backward, training her rifle on the door. Xochi and Hobb stood beside her. How many are there? she thought frantically, trying to sort out how many voices she’d heard. Three? Four? Could there have been more that hadn’t spoken?

“Caviar sounds worse than fish,” said another. “Artichokes, though. I think those come in cans.”

The door pushed forward half an inch. Ariel poised her finger over the trigger, ready to fire, but the door stopped moving.

“Wait a minute,” said a voice. “You’re going to love this.”

“Nothing in the bar will still be good,” said another voice. “It’ll all be separated, like the gasoline.”

“Not all of it,” said the first voice. The door closed again. “Stashed behind the bar they’ve got two unopened bottles of wine, completely sealed.”

“Don’t taunt me.”

“I’m not.”

Ariel heard a clink of glass, followed by a cheer. Definitely more than three voices, she thought, but she couldn’t tell how many.

Xochi lowered her rifle. After a long pause, Hobb did the same. Ariel stepped quietly backward to Isolde and pressed her cheek to the other girl’s ear, whispering as softly as she could. “Can you keep walking?”

“If I have to.”

“They won’t be occupied for long,” said Ariel. “We need to get out this back door before they come looking for food.” She turned to the others and motioned toward the door. They crept toward it slowly, one foot at time, barely even daring to breathe.

All of them but Kessler.

The older woman stayed rooted in place, staring at the kitchen door. Come on! thought Ariel. She waved her over, trying to get her attention. Nandita was already by the back door, her hand poised to open it. Kessler turned toward them, finding Isolde. Her eyes were sad, but her jaw was set and determined.

I’m sorry, she mouthed.

Ariel screamed in her head, Don’t do it!

“Help us,” said Kessler loudly. “We have a sick child, and we need medicine. Can you help us?”

“No!” screamed Isolde.

The room beyond exploded in sound, four or five or ten Partial soldiers all standing up at once, glasses falling with a crash. “Who’s there? Identify yourselves!”

“We need your help,” said Kessler again. “The child is dying.”

“I won’t let you hurt him!” howled Isolde, clutching Khan to her chest. Kessler strode toward her, whispering softly, trying to speak as Hobb held her back.

“No one will hurt him,” she whispered. “They’ll just see him and get sick and take it back to their outpost to infect everyone else. We may lose a few days, but we’ll be safer, we won’t have any more patrols to worry about, we’ll be free—”

“We’re coming in,” shouted a Partial, right on the other side of the door. “We want to see hands in the air and weapons on the floor.”

“Leave us alone!” shouted Hobb.

The door opened a few inches, though no Partials were visible. “Weapons on the floor or we come in shooting.” Isolde threw her rifle down, looking at Kessler like she wanted to tear her apart with her teeth. “That’s right,” said the voice, “keep going. Every gun in the room goes down.” Kessler dropped her rifle, then Hobb and Xochi. “Keep going, come on.” Ariel was the last to surrender her rifle, and as soon as her hands were raised, Partials swarmed into the room, four that she could see with at least one more waiting in the other room. “Hands in the air,” the lead Partial repeated. “Where did you come from? We’ve had this area cleared for weeks.”

“We need help,” said Kessler. “We’ve been trying to make it back to East Meadow to save the child.” She pointed to Isolde, but the nearest Partial shoved his gun closer to her face, and she quickly raised her arm again. “It’s the storm,” she said. “We weren’t ready, and he’s gotten sick. Can you help him?”

The Partials said nothing, but Ariel could feel a faint buzz on the edge of her perception. The link? she wondered. Is that what it feels like? After a moment the lead Partial stepped forward, his rifle down, his arm outstretched toward Isolde.

“Let me see him.”

“Don’t you touch him,” Isolde hissed.

“We’re not here to hurt you. We don’t have a medic, but we do have a supply of medicine. If there’s something we can do for him, we will.”

“Just let him see the child,” said Hobb. “We don’t want any trouble.”

Stay back, thought Ariel, you might not be infected yet. Just run now and—

He stepped forward again, keeping his eyes locked on Isolde’s. “I’m just going to look. Move your hands to the side, please—hands away from the child, please.” Ariel realized that they might suspect a bomb, as there was really no way of knowing that the tiny bundle on Isolde’s chest was really a child. She moved her hands away, her face a mass of devastated tears. The Partial reached out, touched the edge of the blanket around Khan’s head, and pulled it back.

“Bioweapon!” he screamed. “Fall back, fall back!” He practically tripped over himself trying to get away from the sick, blistered baby. Isolde wrapped her arms around the child and turned away; the soldiers scrambled for the door they came through; Kessler surged forward, shouting for them to stay, that it was all right, and a terrified Partial shot her in the chest. The shot was like a signal for the world to go mad, and in a heartbeat the entire room was filled with gunfire, Partials roaring the retreat, Ariel’s group diving for cover and scrambling for their weapons. Bullets and shrapnel flew through the air, bouncing off pots and pans and showering the room in dust and plaster. Ariel drew her pistol and dropped to the cover of the central counter, firing into the wall of Partials without even pausing to aim. Xochi went down, and Nandita beside her, but Ariel couldn’t see if they’d been hit or were simply hiding. Isolde ran for the back door, Hobb roaring a warning and shielding her with his body. Two tufts of red flew up from his back, and he shoved the mother and child out into the storm.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Green and the other soldiers wanted to move quickly, hoping to travel another mile before nightfall, but Kira insisted that they bury the two Ivies. She had killed several of them by now, but this one had shaken her. They took the bodies to the nearest residential street, found a pair of shovels in the shed of a small, blocky home, and spent an hour digging a hole: first through the snow, nearly three feet high and frozen into hard-packed ice, and then through the stiff, unyielding soil below. Commander Woolf said a few words, and then Green and Falin performed a Partial ritual Kira had never seen before: They fanned at the body, spreading the link data of DEATH out into the air. If there were other Partials in the area it would give away their position, but Kira didn’t bring that up. It was obviously important to them.

Marcus and Woolf were traveling with a group of forty-seven refugees, including a soldier named Galen. They traveled as far as they could that night, exchanging stories along the way: Marcus and Woolf told of their excursion up to Trimble’s stronghold; Kira told of her journey out west, and of her eventual revelation about the dual cure for RM and expiration. That night they camped in a high school auditorium, tearing down the tall, moth-eaten curtains to build a series of smaller tents among the old rows of chairs. The auditorium had no exterior windows or walls, which helped keep the brutal cold at bay, and the tents helped trap their body heat where it could do the most good. Kira crawled into a small tent with Marcus and Woolf to discuss their plans.

“We’re only a mile outside East Meadow,” said Marcus. “We just follow this same road, but . . . I can’t say how long it’s going to take us to get there. The snow’s been slowing us down too much.”

“I remember this area from some of our salvage runs,” said Kira. “We’re closer here to the hospital than the hospital is to the coliseum. Do we know where the Partial army is stationed?”

“All over the island,” said Marcus. “That’s what I was trying to tell you earlier—the army’s been scattered, hunting down Tovar and Mkele and everyone else. They’ve been distracting the Partials, leading them away from East Meadow so the rest of us could escape.”

“Escape to where?” asked Kira. “The airport? Long Beach? You can’t just hide thirty-five thousand people, they’ll find us again.”

“We’re leaving the island,” said Woolf. “And we’re running out of time to do it.”

“We can’t leave,” said Kira quickly, shaking her head. “We have to stay—we have to work together, like I told you. We have to forget all our hatred and the wars and everything else—”

“Delarosa has a nuke,” said Marcus.

Kira felt like she’d been kicked in the stomach. “What?”

“She’s planning to set it off in White Plains,” Marcus continued. “The odds are against her, and she probably won’t even make it that far, but we have to plan for the worst. We’ve been making our way to East Meadow ever since we escaped, gathering refugees in the wilderness as we go. We have to warn them, and we have to get out.”

“Even if the nuke doesn’t go off,” said Woolf, “it’s still best to leave. Partials and humans are never going to come to a truce—minor exceptions notwithstanding. We can’t live in their shadow anymore.”

“We have to stay together,” said Kira, feeling her whole world slipping away. “We need them—they need us—”

“But who’s going to agree to it?” asked Woolf. “A few stragglers here and there, sure, but that’s not enough.”

“No, it’s not,” said Kira hotly. “We need to convince them, on both sides, that this is the only way any of us can survive. If we run away, we’re just going to put ourselves right back in the same old position again, losing every new child to RM, with no future and no hope for anything.”

“Kira—” said Marcus, but she spoke right over him.

“We need to stop Delarosa,” said Kira. “Warn East Meadow and evacuate and whatever you need to do, but if what you say about her is true, I don’t have a choice. I’m turning around and going after that nuke. We can’t let anyone else die.” She started to rise, but Marcus put a hand on her arm.

“Somebody’s already gone after her.”

She paused in midcrouch, listening tentatively.

“He’s a friend of ours,” Marcus continued. “A Partial soldier named Vinci. Delarosa’s got a two-week lead on you, but only a few days on him. For all we know he’s already stopped her, but we can’t take the chance of not warning everyone, just in case.”

Kira shook her head, fighting back tears. “But what if he doesn’t make it?”

“You wouldn’t even know where to start looking,” said Marcus. “You want to work together with the Partials? Then trust Vinci. Help us warn East Meadow—humans and Partials.”

“We can’t help the humans escape the occupation by telling the occupiers where we’re going,” said Woolf.

“This is a really terrible time to even bring that up,” said Marcus, shooting him a hard glance. He looked back at Kira, who was trying her best not to scream. She breathed carefully, forcing herself to be calm. This is just another obstacle, she told herself. I’ve overcome others, I can overcome this one.

“This is always the hardest part,” she said.

Marcus raised his eyebrow. “Evacuating the entire human population of Earth from a nuclear fallout zone?”

Kira gave a sad smile. “Accepting that I can’t fix everything.”

She curled up in her bedroll apart from the others and tried to sleep. They needed to rise early in the morning and get to East Meadow quickly. The Partials had to listen to reason. She’d seen too many groups like Green’s and Falin’s, lost and directionless as Morgan withdrew ever deeper into her obsession. They were occupying the island because they didn’t know what else to do—surely she could convince them of her plan?

I need to save everyone, she thought. I can’t live with anything less. I won’t leave anyone behind.

Anyone else.

She fell asleep and dreamed of Samm.

In the morning Kira rose early, roused Green and Marcus, and set out for East Meadow. Newbridge Road was wide and straight, lined with trees and stores and crumbling houses. The center strip, which had once been grass, was now bursting up with bushes and saplings, lumpy and white with mounds of snow. The storm had stopped in the night, letting them see farther than they had in days, and the sun was blinding as it reflected off the fierce white sheet. A small breeze blew whorls of loose powder across the surface of the drifts, white ghosts on a white field. The crust was brittle, and they sank to their thighs with each freezing step.

One mile took them nearly an hour.

The closer they came to East Meadow, the more Kira felt her nerves wearing thinner, her teeth more on edge. The city was familiar—the only home she could remember—but it was intensely unfamiliar at the same time, eerily empty and buried in a death shroud of snow. When they reached the turnpike and turned west, they could see the hospital rising high above the rest of the city, the tallest building for miles, but where it was once the hub of a bustling community, it stood now pale and lifeless, the street leading up to it as silent as a tomb. Kira had lived her life among the abandoned detritus of a lost civilization—homes and buildings and cars full of skeletons; wearing dead girls’ clothes and living in dead men’s houses; watched by a thousand lifeless eyes from the family photos of the ones who hadn’t made it. It had never bothered her because it couldn’t—because it was the only world she’d ever known. The old world was gone, and they were building a new one in its ashes. Now she saw her world as theirs, her own life become a lifeless ruin. It made her feel numb, even more so than the cold and the snow and the tiny trickles of ice sliding down her frost-hardened face.

A nurse sat in the hospital lobby, alone in the cavernous silence. She looked up with a stunned expression, as shocked to see them as they were to see her, and after a moment Kira recognized her from her old days as an intern.

“Sandy?”

The woman smiled, polite but confused. Kira pulled off the long strip of blanket she’d been using as a scarf, and Sandy’s eyes went wide. “Kira Walker?”

Kira smiled back, feeling suddenly self-conscious. “Hi.” This city had gone through hell for her, daily executions trying to draw her out. For all she knew Sandy may have lost a loved one because of her. Kira watched her stand up and step toward her, hesitantly at first, but after a moment she was running, wrapping Kira in a tearful hug without regard for the wet slush that coated her chest and legs.

Kira hugged her back. “Where is everybody?”

“Running,” said Sandy, “or getting ready to. Haru sent word that the Partials are planning a final attack, to get rid of us for good.” Her face was pale with fear. “They’re going to wipe us out.”

“It’s not the Partials,” said Green darkly.

Kira furrowed her brow, thinking. “Where’s Haru?”

“We haven’t seen him,” said Sandy, “but we’ve seen refugees who have. The message reached us a few weeks before the snow, and we’ve been sneaking people out when we can. Now there are barely any Partials left in East Meadow, just for show more than anything, and we can leave more freely.”

“They’ve gone to fight rebels?” asked Kira.

Sandy shook her head. “They’re leaving, so they can bomb the whole city and wipe us out.”

“They wouldn’t do that,” said Kira, and got ready to explain about Delarosa and the bomb, but then decided against it. As long as everyone is scared enough to leave, Kira thought. “But Haru’s right, we are all in danger. What about you? Why haven’t you left?”

“There are still injured people in the city,” said Sandy. “Someone has to stay behind to take care of them. Nurse Hardy is here, too.”

“And Skousen?” asked Marcus.

Sandy shook her head. “The Partials took him weeks ago, when the bioweapon first surfaced.” She noticed the confusion on their faces and frowned. “You haven’t heard? There’s a plague that kills Partials—their own version of RM. I guess someone’s finally giving them a taste of their own . . . nonmedicine. That’s the other reason their army left town; nobody wanted to stay here after Partials started falling ill.”

Kira wondered how Skousen or anyone else could have engineered a Partial plague so quickly, but that was the least of her worries. Wherever the plague came from, it was one more obstacle that would convince the Partials and humans they could never dare to trust one another. She clenched her fist, as if she was trying to hold on to her hope like a tangible object. “You need to get out now,” said Kira. “It was very brave of you to stay behind, but it’s time to leave; the Partials will be leaving too, so there won’t be any new patients to deal with. Get everyone dressed, gather all the food and medicine you can, and get out.”

Sandy shook her head. “Two of our patients can’t even walk.”

“Then we’ll pull them in rickshaws,” said Kira. “I’ll pull one myself. The threat is real, and we don’t have long—just go.”

Sandy hesitated a moment, then nodded and ran down the hall. She only got a few steps before a deep rumbling sound rippled through the air; Kira felt it first in her gut, shaking her ribs, then throbbing in her ears like a low, steady beat. She looked at Sandy, who looked back and shook her head; she didn’t know what it was either.

“It’s a rotor,” said Marcus. “A flying vehicle, like an airplane with vertical takeoff. We saw them in White Plains.” He looked at Sandy. “You didn’t recognize the noise?”

“We’ve never seen anything fly before,” said Sandy. “This is new.”

The door to the stairwell flew open and Nurse Hardy burst out in a frenzy, wheezing for breath and gripping the door frame for support. “They’re on the roof,” she gasped. “They’ve come for the patients. Is that . . . Kira Walker?”

Kira took a step toward her, raising her rifle in preparation. “Partials?” Hardy snapped out of her shock and nodded, still out of breath, and Kira stepped forward again. “Where are they taking them?”

“They’re not taking them anywhere,” said Hardy. She staggered out into the lobby, and Kira could see now that she was bleeding from her arm. “They’re going room to room, killing them.” She clutched her arm and tried to breathe. “They’re taking their blood.”

Kira looked at Green and snarled. “The Blood Man.”

“It’s about damn time,” said Green, raising his rifle and stalking toward the staircase. “I’ve been anxious for a little chat with him.”

Kira followed him up the stairs, with Marcus close behind, not stopping on each floor like they had in the mall, but climbing relentlessly. They heard a scream high above them, silenced almost instantly by a gunshot and a slamming door. “Sounded like the eighth floor,” said Kira.

“Morgan’s army confiscated most of the solar panels when they first arrived,” said Marcus. “They moved the patients up here because it made the few panels left just a little more efficient; all the power in the lower levels is cut off completely.”

“Can you link them yet?” Kira asked Green.

“No. As soon as I do, though, they’ll know we’re here.”

“They won’t know who, though,” said Kira. “You could be any Partial; they won’t know you’re an enemy.”

“They’ll know I’m not an Ivie,” said Green, “which seems to be the only distinction that matters to them.” He clenched his teeth and snarled, then stopped suddenly on the landing between floors five and six. “You go first.”

“Whoa,” said Marcus. “Who sends the lady into combat first?”

“A smart combatant,” said Kira, not even slowing as she brushed past Green. “I can read the Ivies on the link a bit, and they can’t read me. It’ll give us maybe an extra ten seconds before they know we’re there, but that’s better than nothing.”

As they neared the seventh floor she started to sense them—just a few, maybe three or four at the most. She remembered the victims she’d found so far, the Partial on the dock and the ice-cold Tovar, and she felt her blood rising. She remembered the dying girl Kerri, crying as her life slipped away. We’re trying to save you, she’d said, and Kira still couldn’t get it out of her mind. Save us from what? From who? She shook her head, clearing her doubts like cobwebs. The Ivies, and the Blood Man they served, were evil. She would put them down.

Eighth floor. She could feel the Ivies clearly on the link; her practice was paying off, and she fell into her combat mode like slipping on an old glove. Green was waiting below, holding his breath, giving her time to make her ambush. Marcus crouched beside her at the top of the stairs, his rifle ready in his hands. Kira closed her eyes and concentrated, trying to feel the presence of the Ivies, to pinpoint their locations as accurately as she could.

THIS ONE SAVED MOVING ON

HURRY NOT MUCH TIME

Behind their data was something else, larger and more powerful, like the vague outline of a whale swimming just beyond her perception in the deep of the sea. The Blood Man, she thought. It was the same kind of intense link data she’d sensed from members of the Trust, which only confused her more. What are you? she thought.

The hallway beyond was clear, the Ivies all working in different rooms, and she pushed open the door without a sound. She kept her rifle tight to her cheek and shoulder, the sights lined up to kill whoever appeared first. She sidestepped to a corner, taking what little cover she could, and when the first Ivie walked into her kill zone she fired a burst straight into its chest, dropping it in a heartbeat. A jar of blood fell from its lifeless hand and shattered on the floor. The alarm shot across the link: DEATH ATTACK PREPARE CAUTION. Another head appeared just out of her view, but Marcus was already firing as she tracked her rifle toward it, and the shape ducked back behind a doorway. Green raced up the stairs to join them, and she felt a ripple of recognition on the link as the Ivies sensed him, followed by confusion as they realized they were being attacked by both humans and Partials.

The deeper presence moved, a dark shape in the back of her mind, and she tracked her rifle back again to find it. Just step into view, she thought, daring him to come forward. Just give me one chance and I’ll end this horror show once and for all.

“You must understand that this is not a personal attack,” said a voice, and Kira felt her heart plummet, the ground dropping away beneath it, her entire world becoming a bottomless black pit. “We are trying to save this world, so that it can be a part of the next one. Think of it as an honor, that your body and blood will provide the seeds for a new Eden.” He walked into view at the end of the hall and Kira’s rifle dropped from her cheek, fell from her hands, clattered to the ground as she stared at the Blood Man, walking toward her through the bright fluorescent lights.

“Kira?” said Marcus. Green raised his rifle to fire, but all Kira could do was put up her hand and shake her head.

Kira felt her legs trembling, her stomach wrenching, her arms longing to reach out and touch him even as her mind howled at her to run, to stop him, to kill him, to scream. She gripped the wall for support and stared at the face that haunted her dreams, and spoke the word she hadn’t said since she was five years old.

“Daddy?”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Armin Dhurvasula stared back at Kira, his dark eyes flickering, considering her. She could feel his emotions on the link, wonder and uncertainty and a fierce determination, so strong it left her gasping. Her father took a step forward, as if trying to see her better, and a broad, almost childlike smile spread across his face.

“Kira!” he shouted. He ran toward her, wiping his hands on a towel. “Kira, you’re alive!”

Green raised his rifle to fire, but Armin froze him in place with a surge of link data so powerful Kira felt her own knees buckle. Marcus grabbed her arm, holding her up, and when Armin drew close she gripped Marcus tightly.

“Don’t touch me,” she hissed at her father.

“Kira,” said Armin. “You can’t know how happy I am to see you. I thought for sure you’d died in the Break—obviously you were immune to RM, but when I finally made it home again, you were gone.”

“I was . . . alone for weeks.”

“It was a chaotic time,” said Armin. “But you’re here now, and we can do so much together—”

“What are you doing?” she demanded. “You’re the Blood Man? You’re the one leaving dismembered bodies all over the . . . everywhere? How could you do this?”

“I’m saving them,” he said simply. “The world’s ending—you thought it ended in the Break, but that was just the gunshot; the last thirteen years have been a long, slow bleeding, twitching in an illusion of life, preparing for this moment—this true death. The Partials will die in a few months, and the humans not long after. Jerry’s impossible winter will only hasten the inevitable. How long do you really think we have?”

“So just because we’re dying means it’s all right to murder everyone?” asked Kira. “Like we’re some kind of . . . sociopathic playground now? What’s wrong with you?”

“I do not enjoy what I’m doing,” said Armin. “Don’t think me heartless for accepting the inevitable—no more than an oncologist is being cruel when he tells a cancer patient that he only has a month to live. That doctor isn’t a monster, he’s simply doing his job. The difference here is that I can do something no oncologist has ever been able to do; no doctor, no politician, no holy man. I can save them, Kira.”

“By killing them?”

“By harvesting the best of them—their strength, their will, their creativity. All of it encoded in their DNA.” He held up a jar of blood and tissue, then peered into her eyes. “Kira, what do you think is going to happen when the world ends?”

“We survived it once,” she said. “We can survive again.”

“We can’t.” He shook his head. “We had a plan for the world, you know. I still believe it would have worked. I designed that biology myself, and it was flawless. But it’s all gone now. It was human nature that made it impossible, human and Partial.”

“So I was right,” said Kira. She looked at Green and Marcus, then back at her father. “I solved the puzzle; I discovered the process you engineered: the secrets buried in RM and expiration and the Partial DNA. I knew there was a plan, and that the plan was for peace, because I knew you.” Her eyes darkened, and she stared at the jar in his hands in horror. “At least I thought I did.”

“That dream is gone now.”

“How can you say that?” she asked. “You were determined to care for the life you’d created; you fought for Partial rights before the Partials even existed. You knew they were destined to be a second-class species, not even accepted as people, and you devised the entire plan to ensure that Partials and humans had to see each other as equals if they wanted to survive. You tried to eliminate racism on a biological level, for all time.” She gestured to the jar of tissue, to his gloved hands red with drying blood, to the Ivies behind him standing silent in the doorways of murdered patients. “How did you go from that to this? How could you ever convince yourself that this was the only way?”

Armin’s face grew more serious, and he repeated his question in a somber tone. “Do you know what’s going to happen when the world ends? We call it the end of the world, but it’s only the end of us. The world will go on, the planet and the life that lives on it. Rivers will keep flowing, the sun and the moon will keep turning, vines will creep up across the cars and the concrete. There will come soft rain. The world will forget that we were ever here. Human thought—the glorious zenith of five billion years of evolution—will go out like a candle, gone forever. Not because it was time, not because the world moved past us, but because we, as a people, were fools. Too selfish to live in peace, and too proud to stop our wars long after they ceased to have any real meaning. Your precious human souls, your Partial brothers and sisters, all of whom you seem to think can live together in peace, are out there right now tearing this island to shreds, fighting and killing and dying not because they see a way out, not because they have a cure or a clue or a solution to any of their problems, but because that’s what they do. The only thing left of any value on this entire planet is their lives, but that’s not worth anything while the other guy still has his, so they kill each other. They are in a desperate race toward the final death. The winner will be the last one standing, and his prize is the final and most terrible solitude this world has ever known.”

Kira wanted to protest, but her eyes fell to the body of the Ivie she’d shot, barely thirty feet away, its blood spreading thickly across the floor. She thought of the people she’d killed to get here, the bodies in her wake. A collapsed apartment building in New York City. The Manhattan Bridge. Afa Demoux. Delarosa and her nuke. Kira’s own bloody hands, as red as her father’s, stabbing a dagger into the skull of a dead Partial soldier.

“These people are already dead,” said Armin. “Leaving them alive is no mercy, for they’ll only be killed by someone else, and yet I can’t abandon them. I’ve played my part in their destruction, don’t think I’ve forgotten that. Don’t think I’ve forgiven myself. But Jerry has set the stage for a new beginning. And when the snows melt and the sun returns and the world erupts in young green leaves, I will make sure that someone’s there to see it. I will make sure there are eyes to behold it, and minds to understand it, and voices to carry on our story. You are breaking yourself in pieces to give a dying man a few more seconds of life. I’m going to take that man’s blood and build a child and a future and a legacy that will last for another five billion years. To cover the Earth and reach out into the stars and fill the universe with poetry and laughter and art. To write new books and sing new songs.”

Kira felt unable to look away from the Ivie’s body and everything it represented. Too much blood. Too much loss. “You’re going to build a new species.”

“Human and Partial will be no more,” said Armin. “There will only be one species, one perfect species. I’ve done it before. I’ve unlocked the human genome and arranged it in perfect order, like notes in a symphony. I’ve honed the genetic template for the human form through dozens of generations of Partial technology, and you know that better than anyone. Because you’re the final result.”

Kira looked up, meeting his eyes, and he smiled.

“You,” he said, “my daughter, built on the model of my own DNA, polished and refined through countless drafts until I had eliminated all trace of flaw or imperfection. I had hoped some of the late-model Partials had survived, for they would be the ideal starting point for this new world, the first brushstroke on our new, blank canvas.”

“Okay,” said Marcus, stepping forward to place himself between Armin and Kira. “This whole conversation has been freaking me out, but that last sentence took it down a whole other path.”

“You want my DNA too,” said Kira. “My blood in a jar to take back to your lab.”

“I want you,” said Armin. “Your body and your mind.”

“I won’t go with you.”

“You don’t have a choice.”

“There’s always a choice,” said Kira. “I learned that from someone who was more of a parent to me than you could ever be.” She drew herself up as tall as she could. “If you want my blood, you’re going to have to take it.”

Armin sighed, and the energy in his face fell away like dead skin, leaving nothing behind but a dull, emotionless stare. “You’ve heard what I’m planning,” he said softly. “You understand that there is no other way.”

He pulled a small metal tube from a sheath on his belt, like a rounded trowel, sharpened on one end. The precise size and shape to puncture a human body and sluice out all the blood and tissue within. “None of us is more important than this. Not even my own daughter.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Dr. Cronus Vale used the link to clear a path through the crowded White Plains street, ignoring the stunned glances of the Partials he passed. His age alone marked him as an anomaly, for there were no Partials left who looked older than eighteen. The doctor and officer models were all part of early batches, long since expired, and his link data marked him as a god, a powerful being their biology had no choice but to obey. There were no guards at the door of his hotel, just as there were no housekeepers inside. The soldiers took turns cleaning it, infantrymen alternating with the women of the piloting corps, giving the building an austere, military feel. Everything in White Plains felt that way. Vale missed the country paradise of the Preserve, but there was no way to get back there now. He could commandeer a rotor, he supposed, but what then? Fly there in the deepening cold and worsening storm? Bring another group of Partials along and hope they would understand what he was trying to do? Rely on Morgan to not come out looking for him again? Vale wanted to see the Preserve once more, the friends that he’d made there, but more than that he wanted to keep the Preserve safe. If the only way to do that was to stay away, he’d stay away.

Especially now that there was a nuke on the loose. The stakes had been raised, and the few Partials who knew about it were clamoring to take the fight to the humans. They were already terrified by the thought of the bioweapon—Vale had left Dr. Morgan’s lab partly just to keep the army under control, halting every new plan for retaliation. If he told them the humans were on the way with a nuclear device in tow, he didn’t know if he’d be able to hold them back.

A Partial soldier named Vinci was waiting in the lobby; he was the one who’d warned Vale about the nuke. He’d been chasing Delarosa all the way from Long Island, but when he’d lost the canny human terrorist in Manhattan, he’d come straight to White Plains to recruit more people to the search. He watched Vale with somber eyes. “Any news?”

Vale shook his head. “Not here. We’ll talk in my room.” He led him up the elevator to a suite on the top floor, which Vale had converted to a command post. When the door was closed and locked, he turned to Vinci with a solemn look. “We’ve canvassed the Bronx with regular patrols, and put as many spotters as we can on the coast in case she tries to cross by water, but they haven’t turned up anything yet. It was smart of you to come straight to us, but we have to consider the possibility that Delarosa already crossed to the mainland before we established our patrols.”

“I put the men you gave me on regular routes in and around the city,” said Vinci, acknowledging the possibility that Delarosa was already on their doorstep. “I just don’t know if it will be enough.”

“What else can we do?” asked Vale. “Everyone left in White Plains is assigned to energy, maintenance, or food production; we can spare them, but do we really want word of this to spread? It’s a nuclear attack, for crying out loud—the last time someone tried to nuke the Partial army, they struck back with the biggest display of overkill in the entire Partial War. I don’t want to cause a panic or a pogrom.”

“All they need to know is that they’re looking for a human matching her description,” said Vinci. “We don’t have to tell them what she’s doing.”

“They’ll figure it out soon enough,” said Vale. “They’re not idiots.”

“Their first assumption will be the East Meadow bioweapon,” said Vinci. “The patrols I organized this morning already think that’s what they’re looking for, though obviously I didn’t confirm or deny it.”

“Congratulations,” said Vale, “your cunning ruse has struck me speechless. Did you also tell them not to share their suspicions with anybody else? Do you have any faith that they’ll actually follow that order? All it takes is one drunk soldier in a bar tonight, telling his mates about the paranoid snipe hunt he’s been assigned to by the former AWOL traitor now serving under a member of the Trust, and the suspicions will fly and the rumors will grow and who knows what we’ll have in the morning? Not three months ago this city tore itself apart in an involuntary change of leadership, because Trimble was too paralyzed by indecision to confront any of the problems her people were facing. Now Morgan’s doing the same thing, too obsessed with expiration to bother with anything else, and the city’s getting restless. A panic like this—nuke or bioweapon or anything similar—and we’ll have a riot on our hands.”

“A few Partials dead in a riot is still better than an entire city disintegrated in a mushroom cloud,” said Vinci. “If it takes a public announcement and a citywide search, then that’s what we do.”

“Another batch dies in two weeks, give or take,” said Vale. “Another fifty thousand people gone, not in the blink of an eye but in a debilitating, agonizing process. Fifty thousand death signatures saturating the air in this city until you can barely breathe without losing your mind to depression or madness. Do you know what that’s going to do to the army here? Do you know who they’re going to blame?”

“You?” asked Vinci.

Vale frowned. “They should, but they won’t—even if the Trust’s role in their expiration was common knowledge, killing me wouldn’t be enough. Their problems have always had their root in humanity: the war, the poverty, the oppression, the Last Fleet. Even expiration—Morgan and I pushed the buttons, but it was the human species as a whole who asked for it, who planned it, who paid for it. Now the humans have a bioweapon? They have a nuke? Tell me you believe for one minute that the Partials won’t retaliate with lethal force, falling on that island with everything they have and more. Even with two-thirds of your species dead, you outnumber them ten to one. You have rotors, you have ATVs, you even have a few tanks left—enough for an armored brigade, at least. The humans have survived this long only at your mercy, and that mercy will be gone if word of the nuke gets out. I want to find that nuke as much as you do, but we need to keep it secret.”

Vale closed his eyes, exhausted and frustrated. There was a squawk from the radio.

“Arrow Team to General Vale,” said the voice. “Code White, repeat, Code White.”

“Code White,” said Vale, his eyes snapping open. “They’ve found her.”

“And Arrow’s one of mine,” said Vinci, a slow wave of fear spreading out across the link. “That means she’s in the city.”

“Damn.” Vale climbed to his feet and crossed to the radio. “This is General Vale. This line is not secure, repeat, this line is not secure. We will come to you. State your location. Over.”

“Unsecure line acknowledged,” said Arrow Team. “Checkpoint Seven. Over.”

Vinci spread a map across the table and scanned it quickly. “Here,” he said, pointing to the western edge of the city. “It’s an old college.”

“Barely a mile from downtown,” said Vale. “If she sets it off there, it’ll kill every Partial in White Plains.”

“Then we’d better make sure she doesn’t.”

Vinci frowned, then pressed the radio button to speak. “Checkpoint Seven: We’ll see you in a few minutes. Over and out.”

Vale had a small Jeep, fully electrical. The Partials maintained a nuclear power plant that supplied more than enough power—enough that Morgan had siphoned it for years while in exile, powering her secret laboratory. The drive to the old college was short, and when they arrived they found the place swarming with soldiers, far more than a single recon team could account for. Vale swore and climbed out of the Jeep.

“Report,” he said firmly, and the link carried the full weight of his authority. The sergeant in charge was talking almost before she turned to face him.

“Sergeant Audra, sir.” She saluted. “We found the human insurgent approximately twenty minutes ago. She attempted to activate her cargo when she saw us, and we were forced to incapacitate her.”

“You shot her?” asked Vinci.

“She’s wounded but alive,” said Audra. “Our medic expired last year, but we’ve done our best to stabilize her.”

Vale nodded; the medics had been among the first to be produced, due to their more advanced training requirements, and thus had been some of the first to die. He looked pointedly at the swarm of soldiers, feeling their nervous energy crackle across the link; they were scared. “Why the crowd?”

“Don’t worry, sir, they all have clearance. We’re all teams Commander Vinci organized.” She hesitated, and Vale felt another burst of nervous fear. “When we realized what her cargo was, sir, we thought it was wise to bring in extra security.”

Vale ground his teeth in frustration; the other recon teams did, technically, have clearance, but he’d have preferred if the team that found her were the only team to know what she’d been carrying. “Take me to see it.”

The sergeant led Vale and Vinci into the main college building, where several soldiers in tech uniforms were milling around just as nervously as the scouts outside. “We’ve been using this facility for weeks,” said Audra, “trying to get the satellite feeds up and working again. That’s how we found her—she was farther north, trying to sneak in through a residential neighborhood, but her movement showed up on a scan from the satellites, and we brought her here, like I said, for security. We think she probably came up the river and managed to bypass our patrols.”

“I used to lead a security checkpoint in Tarrytown,” said Vinci. “Was nobody there?”

“I understand that checkpoint’s been vacant since you abandoned it and joined the humans,” said the sergeant, adding a strictly formal “Sir.”

Vinci’s irritation steamed across the link, but Vale steered the conversation in another direction before it could escalate. “What do you mean that you found her by satellite?” he asked. “We haven’t had satellite uplinks working since the Break.”

“Not until a few weeks ago,” said the sergeant, and Vale could sense her pride. “General Trimble had several feeds she used to monitor the faction wars, but her control room was . . . irreversibly damaged in the civil war. This college had a new computer science department, upgraded right before the Break. Our techs have been working on it for a while, and last week we were finally able to tap into Trimble’s old feeds.”

“You didn’t think that was something you ought to report?” asked Vinci.

“We’ve reported it to Morgan three times,” said the sergeant. “She never got back to us. We’re lucky we had the satellites, though, since Delarosa was easy to spot against the snow. Here they are.”

She led them into a heavily guarded room. Marisol Delarosa, whom Vale recognized from the files he had found on her, lay on one side of it, bleeding heavily from her shoulder, with two soldiers leaning over her trying to clean and bandage the wound. In the center of the room sat a small nylon bike trailer, the kind people would use to pull their children behind their bicycles before the Break. Barely two feet across, painted a dull white, it carried a fat metal canister that had gotten an identical paint job. From some scratches on the side Vale could tell it had once been painted green, to better hide it in the forest, and he imagined she must have hurriedly repainted it when Ryssdal’s insane winter storms started up. It was smaller than he’d expected, and while he marveled that she’d gotten so far, he couldn’t deny that such a disguise would have made them phenomenally hard to spot. With as much trouble as the human resistance was making right now, a lone woman with a small package like this could hide in the wilderness almost indefinitely.

Until she came here, thought Vale, and tried to kill eighty percent of the people on the planet.

He felt himself sweating. She’d been trying to activate it when they found her. Another minute and we’d have all been dead.

“Is it really what we think it is?” asked Audra. “A nuclear warhead?”

Vale could hide his feelings from the link and lie if he wanted, but Vinci’s data would give it away. And they already know anyway. They’ve examined it, identified it, and neutralized the threat. They’ve done their jobs, and I can’t lie to them now. “It is.”

“Damn bloody humans,” said the sergeant. “Nothing’s ever enough for them, is it? First the bioweapon, and now this.” She gestured violently at Delarosa. “If this witch got this far without us seeing her, how do we know there’s not more of them out there? What are we supposed to do?”

One of the newly appointed medics piped up from the side of the room; his name tag said Ether, and Vale couldn’t help but be amused by the juxtaposition. “I’ll tell you what we do,” said Ether. “We take that nuke straight back and turn East Meadow into a parking lot.”

Vale’s amusement vanished.

Delarosa, bound and bandaged and muzzled by an oxygen tube, made a move to attack Ether, but the other medic held her down.

“No one’s going to blow up anything,” said Vinci, and Audra’s fury burned across the link.

“We don’t need a human-lover in here telling us what to do,” she snapped. “After everything they’ve done to us, you’re taking their side in this?”

“I’m taking any side that’s not genocidal,” said Vinci. “Everything that has gone wrong since the moment we came back from China has been because of one species trying to get the upper hand on the other. We’re not going down that road again.”

“It’s going to give us some breathing room,” said Audra. “It’s going to give Dr. Morgan time to finish her work, maybe save some of us from expiration.”

“And what if the cure was coexistence?” asked Vale. He looked around the room, holding each Partial’s gaze before moving to the next one—the sergeant, the medics, the guards. “What if I told you that we could cure expiration right now, just by breathing the same air as that human in the corner.” Delarosa looked at him in disbelief, and the link told him that the Partials were just as incredulous.

“That’s impossible,” said Vinci.

“Humor me,” said Vale, but there was no humor in his voice. He looked at Vinci intently, pleading with him, and his sincerity was palpable on the link. “Pretend, for a moment, that she, and every human carrying the RM virus, is the cure for expiration. That they produce a chemical agent in their breath, the same as you do for them.”

Ether answered first, hesitantly. “We’d . . . have to find a way to synthesize it and . . . make a pill or something.”

Just like the humans tried to do, thought Vale. Just what I did. He shook his head. “You can’t synthesize it. It’s a two-part biological reaction: You breathe out a particle that renders RM inert in the humans, and then their body alters it and breathes it back out, curing you of expiration. You have to have both species in close proximity, and you have to have living bodies in which the reactions can take place.”

“They’d kill us first,” said Audra.

“Not all of them,” said Vinci.

“It only takes one,” said Audra. “This one smuggled a nuclear bomb right under our noses—one lone woman—and we stopped her with seconds to spare. How is the existence of one or two or even a thousand friendly humans supposed balance that out?”

“We might be able to harvest it,” said Ether. “We could keep them in a controlled environment—a prison camp, or a smaller island where we can watch them more closely—and then send a few people in every morning to collect the healing particles. Then we could distribute it through the army like an inoculation.”

Delarosa’s face was livid.

Now they’re re-creating my own failed plans, thought Vale. “Suppose that doesn’t work,” he said. “Suppose it takes”—he reversed the numbers from the Preserve—“ten humans for every two thousand Partials. One human for two hundred. If we implement this now, today, before losing any more soldiers to expiration, we’d need what, one thousand of them? Fifteen hundred? How do you support that many humans?”

“They could support themselves,” said Audra. “We’d make it a . . . like a labor camp.”

“And the Partials that live with them?” asked Vale. “As I said, they need to be in close proximity to Partials in order to produce the particle. Would those Partials live in the labor camp too?”

“They’d need guards anyway,” said Audra. “We could take shifts.”

“And what about the other thirty thousand humans?” asked Vale, feeling increasingly repelled by the entire conversation. “What do we do with the ones we don’t need? Do we put them in labor camps as well, or just kill them outright?”

“Fifteen hundred is already large for a sustainable prison population,” said Ether. “If we want to keep them from attacking us, or escaping and making the whole thing moot, we have to limit the population as much as we—”

“Listen to yourselves!” shouted Vale. His felt his heart pounding, his blood pressure rising even with a host of gene mods to keep it in check. “They’re not animals! They created you!”

“And they tried to destroy us,” said Audra. “This prison camp idea isn’t all that different from what we’ve done all along, keeping them isolated to Long Island. But keeping them alive was a mistake. Do you know what else we’ve seen on the satellite? They’re massing in the south—a giant human army, armed to the teeth, gathering for a final push.”

“Gathering in the south?” asked Vale. “As far away from us as possible?”

“They’re getting out of the blast radius,” said Audra. “What else could it be? They retreat to the South Shore, send her to trigger the bomb, and then come around Manhattan and up the river to clean up any survivors.”

“That’s a military plan,” said Vale. “They’re not an army! That’s what you’d do, but not—” But even as he said it, he realized he was caught in a loop of flawed logic generated by racist suspicion, one he could never hope to talk his way out of. “Just . . . get out, all of you.”

“But—” Vinci protested, but Vale sent a surge of linked authority, and the Partials started filing obediently through the door.

“I’m going to talk to the prisoner,” said Vale. “Keep the door closed and locked, and resume your patrols, all of you. You are not to mention any of this to anyone.”

The door closed, and Vale locked it, then wearily walked to the corner where Delarosa lay red-faced and helpless. He pulled an office chair toward her and flopped down in it heavily, making no attempt at ceremony or formality. I’m too tired, he thought, then he said it out loud. “I’m too tired.”

The woman remained still, watching him with dark, serious eyes.

“You must just be burning up right now,” he said. “Aren’t you? Caught in a trap by the very people you were looking to kill. And I suppose that includes me. I’m not a Partial, but I’m just as guilty as any of them for what has happened to this godforsaken planet. No, guiltier.” She saw the surprise in her eyes, and nodded. “I’m a member of the Trust, though I don’t suppose you know what that is?”

She paused a moment, then shook her head. Vale let out a long breath.

“Not many humans do.” He looked at the nuke, mud-spattered and scratched by a hundred thousand rocks and roots and whatever else it had passed through to get there. It was a simple metal cylinder, battered and dingy and absolutely terrifying. “The finger of God,” he said softly. He leaned over to grab the wheeled cart and pulled it closer. The end screwed off, and he found the inner electronics jury-rigged with a series of yellowed plastic light switches, probably scavenged from an old abandoned home. “You’re old,” he said idly, then shot her a quick glance. “Not old, of course, I’d never be so rude to a lady like yourself. But you’re old enough to remember the old world. The things we left behind. You remember how in all the movies and the holovids, everyone always had big red timers on their nuclear bombs? It looked like someone had stuck a digital alarm clock on there, though I suppose that’s still more high-tech than these things.” He gestured to the switches, their wires exposed, but he didn’t dare touch them. “The bad guy sets the bomb, or the good guy sets it accidentally, and then everybody watches as it counts down: fifty-nine, fifty-eight, fifty-seven. Tick, tick, tick. None of that for you, though.” He looked at her again. “No timer, no ‘run like hell’ period where you try to get to safety. You were just going to flip these switches and blow up right along with us.” He screwed the lid back on, then looked at Delarosa, lying bleeding on the floor. He leaned forward and pulled off her oxygen mask. “I figure it’s not much of an interrogation if you can’t even talk.”

Delarosa watched him, saying nothing. Vale said nothing back. After a moment she spoke, and Vale heard the pain in her voice.

“This is still not much of an interrogation.”

“The things I want to know you don’t have any answers for.”

She adjusted her shoulder slightly, wincing. “Such as?”

“Such as why everybody in this entire world hates everybody else. Why I can’t get four people to agree to a peaceful resolution even when I lead them by the hand ninety-five percent of the way.”

“I don’t hate you,” said Delarosa. “You or them. Not personally.”

“But you still want to blow us all to hell.”

“This is going to end in war,” said Delarosa. “Everyone in the world is dying, and there’s no hope left, and the nerves are too raw. Look back at what’s happened and tell me which part we could have avoided.”

“You could have not brought a nuke into the middle of an army,” said Vale. “You think your island got invaded? Just wait until word of this gets out.”

“You heard them talking just now,” said Delarosa. “This warhead is an excuse. You said it yourself—they’re an army, bred for battle; the humans are just as desperate. War is inevitable.”

“So you wanted to end it before it could start.”

“It seems like the only moral option.”

“‘Moral,’” said Vale. “That’s an interesting adjective to apply to ‘genocide.’”

“Destroy White Plains and the Partial population drops to whatever’s on Long Island,” said Delarosa. “We’ll be back on even footing again, give or take. The Partial leadership will be dead, and the ones left will stop waiting for orders that are never going to come. Maybe they’ll make a treaty with the humans, I don’t know, but even if they attack, the humans will be able to fight back. They’ll have the courage to fight back. They’ll have a chance.”

Vale nodded, thinking, staring at the bomb. “The situation I spoke of earlier wasn’t just smoke,” he said softly. “It’s real. Kira Walker discovered the biological mechanisms, and since then I’ve had the chance to study it out, to dig down into the science of it, and it’s real. It could save everyone.”

“Do you think anyone will go along with it?”

“I thought so,” Vale said, closing his eyes. “A long time ago. But then the Break happened and . . . No, I don’t. I told Kira that if Dr. Morgan found out about the cure for expiration, she’d enslave the entire human population. It took four soldiers less than three minutes to propose two different versions of that worst-case scenario.” He tapped the bomb, listening to the metallic clang. “I had to choose once before, you know. Humans or Partials. I chose to save a group of humans, and enslaved ten Partials to do it. It was the only way.” He sighed. “What else can I do?”

Delarosa furrowed her brow. “What are you saying?”

Vale took the cap off the warhead and looked at the jury-rigged switches. “I’m saying that I still think the end of all this is a choice between the species.”

“Are you serious?”

Vale flipped a switch. “There’s a combination, I assume?”

Delarosa took a deep breath, her voice almost reverent. “Yes.” She hesitated. “Okay. On, off, on, off. Right to left.”

Vale raised his eyebrow. “That’s the secret password?”

“It kept it from going off accidentally,” said Delarosa. “Beyond that, the simpler the better. I figured if I made it easy enough, even if you caught me someone might trigger it accidentally.”

Vale looked at the switches, flipping the first three in turn. “On, off, on.” He looked up. “Any last words?”

“My shoulder hurts,” said Delarosa. There was steel in her voice. “Get it over with.”

Vale closed his eyes, speaking not to her but to the entire world. “I’m sorry.”

Off.