Dedication

This book is dedicated to everybody you hate. Sorry. Life’s like that sometimes.

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Part 1

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Part 2

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Part 3

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Nine

Chapter Fifty

Chapter Fifty-One

Acknowledgments

Copyright

About the Publisher

PART 1

CHAPTER ONE

“This is a general message to the residents of Long Island.”

The first time they heard the message, nobody recognized the voice. But it played every day, all day, for weeks, cycling through every available frequency to be sure that every human on the island could hear it. Terrified refugees, huddled in groups or alone in the wilderness, came to know it by heart; it blared from every radio relentlessly, burning itself into their minds and memories. After the first few weeks it haunted their dreams, until even sleep was no respite from the calm, methodical proclamation of death.

“We did not want to invade, but circumstances forced our hand.”

The voice, they eventually learned, was that of a scientist named McKenna Morgan, and the “we” of her sentence referred to the Partials: unstoppable super-soldiers, created in labs and grown in vats to wage a war the humans couldn’t win on their own. They fought, and they won, and when they came back to the United States to find themselves homeless and hopeless, they turned on their creators and waged a new war, the Partial War, the war that ended the world.

But the war that ended the world was not the last war that world would ever see, for twelve years later the humans and the Partials were both on the verge of extinction—and each species was willing to destroy the other to survive.

“We are looking for a girl named Kira Walker, sixteen years old, five feet ten inches tall, approximately one hundred eighteen pounds. Indian descent, light-skinned, with jet-black hair, though she may have cut or dyed it to help disguise her identity.”

Only a few people on the island knew Kira Walker personally, but everyone knew her by reputation: She was a medic, trained in the hospital to study the plague known as RM. They knew Kira because she had found the cure; she had saved the life of Arwen Sato, the Miracle Baby—the first human infant in twelve long years to live more than three days. Kira was infamous because, in the process of finding the cure, she had led two unprovoked attacks on the Partial army, awakening, they thought, the monster that had lain dormant since the end of the Partial War. She had saved the world, and she had damned it. The first time the message played, most people didn’t know whether to love her or hate her. Their opinions grew less complicated with every human death.

“Bring us this girl and the occupation ends; continue to hide her, and we will execute one of you every day. Please don’t force us to do this any longer than is necessary. This message will cycle through all frequencies and repeat until our instructions have been complied with. Thank you.”

The first day they killed an old man, a schoolteacher from back in the days when there were still children to attend. His name was John Dianatkah, and he kept a hive of bees to make honey candy for his students. Partial soldiers shot him in the back of the head in the middle of East Meadow, the largest human settlement on Long Island, leaving his body in the road as a sign that they were serious. Nobody turned Kira in because, at that time, they were proud and unbroken; the Partials could rattle their sabers all they wanted, but the humans would not bend. Yet still the message played, and the next day they killed a young woman, barely seventeen years old, and the day after that an old lady, and the day after that a middle-aged man.

“Please don’t force us to do this any longer than is necessary.”

A week went by, and seven people died. Two weeks; fourteen people. In the meantime, the Partials weren’t attacking the humans, they weren’t forcing them into labor camps; they simply corralled them in East Meadow and rounded up everyone who tried to escape. Attack a Partial and you were whipped or beaten; cause too much trouble and you might be the next night’s victim. When a human disappeared completely, the rumors spread in hushed whispers: Maybe you’d escaped. Maybe Dr. Morgan had taken you to her bloodstained laboratory. Or maybe they’d simply find you in the street the next night, kneeling in front of a Partial while the endless message blared from speakers all across the city, until you sprawled forward with a bullet where your brain used to be. Every day another execution. Every hour another message, the same message, endless and unstoppable.

“We are looking for a girl named Kira Walker.”

Still, nobody turned her in—not because they were proud, but because they couldn’t. She’d left the island, said some, and others said she was hiding in the woods. Of course we’d give her to you if we had her, but we don’t, can’t you see that? Can’t you understand? Can’t you stop killing us? There are barely any humans left, can’t you find another way? We want to help you, but we can’t.

“Sixteen years old … five feet ten inches tall … Indian descent … jet-black hair.”

By the end of the first month the humans were as scared of one another as they were of the Partials, terrified of the witch hunt that swept through the refugees like a poison wind—you look like Kira, maybe they’ll take you, maybe that will be enough. Teenage girls, women with black hair, anyone who looked like they might be Indian, anyone who looked like they might be hiding something. How do I know you’re not Kira? How do they? Maybe they’ll stop killing us, even if it’s only for a while. And how do we know you’re not hiding her? I don’t want to turn you in, but we’re dying. I don’t want to hurt you, but they’re forcing us.

“Continue to hide her, and we will execute one of you every day.”

The Partials were bred to be stronger than humans, to be faster, to be more resilient and more capable in every way. They were trained as warriors since the day they were pulled from their vats, and they fought like lions until they turned twenty and their built-in expiration date killed them. They wanted Kira Walker because Dr. Morgan knew what the humans didn’t: that Kira was a Partial. A model that they’d never seen before, that they never knew existed. Morgan thought Kira’s DNA could help them cure the expiration. But even if the humans knew, they wouldn’t care. They only wanted to live. A handful of resistance fighters survived in the wilderness, relying on their knowledge of the terrain to keep them alive while they fought a losing war against extinction. Partials outnumbered humans 500,000 to 35,000—more than ten to one—and outclassed them in combat by another order of magnitude. When they decided to kill humans, there was no way for the humans to stop them.

Until the leader of the resistance recovered a nuclear warhead from a sunken navy destroyer.

“We did not want to invade,” said the message, “but circumstances forced our hand.”

The resistance told themselves the same thing as they smuggled the bomb north toward the Partial homeland.

CHAPTER TWO

Senator Owen Tovar blew out a long, low breath. “How did Delarosa know there was a nuke in a sunken ship?” He glanced at Haru Sato, the soldier who’d delivered the news, and then looked at the island’s intelligence officer, Mr. Mkele. “More to the point, how did you not know it?”

“I knew there was a sunken fleet,” said Mkele. “I had no idea it had been carrying a nuclear warhead.” Haru had always seen Mkele as a confident, capable man: terrifying when he and Haru were on different sides, fiercely reassuring when they were on the same one. Now, though, the intelligence officer seemed desperate and overwhelmed. Watching Mkele flounder for answers was even more disturbing, in its way, than the horrors that had brought them to this point.

“One of the people in Delarosa’s resistance group knew about it,” said Haru. “I don’t know who. It was some old navy guy.”

“And he’s kept it to himself all these years?” asked Tovar. “What, did he want it to be a surprise?”

Senator Hobb tapped the table. “He probably had the very understandable fear that if he told someone, they’d find it and try to use it. Which, it turns out, is exactly what happened.”

“Delarosa’s claim is that the Partials are overwhelming us,” said Haru. The four men were deep in the tunnels beneath the old JFK International Airport—a ragged ruin now, but one with a wide airfield around it that made encroaching Partials easy to spot. It had become the fugitive Senate’s last, desperate hiding place. “Not just now, but forever—she says that the human race will never be able to rebuild properly while the Partials are still out there. And she’s right, that’s the terrible thing, but that doesn’t mean detonating a nuke is going to make things any better. I would have stopped her, but she’s got a whole army of guerrillas, and most of my unit joined them.” He shook his head. Haru was the youngest of the four men, barely twenty-three years old, and he felt more like a child now than he had in years—than he had since the Break, really. The doom and the chaos were terrible enough, but it was the familiarity that really got to him—the sense that the doom and the chaos had all happened before, twelve years ago when the world ended, and now it was ending again. He had been a child then, and suddenly he was a child again, lost and confused and desperate for someone, for anyone, to step in and make it all better. He didn’t like that feeling at all, and he hated himself for allowing it to enter his mind. He was a father now, the first father in twelve years to have a living, breathing, healthy child, and she and her mother were trapped somewhere in the middle of this mess. He had to pull himself together, for them.

“I liked Delarosa better when she was in jail,” said Hobb. “This is what we get for trusting a terrorist.” He shot a glance at Tovar. “Present company excepted, of course.”

“No, you’re right,” said Tovar. “We’ve made a habit of trusting fanatics, and it’s rarely turned out well for us. I was a pretty savvy terrorist—savvy enough to get my label switched to ‘freedom fighter’ and wind up in charge—but I’m a terrible senator. We like people who stand up and fight, especially when we agree with them, but it’s the next step that really matters. The part after the fighting.” He smiled sadly. “I’ve let everybody down.”

“The Partial invasion was not your fault,” said Mkele.

“The final remnants of the human race will be glad to hear it,” said Tovar. “Unless the Partial invasion’s a big hit, in which case I’ll totally claim the credit.”

“Only if Hobb doesn’t beat you to it,” said Haru.

Senator Hobb spluttered an awkward defense, but Mkele merely glanced at Haru disapprovingly. “We have more important things to do than trade insults.”

“Even true ones,” said Tovar. Mkele and Hobb both glared at him, but he only shrugged. “What, am I the only one admitting my personal failings?”

“There’s a convicted war criminal with a nuclear weapon loose on our island,” said Hobb, “not to mention the army of super-soldiers murdering us like cattle. Can we maybe focus on that instead of personal attacks?”

“She’s not going to use it on the island,” said Haru. “Not even Delarosa’s that bloodthirsty. She’s not out to kill Partials, she’s out to save humans—she’s still going to kill the Partials, obviously, but not at the expense of the few of us who are left.”

“That’s a nice sentiment,” said Mkele, “but a nuclear warhead is a very imprecise weapon. How do we know she’ll use it wisely? Best-case scenario, she takes it to the mainland, blows it somewhere north of the Partials, and lets the fallout radiation finish them off; more likely, she takes it to their home base in White Plains and blows it there, killing all of us in the fallout instead.”

“Which might be the only plan that works,” said Hobb. “For all we know, they’re not even susceptible to radiation poisoning.”

“How close is White Plains?” asked Tovar. “Anybody have a map?”

“Always,” said Mkele, and set his briefcase on the table, undoing the locks with a pair of soft clicks. “Traveling from here to White Plains would take days, because you’d have to go around the Long Island Sound.” He unfolded a paper map and spread it flat on the table before them. “Even if she crosses the sound by boat, which is the route most likely to get her caught, it will take her a couple of days to get there, at minimum. Months, maybe, if she travels carefully enough to stay hidden. As the crow flies, though, it’s not that far. White Plains to East Meadow is …” He studied the map, pointing out the two cities and measuring their distance with a well-worn plastic ruler. “Forty miles, give or take.” He looked up. “Do we know what kind of nuke she has? What kind of payload?”

“She said she pulled it from a ship called The Sullivans,” said Haru. “Plural like that, I don’t know why.”

“That’s a destroyer,” said Tovar, “Arleigh Burke class—an older ship, even twelve years ago, but very dependable; the navy used them for years. The Sullivans was named after five brothers who all died in the same battle in World War II.”

“I thought you didn’t know about the nuke,” said Hobb.

“I didn’t,” said Tovar, “but you’re talking to an ex-marine. Try to name a navy ship I don’t know the specs of.”

“Then tell us the specs of this one,” said Mkele. “Would that class of destroyer be armed with nuclear missiles, or would they have just put one in the cargo hold for onboard detonation, like a suicide bomber?”

“Arleigh Burke destroyers would be outfitted with Tomahawks,” said Tovar. “That’s a nuclear cruise missile with a two-, maybe three-hundred-kiloton payload. Those are designed for long-range attacks, but the Partials had enough antimissile defense to shoot one down before it hit home. The reason it’s sitting right off the coast of Long Island, I assume, is that they brought it close to detonate on site; it would have sacrificed the fleet, and most of New York and New Jersey and Connecticut, but it would have destroyed the Partials pretty decisively.”

Haru grimaced, marveling again at how desperate the old government must have been to consider such a thing—though he supposed it was no more desperate than their situation now. Before the world ended, and knowing that it was about to, a nuke would have been a small price to pay: You’d kill everyone in range, and destroy the area for decades to come, but the Partials would have been gone. It might have actually been worth it. Now, though, with the last of the human race sitting just forty miles away …

“What’s the radius of destruction?” asked Haru. “Is the entire island dead?”

“Not necessarily,” said Tovar, “but we don’t want to be here if we can help it. At that payload the initial fireball’s going to be about a mile and a half wide—that’s the part that’s two hundred million degrees—and the physical shock wave will destroy everything within five or six miles. Everything in that zone is going to go up in flames, instantly, and that much fire starting that abruptly will suck in enough air to jump-start a raging hurricane with air temperatures hot enough to boil water. Every living thing within … ten miles of ground zero would be dead in minutes, and five or ten miles farther out you’d still kill enough of everything not to know the difference. Here on the island we won’t have any of those primary effects—we might feel a thump, and anyone looking right at the detonation will be blinded, but that should be the worst of it. Should be. Until the radioactive ash cloud gives us all leukemia and we die in slow, crippling agony.”

“And how big is the ash cloud?” asked Haru.

“A nuclear ash cloud doesn’t radiate out like a shock wave,” said Mkele. “It’s a distribution of physical material, so the exact pattern will depend on the weather. The major winds in this region tend to blow northeast, so most of the ash cloud will drift that way, but we’re still going to get some peripheral fallout—flurries around the edges, and castoffs from the winds in the firestorm.”

“Anyone less than ninety miles downwind will be dead within two weeks,” said Tovar. “We just have to hope the winds don’t change.”

“So the Partials would be effectively destroyed,” said Hobb.

“Everyone on the mainland, yes,” said Mkele, “but this close to the blast zone we’re going to lose a lot of humans as well, even under ideal conditions.”

“Yes, but the Partials will be gone,” Hobb repeated. “Delarosa’s plan will work.”

“I don’t think you’re grasping the ramifications here—” said Haru, but Hobb cut him off.

“I don’t think you are either,” Hobb snapped. “What are our options, honestly? Do you think we can stop her? The entire Partial army has been trying to find Delarosa for weeks, and they can’t; we can barely leave this basement without getting shot at, so I’m pretty sure we’re not going to find her either. We could find her strike force, maybe, because we have protocols in place for that, but the team delivering the warhead is likely beyond recall. This bomb is going off, whether we like it or not, and we need to be ready.”

“The Partials will catch her,” said Mkele. “A warhead’s not an easy thing to transport—it’s going to compromise her ability to stay hidden.”

“And if that happens, she might just blow it on sight,” said Hobb. “As long as she’s twenty miles from East Meadow, our major population center is safe, and then the winds will blow the fallout north to White Plains.”

“If she makes it twenty miles,” said Haru.

Tovar raised his eyebrow. “Are we prepared to risk the human race on a bunch of ifs?”

“What are we risking?” asked Hobb. “We send someone to stop her, and everyone else to evacuate the island—we’re not risking anything unless we don’t act.”

“Hobb wasn’t exaggerating about how hard it is to move around,” said Mkele. “Haru can do it because he’s been trained, and he knows the island, but how do you intend to carry out a mass evacuation without drawing attention?”

“We do it after the blast,” said Hobb. “Spread the word, get everything ready, and when the bomb goes off and the occupation force is distracted, we rise up, kill as many Partials as we can, and run south.”

“So your plan is to murder a superior enemy army,” said Tovar, “and then outrun the wind. I’m glad it’s so simple.”

“We have to evacuate first,” said Haru, “now, to avoid even the periphery of the nuclear fallout.”

“We already talked about how that’s not going to work,” said Hobb. “There’s no way to move that many people without the Partials seeing us and stopping us.” He looked at the others. “Remind me why the kid is even here?”

“He’s proven himself valuable,” said Mkele. “We’re not exactly in a position to turn away help.”

“Which is also why you’re still here,” said Tovar.

“My wife and child are in East Meadow,” said Haru, “and you know who they are—every human being alive knows who they are. And that means you know why we don’t have time to waste. Arwen is the only human child in the world, and she’s going to attract some attention—for all we know, they’re already in Partial custody somewhere, ready to be cut open and studied.”

“We can’t lose that child,” said Tovar, and Haru could see that the fear in his face was real. “Arwen represents the future. If she dies in that explosion, or in the fallout after …”

“That’s why we have to evacuate now,” said Haru, “before Delarosa detonates that nuke. There’s got to be a way.”

“Hobb’s plan uses the explosion as a distraction,” said Mkele. “But what if we distracted them another way?”

“If we could create a distraction big enough to overthrow the Partials, we’d have done it already,” said Hobb. “The nuke is all we have.”

Mkele shook his head. “We don’t need to overthrow them, just pull their attention. Delarosa’s guerrillas have been doing that already, more or less, but if we went all out—”

“We’d die,” said Tovar. “It’s like Hobb said, if we could do it safely, we’d have done it already.”

“So we don’t do it safely,” said Mkele.

The other men went quiet.

“This is as final and as deadly as any situation can be,” said Mkele. “We’re talking about a nuclear explosion forty miles from the last group of human beings on the planet. Even our best-case scenario, where somebody finds Delarosa and stops her in time, leaves us trapped in the hands of an occupying species that treats us like lab rats. An all-out attack on the Partials is going to kill every human soldier who tries it—none of us hold any illusions about that—but if there’s a chance that the rest of the humans could escape, then how can we possibly argue that it’s not worth it?”

Haru thought about his family: his wife, Madison, and his baby girl. He couldn’t bear to think of leaving Arwen without a father, but Mkele was right—when the only alternative is extinction, an awful lot of horrors become acceptable. “We’re going to die anyway,” he said. “At least this way our deaths will mean something.”

“Don’t go volunteering just yet,” said Tovar. “This is a two-part plan: One group provides the distraction, and the other gets everyone as far south as humanly possible. No pun intended.”

“Then we run,” said Mkele. His voice was somber. “Away from our only source of the cure. Or did we all forget?”

The room fell quiet again. Haru felt a numbness creeping up his legs and back—no matter how far they ran, they still had RM. Arwen was alive because Kira had found a cure in the Partials’ pheromonal system, but so far the humans had been unable to replicate it in a lab. They’d have to start over in a new medical facility, and it could take years just to find one and get it working again—and there was no guarantee that they’d ever be successful. If the Partials died, the cure would almost certainly die with them.

Haru could tell from their faces that the others were thinking of the same insurmountable problem. His throat was dry, and his voice sounded weak when he broke the silence. “Our best-case scenario keeps sliding closer and closer to our worst.”

“The Partials are our greatest enemy, but they’re also our only hope for the future,” said Mkele. He steepled his fingers and pressed them to his forehead a moment before continuing. “Maybe we should take some with us.”

“You say that like it’s easy,” said Haru.

“What do you want to do?” asked Tovar. “Just keep a few in cages and pull out the pheromone when you need it? Doesn’t that seem kind of evil to any of you?”

“My job is to protect the human race,” said Mkele. “If it means the difference between life and extinction, then yes, I will keep Partials in cages.”

Tovar’s face was grim. “I keep forgetting you had this same job under Delarosa.”

“Delarosa was trying to save the human race,” said Mkele. “Her only crime was that she was willing to go too far in order to do it. We decided, briefly, that we didn’t want to go along with her, but look at us: We’re hiding in a basement, letting Delarosa fight our battles, seriously considering letting her deploy a nuclear bomb. We are long past the point where we can pick and choose our morality. We either save our species or we don’t.”

“Yes,” said Tovar, “but I’d prefer it if we were still worth saving by the end of it.”

“We either save our species or we don’t,” Mkele repeated, more forcefully this time. He looked at the other men one by one, starting with Hobb. The amoral senator nodded almost immediately. Mkele turned next to Haru, who stared back only a moment before nodding as well. When the alternative is extinction, all kinds of horrors become acceptable.

“I don’t like it,” said Haru, “but I like it more than everybody dying. We’re out of time for anything better.”

Mkele turned to Tovar, who threw up his hands in frustration. “Do you know how long I fought against these kinds of fascist policies?”

“I do,” said Mkele calmly.

“I started a civil war,” said Tovar. “I bombed my own people because I thought freedom was more important than survival. There’s no point saving us if we lose our humanity in the process.”

“We can change if we live,” said Mkele. “A nation built on slavery can be redeemed, but not if we all die.”

“This is wrong,” said Tovar.

“I never said it wasn’t,” said Mkele. “Every choice we have is wrong. This is the lesser of ninety-nine evils.”

“I’ll lead your distraction,” said Tovar. “I’ll give my life to help the rest of you escape, and I’ll sell that life as dearly as possible. Hell, I’ve always been a better terrorist than a senator anyway.” He stared at them pointedly. “Just don’t give up on goodness yet. Somewhere out there there’s a way to get through this.” He opened his mouth to say something else, but instead just shook his head and turned to leave. “I hope we find it in time.”

Tovar’s hand was inches from the doorknob when suddenly the door shook, practically rattling on its hinges as someone pounded on the other side.

“Senator!” It was a young voice, Haru thought, probably another soldier. Tovar glanced back at the group curiously before opening the door.

“Senator Tovar,” said the soldier, practically tripping over himself in his rush to speak. “The message has stopped.”

Tovar frowned. “The message … stopped?”

“The radio message from the Partials,” said the soldier. “They’ve stopped the broadcast. Every channel is clear.”

Mkele stood up. “Are you sure?”

“We’ve scanned every frequency,” said the soldier.

“They’ve found her,” said Haru, stunned by the sudden blend of relief and terror. He’d known Kira for years, and the thought of her in Partial hands was sickening, but at the same time, Kira would be the first to say that one girl was more than a fair trade for the hundreds of people the Partials seemed willing to kill in their search for her. He’d come to hate her for not turning herself in, and eventually convinced himself that she couldn’t possibly still be on the island; she must have either fled or died, or surely she would have come forward by now. No one could stand by silently while so many people were executed. But now, if she’s been captured, maybe that means she’s been here all along … The thought made him furious.

“We don’t know for sure that they’ve found the girl,” said Mkele. “It’s possible that their radio tower’s just failed temporarily.”

“Or maybe they just gave up,” said Hobb.

“Keep monitoring the frequencies,” said Tovar to the soldier. “Let me know the instant you hear anything. I’ll join you when I can.” The soldier nodded and ran off at a dash. Tovar closed and locked the door, keeping their conversation secret—nobody else knew about the nuke, and Haru knew it was wise to keep it that way. “How does this change our plans?” asked Tovar, looking back at the group. “Does it change them at all? There’s still a nuke, and Delarosa’s still probably going through with her plan. Even without the daily executions it’s still just a matter of time, and this is still the strongest blow she can strike against them.”

“If the Partials pull out, it makes the nuke an even more attractive option,” said Mkele, “because it will catch more of them in the blast.”

“And Kira too,” said Haru. He didn’t know how he felt about that.

Tovar smiled sadly. “Twenty minutes ago we were struggling to justify this attack, and now we can’t bear to give it up.”

“Delarosa will go through with her plan,” said Hobb, “and we should go through with ours.”

“Then I guess it’s time to piss off the overwhelming enemy,” said Tovar. He saluted them stiffly, the ex-marine appearing like magic from inside the form of the old, weathered traveler. “It’s been a pleasure serving with you.”

Mkele saluted him back, then turned toward Hobb and Haru. “You’re in charge of the evacuation.”

“He means me,” said Hobb.

“He means us,” said Haru. “Don’t think you’re in charge just because you’re a senator.”

“I’m twice your age.”

“If that’s the best reason you can come up with, you’re definitely not in charge.” Haru stood. “Can you shoot?”

“I’ve trained with a rifle since we founded East Meadow,” said Hobb indignantly.

“Then get your gear ready,” said Haru. “We’re leaving in an hour.” He left the room, deep in his own thoughts. Maybe the Partials really had found Kira—but where? And why now, after all this time?

And now that they had her, what would they do?

CHAPTER THREE

Kira stared up at the surgery robot, a massive metal spider looming down from the ceiling. Twelve sleek, multijointed arms swiveled into place, each tipped with a different medical instrument: scalpels and clamps in half a dozen different sizes, syringes with interchangeable barrels of brightly colored liquid, and spanners and spikes and other devices with functions Kira could only guess at. She’d been in medical training since she was ten—almost eight years ago now—but there were things in here she’d never even dreamed of.

They showed up all the time in her nightmares, though. This was the same facility in Greenwich, Connecticut, where Dr. Morgan had captured her and tortured her before Marcus and Samm had saved her. Now she’d abandoned them both and come back of her own free will.

The spider rotated silently, reaching toward her with sleek steel pincers. Kira suppressed a scream and tried to think calm thoughts.

“Local anesthetic to points four, six, and seven,” said Morgan, tapping the locations on a massive wall screen, where a diagram of Kira’s body hung motionless in the air. “Engage.” The spider reached down without pause or ceremony and plunged its needles into Kira’s hip and abdomen. Kira stifled another scream, gritting her teeth and compressing her fears into a low grunt.

“Such a glowing bedside manner,” said Dr. Vale, standing by another wall. “It warms my heart, McKenna—you’re like a mother hen.”

“I started a war to find this girl,” said Morgan. “You want me to ask permission every time I touch her?”

“A quick ‘This will only hurt a little’ might be nice,” said Vale. “Maybe even an ‘Are you ready, Kira?’ before we start the surgery?”

“As if my answer would change anything?” asked Kira.

Morgan shot her a glance. “You made the choice to be here.”

Vale snorted. “Another answer that didn’t technically change anything.”

“It changed a great deal,” said Morgan, looking back at the wall screen. She plotted out lines for incisions. “It impressed me.”

“Well, then,” said Vale. “By all means, treat her like a lab rat.”

“I was a lab rat last time,” said Kira. “This time is better, believe me.”

“That’s the kind of answer that only makes this worse,” said Vale, shaking his head. “You were always cold, McKenna, but this is the most coldhearted, dehumanizing—”

“I’m not a human,” said Kira, and realized with a start that Morgan had said almost the same thing—“She’s not a human”—simultaneously. They looked at each other for a moment, then Morgan turned back to her wall screen.

“In the interest of”—Morgan paused, as if searching for the right way to say it—“a peaceful working relationship, I will be more communicative.” She tapped a few icons on the wall screen, which split into three sections—the line diagram of Kira’s body on one side, and two half-size boxes on the other showing two sets of data: one labeled “Expiration” and one labeled “Kira Walker.” “Dr. Vale and I were part of the Trust—the group of ParaGen scientists who created the Partials and the RM plague. We didn’t intend for the plague to bring the human race to the brink of extinction, obviously, but the damage is done, and once I realized the humans were a lost cause, I turned my attention to the Partials instead. I’ve spent the last twelve years helping them build a new civilization, trying to find ways to overcome the sterility and other handicaps hardwired into their DNA. Imagine my surprise when they began dying, for no discernible reason, precisely twenty years after they were created.”

Vale spoke up again. “The expiration date was—”

“The expiration date was the surest sign that ‘the Trust’ was a horrible misnomer,” said Morgan. “Living, thinking beings that I helped create were preprogrammed to wither to dust in a matter of hours the moment they hit their biological deadline, and I knew nothing about it. I’ve been doing everything in my power to fix it, which brings us here.”

“You think I can cure it,” said Kira.

“I think something in your body holds the secret that will help me cure it,” said Morgan. “The last time I had you in a lab, when we discovered you were a Partial—another secret the ‘Trust’ kept from me—my initial scans determined that despite being a Partial, you had none of the genetic handicaps the others have: no sterility, no fixed age, no inhibition of growth or any other human function. If it turns out that you have no expiration date either, there might be a way to reverse engineer certain fragments of your genetic code to help save the rest of the Partials.”

“I’ve already told you that this is impossible,” said Vale. “I’m the one who programmed the expiration date—I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you at the time, but there it is. You were unstable, and no, we didn’t trust you. It wasn’t just you, though—Armin didn’t trust me with some of the pieces, either.”

Armin, thought Kira. My father—or the man I used to think was my father. He took me home to raise as his own, he never even told me what I was. Maybe he would have, one day. Now nobody even knows where he is. She wondered if he was dead. Everyone else in the Trust had survived the Break—Trimble and Morgan here with the Partials, Vale in the Preserve with a group of hidden humans, Ryssdal in Houston working on “environmental issues,” whatever that meant, and Nandita on Long Island with the humans.

Nandita. The woman who raised me, who also didn’t tell me I was a Partial.

Dr. Morgan tried to kill me, but at least she hasn’t pretended to be something she isn’t.

“Even if you can find something in there,” Vale continued, “how are you going to incorporate it into the Partials’ genetic sequence? Gene mods? You’re talking about hundreds of thousands of people—even if we had the facilities and the personnel to mount that kind of a mass modification effort, we don’t have the time to pull it off. How many Partials are left, half a million?”

“Two hundred thousand,” said Morgan, and Kira couldn’t help but gasp at the low number. Morgan’s voice was grim and exhausted. “They were created in batches, so they die in them as well. The next wave is due in just a few weeks.”

“And they’re all soldiers,” said Vale. “Infantry and pilots and maybe a few commandos, but the leaders are all dead—more to the point, the doctors are all dead. It’ll be up to you and me, and we wouldn’t be able to process even a tenth of what’s left before their time runs out—even if we already knew how.”

“That’s why we have to do something,” said Kira. She thought of Samm, and everything they’d shared, and their final, terrifying, passionate moment together. She loved him, and if her sacrifice here could keep him alive … “Everyone in the world is dying, humans and Partials, and I gave myself up because this is our best shot at saving anyone. So let’s get on with it.”

Vale’s expression darkened. “I’m trying to help you, Kira, don’t get snotty with me.”

“You don’t know her very well,” said Morgan, and her voice softened.

Vale stared at her a moment, then snarled and turned away.

Morgan looked at Kira. “Last time, we scanned your reproductive system only peripherally—back when we thought you were human, it wasn’t a priority. Today we’re going to do several biopsies.”

Kira’s hips and abdomen already felt numb and lifeless from the anesthetic. She looked back at Morgan, steeling her resolve, and nodded silently.

“Engage,” said Morgan, and the spider unfurled its knives.

CHAPTER FOUR

“Disengage that last hose,” said Heron. Her voice sounded tinny and distant through the radio, and Samm bristled again at the oddness of trying to communicate without the link. Partials used pheromonal communication because it was efficient, folding words and emotions and tactical information into a single, silent package. Working side by side, yet communicating solely through the radios in their helmets, felt like being deaf and mute. He still didn’t understand how humans did it.

As difficult as dealing with the repurposed diving gear was, though, it was necessary. If either of them breathed a whiff of the air in the laboratory, they’d be unconscious in seconds.

Samm slowly disengaged the final hose from the unconscious Partial’s odd metal face mask. There were ten comatose Partials here in Dr. Vale’s old laboratory, fast asleep in a secret subbasement of the Preserve. Vale had kept them here, unconscious, for thirteen years, tending them like plants and harvesting the Lurker pheromone from their bodies—an engineered chemical, naturally produced by all Partials, which served as the only known cure for RM. These Partials had kept the humans of the Preserve alive for over a decade, allowing them to raise healthy children—something the humans on Long Island had been completely unable to do. These ten Partials—But no, Samm corrected himself, these nine Partials. These nine Partials had given the Preserve a life and hope no other human had felt since the end of the world. Maybe even before that. They were saviors. But they were unwitting, unwilling, unconscious saviors, and Samm could not allow that to continue. The tenth Partial, this last one with the odd-looking face mask, had been modified by Dr. Vale to produce a different pheromone: one that would instantly render any Partial comatose. His mere proximity was a weapon.

Samm and Heron were disconnecting him, but they still had no idea what to do with him.

“That hose was pumping his sedative throughout the building,” said Heron. “Now that we’ve cut off his access, the effect should be limited to his immediate presence.”

“He’s got a tag,” said Samm, leaning in closer. “Williams.” He flipped the dog tag over, reading the numbers on the back; he couldn’t interpret them perfectly, but he knew the coding system well enough to know that Williams had been assigned to the third regiment. The group we left behind, back in the rebellion, to guard Denver and NORAD after we’d taken them. He guessed that the other Partials in the room had come from the same group. He flipped the tag over again, hoping to find something he’d missed, but there was nothing. It wasn’t surprising, exactly—most Partials only had a first name—but it was odd to find one who only had a last name. He wondered what the man’s story was, where his name had come from, what he’d done and what he’d thought and how he’d lived, but that information was lost forever now. His own genes would keep him sedated for the rest of his life.

It was the cruelest thing Samm had ever witnessed, and Samm had watched the world end.

“This mask is grafted on,” said Heron, probing Williams’s face mask with gloved fingers. Samm looked closer and saw that she was right—it wasn’t really a mask at all, more of a cybernetic implant that covered, or perhaps replaced, the man’s nose, mouth, jaw, and neck. Vents stood out on the side like gills, and the surface was covered with nozzles and valves. His entire body was rebuilt for a single purpose, thought Samm, to spread this sedative, but then he paused and considered his own body. I was built for a single purpose too. All of us were. We’re weapons, just like him.

I’m even designed to destroy myself, when I reach my expiration date.

In eight months.

“We still haven’t decided what to do with him,” said Samm.

“We can leave him here for now,” said Heron. “Vale kept him healthy for years, and he’s still hooked up to life support. Now that the hoses are disconnected, we can access the rest of the building without these stupid helmets, and we can move the rest of the Partials up and out of range so they can wake up.”

“And then what?” asked Samm. “We just keep him here forever?”

“Until his expiration, yeah,” said Heron.

“He’s like a living corpse,” said Samm. “That’s cruel.”

“So is killing him.”

“Is it?” Samm sighed and shook his head, looking around at the room full of atrophied, corpselike Partials. “Every single one of us is going to be dead in eight months—I was part of the last purchase order, and when we go, there’s nobody left. The humans will live longer, but without the cure for RM their species won’t propagate, and they’ll be just as dead as we are. The entire world is on life support, and—”

“Samm,” said Heron. Her voice sounded cold and clinical, and Samm wondered if she was really being terse or if all the consoling, sympathetic feelings were being cut off with the rest of the link. With Heron it was hard to tell, even under the best of circumstances. “Survival is all we have. If we end we end, but if we live a second day there’s always a chance, no matter how slim, that we can find a way to live a third, and a fourth, and a hundredth and a thousandth. Maybe the world kills us and maybe it doesn’t, but if we give up, it’s the same as killing ourselves. We’re not going to do that.”

Samm looked at her, confused by the care she seemed to be taking for his welfare. It wasn’t like her, and without the link to clue him in, he had no idea why she was behaving so strangely. He tried to read her face, the way Kira said that humans did—Heron was an espionage model, the most human of the Partial designs, and showed a lot of her emotions on her face. Even without the curved diving helmet distorting her visage, though, Samm was just too unpracticed to read anything.

The best thing he could do, then, was answer. “I’m not really considering it,” said Samm. “I would never give up.” He stared at Williams. “But he can’t give up, even if he wants to. For all we know he’s miserable—maybe he’s in pain, or he’s aware enough to feel trapped, or something even worse. We don’t know. There’s always a chance for us to find something new, like you said, but what about him? Vale said he lost the technology to make another Partial like him, and that includes the technology to turn him back. He will never be conscious or … alive, ever again. I just don’t know if that existence, specifically, is worth preserving. Maybe euthanasia is the most merciful thing to do.”

Heron paused a moment, looking at him, before answering softly. “Do you really want to kill him?”

“No.”

“Then why are we even talking about it?”

“Because maybe what I want doesn’t matter here. Maybe the best decision is the hardest one to make.”

Heron turned away and started fiddling with one of the other Partials, the one next to Williams, checking his vital signs before carefully disconnecting him, tube by tube, from the life support system. She wasn’t killing him, Samm knew, she was freeing him; this was the next step in their plan. He checked his own oxygen level in the diving helmet—a needless precaution, since there were several hours left—and read Williams’s sensor readout one last time. He was alive, technically, and his body was as healthy as any long-term coma patient’s would be. He turned to the other nine Partials and helped Heron unplug them from the machines.

They wheeled the first two gurneys to the elevator and took them upstairs. The humans who lived in the Preserve were waiting outside, led by the only two humans Samm was certain he could trust: Phan, the short, perpetually cheerful hunter, and Calix, the most skilled scout in the Preserve, now confined to a wheelchair from the gunshot in her leg. She watched Heron coldly as they brought the first two Partials out of the building, but when they actually reached her the coldness was gone, and she was all business.

“I didn’t want to believe you,” she said, staring at the comatose Partials.

“There are eight more down there,” said Samm, taking off his diving helmet. The air was fresh, with no lingering trace of the sedative. “All as emaciated as these two.”

“And this is where Dr. Vale got the cure,” said Phan. He touched one of the unconscious Partials lightly on the arm. “We didn’t know. We never would have …” He looked up at Samm. “I’m sorry. If we’d known he was enslaving Partials, we would have … I don’t know. But we would have done something.”

“We’ve had more than one thousand children born since the Break,” said Laura, an older woman, and the acting leader of the Preserve now that Vale was gone. “Are you really saying you would have let them all die?”

Phan went pale, an impressive feat on his dark features. “I didn’t mean that, I just mean—”

“Are you saying you want them back down there?” asked Heron, watching Laura like a snake about to strike. She still wore her helmet, and the radio gave her voice a menacing, mechanical sound. Samm interjected before the situation could get out of hand.

“I’ve already told you I’ll fill in for them myself,” said Samm. “You need the cure, and I understand that, so you can get it from me—willingly. The slaves go free, and everybody’s happy.”

“Until Samm dies,” said Heron. He assumed she was being flippant and sent her a scalding blast of WATCH IT before realizing that with her helmet on she was still cut off from the link data. He glanced at her instead, trying to convey the same sharpness he’d seen so often when Kira was mad at her. She smirked back, silently amused, and he assumed he’d done it wrong. At least she knows what I meant, even if she doesn’t care.

Calix craned her neck over her shoulder, calling to the gathered humans behind her. “Take these two back to the hospital, and make sure they’re ready for more.” The crowd hesitated, and Calix barked another command that even Samm could tell was intended as a harsh verbal slap. “Now!”

An older man spoke. “These are Partials, Calix.” His suspicious glance encompassed Samm and Heron as well.

“And they’ve saved one thousand of your children from RM,” said Calix. “They’ve done more for this community than any of us, and they’ve done it all from the verge of death. Anyone who’s got a problem with helping them will answer to me.”

The man stared at Calix, a slim sixteen-year-old girl in a wheelchair. Her eyes hardened.

“You don’t think I can back that up?” she whispered.

“Just take them to the hospital,” said Laura, grabbing the first gurney. “I’ll come with you. The rest of you go down with them, now that we know it’s safe.”

Samm let Laura pull the gurney away and slowly buckled his diving helmet back on for the next trip down. He knew this wasn’t easy for the humans to do, but they were doing it, and that impressed him. In the back of his mind, though, he knew that Heron’s quick, snarky comment was the truest statement any of them had made: Sooner or later, no matter what anyone did or sacrificed, the Partials were going to die. And then the humans would die, and it would all be over.

Kira had left to help try to find a cure. Would she and Dr. Morgan find it in time? And if they did find it, would they bring it back here?

Kira …

Would Samm ever see her again?

CHAPTER FIVE

Dr. Morgan took biopsies of Kira’s uterus, ovaries, lungs, sinuses, heart, spinal fluid, and brain tissue. She built elaborate models of Kira’s DNA, manipulating them on the molecular level through a massive holographic display, running so many simulations she actually slagged one of the hospital’s central computer processors. Every Partial technician who might have known how to replace it had already expired, so they soldiered on with the two remaining processor banks and hoped for the best.

Hope, Kira realized, was quickly becoming their sole remaining asset.

Dr. Vale, for his part, spent his time poring over Morgan’s copious records of Partial genetics, trying to reconstruct as much of his work on the expiration date as possible. When Kira wasn’t on the operating table or in the recovery room, she sat with him, usually attached to a rolling IV, and tried to learn as much as she could.

“This is part of the aging sequence,” said Vale, pointing to a segment of a DNA strand glowing faintly on the screen. He highlighted a series of amino acids with his fingers, and it glowed a different color. “A normal Partial grows to physical maturity in about ten months, all inside of a big glass tube; we called them vats, but they really looked more like those clear capsules you’d use at an express diner.”

Kira shook her head. “I have no idea what that means.”

“Sorry. How about a … skinny glass elevator?”

“I was five years old at the Break,” said Kira. “I grew up after the world already ended. You’re going to have to explain this without old-world metaphors.”

“Okay,” said Vale, pressing his fingers to his lips as he thought. “Okay. Imagine a clear cylinder, about seven feet long and two feet in diameter, with a metal cap on each end full of tubes and hoses and such. We had a few of them in the ParaGen building in the Preserve, I should have shown you; the rest were all at the growth and training facilities in Montana and Wyoming, but those were pretty heavily bombed during the Partial War. Anyway: The techs would create the zygotes in a lab and plant them in a nutritive gel Dr. Morgan invented, and by the time they were done growing, they more or less filled the tube; them and all the liquid we pumped in with them. I designed the entire life cycle,” he said, pointing back at the glowing DNA strand on his screen. “They required a remarkable amount of energy to grow at such a rate, most of which they drew from Morgan’s gel, though we had to keep them warm as well—the infant Partials were designed to be so energy-efficient that they lost virtually none of their energy as heat, which helped them grow quickly but kept them unnaturally cold. Once the accelerated aging was finished, the heightened metabolism slowed down, and they live relatively normal lives, but when the twenty years are up, the age accelerator kicks into overdrive—it looks like they’re decomposing, but really they’re aging a hundred years in a matter of weeks.”

“And freezing to death at the same time,” said Kira.

“Well, yes,” said Vale. “The energy has to come from somewhere.” He sighed. “I know you don’t approve, and I assure you that I don’t either. I didn’t like it then and I don’t like it now. But there was no other way.”

“You could have refused.”

“To create the Partials? ParaGen stood to make trillions of dollars—if we hadn’t helped them, they would have found someone else. This way we could control the process.”

“You could have refused to set an expiration date.”

“It was supposed to be a temporary measure to buy us time: The government wanted a kill switch, the Failsafe I thought had been implanted in you, and if we’d gone with that plan, the Partials would all be dead by now, and the humans would have no hope at all. This way we had twenty years to find another solution, but the end of the world precluded that.”

The Failsafe. Kira had crossed the continent looking for information on the Failsafe, only to discover that it was a twisted mess: The government had demanded a plague that could kill Partials if they ever got out of hand, and the Trust had built two versions. The first—the plague the government wanted, the one that would only affect Partials—was never implemented, intended solely as a decoy to make ParaGen think the Trust was following orders. The second, which would only target humans, was what eventually came to be known as RM, though for reasons even the Trust didn’t understand, it had proven to be far more deadly than planned. They had tried to make the humans’ well-being dependent on the Partials, giving them a disease only the Partials could cure. They’d thought it was the only way to keep the Partials safe from genocide. Instead, they’d committed genocide themselves.

Kira watched Vale in silence as he pored over the DNA images, reading them the way an archaeologist would read an ancient language—organic hieroglyphics that he studied with a low, intense mutter. After a moment Kira spoke again.

“What was your plan for those twenty years?”

“Excuse me?”

“You said you had twenty years to deal with the expiration date before it kicked in, and that you were going to try to deal with it before it became an issue. What was your plan?”

“It was Armin’s plan,” he said softly, still staring intently at the DNA. “We all had our jobs, and we worked in secret. That’s why Morgan didn’t know about the expiration date.”

At the mention of his name, Kira was lost in another dark reverie. It was Armin who had formed the Trust, he who had suggested the rash plan to save their million Partial “children” from death. If he had a plan to overcome expiration, what was it? Was he just relying on the same genetic equipment Morgan was? Before the Break, with access to the full resources of ParaGen, gene-modding a million people might have been a feasible plan, diving into their DNA and carving out the expiration code like a patch of rot in an apple. What Armin would have done, she could only guess. She’d lived with the man for five years, give or take—she had no idea how long she’d gestated in a growth vat before popping out to be taken care of. Armin had raised her as his own, so fully she’d never even suspected she wasn’t human, that she wasn’t really his daughter. She didn’t even know what her purpose was. Would she ever meet him? Would she ever get the chance to ask him?

Did knowing the truth about who he was, and what she was, make him less of a father? She remembered him with love—was that relationship any less meaningful now? She hadn’t decided yet. She wasn’t sure if she could. You didn’t need a biological connection to be a family; all of the family relationships post-Break were ones of adoption, and the love they felt was real. But none of those adoptive parents had lied to their children about the fundamental aspects of those children’s existence and species. None of those adoptive parents had synthetically engineered their children and grown them in a clear glass cylinder.

None of those adoptive parents had ended the world.

Well, except Nandita. I have all the luck with parents.

“Do you know where Armin is?” she asked softly.

“You asked about him before,” said Vale, pausing to turn and look at her. “What’s your interest in him?”

Kira wasn’t sure she wanted to share that part of her life with Vale or Morgan—at least not yet. “He’s the only one we can’t account for.”

“We don’t know much about Jerry Ryssdal, either.”

“But Jerry Ryssdal wasn’t the one who created the Trust.”

Vale shook his head helplessly. “Well, given the circumstances, I would assume Armin is dead.”

Kira swallowed, trying not to let her feelings show, even as she was unsure of what those feelings were. “But the Trust are all immune to RM. You gene-modded yourselves for protection.”

“There are plenty of ways to die that aren’t related to RM,” said Vale. “When things fell apart … he could have died in a looting scuffle, during a Partial bombing—”

“I thought the Partials didn’t attack civilians.”

“ParaGen was hardly a civilian target in that particular war,” said Vale. “Many of our facilities were attacked, and he may have been in or near one at the wrong time.”

“But you survived.”

“Why are you interrogating me?”

Kira took a deep breath, shaking her head tiredly. “You’re trying to work, and I’m … preoccupied. I’m sorry. You’re in here practically twenty hours a day trying to cure this thing, and I should be helping you, not—”

Now it was Vale’s turn to shake his head, refusing to meet Kira’s eyes. “You’re helping more than anyone.” There was more anger in his voice than Kira had expected. “You’re a sixteen-year-old girl and I’m letting Morgan treat you like a cell culture.”

“I volunteered.”

“That doesn’t make it right.”

“It’s the only right choice there is.”

“That doesn’t mean I like it.”

They sat in silence for a moment, and Kira smiled sadly. “I’m seventeen, actually. Almost eighteen.”

Vale smiled back, though the smile seemed just as sad and forced as Kira’s. “When’s your birthday?”

“I have no idea. Sometime in January. I always just celebrate it on New Year’s.”

Vale nodded, as if that meant something profound. “A snow baby.”

“Snow?”

Vale sighed again. “I forget you kids don’t know about snow. When was the last time …? I can’t remember … Even I must’ve been a kid the last time it snowed. Anyway: a New Year’s baby, then.” He turned back to his monitor. “That’s good luck. We’re going to need it.”

Kira looked at the glowing DNA strand, trying to read it like he did, but it meant virtually nothing to her. She’d trained as a medic, so she knew the terminology, but genetics were not her specialty. She traced the tape holding the IV tube to her arm. “Are you sure there’s nothing more I can do to help?”

“Find Armin,” he muttered, staring at the screen, “and ask him what the hell we’re supposed to do now.”

Kira felt a surge of excitement at the suggestion, but she knew it was a hopeless plan—there was too little time left, and no idea even where to begin. And when it came right down to it, she wasn’t even sure she wanted to find her father. What would she say to him? She didn’t even know if she’d be angry or glad. “I’ve tried looking for the Trust already,” she said at last. “I can do more good here, helping you and Morgan with your research.”

“That’s what you keep saying.”

“I know you’re just trying to help me,” said Kira, “and I appreciate that, but I’m serious about this.” She felt a flutter of fear, as she always did thinking about her situation, but forced it down. She thought about Samm, and steeled her resolve. “I don’t go back on my promises.”

“Even if they have no purpose?”

Kira frowned. “You don’t think Morgan will find anything?”

“I think she’s looking in the wrong place. All she’s going to find in you is a basic Partial template, an example of a Partial genome with no expiration triggers.”

“Which is exactly what she’s looking for,” said Kira.

He dismissed that notion with a wave. “It’s a solution she can’t implement. Even if she finds the right genes, what then? We don’t have the time or the means to disseminate the cure to more than a handful of Partials, let alone every Partial in the world. I’ve talked to her about it, but she’s determined.”

Kira started to speak but trailed off, uncertain and terrified. “But if I’m not …” It was a fear she hadn’t even realized she had, but which sprang up in her mind like a nightmare, shaking her to the core.

I’m not a cure for RM, and I don’t have any special powers or abilities that anyone can find. I’m not even the Partial Failsafe, according to every test they’ve been able to run. I thought I was created for a purpose, but I’ve tried everything else, and curing expiration is the only purpose left.

But if I’m not the cure for expiration, what good am I to anyone?

She tried to control her tears, but they burst out in a flood. Vale looked up in surprise, his face a mask of confusion; he looked like he wanted to help but had no idea what to do or say, and Kira stood up quickly, grabbing her rolling IV stand and walking away before he could try to comfort her. She was still sobbing, so much she could hardly see, but she knew that a single word from anyone, even a kind one, would wreck her completely. She staggered out of the room, closing the door behind her, and sagged against the wall in a torrent of tears.

I thought the Trust had a plan to save everyone, and the more I looked the more it kept coming back to my father, to me, to the questions that no one could answer. Why did he make me? Why would anyone hide a Partial among the humans? What was I intended to do or be or accomplish? What was I … She sobbed, completely unable to even articulate the thought anymore, even to herself. She’d dared to believe that she was the plan—that her father had created her for this time, for this purpose, to cure both species and save the world. To lose that dream was hard enough, but the sheer arrogance of having that dream in the first place broke her in half.

Dr. Morgan found her twenty minutes later, curled on the floor and shivering in her hospital gown.

“The spinal fluid was another dead end. I want brain tissue.”

Kira didn’t bother to ask why, or what her methods were, or how much brain tissue Morgan needed. She dragged herself to her feet, clutching the IV stand like a cane, and shuffled toward the operating room. The biopsies were invasive and painful, more like torture than a medical procedure, but Kira set her face grimly and lay down under the spider. The hospital was so empty, they hadn’t passed a single other person in the halls. Too many of the Partials were dead.

The needles gleamed, piercing her like daggers, but Kira embraced the pain. It was all she had left.

CHAPTER SIX

Ariel tapped her fingers on the stock of her rifle, watching Nandita as the women in the house readied themselves to leave. It would be so easy to kill her—half a second to aim, another to pull the trigger. Boom. Dead. So easy to rid the world of its most heartless, deceitful, irredeemable denizen. Nandita Merchant had created the Partials, she had created RM, she had kidnapped Ariel and three other girls and experimented on them for years, right under everyone’s noses, lying to them about their true nature. Ariel was a Partial. Her adoptive sisters—Kira and Isolde—were Partials. The enemy.

In Ariel’s mind it felt as if Nandita had changed her with a sentence, like a magic spell, stealing her humanity to leave her gasping in the darkness. She had made her a monster, with the blood of the world still dripping from her talons. She didn’t know what to think, or even how. It was too much to take in. The world had shifted, and it would never be the same.

Only one thing remained after the announcement: She had hated Nandita before, and she hated her now. She touched the trigger, just lightly, not even pointing the rifle in Nandita’s direction. The curve of it gave her a dark, illicit thrill. It would be so easy.

Isolde walked into the room, a stuffed backpack in each hand and Mohammad Khan, her red-faced, screaming baby, in a tight sling across her chest. Ariel moved her hand back to the stock.

“I have blankets, clothes, and everything in the house that can be used as a cloth diaper,” said Isolde. Her eyes were bloodshot, and her voice was raw from emotion and fatigue. “I think that’s everything, but I don’t know. I’m convinced I’m forgetting something.”

“You’re fine,” said Nandita, stroking Khan’s cheek ineffectually. He was five days old—an outright miracle in the world after the Break, when most children died in three—but his apparent immunity to RM wasn’t saving him from the other disease he’d had since birth, a mysterious illness that spiked his fever and ruptured his skin with boils and rough, leathery patches. Nandita thought she could save him, that Khan’s human/Partial hybrid DNA would make him more resilient. But Ariel knew the truth. Being a hybrid hadn’t saved her baby two years ago, and it wouldn’t save Isolde’s now.

Isolde set her backpacks on the couch, next to Xochi’s and that of Xochi’s adoptive mother, Senator Erin Kessler. Madison’s bag was on the floor, packed mostly with supplies for Arwen, her baby, and the only healthy human child since the Break.

Isolde froze in terror when a sudden knock sounded sharply on the front door. Every woman in the house looked up with wide, wild eyes, for a knock on the door meant only one thing.

Partial soldiers.

Ariel took stock of the room in a single, practiced glance—almost everything in the house was liable to get them arrested, starting with Arwen. The Partials had heard rumors of a thriving human child, nearly one year old, and they wanted her for their experiments. Khan would probably mean nothing to the average observer—his condition made him appear as just another doomed baby—but the guns were contraband and the loaded backpacks were a clear sign that they were about to make a run for it. Nobody was allowed to leave East Meadow, and if the Partials thought they were trying, they’d arrest them all just to be sure.

Ariel stashed her gun behind a bookcase, still in easy reach if she needed it, and caught the bags Xochi threw to her. Nandita, who the Partials had been searching for almost as eagerly as Kira, hid herself in a back room, while Senator Kessler did the same—she wasn’t necessarily a criminal, but if the Partials recognized her as a senator, they might take her anyway. Isolde struggled to calm her screaming baby, and far in the back, beneath a false panel in the floor, Madison quietly shushed Arwen. Ariel hid the last of the bags in a kitchen cupboard; barely ten seconds had elapsed since the knock on the door. The soldier outside pounded loudly again, and Ariel opened it.

“What do you want?” Her voice was more surly than she’d intended; she was trying to act innocent and unnoticeable. When the Partials didn’t react to her anger, she realized that maybe anger was the most innocent reaction of all in an occupied city. She allowed herself a fierce scowl, surprised at how good it felt.

The pair of Partial soldiers on the porch were both young—about eighteen years old in appearance, as they all were, though she knew they were closer to twenty. She wondered if she’d seen these two around the city anywhere, maybe guarding a street corner when she’d been out scavenging for food, but they all looked so similar she couldn’t tell. The Partials weren’t clones of one another, but they may as well have been. Ariel found them completely indistinguishable. It made her wonder if the Partials thought the same thing about humans.

Which only made her grimace, nauseated anew by the realization that “us” and “them” meant completely different things than they had three days ago.

“Miss,” said the first Partial, “we heard a baby crying on the premises. We’ve come to see if there’s anything wrong.”

You mean you’ve come to see if it’s Arwen, thought Ariel. She glanced at Isolde, who flashed a look of impotent fury before gritting her teeth and giving a small, almost imperceptible nod. They had prearranged a plan to use Khan to hide Arwen, and while Isolde had agreed with it, she hated it intensely.

“Yes,” said Ariel, pointing toward the swaddled infant. “Can you help? We’ve done everything we can, but he’s dying.” The Partials glanced at Isolde and her baby, and Ariel stepped closer. “It’s RM, and it’s killing him.” She felt more anger boiling to the surface and unleashed it like a flamethrower. “Don’t you have any medicine? They told us the Partials had the cure—can you help him? Or are you just here to watch him die?”

The first Partial stepped inside and walked to Isolde, examining Khan up close. Isolde took up the act as well, though she was less angry and more pleading. Ariel studied the second Partial, still in the doorway, covering his partner like a good wingman; his rifle wasn’t aimed, but it was ready to bring up at a moment’s notice, and they all knew from experience just how fast a Partial could be.

It occurred to Ariel, not for the first time, that she could give them Nandita. The old woman was concealed in a closet, trapped like a rat if Ariel decided to lead them to her. What would they do if they found her—torture her? Kill her outright? Nothing good, she knew, or Nandita wouldn’t be so intent on staying hidden. Ariel wanted to speak up so desperately she had to clench her fist to keep from blurting it out, but there were two reasons she forced herself to keep quiet: first, because the inevitable questions that followed might possibly expose Arwen, or even Khan’s unique parentage. Second, and more frustrating, was Nandita’s mysterious power over the Partials—she seemed to be able to control them, and exposing her to these two soldiers would do nothing but give her a new pair of pawns.

The control, she knew, came through something called the link—Kira had discovered that the Partials used a system of chemical communication, like pheromones in an ant colony, breathing one another’s thoughts and feeling one another’s emotions. Ariel, however, could never sense any of it. She breathed deeply, trying not to be obvious about it. Nothing. It made her wonder if Nandita was simply lying to them—if they weren’t some alternate Partial model, but human after all. She’d lied about everything else, why not that?

“Hi,” said the Partial in the doorway. “I’m Eric. That’s Chas.”

Ariel stared back, furious at the soldier’s attempt at conversation. How dare he treat them like friends—like equals—in the middle of an enemy occupation? In the middle of an armed home invasion? She wished she could use the link just so she could blast him with the full force of her rage.

Caught by a sudden impulse, before she knew it she was blowing out a long, slow breath, right toward his face. Any harder and he’d feel the wind of it. Her heart seemed to stop as she waited, watching his eyes for any reaction, but she saw nothing—no sudden alarm, no glimmer of recognition. If she had the link at all, he was as deaf to hers as she was to his. She didn’t know if she should feel triumphant or disappointed, and the confusion only made her feel sicker. She scowled, and gripped the door frame for support. The Partial in the doorway shot her a quick glance, saw nothing important, and continued with his scan of the living room.

The Partial named Chas inspected Khan, presumably trying to determine for himself whether this fevered newborn was the fabled Miracle Baby. The women’s plan, posed by Xochi, was to present Khan to any Partial scouts in the hope that they wouldn’t bother looking for a second baby. The only problem would come if one of their neighbors—perhaps someone starving, or hoping to free a loved one from the Partials’ prison—had sold them out. All the humans knew about Arwen, and where she was hiding, but none of them would dare to betray the Miracle Baby. She hoped. Ariel held her breath, trying not to look as scared as she felt, waiting for the Partials to leave.

“What are these blisters?”

Ariel felt her chest grow tighter; she was still facing the doorway, but she could hear the sharp intake of breath as Xochi or Isolde, maybe both of them, reacted in sudden fear to the question. Had the Partials noticed their fear? Did they suspect the girls were hiding something? She wanted to spin around, to see what was happening in the room, but forced herself to stay calm. She studied Eric in the doorway, looking for a sign of alarm in his face, but saw nothing. That might not mean anything, she told herself. The link makes them express emotions differently from us. He could be on the verge of killing us, and we’d never know.

The silence dragged on, the soldier’s question hanging in the air unanswered, and Ariel realized that Isolde was too shocked to speak. Maybe the Partials would miss a sudden intake of breath, but a failure to answer a direct question was bound to arouse suspicion.

Ariel turned around slowly. “He’s sick. I told you already.”

Chas adjusted his rifle and leaned in closely over Khan; the baby whimpered slightly, too exhausted from its constant pain to keep screaming. Chas reached toward one of the dark-yellow blisters. “This doesn’t look like RM.”

“RM’s not the only disease a baby can get out here away from a hospital,” said Ariel, her anger laced with fear. Why won’t they just go away? She swallowed nervously.

Isolde turned and stepped back, shielding the baby from the soldier’s hand. “Don’t touch him,” she snapped. “The blisters are painful.”

Eric raised his rifle—not all the way, but just enough to signal that it was still there, and that the Partials still had all the power. Ariel felt things spiraling out of control, the situation turning dark and desperate and ready to snap. She raised her hand to reach out, but she didn’t know where or to whom. Chas reached for Khan again, more aggressively this time, and saw Isolde raise her hand.

“Isolde!” Ariel tried to force her voice to be bright and chipper. The blond girl looked up, her hand frozen halfway through what might have been intended as a slap or worse. “Can I get you a drink of water?”

Isolde glared at her, her pale face practically red with rage, but she allowed the soldier to touch Khan’s face, probing carefully at the rough patches of hardened skin. Isolde seemed to swallow a scream and nodded to Ariel as mechanically as she could. “Thank you.”

Ariel walked toward the kitchen, but Chas barked a sudden order.

“Stop.”

Ariel froze. She could just see Xochi from the corner of her eye, edging toward the curio cabinet where she’d hidden her handgun.

“No one’s allowed to leave the room,” Chas continued, his voice grim and serious. “You all stay exactly where you are, where we can see you.”

Ariel looked the other way, still frozen in place, and counted the steps to her own rifle’s hiding place. Three steps, and cover when I get there.

It still won’t be enough.

If they started a fight, Senator Kessler would be here in seconds, surprising the Partials and, if they were lucky, taking one out of the fight. If the fight went long enough, Nandita would expose herself as well, using her power over the Partials to stop it—she didn’t like to use her control out of fear that it would attract too much attention from the rest of the Partial army, bringing out forces they couldn’t hope to deal with, but for a situation like this she might step in. But Xochi or Isolde or both might already be dead by the time Nandita came out, and maybe even Ariel herself.

At last Chas turned away.

“Let’s go.”

He walked to the door, and that was it—no warnings, no parting words, no acknowledgment of Khan’s illness or Isolde’s desperate cries for help. They were looking for Arwen, and this wasn’t Arwen, so they left. Isolde clutched her baby close to her chest, and Xochi closed the door the soldiers had left hanging open.

Ariel grabbed her rifle, checked the barrel, and tried to slow her breathing.

“We’ve got to get out of town tonight,” said Kessler, stepping into the room with her own rifle gripped tightly in her hands. “That was too close.”

“I think we handled it pretty damn well,” Xochi snapped.

Kessler growled, rolling her eyes. “I never said you didn’t.”

“Be quiet or you’ll make him start crying again,” said Isolde, and hurried out of the room. Ariel slowly peeled her fingers off the rifle, though she still couldn’t take her eyes off the locked door, or the windows they’d so carefully blocked to keep from being spied on. Xochi and Kessler pulled the bags out of the cupboards in the kitchen, running last-minute checks to make sure everything was ready. Ariel set her rifle on the table beside her but couldn’t bring herself to take her hand off it.

“You may have saved their lives, Ariel,” said Nandita, so close behind her that she almost jumped when she heard the old woman’s voice. She shot her a dark glance over her shoulder, then walked into the kitchen to help with the bags.

“The other girls froze,” Nandita continued. “You didn’t. I thank you for that.”

Kessler glared at Xochi, but neither of them spoke.

“You still haven’t told us where we’re going,” said Ariel.

“Does it matter?” asked Madison, walking in with Arwen on her hip. “We need to get out, I don’t care where.”

“Where this group goes matters more than almost anything else in the world,” said Kessler. She had a soft Irish lilt in her voice; Xochi, her adopted daughter, was Mexican by birth, but had lived with Kessler so long that the same lilt crept into her voice when she was angry.

It was fully evident now. “You know that’s not what she meant, Erin.”

“Yes, we have to get the children away from the Partials—” said Madison, but fell abruptly silent almost before she could even finish speaking. Ariel felt everyone’s eyes on her but said nothing. “The Partial soldiers,” said Madison, correcting herself. “We had the perfect cover today, and it still almost fell apart.”

“I’m not suggesting we stay,” said Kessler. “I’m just agreeing with Ariel. We need to know where we’re going.”

“To the same lab where I spent most of the last year,” said Nandita.

“That doesn’t tell us anything,” said Ariel.

Nandita sighed. “And what if one of you is captured? They could torture you, and get the location, and cut the rest of us off before we even arrive.”

“What are you expecting this trip to be like?” asked Ariel. “Two infants, an old woman, and barely enough survival training to go around. We’re sticking together just to stay alive, and if they find one of us, they find us all.”

Nandita glared back at her, but after a moment of silence she spoke. “Before the Break there was a government laboratory on a tiny island off the eastern tip of this one, the Plum Island Disease Research Center. Being separated from the rest of the continent made it the only safe place to study the most contagious organisms, but it turns out that same isolation saved it when the rest of the world fell apart. It has its own power source, its own air and water recycling system, and a hermetically sealed interior—it hasn’t fallen apart the way everything else has. That’s where I made this.” She held up the hand-sized leather bag that hung around her neck, containing the small glass vial with a chemical trigger; the trigger that would release … something inside Ariel’s and Isolde’s bodies. Nandita had thought it was the cure for RM, but given everything unexpected that had happened with Khan, they could only wonder. “If there’s any facility in the world where I can study and cure Khan’s illness, it’s there.”

Ariel found herself instinctually assuming that Nandita must have other motives as well, but she didn’t have time to dwell on it. Isolde entered the room, and Khan, in a rare moment of surrender, was passed out from fatigue, asleep on her chest. Isolde looked just as exhausted.

Ariel looked back at Nandita, fixing her with her stare. “Can you actually save him?”

“I will stop at nothing.”

They stared at each other, sizing each other up. Ariel wondered what the old woman was thinking, what she was reading in Ariel’s face and attitude.

“If you can really help him,” said Ariel, “then I’ll stop at nothing to help you do it.”

And as soon as he’s safe, I’ll kill you.

CHAPTER SEVEN

General Shon, leader of the Partial invasion force, climbed down from his horse in the yard outside the Dogwood outpost. He handed the reins to his assistant, Mattson. The human Defense Grid had used Dogwood to patrol East Meadow, keeping threats at bay, and Shon now used it for the opposite purpose of keeping the humans contained inside the city. As the most remote outpost, it was also a handy place to keep certain things he didn’t want anyone, human or Partial, to find. The link data in the yard crackled with anxiety—Shon could feel edginess and uncertainty in the soldiers, just like the rest of the army, but here they were outright terrified, and with good reason.

The humans, it seemed, had released a biological weapon, and Dogwood was where Shon had been keeping the corpses of his Partial brethren who’d died from the disease.

“Are you sure it’s safe here, sir?” asked Mattson.

“I wouldn’t have anyone here if it wasn’t,” said Shon. “Let’s go inside.” He tried to project as much strength and certainty as he could, hoping his example would bolster the soldiers. Ideally it would be a real general here, not Shon—he was just another infantryman, like them, created to be a sergeant at the most—but he was the one Dr. Morgan had promoted when the other officers expired. Authority was more than just rank for the Partials, it was a biological fact: A general could command those under him through link data that enforced their obedience, and they passed those commands down with link authority of their own. Everyone knew where they fit, and why, and it worked. Now the entire army was flailing, leaderless, and Shon felt it more than anyone. He forced the thoughts out of his mind, determined again to present the most confidence he could muster.

“General,” said the guards, saluting as he approached. They were men he’d handpicked for Dogwood, and they knew not to be confused by an infantryman in a general’s uniform. He saluted back, and they opened the door to the main building. The strong scent of antiseptic wafted out, and the guard offered Shon a paper mask to cover his mouth and nose.

Shon hesitated, not wanting to muffle the link by restricting his air, but the guard shook his head. “Trust me, sir, you’ll want it. The link still functions, it’s just weaker.”

Shon took the mask, and motioned for Mattson to do the same. They walked inside, where an old friend of Shon’s met them with a crisp salute.

“Sir, welcome to Dogwood.” Michelle, a sergeant herself, had driven Shon’s armored personnel carrier in the Isolation War, and they’d fought together in ten or twelve military campaigns since, most of them against other Partials after the Break. Since Long Island had no easy access to fuel for the APCs, Michelle had been scheduled to return to the mainland after the initial invasion was successful, but Shon had asked to keep her as a tactician. Now she ran Dogwood. The weary tinge to her link data told Shon she was as exhausted by the demands of emergency promotion as he was.

Shon saluted back. “Sergeant.”

“Thank you for coming, General,” said Michelle. “I wish I had better news.”

“More victims?”

“Two more, though all the victims were stationed inside East Meadow. I have the bodies isolated, and I’ve sent everyone in their units to Duckett Farm.”

Shon sighed. “Do they know they’re in quarantine?”

“They know they’re not allowed to leave; maybe they suspect the truth, I don’t know. Even if they do, they might not suspect it’s a bioweapon.”

“We’re genetically engineered to fight off all disease,” said Shon. “Now that there’s a disease we can’t fight, I don’t know what else they’d think it is.”

“I’m just hoping for the best, sir,” said Michelle. “So far none of them have gotten sick, just like the previous units we put under quarantine, so unless they’re carrying the disease and haven’t manifested yet, I think we’ve saved them all.”

“Not all, though,” said Shon heavily.

Michelle shook her head. “Not all. Come with me.” She led them to a small room full of white plastic bodysuits, talking as they pulled the protective coverings on over their uniforms. “The doctor arrived only two days ago, but he’s already made some excellent headway toward figuring out what the bioweapon is.”

“That’s good.”

“I suppose it’s progress,” said Michelle, “but as news goes, it hardly classifies as ‘good.’ The blisters seem to be caused by an autoimmune response—the bioweapon affects Partial biology in such a way that the body becomes allergic to its own skin; the skin cells can’t connect to each other properly, and the entire epidermis starts to disintegrate. There’s a word for it that I can’t remember; something big, at least five syllables.”

Shon glanced at her sidelong, confused by the self-deprecation. “You know plenty of five-syllable words.” Almost immediately he felt her embarrassment through the link data. She was trying to stay on top of everything, and she’d learned the word, but this was so far outside the realm of her expertise and she hadn’t slept in days and there should be a doctor or a general handling this outpost, not a driver, and—

He held up his hand. “It’s okay, Michelle, I know you’re doing your best.”

“Acantholysis,” she said quickly, and her link data returned almost immediately to a professional calm. “I’m sorry, sir, it won’t happen again.”

“It’s not your job to know the names of the diseases,” said Shon. “That’s what the doctor’s for. So if this …” He shook his head, struggling to remember the word, and eventually gave up. “If these blisters are caused by an autoimmune response, I assume that makes it harder to cure?”

“Much harder,” said Michelle, opening a door to a basement stairwell. The antiseptic smell was stronger here, and the plastic-lined steps were puddled with disinfectant. Shon pressed his face mask tighter against his mouth and nose to keep from coughing. “But I haven’t told you the worst part yet. The other primary symptom is rough, scaly skin, something the doctor can only diagnose as icthyosis.”

Shon parsed the Latin roots of the word and frowned in confusion. “Fish. Because of the scales, I assume?”

“Exactly. But icthyosis isn’t communicable, it’s genetic.”

Shon stopped short, one hand on the stairway railing. “This is a genetic disease?”

“Somehow the humans have found a way to make a genetic disorder contagious.”

Mattson swore, and Shon couldn’t help but agree with the sentiment; the link data from both Mattson and Michelle was sharp with fear, detectible even through the face mask. Shon looked at the door at the bottom of the stairs, which Michelle’s team had converted to a makeshift air lock, shrouded with plastic and ringed with rubber seals. Shon felt a surge of trepidation, stopping just for a moment; the urge to turn and flee almost overpowered him. It occurred to him that if he could still sense link data through the mask, it probably wasn’t protecting him from an airborne disease, either. He kept it on anyway.

“Let’s do this.”

Michelle opened the door and they followed her through.

The basement was as carefully sealed as the door, not only the windows but the walls themselves covered with layers of protective plastic. The room was crammed with bulky medical computers and the two hospital beds, each one bearing a Partial covered with boils and rough, scaly skin. Shon had considered housing the victims and their researchers in the East Meadow hospital, but he was concerned the disease would get out, and wanted it as far from the Partial population on the island as possible. Instead he’d brought several of the hospital’s solar panels and set them up here, to power the medical equipment and air recyclers.

He’d also sent Dogwood the hospital’s best human doctors, since all the Partial doctors had already expired.

“This is Dr. Skousen,” said Michelle, leading him to an old man in a medical gown and a face mask of his own. The human looked up from a twitching, sweating patient and scowled at Shon.

Shon nodded but didn’t bother to extend his hand to shake. “We’ve met,” said Shon. “Tell me, Dr. Skousen, have you had any luck isolating the cause of the disease?”

Shon was only beginning to understand the full range of human facial expressions, but the hatred on Skousen’s face was easy to read. “The only reason I’m even looking for this germ is to shake its hand for killing you so spectacularly.”

Shon radiated irritation on the link, even though he knew the human couldn’t sense it. “But you are looking for it?”

Skousen simply scowled at him, and after a moment Michelle answered for him. “As far as we can tell, yes,” she said. “He may as well be doing magic down here for all we understand it.”

“He’s not hurting anyone,” said Shon, meeting Skousen’s stare. “That’s not who he is.” He looked back at Michelle. “You’re giving him time to study our RM resistance in return, like I said?”

“Two hours a day,” Skousen snarled, “with no access to my notes or my team from the hospital.”

“I can give you some of that,” said Shon. “If Michelle vouches for your work, I can bring some of your notes from East Meadow.”

“And my team.”

“I can’t take the risk that you’ll collude against us.”

“I thought you said that’s not who I am.”

Shon shook his head. “I trust you, Doctor, not your colleagues.”

“More time, then,” said Skousen. “Two hours a day is nothing—my people are dying, and I might be the only man alive who can help them.”

“He only sleeps four hours as it is,” said Michelle. “We expect him to collapse in exhaustion any day now.”

“I can do the work if you’ll give me the time!” Skousen growled.

“Your priority is to cure these Partials,” Shon ordered.

Dr. Skousen laughed coldly. “That’s not even close to my priority.”

“You can’t cure anyone if you’re dead.”

“You already tried to kill me,” said Skousen. “Thirteen years ago when I cared for an entire hospital full of RM victims. You think this is bad?” He gestured wildly at the dying Partials, his hands shaking with age and anger. “When the bodies pile so high in this room that you have to step on the dead just to reach the dying, then you can tell me how serious this is. Then you can tell me I’m working too hard and I need some rest. Then you can see what it’s like to watch an invisible monster kill everyone you’ve ever loved, assuming you love anything at all.”

Skousen’s chest was heaving, his old frame out of breath and shaking from the tirade. Shon watched passively, moving only to grab Michelle’s arm when she advanced on the doctor angrily.

“Tell me again why we trust you at all,” Michelle said, her voice neutral but her emotions raging like wildfire on the link. “This is a weapon your people created—”

“We still don’t know that for sure,” said Shon.

“—and you’re the only one on this island with the medical expertise to create it,” Michelle continued, tugging against Shon’s grip on her arm. “You should be hanging from a traffic light being eaten by crows, not hiding down here laughing while we parade your victims past you like a highlight reel.”

“He didn’t create it,” said Shon.

Dr. Skousen sneered. “Why do you think you know me so well?”

“Because when my platoon arrived in East Meadow, you were treating our wounded outriders in your hospital. Because you continued to treat them even after we started Morgan’s daily executions.” Shon spoke simply and softly. “Because you’re a healer, and you hate us, and you heal us anyway. You remember RM too well. You couldn’t create a new disease even if you wanted to.”

Skousen looked back fiercely, but soon he began to sag. “I’ve dreamed of your deaths every night for thirteen years, but not like this. No one should die like this.”

Michelle stopped trying to reach the old human, and Shon relaxed his grip on her arm. The air recyclers hummed loudly in the background, filling the dark plastic room with an unfeeling hiss. Shon gestured at the dying Partial soldiers. “Do you know how to cure it?”

“I barely even know what’s causing it,” Skousen whispered.

“Michelle said something about it being a genetic disorder.”

“Two different ones, if I’m reading the data correctly,” said Skousen. “It might be a bioweapon, but at this point you have to consider the possibility that this is a … malfunction. A factory error in your DNA, possibly related to your expiration date.”

“Expiration doesn’t look like this,” said Shon.

“Nothing in your history looks like this,” said Skousen. “We have to base our theories on analysis, not precedent.”

“So what’s causing it?” asked Shon. “Why is it only appearing in East Meadow, and why only in specific quadrants? Every victim we’ve seen has come from one of two patrol assignments, overlapping in a very specific region of the city—that has to be environmental.”

“Every victim we’ve seen has appeared in the last four days,” said Skousen. “This disease is too new to make any assumptions about—something that looks like a trend might just be a quirk blown out of proportion by a small sample size.”

A muffled alarm sounded down through the insulated ceiling, just loud enough to hear. Michelle looked up sharply.

“New victims.”

“Damn.” Shon moved to the door, but Michelle blocked his path.

“The disinfection procedure to get out of this room takes ten minutes. We might as well just wait.” She sighed. “They’ll bring them right to us anyway.”

They waited, agonizingly helpless, listening to the shouts and footsteps above them. Finally the door opened, and two gas-masked soldiers dragged a stumbling, blistered Partial into the basement laboratory. Skousen helped them get the man onto a table, and Shon used the link to demand a report.

“Same patrol as the others,” said the first soldier, saluting as he spoke. “Symptoms are about two hours old; we grabbed him as soon as his unit reported them.”

“The others have been quarantined?”

“They’re in the yard,” said the soldier. “We knew you’d want to talk to them first.”

Shon nodded and walked to the sick man. “What’s your name, soldier?”

“Chas,” said the man, grunting the word through gritted teeth. “The pain, it’s—”

“We’ll do everything we can for you,” said Shon, and turned to Michelle. “Stay here; learn everything you can from him. I need to get upstairs and debrief the others.” He looked at Skousen. “Figure out why this is happening.”

The human’s voice was firm. “Bring me my notes.”

“We don’t have time for this.”

“Then give me what I want,” said Skousen.

Once again Shon felt the impossible weight of his assignment bearing down on his shoulders, threatening to grind his bones to dust against the ground. Invade the island, subdue the humans, find the girl Kira, kill the humans, control the humans … and now silence. Morgan’s orders had piled up like corpses, and then she had found the girl and closed herself off, with no new orders at all. Shon was undertrained, understaffed, and completely on his own, and now the situation on the island was breaking down faster, and more catastrophically, than he could possibly keep up with. He nodded curtly to Skousen, promising the old man his notes, and raced to the decontamination chamber, where he and Mattson and the two arriving soldiers scrubbed themselves and their boots and their plastic bodysuits with sharp, harsh chemicals. Shon threw away his face mask with disgust and grabbed a new one before racing outside to talk to the rest of Chas’s patrol.

What he found in the yard was not remotely what he had expected.

The soldiers in the yard were braced in a wide semicircle, the Dogwood guards and the visiting patrol mixed together almost haphazardly, their rifles up and their sights trained solidly on some … thing … in the middle of the open yard.

Shon drew his handgun as he approached, staring in shock at the thing before him. It was man-shaped, at least vaguely—two arms, two legs, a torso and a head—but it was at least eight feet tall, with a broad, solid chest and thick, powerful arms. Its skin was dark, a kind of purplish black, and plated like the hide of a rhinoceros. Its fingers and toes were clawed, and its thickset head was the most inhuman part of all—hairless, noseless, with a jagged mouth and two dark pits for eyes, which watched them all silently. Shon drew even with the soldiers in the semicircle, his gun level, his mind barely comprehending what he was seeing.

“What the hell is that?”

“No idea, sir,” the soldier next to him breathed. “It’s … waiting for you.”

“It talks?”

“If you want to call it that.”

Shon looked over his shoulder, seeing Mattson there with his own gun drawn. Shon looked back at the creature and swallowed, stepping forward. The thing watched him, never moving.

Shon took another step and spoke. “Who are you?”

“I am here to speak to your general.” The thing’s voice was deep, rumbling through Shon’s chest like an earthquake and reverberating in his mind with shocking clarity. It didn’t seem to have used its mouth at all.

Shon reeled in shock. “How are you using the link?”

“I am here to speak to your general.”

“I am the general.” Shon stepped forward again, lowering his gun slightly to display his uniform. “You can speak to me.”

Wide holes opened on the thing’s neck, sniffing like nostrils, or a blowhole. “You are not a general.”

“Battlefield promotion,” said Shon. “All our generals are dead.”

Shon felt a wave of confusion so crippling he nearly dropped his gun, and saw in his peripheral vision that the other soldiers were staggering under the same effect. He righted himself, trying again to project as much strength and confidence as he could.

“What do you want to say to us?”

“I am here to tell you that the Earth is changing,” the thing rumbled. It shifted its weight from one massive leg to the other, and still its mouth never opened as it spoke. “You must prepare yourselves.”

“For what?”

“For the snow.”

The giant turned and walked away.

“For snow?” Shon took a step to follow it, confused at the strange pronouncement, and even more so by the sudden departure. “Wait, what do you mean? Winter? What are you talking about? What are you?”

“Prepare yourselves,” said the thing, and Shon saw the slits over its collarbones flare open again, and suddenly he was staggering from fatigue, his body going numb, his eyes struggling just to stay open. He tried to speak, but the world grew dark, and all around him the soldiers were sinking to their knees, collapsing in the dirt.

Shon managed one more “Wait” before the crippling need for sleep overpowered him, and his eyes forced themselves shut. His last view was the monster’s back as it plodded slowly away.

CHAPTER EIGHT

“You’re useless,” said Dr. Morgan. She was staring at the wall screens, filled to overflowing with data on Kira’s biology, Kira’s immune system, Kira’s DNA, Kira’s everything. They had spent weeks studying her from every possible angle, Morgan and Vale and Kira together, and they had found nothing. There was nothing in her genes that could stop or reverse or even slow expiration, no way to save the Partials from dying. For Kira it was a devastating loss, and she lay on the operating table with no energy left—not physically, not mentally, and certainly not emotionally. She felt like a raw nerve, exposed and despairing, every bit as useless as Morgan said she was. She looked across at her face on the wall screen, sideways to her perspective, gaunt and gray and checkered with scars and bandages from a dozen different invasive surgeries. Her face was a doppelgänger that had betrayed her—her own body an unsolvable riddle, and an implacable enemy.

For Morgan, the realization hit like a tidal wave. She screamed in frustration, finally giving up, and in a sudden fit of rage pulled out her sidearm and shot the screen, fracturing it into a jagged web of bright, vicious fangs. The image remained, split in serrated shards, and Kira saw her face abruptly cracked and refracted—an eye on this piece, a strand of hair on that one, the corner of a mouth made large and separate and meaningless.

“Useless!” Morgan screamed again. She stood up, spinning around with the gun extended, and Vale jumped in front of Kira, desperately trying to calm the raging scientist. Kira, for her part, was too despondent to move.

“Be reasonable, McKenna.”

“How much time did I waste on her?” Morgan demanded. “How many Partials have expired while I was in here wasting my time on a dead end!”

“That’s not her fault,” said Vale. “Put down the gun.”

“Then whose fault is it?” Morgan seethed, thrusting the gun in Vale’s face, then turning back to the damaged screen and firing three more rounds into it: bam bam bam, a therapy of destruction shattering the remnants of Kira’s projected face. “It’s our fault, if it’s anyone’s,” she said, more softly this time, though every bit as furious. “Even mine, though I only knew half the plan at the time. Armin’s fault, maybe, because he seems like the only one who knew the whole thing, but he’s gone.” She snarled and threw the gun on the floor. “I can’t shoot him.” She gripped the edge of a small rolling table, and Kira braced herself, waiting for the woman to throw it aside, scattering scalpels and syringes across the white tile floor, but Morgan’s rage seemed to be subsiding. Instead of throwing it, she was gripping it for support. “It doesn’t matter whose fault it is,” said Morgan. “All we can do now is look for another lead.” She stared at her computers, or through them to something else beyond, but there was no hope in her eyes.

Kira clutched the thin operating blanket tighter around her shoulders, rolling sideways on the table and curling into a ball. She watched Vale, his mouth open, preparing to speak but holding back, looking at Morgan as if trying to build up the nerve. His hesitance made Kira angry—far more than the action merited, she knew, but her nerves were worn raw. She sneered and croaked at him.

“Just say it.”

He looked at her. “What?”

“Whatever you keep trying to say. You’ve been on the verge of it all morning, just get it out.”

He took a deep breath. “It’s just that …” He grimaced, still staring at the back of Morgan’s head. “Look, I don’t want this to sound wrong; I’m not trying to say ‘I told you so’—”

“Don’t even start,” said Morgan.

“But I do think we need to consider the possibility that we’ve backed the wrong horse, so to speak,” said Vale, pushing forward despite her warning. “Both species are dying, and we know the cure for one of them—let’s just focus on that one, and save as many humans as we can—”

“And let the Partials die?” Morgan demanded. “Two hundred thousand people that we helped create—practically our children—and we should do nothing? Or worse yet, enslave them? Like your master plan? Lock them up in some basement dungeon as … what, feed stock? A temporary cure for the lucky species we deigned to save?”

“We’re past the point of options we can all agree on,” said Vale. “Everyone is dying. We’re running out of time, and this is a dead end, and I don’t think I’m being a monster to suggest that we need to use what little time we have left pursuing the only solution that any of us have managed to uncover.”

“The cure for RM is just as much of a dead end,” said Kira. “In another ten months every Partial will be gone, and the cure will be gone with them, and none of this will matter.” She thought again of Samm, and longed to see him again before he expired. But he was on the other side of the continent, with a toxic wasteland and a pair of solemn promises keeping them apart.

“That’s why we have to act now,” said Vale. “Extract as much of the cure as we can and store it for the future, to give us a buffer while we try to find another solution.”

“We have ten months left—” said Morgan.

Vale sighed, as if his argument was self-evident. “Ten months is nothing.”

“But we could still do it,” hissed Morgan, “and the humans will still be there when we’re done.”

“Both of you shut up,” said Kira, forcing herself to sit. She wanted nothing more than to lie down, to heal from her weeks of surgeries, to close her eyes and let this whole problem go away, but she couldn’t. She’d never been able to let go of anything, and no matter how much she cursed herself now, she pushed herself up, gritted her teeth, and stepped down to the floor. “Shut up,” she repeated. “You fight like my sisters, and I’m not in the mood.” She gathered the blanket around her, shivering in the cold room, and walked to one of the undamaged wall screens. “We’re doctors, dammit, let’s act like it.”

“We’ve been acting like it for weeks,” said Vale. “I think we’ve earned a little break for self-pity.”

“And only two of us are doctors,” said Morgan snidely. “Neither of them are you.”

“Only two of us figured out the cure for RM,” Kira countered, studying the monitors. “Go ahead and remind yourself which two.”

Morgan sneered, but after a moment she stalked to the door. “Have your little pity party,” she said to Vale. “I have work to do.” She stormed into the hall and slammed the door behind her.

“I delight in anyone who stands up to that harridan,” said Vale, “but she’s arguably the most powerful person in the world right now. You need to keep a civil tongue.”

“People have been telling me that my whole life,” said Kira, only barely paying attention to him. She stared at the vast screen, cataloguing the data in her mind, searching for some kind of order in the chaos—some final, perfect key that would pull it all together and make sense of it. “What do you see here?”

“Your entire life, reduced to numbers,” said Vale. “Cellular decay rates, gene sequences, pH levels, white cell counts and bone marrow samples—”

“The answer’s not here,” said Kira.

“Of course it’s not here.”

She felt a tiny spark of excitement, the familiar thrill of solving a riddle slowly coming back to her. “But this is the most exhaustive biological study I’ve ever seen. It’s not just my data, it’s years’ worth of studies about expiring Partials and healthy Partials and human test subjects and everything else. Whatever else you want to accuse her of, Dr. Morgan is spectacularly thorough.”

“You’re acting like that’s good news,” said Vale, “but everything you’re saying only makes our situation worse. Morgan’s a brilliant scientist, and she’s been collecting this data for over a decade, and the answer’s still not here. If you’ve already looked everywhere and you can’t find your answer, your answer doesn’t exist. There is no cure for expiration.”

Kira spun around, her eyes alive with eagerness. “Do you know how I found the cure for RM?”

“By capturing a Partial and experimenting on him,” said Vale. “Kind of puts your current situation into an interesting karmic light.”

Kira ignored the jibe. “We did everything for RM that Morgan’s done for expiration, and we ran into this same wall—we’d tried everything, we’d failed at everything, and we thought we had nothing left. We found the cure because we looked in a Partial, and we looked in a Partial because he was literally the only thing we hadn’t looked in yet. It didn’t make sense, it didn’t follow from any data we’d previously collected, it was just a hunch—an absolute Hail Mary—but it worked, by pure process of elimination. If you’ve already looked everywhere and you can’t find your answer, you haven’t looked everywhere yet.”

Vale walked toward the screen, studying the glowing words and numbers as he did. “I know the Trust kept a lot of secrets from one another,” he said, engaging more actively in her brainstorm. “But I can assure you there are no more mysterious species out there we can gather up and poke around in.”

“Not strictly true,” said Kira. “On our trip to the Preserve we were attacked by talking dogs.”

“The Watchdogs aren’t a cure for expiration,” said Vale, tapping the screen to call up a file on the semi-intelligent animals. “Believe it or not, Morgan’s already studied them, trying to see if they had the same expiration date the Partials did. They don’t carry any more potential cures than you do.”

“Which is exactly why this giant, useless data dump is such a godsend,” said Kira. “It’s like a road map that only shows ninety-nine percent of a country—all we have to do is figure out what isn’t on the map, and that’s where the answer is. The one percent of the territory that we haven’t studied yet.”

“Okay,” said Vale halfheartedly, flicking through a list of digital folders, “what’s not in here?” He stopped, watching as his simple touch created a cascade of innumerable folders flying past him on the screen. “How are we even supposed to know where to start?”

“We start by thinking about the people, not the numbers,” said Kira. “This isn’t just data, it’s Morgan’s data, collected by her based on her own suppositions. And she wasn’t looking for a natural, random phenomenon, she was looking for something created by another person—by Armin Dhurvasula. He had a plan for everything, you said he did, so all we have to do is figure out what it was.”

“If your plan relies on us reading the mind of a dead mad scientist who might have come up with a plan to save the world, maybe, I’m going to suggest that we’d be better off looking for another plan.”

“It’s not mind reading,” said Kira, “just … think about it. What were the resources Armin had to work with?”

“The entire industry of genetic engineering.”

“Divided into a specific subset of tools,” said Kira. “Each of you in the Trust had a specific job, right? What was his?”

Vale narrowed his eyes, as if suddenly caught by the viability of Kira’s line of thought. “He did the pheromones—the link system.”

Kira grimaced, pulling up the folders about Morgan’s pheromonal research. It was one of the biggest subsections in the databank. “Morgan has researched every aspect of the pheromones she could think of,” she said, shaking her head as she flicked through the list of subjects: Communication; Tactics; Vulnerabilities. Dozens of folders, each with dozens of subfolders, sitting on top of a mountain of notes and experiments and images and videos. “There’s no way she missed something in all of this.”

“She missed the cure for RM,” said Vale.

Kira almost laughed. “Yeah, okay, I’ll give you that one. That still doesn’t make this any easier to figure out.”

“So now we need to think like McKenna Morgan,” said Vale. “Why did she miss the cure under all this data?”

“Because she wasn’t looking for it,” said Kira. “She was trying to solve Partial expiration, not the human RM susceptibility, so she never thought to look in the other species.”

“So maybe we should be looking in the other species, too.” Vale put his hands over his mouth, breathing through his fingers—a nervous tic Kira had noticed several times over the last few weeks of research. He stared at the data. “Let’s approach it from this angle: Morgan missed the connection because she didn’t expect Armin to make one species the cure for the other. But this can’t be as simple as reversing that same situation, because that’s impossible—he could hide the cure for humans inside the Partials because he built the Partials. He built the pheromone system that carries the human cure. But he obviously didn’t build the human genome, and unless he ran some kind of massive gene mod program we don’t know about—”

“Holy shit,” said Kira.

“I told you to keep a civil tongue,” said Vale.

“He did run one,” said Kira. Her body was practically shaking with excitement as the revelation rushed over her. “A massive program, worldwide, that reached out to every human and altered them, right under our noses—he seeded them with active biological agents, each carrying his own, custom-built DNA. If he wanted to hide the Partial cure inside humans, he had a perfect opportunity to do so.”

Vale stared at her, his face twisted in confusion, until suddenly his jaw dropped open and his eyes went wide. He struggled to speak, but he was completely dumbfounded. “Holy shit.”

“No kidding.”

“RM,” said Vale, turning back to the wall screen and clutching his head, as if expecting his brain to burst right out of his skull. “Every human being in the world is a carrier for RM. He used the world’s most contagious virus to plant the cure in the last place anyone would ever look.”

Kira nodded. “Maybe. We don’t know for sure. But it’s a start.”

“Then let’s get to work.”

CHAPTER NINE

Kira read through Dr. Morgan’s archive without sleeping, without leaving the room, not even pausing to eat. The grim scientist had studied RM, but only peripherally, and never in the context of Partial expiration. Most of her research on the subject was related to Pheromone 47, the mysterious particle that Kira had dubbed the Lurker, because it didn’t seem to have any purpose. Morgan’s hypothesis had been that the Lurker could cause RM, or somehow trigger it in a human who was carrying RM but had not yet manifested symptoms. Kira had deduced—over a year ago now, she realized—that the Lurker was in fact the cure for RM, but she had only made that connection because she’d spent months studying RM itself. Morgan had never done that.

The records also contained a fair bit about the other Partial factions, the ones who still held out against Morgan’s consolidation, and Kira read these now and then as breaks between the endless string of biology studies. Each rival faction was too small for the larger armies to bother with, and now that Trimble’s forces had been brought into her fold, Morgan seemed to be ignoring them completely. Each one was marked with an approximate location, and one or two lines explaining their reasons for not supporting Morgan: “disagrees with our methods”; “opposed to medical experimentation”; “formed a new, pacifist cult”; and so on. The nearest was a group called the Ivies, somewhere in northern Connecticut. She read each new entry with fascination, astonished not just at the variety, but at the one thing that made each group the same: Faced with the issue of supporting Dr. Morgan or dying of expiration, they chose the latter. None of them had firm plans to solve it on their own—or at least if they did, it wasn’t recorded in Morgan’s files. Kira wondered if Morgan’s records had a prideful blind spot, or if the other factions were really just ready to die. Trimble, it seemed, had been holding out for something to step in and cure it all for her. Were the others the same?

Did anyone, in the end, have any hope of being saved?

Scrolling through the medical records, Kira’s mind turned just as often to Arwen, the baby she’d saved from RM. But no, she wasn’t a baby anymore—that had been over a year ago. She’d be a toddler now. Setting aside her cursory glances of the children at the Preserve, Kira hadn’t seen a toddler since the Break, more than thirteen years ago, and though she had studied pregnancy and childbirth in excruciating detail, she realized she knew next to nothing about childhood itself. How fast did children grow? Would Arwen be walking by now? Talking? The entire concept of early childhood development had never come up before, for her or for anybody. Madison would be learning everything for the first time.

Kira felt a wave of despair, thinking that Arwen’s tiny, precious life wouldn’t even matter if she couldn’t find a way to cure everyone completely.

She dove back into her studies, determined to do just that.

RM was a shockingly complex virus that passed through multiple stages over the course of its life cycle. When she’d been studying Samm—well over a year ago, she thought grimly—she’d named these stages the Spore, the Blob, and the Predator. The Spore was the most basic version of the virus, created inside of the Partial respiratory system, where it passed into the air and, eventually, into a human body. As soon as it entered the bloodstream, usually by being absorbed through the lungs, it transformed itself into the Predator—a vicious killer that sought only to reproduce itself and build more of the Spore, attacking the host and practically eating it alive, breaking down every cell and tissue it could find in a mad rush to spread the disease to as many new hosts as possible. Carried to its extreme conclusion, this process could reduce a human body to goo, but obviously the infected person would die long before, as her organs and internal systems broke down. Most hosts actually died from fever, as their bodies fought back so violently they ended up frying themselves from within.

As deadly as the Predator was, human doctors knew very little about it, simply because it killed too efficiently. Anyone who lived long enough to be properly studied was either inherently immune—a staggeringly small percentage of the population—or infected with the third stage of the virus, which Kira had named the Blob. She had thought the Blob was the killer, but the Blob was in fact a combination of two different particles: just as the Spore reacted with human blood to become the Predator, so the Predator reacted with the Lurker, the mysterious Pheromone 47, to become the Blob—a fat, harmless, almost completely inert version of the virus. The Partials breathed out the disease, but they also breathed out the cure, which they could pass along in proximity to a human. Vale and Morgan insisted that the Trust had never intended for RM to destroy the human race, and it was the Predator they were probably referring to—RM was simply too good at its job, far better than anyone had ever expected, and the disease spread too quickly among people far from any Partials. Graeme Chamberlain had designed it, and killed himself soon after, so whether he’d done it on purpose was anyone’s guess. But the key interaction, the most important part of the process, was that third stage. The Blob. It said so much about the Trust, and about their plan, and about the man who’d come up with it.

Armin Dhurvasula. Kira’s father.

Kira had yet to find any solid connection between RM and expiration, but she had leads. First of all, she knew from Dr. Vale that the purpose of RM had been to tie humanity intrinsically to its engineered children. The Partials were thinking, feeling people, and the human race couldn’t be allowed to cast them aside like used tools when it was done with them. By putting the cure for RM inside the Partials, it seemed as if they were making a clear statement about the solution to this problem—the humans who cast the Partials aside would get sick, but the humans who embraced them would be fine. The Partials would breathe out their cure, the humans would breathe it in, and everyone would be healthy. And if the Predator had been less deadly, that plan probably would have worked. Would the same plan have saved the Partials as well?

If Kira was right, somewhere in the life cycle of the RM virus there was a cure for expiration. Obviously it wouldn’t be in the Spore, because then the Partials could heal themselves; it wouldn’t be in the Predator, either, because the mere presence of the Partials removed the Predator from the bloodstream. No, the cures seemed to be designed to activate only when the species intermingled, so what she was looking for would be buried in the Blob. The Partials would give humans the Lurker, thus saving them, and then the humans would turn around and give something back to the Partials and save them … but what? Was there a fourth stage of the virus she hadn’t encountered yet? Was there another interaction she hadn’t seen? It was possible that some of the Partials who’d spent a lot of time around humans would have already been exposed to the cure, but the only way to test that was to wait until their expiration date and see if they died. She opened a new file on her medicomp and made a note to check the records for something like this, but she didn’t hold out much hope for it—if any of the Partials had survived their expected expiration, it would be bigger news. Very few of the Partials had come into contact with the humans anyway, not for nearly eleven years. The Partials involved in the East Meadow occupation had received plenty of human contact, but was it enough? How much did it take? How quickly could it take effect? There were too many variables, and they were running out of time—observational data wasn’t good enough. She would have to test her theory directly, and that meant hands-on experimentation: She had to obtain a sample of the Blob and expose it to Partial physiology.

It was a good plan. It was the only plan she could make. But the steps she would have to take to carry it out made a part of her die inside.

“We need to kidnap a human.”

Dr. Vale looked up from his medicomp screen; another iteration of the same data Kira had been poring over for days. He stared at her a moment, blinking as his eyes refocused from the screen to her face. “Excuse me?”

“We need a human test subject,” said Kira. “We have to study the interactions between the stage-three RM virus and a living Partial, and the only way to get stage-three RM is from a human. I’m not human, and you’ve already used gene mods to make yourself immune. The only way to get what we need is from a human—I don’t like it, but it’s a medical necessity. What we learn in this experiment could save the world.”

Vale stared a moment longer, his face blank, before finally furrowing his brow and turning fully toward her. “Forgive my incredulity, but is this the same young woman who called me a monster for keeping Partials imprisoned under the pretense of medical necessity?”

“I told you I didn’t like it. And I’m only talking about taking blood samples, not inducing a comatose state in our subject for years on end—”

“Is this also the same young woman,” Vale continued, “who was herself kidnapped and studied? In this same facility?”

Kira gritted her teeth, frustrated both with him for resisting, and with herself for suggesting it in the first place. It tore her apart even to consider it, but what other options were there? “What do you want me to say?”

“I don’t know,” said Vale. His voice sounded lost and weary. “I’m not fishing for a specific response, I’m just … surprised. And saddened, I suppose.”

“Sad because this is our only option left?”

“Sad because I may have just witnessed the death of the world’s last living idealist.”

Kira clenched her fists, trying to calm herself as tears threatened. “If we can find the interaction between the species, with RM as a catalyst for both cures, we can save the world. We can save everybody. Isn’t that worth every sacrifice we can make?”

“When you gave yourself to this research, it was a sacrifice,” said Vale. “I didn’t like it, but I admired you for it, but now—”

“Now we have even less time to debate the ethics of it—”

“Now you’re talking about someone else,” said Vale, raising his voice to talk over her. “Now I see I was wrong about you, because you weren’t giving yourself for a cause, you were just obsessed, as obsessed as Morgan is, and you only gave yourself because you didn’t have anyone else to give.”

Kira’s tears were real now, streaming hotly down her face as she screamed back at him. “Why are you fighting me so much?”

“Because I know what it feels like!” he roared. He stared at her, his chest heaving with the force of his emotion, and she looked back in stunned silence. He took a few more ragged breaths, then spoke more softly. “I know what it’s like to betray your ethics, your humanity, everything that makes you who you are, and I don’t want you to go through that. I destroyed ten lives in the Preserve—ten Partials that I didn’t just enslave, I tortured. I loved them so much I betrayed the entire world to give them the life they deserved, and when that plan went as wrong as it could possibly go, I betrayed them in return, all to save what, a thousand humans? Two thousand? Two thousand humans who are just going to die alone once the only source of the cure expires anyway.”

“Not if this experiment works.”

“And if it does?” asked Vale. “What then? Say the humans can’t live without the Partials, and the Partials can’t live without the humans—how will that possibly end well? Are you expecting some kind of glorious cultural marriage between the two? Because that’s not what happened before, and it’s never going to. The group with the power has always oppressed the group without—first the humans, by making Partials in the first place, and forcing them to fight and die and come home to a life of second-class subservience. Then the Partial War. Then my work in the Preserve. Dr. Morgan’s experimentation with live subjects. Even you captured a Partial for study and were captured in return. Now Morgan’s invaded East Meadow and the humans are fighting tooth and nail, and Kira the Partial wants to capture a human. Don’t you see the futility of it all? You know both sides better than anyone. If you can’t live in peace, how can anyone else hope to do it?”

Kira tried to protest, knowing that he was wrong—that he had to be wrong—but completely failing to find any reasons why. She wanted him to be wrong, but that wasn’t enough to make it so.

“There will be no cultural marriage,” said Vale. “No meeting of equals. The future, if we have one at all, will be a mass cultural rape. Tell me with a straight face that that’s good enough, that that’s acceptable on any conceivable level.”

“I …” Kira’s voice trailed off.

There was nothing to say.

CHAPTER TEN

Samm shouted into the hallway, “I think this one’s waking up!” He heard a flurry of activity and raced back to the side of the bed where Partial Number Five was slowly stirring. The Partials from Vale’s lab had been free of the sedative for weeks now, but the effects had lingered, and their bodies, unconscious for nearly thirteen years, seemed reluctant to wake up. Many in the Preserve had given up hope that they would wake up at all, but Samm had refused to abandon them. Now Number Five—they did not know their names—was moving, not just shifting in his bed, but fidgeting, coughing, and even groaning around his breathing tube. Samm had watched with growing excitement all morning, but when Five finally started to flutter his eyelids, as if struggling to open them, Samm called for the others. They came flooding into the room: Phan and Laura and Calix, who was now on crutches as Heron’s bullet wound slowly healed in her leg. The girl pointedly avoided even looking in Heron’s direction.

Avoiding Heron was all too easy these days, as she seemed to have withdrawn herself from the community—not completely, but almost. Instead of disappearing from sight, she simply hovered along the edges, lurking in shadows and hallways, detached from the others. She stood now against the back wall of the hospital room, practically in reach of the humans but somehow miles apart from them. Samm knew without looking that she was as curious about the humans’ behavior—and Samm’s—as she was about the slowly waking Partial. Her link data was typically analytical, but with a tint of the growing confusion that Samm had started to sense from her more and more frequently.

WHY?

Samm did his best not to respond, focusing his thoughts—and through them, his link data—on the stirring Partial. He had approached Heron about her apparent confusion before, but every time he did, she left immediately. He didn’t know what she was trying to figure out, but she wasn’t interested in talking about it—but neither did she seem interested in leaving the Preserve entirely. The one thing he knew for sure about Heron was that if you saw her lurking in the shadows, it was only because she wanted you to. What did she want now? He would have to think about it later, when the link wouldn’t give him away.

Partial Number Five had been sending out link data of his own, and Samm returned his focus to that. It was both fascinating and tragic. The link was designed to carry tactical information in the field of battle, informing your squad mates of both danger and safety and syncing everyone to the same informed, efficient emotional state. One of the side effects of this system was that it was triggered from an imaginary stimulus as easily as it was from real life, making Partial soldiers vaguely aware of their sleeping companions’ dreams. The effects were more muted—a simple dream about pizza or a flashback to basic training wouldn’t usually register for anyone else—but an intense emotional experience would often spread through the squad like subtle magic, until they were all sharing the same, or a similar, dream. Like a contagious vision. If one soldier had a nightmare, soon everyone had one; if one soldier dreamed of a girl, the entire squad might wake up with an awkward mix of high fives and embarrassed chuckles. Samm’s sergeant had once dreamed of falling, and the entire group had woken up in the same terrifying moment, gasping with one loud, unified breath as the half-remembered terror subsided. A Partial soldier with a history of good dreams—or simply a very strong memory of a woman—was welcome in any squad, while a soldier haunted by darkness and nightmares was sometimes looked upon as a curse.

The comatose Partials from Dr. Vale’s lab were a pit of darkness Samm could barely stand to be next to. It wasn’t that Number Five’s dreams were dark, for there were many bursts of active, tense, and even happy data that Samm had come to identify as the sleeping Partial’s dreams. What broke his heart was the rest of the time—all the long, troubled, hopeless hours where Five wasn’t dreaming at all. The soldier seemed to exist in a state of constant pain and despair, sensing on some unconscious level that something was deeply and horribly wrong, but lacking the observation and the rational thought to decipher what it was. The other sleeping Partials were the same, with only small variations in the length and magnitude of their brief dreaming respites. Samm could feel their dark pall hanging over the entire floor of the hospital, and he worried about the turmoil they might bring with them when they finally woke up. You couldn’t spend thirteen years in that kind of a pit without being horribly, perhaps irrevocably, scarred by the experience. What would they do when they awoke? Would they be cheered by their recovery, or marked for life by their trauma? Samm had no way of knowing.

As he watched the waking Partial, thinking these thoughts, Samm couldn’t help but feel again inadequate to the unsought task that seemed ready to crush him: the leadership of the Preserve. He was not a leader, not by design and not by nature; he was an underling at best, the perfect soldier, ready to follow his commander through the gates of hell but choked by doubts when it came time to lead the charge himself. And yet here he was, stronger and better informed than almost anybody else in the Preserve, and they had started to look to him for leadership. Laura was technically in charge, but Samm was the one who knew about the sleeping Partials; Samm was the one who knew where Kira and Vale had been taken, and why; Samm was the one who gave his own breath and body to produce the RM cure and save their newborn infants. He had all the power, and they knew it—he could probably beat any ten of them in a fight, too, and he supposed they knew that as well. Even Heron followed him, often wordlessly, though he supposed that was less out of subservience than a simple distaste for taking any leadership herself.

Samm watched the Partial twitching back to life, sensing the horror in its soul, and wondered again if it was a good idea to bring them back at all. Nine Partials could destroy a community like this; nine angry, possibly unhinged Partials would cut through it like a rain of blades. It should be Kira deciding this, he thought, not me—she was the leader, the thinker, the visionary. I’m just some guy.

Like it or not, though, it was his decision, and he wasn’t going to make one against his own people. Thus the Partials were nursed back to health, risks and all, and when they woke up, they’d find some guy named Samm waiting to say hello. He would do his best. He brought children into their rooms sometimes, and tried to send happy thoughts over the link and hoped those actions could counteract their thirteen years of darkness. It was a simple plan, but he was a simple man, and sometimes simple was good. He hoped this was one of those times.

“Here he comes,” said Heron. Samm glanced at her, surprised that she would be the first to announce the final step of Number Five’s awakening, but a sudden cry from Calix made him look back. Heron was right. The gaunt soldier was struggling actively now, not just waking up naturally but striving, practically clawing at the universe to force himself awake by choice. He coughed and sputtered, and Samm jumped up, reaching for the breathing tube and pulling it from Five’s throat. The soldier’s eyes flew open, and his hand shot up to grab Samm’s arm, clamping down with surprising strength for someone so atrophied.

“Help.” His voice was ragged from disuse, thin and raw, but the link data slammed into Samm like a moving truck. The newly opened eyes were wild with terror, and Samm felt the same terror welling up in his own gut—a numbing, crippling, overwhelming sense of wrongness, of helplessness, of boundless fear. Samm raced to sort through his thoughts, trying desperately to separate his own mind from this irrational fright before the link overwhelmed him; he closed his eyes and repeated every comforting detail he could think of, one after the other like a mantra.

You’re safe. We’re your friends. We’re protecting you. We’re healing you. You’re safe. He realized the soldier probably thought he’d been captured, waking up abruptly with none of his companions nearby and no officer to reassure him; any of his squad mates he could sense on the link would be broadcasting the same catastrophic confusion that he was. We’re your friends. We’re protecting you. We’re healing you. You’re safe.

“Help.” The soldier’s voice was painful to hear, as if the words themselves were bleeding. “Arm.”

“What does that mean?” asked Calix. “Does his arm hurt? Why did he say ‘arm’?”

“He knows he’s unarmed,” said Phan. “He’s afraid.”

“He’s still waking up,” said Laura, shaking her head. “He’s not rational. Give him time.”

“He might never be rational,” said Heron. “We don’t know what kind of brain damage he’s sustained from being asleep for thirteen years.”

“You’re not helping,” said Calix.

“I could shoot you again,” said Heron. “Would that help?”

“You’re safe,” said Samm. “We’re your friends. We’re protecting you. We’re healing you.”

“Hole,” said the soldier. “Blood.”

One of the hospital’s few nurses burst into the room. “One of the others is waking up.” She looked over her shoulder, listening to a distant shout, then turned back with a frantic mania. “Two of them.”

Five of the nine were awake before morning, though all but one of them had to be restrained. They seemed insane, mad and squalling like superpowered children; Laura thought their minds had been destroyed by Vale’s enforced coma, while Calix, more charitably, suggested that their minds were simply still asleep, and only their bodies had awoken. Samm thought about it just long enough to decide that he didn’t have enough information to decide, and that his course of action would be the same no matter what was wrong. He helped to hold their thrashing limbs while the nurses tied each Partial down with sturdy leather cords.

He worried, briefly, that the damage to their minds was his own fault, having somehow harmed them when they disconnected the Partials from their life support systems, but he pushed that thought away. There was no turning back now, and nothing he could do. He could only solve so many problems at once, so he would spare no time worrying about things he couldn’t change.

When the sun rose and the next shift of nurses arrived at the hospital, Samm briefed them in full before sending the night shift back to their apartments. He murmured his thanks as they left, but stayed himself; there were still four Partials set to wake up, and while they had been preemptively bound, he still wanted to be there when they woke up.

I don’t want them to wake up and think they’re in prison, he thought. Phan urged him to get some sleep, but Samm was fine—fatigued, yes, but not overly so. He had been designed for far worse physical punishment than a single sleepless night. Emotional punishment, on the other hand …

That was another problem he couldn’t solve, and so he pushed it away. Others could help the Partials as they awoke, whispering and soothing and calming their unfocused agitation, but only with words. He was the only one who could speak to them through the link, and so he stayed. The air itself, thick with the link data of nine traumatic disasters, hung around him like a poison. He sat in the room of Partial Number Three, the next one they expected to rise, and tried to think happy thoughts.

WHY?

The thought rang in his head for nearly a minute before he realized it was not his own. He looked up and saw Heron standing in the corner behind the door, though he was certain she hadn’t been there before. Either he was going crazy, or she was specifically trying to be mysterious. He guessed it was the latter, and wondered what petulance would spark such an odd behavior. Or maybe she simply didn’t want anyone else to see her.

“You’re not a ghost,” said Samm. “I know you didn’t walk through that wall.”

“And you’re not as observant as you think,” said Heron. She stepped out of the darkness and walked toward him, padding across the floor like a cat. Samm imagined her pouncing on him with her teeth bared, tearing the flesh from his face, and realized that he was probably much more exhausted than he realized. Partials were rarely struck by such colorful daydreams. Heron turned the room’s other chair and plopped into it with a distinct lack of grace. She was exhausted as well. “I suppose it’s a wonder you saw me at all, with so much hell in the air.”

“I linked you,” said Samm, then paused, too exhausted to explain himself clearly. “Though I guess there are even more link distractions than visual ones.”

“You don’t have to do this.”

Samm looked around. “I’m just sitting in a room. That’s all I’d be doing if I went home.”

“Home is a few thousand miles away.”

“You know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t,” said Heron. “You think of this place as home? We shouldn’t even be here.”

“You didn’t have to stay.”

“Neither did you.”

“I promised I would,” said Samm. “That means I have to, as surely as if I was chained here.”

“If promises are chains,” said Heron, “you should learn not to make any.”

“You don’t understand,” said Samm. He watched Partial Number Three as he lay in the hospital bed, his eyes blinking rapidly—he was dreaming, and from the intensity of his link data Samm knew it was something terrible. The Partial was running, as fast as he could, blasting the room with his fear.

GET OUT

And underneath it, softer but ever-present, Heron’s unspoken question: WHY?

Samm looked at her, tired of games, and asked her directly, “Why what?”

She narrowed her eyes.

Samm leaned forward. “You really don’t understand why I’m here, do you? That’s what you keep asking about.” He peered into her face, lost in the link and trying to read her eyes, her mouth, her expressions. The way humans did. But it was just a face.

Maybe Heron didn’t have any emotions, on her face or the link. Just questions in an empty shell.

“You stayed too,” he said. “You sold us out to Morgan, but you stayed. Why are you still here?”

“You only have a few months left to live,” said Heron. “Dr. Morgan is looking for a cure, but you can’t get it out here.”

“So you stayed to help me get back?”

“Do you want to go back?”

Yes, thought Samm, but he didn’t say it out loud. It wasn’t that easy anymore. He hesitated, knowing his confusion would be clear to her on the link, but there was no helping that.

GET OUT, linked the soldier, writhing in his restraints, trapped in his own nightmare.

Samm took a slow breath. “I promised to stay.”

“But you don’t want to.”

“It’s my own choice.”

“But why?” Her voice was louder now, and the question hammered into him on the link. “Why are you here? You want to know what I’m asking? I’m asking why you’re here. You want to know why I stayed? Because I want to know why you did. We’ve known each other for almost twenty years now, we fought together in two wars, I followed you through a toxic hell because I trust you, because you’re the closest thing I’ve ever had to a friend, and now you’re going to kill yourself with inaction. That’s not a decision a rational person makes. Your expiration date will come, and you’ll die, and … why? You think you’re saving these people, but you’re only buying them, what, eight extra months? A few more infants saved, a slightly larger generation lives, and then you die and they stop having children and their slightly larger generation grows up and they can’t have any children and the whole world dies. Eight months later than it would have.” Her voice was hot and angry, spitting the words through clenched teeth. “Why?”

Samm pointed at Number Three. “I’m helping them, too.”

“By putting them through this?” Heron yanked on the leather cords.

GETOUTGETOUTGETOUT

“Their expiration dates are even sooner than yours,” said Heron. “You’re waking them up, detoxing them from whatever mind warp Vale put them under, forcing them through this torture, just so they can wake up and die?”

“I’m helping them.”

“Are you?”

“I’m giving them a chance,” said Samm. “That’s more than they had before.”

“Then give yourself the same chance,” said Heron. “Live now, and figure out how to keep living tomorrow. These people are gone, so give them up—come with me back to Morgan and get the cure and live through your expiration. Let’s go home.”

“We don’t even know if she’s found a cure.”

“But if you go home, there’s a chance!” Heron roared. “Go home and you might die anyway, stay here and you die no matter what.”

“It’s not just about living—”

“What the hell else is it about?”

“It’s about living right.”

Heron said nothing, staring at him with fire in her eyes.

“These soldiers kept the Preserve alive for thirteen years,” said Samm. “There are thousands of children who are alive today because these nine men helped them—maybe not willingly, maybe not even knowing what they were doing, but they did it, and they went through hell to do it, and I can’t just leave them to die for that. Let’s say only half of them wake up sane, and only half of those are in shape to make the journey back to Morgan; that’s still two of them she can give the cure to, and two is twice as many as me. Staying here doubles the number of Partials I can save from expiration, at the very least, and even your emotionless calculator brain has to see that that’s worth the trade.”

His fervor grew as he spoke, and he spit the final words like an indictment, feeling good to let his emotions out. He sat watching Heron, waiting for a response, but the link was empty. The soldier had fallen asleep, and Heron was a blank page. An empty shell.

“You can save more Partials …” Her voice trailed off. “But none of them are you.”

She stood up and left, as silent as a shadow, and as Samm watched her go, he couldn’t help but wonder if he’d completely misinterpreted the conversation.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Marcus watched the forest through the broken glass of an old window frame, holding his breath. Commander Woolf had chosen the hiding spot just outside of Roslyn Heights, and it was a good one—a house so covered in vines that no one outside would even know there was a window in this part of the wall, let alone that four people were hiding inside. Galen, one of Woolf’s soldiers, was watching the front door with their biggest gun—an assault rifle they’d salvaged from a dead Grid patrol—while the fourth man in their group, a Partial named Vinci, kept watch from a different window. Their ragtag group were the only survivors from Woolf’s ill-fated diplomatic mission to the Partials. They had been hoping to form an alliance with the largest of the Partial factions, in a desperate bid to fight back against Dr. Morgan’s invasion, but a schism in the Partial ranks had destroyed that plan almost before it could start. The friendly faction fell, and now Morgan ruled them all—all but Vinci, and a handful of tiny, independent factions scattered through the mainland. Woolf’s new plan was to unite those factions to oppose Morgan’s army, but they couldn’t do it alone. They needed to find the only successful group of human resistance fighters.

They needed to find Marisol Delarosa.

Marcus saw a movement from the corner of his eye—just the shake of a leaf, but he’d learned from experience not to take anything for granted. He watched the leaf, and the foliage around it, with a keen intensity, his mind racing with any number of horrifying possibilities: It might be one of Delarosa’s guerrillas, or it might be a Partial soldier; maybe a whole squad of Partial soldiers, slowly surrounding them, getting ready to attack. Maybe it was a Partial sniper, buried in leaves and sticks and camouflage, lining up the perfect shot to drill Marcus right through the eye.

This is when the little bird hops into view and I chuckle derisively at my own paranoia, thought Marcus. Nothing moved. Come on, little birdie. You can do it. He stared at the foliage for two minutes, for five minutes, for ten, but no bird appeared, and no soldiers. Probably just as well, he thought. If I chuckled at my paranoia, I’d probably give myself away and get sniped. Thanks for throwing me off my guard, hypothetical bird.

Commander Woolf crept up beside him, settling into position where they could whisper the latest report.

“Anything?” asked Woolf.

“Just cursing imaginary animals.”

“Crazy or bored?”

“Well,” whispered Marcus, “it’s so hard to pick just one.”

“Vinci hasn’t linked any other Partials,” said Woolf, “so we’re pretty sure there are no patrols in the area. I don’t know if that makes us more or less likely to find Delarosa, but there it is.”

“It makes us a lot less likely to be killed by Partials,” said Marcus, “so I’ll take what I can get.”

Delarosa’s White Rhinos, as she called them, had been evading the Partials for months, thanks to a combination of keeping her groups small, sticking to familiar terrain, and executing a clever system of decoys and distractions—all classic tactics of a defensive guerrilla force, and all devilishly effective. Marcus and his companions had had no more luck than the Partials in finding the elusive army, but they had a few tricks the Partials didn’t. Now and then they’d come across other human refugees, just lone fugitives, lying low from the occupation, who assured them that the White Rhinos were heading north, in a slow, secret march toward the shore. Some of the refugees had been rescued by the Rhinos, others had been fed or given other supplies, but all told the same tale. The human resistance had a plan, and they were coming this way. All Marcus’s group had to do was wait for them.

But they’d been waiting for days, and they were running out of supplies.

“You’re due for sleep soon,” said Woolf. “Go early and try to get some rest; I’ll take over your watch.”

“How much food do we have left?” asked Marcus.

“A day’s worth,” said Woolf. “Maybe more. I don’t think Vinci is eating a full share.”

“Maybe he doesn’t have to,” whispered Marcus. “For all we know he’s … photosynthetic or something. Or he’s been eating these.” Marcus picked at the vines growing across the interior wall. He pulled too hard, the leaf failed to break away like he expected, and the whole section of tendrils shook—inside and out. Marcus looked up in shock at the unexpectedly massive display. “Crap.”

A flurry of bullets slammed into the brick wall, punching through and sending a shower of broken clay shards spraying wildly through the room. Marcus threw himself to the floor, Woolf diving down beside him, and they covered their heads as they crawled for the hallway. The gunfire was quieter than usual—not silent, but more like a nail gun than the harsh gunshot explosions Marcus was used to. They reached the hallway, taking cover behind the extra layer of wall, just as the hail of bullets ceased.

“Can they see us?” asked Marcus.

“Let’s find out,” said Woolf, and stuck his hand back into the open doorway. Nothing shot it. “Probably not.”

“Or they don’t want to bother with just your hand,” said Marcus.

“If they could see us that clearly, they’d have hit us,” said Woolf. “More likely they were passing close by, saw the sudden movement, and thought it was an ambush.”

“All the shots I heard were silenced,” said Marcus. “That means Galen didn’t shoot back.”

Woolf shook his head. “They wouldn’t have hit him, they were shooting at your movement.”

“Good yet embarrassing news,” said Marcus, nodding. “But then why didn’t he shoot? From where he’s stationed he should have had a good angle on the source of that attack.”

Woolf rose to a crouch, checking his own weapon as he prepared to run. “In that case, this is the best news we’ve had all month. Who would Galen see but not shoot at?”

Marcus grinned. “You think?”

“Let’s go find out.”

They scurried down the hall to the stairs, and from there to the main floor, where Galen was crouched in another concealed gun nest. “Humans,” Galen whispered.

“How can you tell?”

“Too many body types,” said Galen. “Partials are all young men, like Vinci; this group has women, one of them pretty old.”

“Smart,” said Woolf. “You haven’t hailed them?”

“Waiting for you.”

Woolf nodded and moved away from Marcus’s window to a separate window—partly for the different angle, but Marcus realized nervously that it was also a safety precaution. If the enemy fired again when Woolf hailed them, he was the only one they’d hit. Marcus admired the wisdom of the move, but the need for it twisted a dull knot in his stomach.

“Rhinos!” Woolf shouted. He wasn’t looking out the window, but lying below it, using a small credenza as an extra layer of makeshift armor. All three of them held their breath, waiting for the reply—would it be words, or bullets?

“Stay quiet!” It was a woman’s voice, and Marcus almost thought he recognized it, but it wasn’t Delarosa. Too young, he thought.

It was the only response. Marcus peered through the gaps in the kudzu, but saw nothing. Galen shook his head. “They’ve disappeared. Now that they know we’re here, it’s too easy to hide from us.”

“You heard from Vinci?” Marcus whispered. Even if this was Morgan’s group, they would want to keep Vinci’s true nature a secret at first. A Partial ally was a valuable asset, but they needed to explain it properly first.

Galen shook his head. “Still upstairs, I think. Staying quiet.”

“Hey,” said Marcus, “it’s not my fault I gave us away.”

Galen looked at him, raising his eyebrow. “You gave us away?”

Marcus rolled his eyes. “It’s also not my fault that I told you that.”

“I can’t believe you gave us away.”

“Not on purpose,” said Marcus. “Next time you don’t know about something stupid I did, let me know you don’t know before I say it out loud.”

“How can I—”

There was a sudden thump from the back room of the house, and a strangled shout that got cut off just before it became loud enough for the sound to carry outside. Marcus spun to face the sagging kitchen door, his rifle up and ready, but stopped in surprise when he heard Vinci’s soft voice.

“It’s just me.”

Marcus furrowed his brow, confused. “What on earth?”

“They sent flankers through the back of the house,” said Vinci. “I don’t know if they’re Delarosa’s people, but they’re definitely human.”

“So you attacked them?” asked Woolf.

“Just disarmed them,” said Vinci. “Don’t shoot, I’m opening the door now.” He pushed open the kitchen door and led two cloaked figures into the front room. Marcus stared at them in surprise, then jumped up eagerly as he recognized the girl in front.

“Yoon?”

The cloaked girl looked at him, a slow smile spreading across her face as she realized who he was. “Marcus?” The smile disappeared almost immediately, and she frowned at him sternly. “Are you trying to get yourself killed?”

“We’re trying to find Delarosa.”

“By scaring the hell out of us,” asked Yoon, “and then shouting loud enough to attract every Partial in the forest?”

“Sorry,” said Marcus. “None of that was really how we intended this to go.”

“I recognize you,” said Woolf, standing up. “You’re one of the Grid soldiers who went with Kira and captured the Partial named Samm. I remember you from the disciplinary hearing.”

“I was reassigned to an outpost on the North Shore,” said Yoon. “When the Partials invaded we fled south, and the unit broke apart, and eventually I ran across the Rhinos.” She pointed to her companion, a young man who looked sixteen years old at the most; Marcus realized with a start that this made him one of the youngest humans left in the world. “This is McArthur.”

Marcus shook the boy’s hand. “You have a first name?”

“No, sir,” he said, and Marcus nodded. It had become common for some of the youngest humans to drop their first name altogether, preferring their surname because it linked them to the past. A three-year-old kid who lost everything he ever loved usually remembered that he had parents, but wasn’t likely to remember much of anything about them. Identifying himself by his surname told people like McArthur that he came from somewhere, and helped him feel connected. Sometimes that was more important than an individual identity.

“Well then,” said Marcus. “Yoon, McArthur, say hello to Galen, Vinci, and Commander Asher Woolf. We’ve been looking for you everywhere.”

“We’re not easy to find,” said Yoon. “Though there’s probably a better way to say hello than just shaking the hell out of the kudzu on the side of the house. We thought it was an ambush.”

“That was an accident,” said Marcus, giving a small, embarrassed nod. “It did work, though, so there’s that.”

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