by Dan Wells
Kira pushed her way through the plastic tunnel. “Good morning.” She said it without thinking, then paused, wondering why. When had she started to think of it as a person?
The Partial, of course, said nothing. It didn’t even seem to react when it heard her, and Kira wondered if it was asleep. She crept closer, trying to stay as quiet as she could, but the Partial groaned and coughed, rolling his head to the side and spitting.
“What are you—” She froze.
The spit was red with blood.
Kira dropped her files and rushed to his side, gently lifting his head. His face was black with bruises and crusted blood.
“Holy crap, what happened to you?”
He groaned again, slowly blinking his eyes open. “Blood.”
“Yeah,” said Kira, running to the cupboards to look for towels, “I can see you’re bleeding, but why? What happened?”
He didn’t say anything. He tilted his head, popping the joints in his neck, then held up his right arm; it moved about three inches before the restraint jerked it to a stop. He had been given a change of clothes, and Kira pulled back his sleeve to reveal an arm covered with thin lacerations, tender and pink. “They cut me.”
Kira’s mouth dropped open in horror. “Who?” The horror turned to anger almost instantly. “Who was it? The guards? Doctors?”
He nodded slightly, and probed his mouth with his tongue, making sure all the teeth were still in place.
“That’s ridiculous,” said Kira, fuming. She stomped to the microscope, snarled, and stomped back. Everything she’d thought about doing, and rejected for being inhumane, someone else had come in and done. She shot a long, cold glance at one of the cameras, an unblinking eye that stared back without emotion. She wanted to smash it, but took a breath and forced herself to calm down. Getting angry wasn’t going to solve anything. I’m trying to be the good guy here, but … is coddling the Partial really “good”? Would I be serving humanity better by testing his limits? She walked to her desk and sat down, still staring straight ahead. I don’t even know what to do.
She hung her head, and while looking down she saw the crumpled rubber glove in the garbage can. The breath test—she still needed to find a way to isolate the Partial’s breath so she could search it for samples of the airborne RM. The Spore. She still hadn’t found a good way to do it. The rubber gloves would work, she was pretty sure, but only if the subject was willing. She glanced at the Partial, grim and silent on the table.
She stood, pulled out another rubber glove, and walked slowly to the table.
“Do you have a name?”
The Partial eyed her carefully, that slow, studying look that made her feel like he was calculating everything about her.
“Why do you want to know?”
“Because I’m tired of calling you ‘Partial.’”
He studied her a moment longer, then smiled, slowly and warily. “Samm.”
“Samm,” said Kira. “I have to admit, I was expecting something more unusual.”
“It has two Ms.”
“Why two Ms?”
“Because that’s what it said on my rucksack,” said Samm. “‘Sam M.’ I didn’t realize the M was for a last name: I was two days old; I’d never met anyone with a last name. I was just… Samm. I spelled it that way on a report, and it stuck.”
Kira nodded and crouched down next to him. “Samm,” she said, “I know you have no reason to help me, no reason to do anything I say, but I want you to understand that this is very important. You guessed yesterday that RM is still a big concern for us, and you were right. Everything I’m doing here—everything we’re all doing—is to find a way to cure it. That’s why we were in Manhattan, because nothing we have left here on the island was giving us any answers. I don’t know if that’s important to you in any way, but it’s incredibly important to me. I’d give up my life to find a cure. Now I know this sounds weird, but I’m going to ask you a favor.” She paused, almost talking herself out of it, then held up the rubber glove. “Will you breathe into this?”
His eyebrow went up.
“I need you to inflate it,” she explained. “That will allow me to isolate your breath sample and study it in the medicomp.”
He hesitated. “Tell me your name.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m tired of calling you ‘human.’”
She cocked her head, looking at him. Was that a joke? His voice was still as flat and unemotional as ever but there was something almost playful behind it. Was he reaching out to her? Testing her? Behind it all, that calm, calculating look never left his eyes. Whatever he was doing, he must have more than one reason for doing it. She pursed her lips, thinking, and decided to go along with it. “My name is Kira.”
“Then yes, Kira, I will inflate your rubber glove.”
She held it to his lips, feeling his breath on her hand, then clamped it down tight while he blew strongly into the glove. It took a couple of tries to get the seal right, but soon she had a small breath sample and pinched the glove off tightly. “Thank you.” She put the glove in the medicomp sample bay, feeling only slightly ridiculous, then closed the chamber and started flicking through the screens. The scope began the long process of finding as many structures as it could, saving them for Kira to look at.
Almost immediately, a small message popped up in the corner of the screen—the scope had found a “partial match” to something in its database. Kira shook her head. No pun intended, right, microscope? A moment later another one popped up, then two more, then four more, partial match after partial match. Kira pulled up the image and found a bizarre protein construct, completely new and yet, like the scope said, very familiar. She peered closer. There were dozens of matches now, climbing swiftly toward the hundreds. Something in Samm’s breath looked very similar to—but not exactly like—the RM Blob. Kira’s fingers flew across the screen, magnifying the image, rotating it, pulling it apart. It was remarkably close to the blood-borne version of RM—a similar size, a similar shape, even some of the same nodes and receptors on the surface. It wasn’t exactly RM, but it was close enough to make Kira shiver. The few small differences were the most terrifying part, because they meant it was new. A new strain of the virus, perhaps.
And Samm was breathing it out.
Kira looked up at the ceiling, moving her eyes from corner to corner. She thought about calling out, or just running out of the room, but she paused. I need to think this through. First of all, she wasn’t sick; she had no symptoms, no discomfort, no signs of any pathogenic attack. She peered closer at the screen, studying the object: It looked like RM, but it didn’t look like a virus. A virus would have a core particle in its center, a little packet of genetic information that entered a host cell and corrupted it, but the thing in Samm’s breath didn’t have one. She searched it carefully, using her fingers to peel back the layers of the image, examining the structure in detail. As nearly as she could tell, this new particle didn’t have any way of reproducing itself. It was like a nonvirus version of the virus.
Whatever it was, the thing had given Kira something to concentrate on. She cross-referenced the image with the others in the database, searching for any sign of its purpose or function. Two possibilities immediately suggested themselves, and she jotted them down on her notepad: first, that Samm’s body could, at one time, produce the Blob, and that somehow that ability had been removed or reduced, leaving only this inert, nonviral structure. It was a vestigial particle, like the human appendix: the evidence of a previous function. Kira thought about that, staring at her notepad. Is this how the Partials spread RM? Did they just breathe it out and kill everyone? But then how did that function go away—what flipped the switch and made the deadly virus turn inert? The Partials are engineered, she thought. A switch like that, and the power to flip it on and off, could have been built right into them. But who holds the key to flipping it?
Kira shuddered, the ramifications twisting her stomach into queasy knots. And yet h
er second guess about the particle seemed even worse: that the particle in Samm’s breath was a precursor to the active virus, designed to transform on contact with human blood and become the deadly Blob. Was that the secret of Partial immunity? A virus that couldn’t even arm itself until it found a human target? That was the worst possible situation for Kira, because it meant there might be nothing she could use—no defensive mechanism she could copy from the Partials to help fight off the virus. If RM targeted humans, specifically and directly, then the only defense against it was to not be human anymore.
Maybe the only way to survive was to be a Partial.
Kira shook her head, throwing down her notepad and shoving the thought from her mind. She couldn’t think like this—she wouldn’t think like this. There had to be something in the Partial genetic code that rendered RM inert, and there had to be a way to copy it and apply it to the human genetic code. And she was going to find it. The only thing this proved for certain was that what Samm had said yesterday was true: The Partials did have a connection to RM, at a very basic level. But what was it?
She tapped on the screen, opening the particle’s profile information to give it a name. The blood-borne form was the Blob, because it was fat; the airborne was the Spore, because it was, presumably, how the virus spread. This new one she labeled the Lurker, because it didn’t have any obvious function at all. It simply sat and waited, presumably, for the right time to strike.
“You’re not going to find what you’re looking for.”
Kira started again; Samm had a funny sense of timing. But she was curious. “And how do you know what I’m looking for?”
“You’re looking for a solution.”
“I’m looking for a cure.”
“The cure is only part of it,” said Samm. “You’re looking for a solution to your problems: rebels, plagues, political unrest, civil war. You’re scared of everything, and to be fair, everything in your lives is pretty scary. You’re looking for a way to move past it, to bring your lives back together. But you’re not going to find the answers simply by curing RM. And you know it.”
He’s been listening to us, thought Kira. A lot of that he could have picked up from the hearing, but not all of it. Not the Voice, certainly. But he’s been paying attention, and he’s figured it out. Her first thought was to stop talking, to make sure the Partial couldn’t glean any more info. And yet, he was tied up and had four days to live. How could deducing an impending civil war possibly help him to escape?
She felt trapped in the room and marched past Samm to open the window for air. It wouldn’t budge. She strained against it as hard as she could, muttering curses at the Senate for locking her in, then remembered that this was ostensibly a sealed room, and felt stupid for even trying to open the window, which only made her curse more harshly.
“We don’t want you to die,” said Samm.
“Then why did you kill us?” Kira whirled to face him, feeling her face grow hot and red.
“I told you, we didn’t create RM.”
“What I found in your breath suggests otherwise.”
If that was news to Samm, he didn’t show it. “If we wanted you dead, you would be dead,” said Samm. “That’s not a threat, it’s a fact.”
“Then what do you want from us?” Kira demanded. “Why did you keep us alive? What are you planning? Is this why you were in Manhattan?”
He hesitated for a moment. “You seem like you’d do anything to ensure humanity’s survival. How far are you willing to go?”
“What are you talking about?” she asked. “What are you suggesting?”
He glanced at the corner, to a camera she knew was watching and listening to everything they said. He closed his mouth and looked at the ceiling.
“No,” said Kira, leaning over him, “you can’t just say something like that and then clam up again. Why did you even start talking if you’re not going to finish?”
He didn’t answer; he didn’t even look at her.
“Is this what you were talking about yesterday? That you can’t tell us because you don’t want to die? I’ve got news for you, Samm: You’re going to die anyway. If you’ve got something to say, say it. You were in Manhattan for a reason; are you saying it had something to do with RM?”
She waited there for a full minute, but he stayed silent, and she turned angrily back to the window, slamming the pane with her hand. The sound of the slam echoed back, but distantly. That was weird. She frowned, peering at the window, and hit it again, wondering what had caused the sound. Nothing happened. She leaned in closer, and suddenly a loud string of rapid pops drifted in from the city beyond. She looked out, trying to see what the noise could possibly be, and saw a plume of smoke rise up from somewhere beyond the trees. It couldn’t have been more than a few blocks away. The popping continued, short bursts of rapid, rhythmic noise, but it wasn’t until she saw people running that she realized what it was.
Automatic gunfire. The city was under attack.
CHAPTER TWENTY
“The Voice,” said Senator Weist. Kira was packed into a hospital conference room with Mkele and the same five senators she’d met at her hearing, and the atmosphere was more tense than she’d ever felt it. “They hit the Senate building. It was the biggest strike team yet—at least forty insurgents, maybe more—and we didn’t take a single one of them alive.”
“What if we’d been there?” demanded Hobb. His wavy hair was limp and sweaty, and his face was pale as he paced restlessly through the room. “We don’t have enough guards for this—”
“The Senate was not their target,” said Mkele. “With no meetings in session, and no senators on site, they attacked during the lightest possible guard rotation. Their purpose was obviously to get inside with as little resistance as possible.”
“So it was a robbery?” asked Delarosa. “It still doesn’t make sense. Everything we store in the Senate building they can get more easily just scavenging the outlands.”
“They were looking for the Partial,” said Mkele. The room went quiet. “Rumors are already going around. That’s why I’ve invited Ms. Walker to join us.”
“One of the soldiers talked,” said Senator Kessler, “or Kira did. We never should have trusted her.”
Kira started to protest, lining up her best and most horrible insults for Kessler’s smug face, but Mkele cut her off.
“If Kira had talked,” he said, “they would have known to attack the hospital. I think it’s more likely that the Voice didn’t know what we had, just that we probably had something; they obviously didn’t know where it was. Even the message they spray-painted on the building was vague: ‘The Senate is lying to you. What are they hiding?’ If they’d known what we were hiding, don’t you think they would have said it?”
“Only if they wanted to start a riot,” said Weist. “News of the Partial would incite nothing less.”
“A riot might be their only plausible goal at this point,” said Delarosa. “The only way for them to create enough unrest to stage a coup.”
“Given how little we actually lost,” said Mkele, “this attack helped us more than it hurt us. The information they apparently had, combined with the information they obviously didn’t have, gives me a valuable estimate of their intelligence network.”
“That’s great now,” Hobb sneered, “but what about before the attack? How did our secret get out? If you’re so brilliant, why didn’t you stop any of this from happening?”
“If you had any delusions that this was going to stay a complete secret in a community this small, you were fooling yourself,” said Mkele. “I advised against the Partial’s presence from the beginning.”
“We made our decision based on your assurances,” said Kessler. “If there’s a leak in the Defense Grid, you need to find it—”
“We knew exactly what we were getting into,” said Delarosa. “If our plan with Ms. Walker carries through, every attack will have been worth it. The potential benefits outweigh the obstacles.”<
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“If it works,” said Kessler, throwing a sharp glance at Kira, “and if the Voice don’t launch a consummate attack before we’re done. That’s a lot of ifs.”
They’re talking about my work as if they’re the ones doing it, thought Kira. Her first impulse was to protest, but she held back. No. If they think we’re working on this together, that means they’re invested in the outcome. They’re supporting the project. It doesn’t matter who gets the credit as long as somebody finds a cure.
“A lot of ifs,” Hobb continued, “and all it takes is one of them to go wrong and suddenly we’re traitors and war criminals. Weist is right about the riot: If word gets out that we’ve got a Partial in custody, no one’s going to wait for an explanation. They’re going to smash everything in sight until they find it, and then they’re going to destroy the Partial, too.”
“Then we have to move it,” said Skousen. “The attack on the town hall was highly destructive; if they do the same at the hospital, it puts too much at risk—the patients, the facilities, even the structure itself.”
“But we can’t move him,” Kira insisted. “The Nassau hospital is the only facility on the island with the resources we need for the study. Nowhere else even has the equipment.”
“The best scenario is to say nothing at all,” said Mkele. “Senator Weist’s initial reaction was correct, according to my simulations: If word gets out that we’re hiding a Partial in the middle of East Meadow, the public outcry will be passionate and violent. People will riot, or defect to the Voice en masse. I recommend we double the police patrols and triple the guard at the Senate.”
“Why complicate things?” asked Kessler. “We should just execute the thing and be done with it.”
“There’s still a lot we can learn—” said Kira, but froze when Kessler shot her a furious glance. What is that woman’s problem?
“I agree,” said Mkele. “What we need to decide is whether or not the things we stand to learn warrant the risk of this secret getting out. Ms. Walker, can you give us a report of your progress?”
