by Dan Wells
Kira was colder than she’d ever been. They’d stopped in a town called Brewster Hill for rest and new clothes, and then again in North Salem for warmer clothes and jackets, but even that wasn’t proving to be enough. Green was more resistant to the effects of the weather, and faster on the road, but even he was feeling it now. They’d gone nearly thirty miles in three days, all the way to Norwalk, and in that time the temperature had dropped twenty degrees at least. Kira was accustomed to a bit of a chill in the winter months, but nothing like this. Her breath came out in visible puffs, and her nose felt numb as she rubbed it with red, tingling fingers.
The streets of Norwalk were a deep metal canyon, just like Manhattan had been, but now there was frost on the deep-green kudzu that covered the buildings and crept in through the long-broken windows. She held out as long as she could, enduring the cold in silence, but finally decided that it wasn’t worth it—getting to Long Island one day or even one hour earlier wouldn’t do her any good if she died of hypothermia. At the next clothing store they passed, Kira led them in and they searched for heavy coats, but there were none to be found anywhere in the building.
“I guess the Break came in the summer,” said Kira. “Nobody’s stocked for this kind of weather.” She paused. “That never occurred to me before, but I guess I’ve never needed a coat before.”
Green shook his head, looking out the broken windows at the dark-gray clouds. “When was the last time you remember it being this cold?”
“Never,” Kira admitted. She recalled Vale’s wistful thoughts about the old winters, the real winters, and shivered. “Do you think it’ll last?”
“If it does, we might even see snow.” Green turned back from the window. “We need to find a hardware store—they’ll have work gloves at least, which is better than nothing, and then maybe a furniture store so we can burn some tables for warmth. I don’t want to cross the sound until this clears up.”
“What makes you think it’s going to clear up?”
“We haven’t had a storm like this in my entire life,” said Green. “Weather patterns that long-standing don’t reverse overnight. We might get a freak storm, but that’ll be it.”
“I hope you’re right.” Kira hopped down from the counter where she’d been sitting and walked back out into the frigid street. The wind had picked up, and blew her hair wildly around her head. “You know where to find a hardware store?”
“No idea. Seems more likely outside of town than in it, though.”
“That means backtracking,” said Kira. “There’s nothing ahead of us but the city and the sound.”
Green shook his head. “I don’t want to backtrack—we’re better off finding a boat and sitting out the storm in the building nearest to it. Then as soon as things are back to normal, we can jump in and race across the water.”
Kira nodded. “Keep your eyes open for parks, playgrounds, and schools. Anywhere with grounds had groundskeepers, which means they’ll have a shed or a garage somewhere with tools and work gloves.”
“Clever.”
“You know how to find maps, I know how to find gardening tools. My adopted mother was an herbalist.” The thought of Nandita quelled her cheerful mood. Nandita had helped create Kira, she knew everything about her, and yet she’d never said a word. Why? Why deceive her? Had she just hoped that the problems would all go away on their own, and that Kira would grow up and grow old and die, and never have to face the truth about who she was and where she came from? If she’d really cared, thought Kira, she’d have given me something to go on. Some help or guidance or advice that would help me to deal with all of this. She would have told me what I was built for, and why, and what I was supposed to do.
With a flash she remembered an old conversation—nearly two years ago now, one of the last times she’d ever seen Nandita before the old woman disappeared. Kira had just come home from the salvage run in Asharoken, the one where they’d triggered a bomb, and Nandita was putting away her herbs. I was troubled about something, thought Kira, probably the bombing, and Nandita said . . . Kira shook her head in disbelief, the words flooding back to her. She said exactly what I needed to hear—not then, but now. Every life has a purpose, Kira. But the most important thing you can ever know is that no matter what your purpose is, that’s not your only choice.
“Groundskeeper,” said Green. Kira looked up and saw a large brick building, the white gabled roof now cracked and yellowing with age; all around it was a wide green lawn, now overgrown with bushes and weeds and a loose forest of ten-year-old trees. There was a sign buried in the middle of the foliage, but it was too vine-choked to read.
“Looks like a government building,” said Kira. “City hall or something. They don’t always have groundskeeping equipment on site, because they handled all their properties from a central location.”
“Maybe this is the central location,” said Green. “Doesn’t hurt to check.” They walked around the side and back, finding a parking lot but no toolshed. Behind the building there was a baseball field, but this, too, had no tools or gloves or anywhere to store them. They made their way back to the main road, ready to press on and look for another park or a school, but Kira stopped in front of a house. Green shook his head. “Too fancy; they didn’t do any of their yard work themselves.”
“Not yard work,” said Kira, “but look at the sign. ‘Home Theater Design and Installation.’ I don’t know what a home theater is, but I bet they used gloves to install them.”
They started their search in the front room, moving quickly through the building; it had been converted from a home to a business and was mostly empty. The back room held a lost fortune in holovid projectors, but those were useless now. She’d have traded the entire thing for a single pair of gloves. Finally in the back parking lot they found a rusted white van, weeds growing up around the flat, deformed tires, with the company’s logo faded and peeling off the side. Kira wrenched the door open and found the back full of power cords and old projector parts, and four pairs of canvas work gloves in the top drawer of a tool chest. They pulled on two pairs each and jogged back to the main road to make up for lost time. The sky was darker now, far darker than it should have been for the time of day, and the wind was practically howling.
“We need to find shelter,” said Kira.
“We need to find a boat,” said Green. “I told you before, the instant this clears up we need to get on the water.”
“Are you afraid it’s going to start up again?”
“I’m afraid that we’re running out of time.”
“Look,” said Kira, “I’m every bit as anxious about this as you are, but we’re not going to do any good if we’re dead of exposure. It feels like it’s dropped another five degrees in the last few hours—this weather is well below freezing, and Partials or not, we’re in a very real danger of hypothermia.”
“We don’t have time to sit around waiting,” Green snapped, and picked up his pace.
“We’ll live a lot longer if we get inside—”
“Really?” said Green.
Kira stopped, trying to figure out what he meant, and the answer hit her like a fist to the gut. She wrapped her arms tightly over her freezing chest and ran to catch up with him.
“How long do you have?”
His voice was emotionless—all the more eerie considering his words. “It just now occurred to you to ask?”
“I’m sorry,” said Kira. “I’ve been focused on expiration as a concept, as an enemy to overcome. . . . You left Morgan’s army. Does that mean you didn’t think she was going to cure it fast enough to matter?”
Green walked silently, head down.
“The youngest batch has seven months left,” said Kira. Samm’s batch, she thought. She swallowed nervously, feeling tears creep up behind her eyes. “Do you have half that?” Green didn’t answer, and she felt her heart sink. “Two months?”
“One,” said Green. “I’ll be dead by the end of the year.”
“T
hat might be enough time to help you,” said Kira quickly, practically racing through the words. “The sooner we get across and find humans, the sooner we can—”
“Then stop arguing with me and look for a boat.”
Kira fell silent, trying to imagine what it would feel like to know you were going to die in one month—and worse, that you knew there was nothing you could do about it. But we can, she thought. This plan will work.
I think.
Green stopped suddenly, putting up his hand to stop her too. “Do you feel that?”
Kira concentrated on the link but felt nothing. “What is it?”
“I have no idea,” said Green. “Something big—like a whole squad’s worth of link data, that kind of signal strength. It’s just that . . . it feels like a single person.” He turned his head slowly, as if trying to pinpoint the exact source of the data. “This way, come on.”
Kira ran a few steps to catch up with him. “Wait, you’re going to look for it?”
“Of course.”
“But we’re in a hurry,” said Kira. “We don’t have time to stop and maybe get captured by a patrol squad.”
“I’m telling you, it’s one Partial,” said Green, still walking.
“But you’re dying,” said Kira. “What changed?”
“Don’t you see? We have to find it because . . .” His voice trailed off, and he shook his head. “Because we have to. Because he has something to tell us.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“How can it not make sense?” Green sounded almost frustrated, as if he were explaining that that water was wet to someone too thick to understand.
Kira shook her head. “Green, listen to me. This is the link—whatever you’re sensing right now is luring you in, on purpose.”
“Maybe. We can handle it.”
“No, we can’t,” said Kira. She thought about Morgan’s arrival in the Preserve, when she and Vale had used their own fierce control over the link to force the nearby Partials to obey them. “I’ve seen this kind of intensity in the link before, and it only comes from a member of the Trust. The people who made the Partials. There are two of them in this area—Dr. Morgan and Dr. Vale—and we don’t want to meet either one of them.” She planted herself in front of him. “If you keep going, we’ll be caught and imprisoned, maybe executed. You do not want to do this.”
He pushed past her and started running.
“Green, wait!”
She took off after him, but he was running at full speed now, arms pumping at his sides, and she struggled to keep up. Kira had something of a Partial’s physical prowess, but she wasn’t trained like he was. She sucked in breaths of freezing air, feeling her arms and chest grow sweaty with effort, and shivering almost immediately after as the sweat cooled and evaporated.
They approached an underpass and Green swerved right, scaling a stepped stone wall and then pelting onto the railroad tracks above. Kira followed, desperate to reach him and stop him, until a gust of wind brought the link data rushing into her lungs, coursing through her brain, stronger than she’d ever imagined, and then she was racing not after him but with him, convinced above all else that she needed to go now, to find this person, to hear his message. They ran along the tracks and then swerved off, down a hill and through a parking lot, crossing streets and jumping fences, until at last a vast field opened up before them. An ancient park, trees shaking in the freezing wind, and beyond it the roiling gray sea. They ran past benches and bushes and old baseball diamonds, barely visible in the new growth that had reclaimed the park. Beyond the field was another road, and beyond that a strip of sand rimmed with rocks and crashing waves. They’d run nearly a mile from where Green first felt the command. Others had apparently felt the same, for a ten-man squad of Partials sat scattered on the rocks, their expressions blank, their link data as stunned as Green’s.
At the front of the group, staring out at the ocean, sat a giant creature, dark red, with skin like rhinoceros hide. Kira slowed to a stop, the sight a shock to her senses, momentarily giving her clarity as her brain fought to determine which feelings were her own and which were coming from the link. It was a clarity that she alone experienced; the rest of the Partials stood in rapt attention.
“You’re just in time.” The thing’s voice rumbled. “It’s starting now.”
Green staggered forward, rubbing his chest to keep warm, taking up a position in the same loose semicircle as the other ten Partials. Kira walked forward as well, not stopping in the circle but pressing through it, approaching the creature directly.
“Who are you?”
“I’ve called you here to warn you,” said the creature. She couldn’t see its mouth move, but felt its voice rumbling powerfully in her chest. “I warned the people on the island, and the Partials in White Plains, but they did not heed me.”
“You’ve been to White Plains?” asked Kira. “You’ve seen Dr. Morgan?”
“It was not a happy reunion,” said the thing, and looked down at its chest. Kira followed its gaze and found that the creature’s chest was riddled with bullet holes. One arm hung uselessly at its side, and the other clutched a gaping wound in its gut. “This body can regenerate most of the damage it takes, but not this much all at once. I am dying.” It turned to look at her, and Kira saw a pair of nearly human eyes buried deep in the thing’s monstrous face. “But I have delivered my warning.”
Kira stepped forward, trying to see the wounds better. “What warning?”
“I have repaired the climate,” said the creature. “I’ve fixed the planet we broke so long ago. Now the world can heal again.”
Kira shook her head, barely understanding what he was trying to say. “You’re saying you’re the one who made it cold?”
“I cleansed the air, the water, the atmosphere. Earth’s protective layers. Undid all the damage from our weapons in the old war. I’ve restored balance. We’ll have seasons again. The first winter will be hard, and none of the people are ready. I warned them to help them survive.”
“You’re one of the Trust,” said Kira. She ran through her mental list, cataloguing every member she knew and which ones she didn’t, to puzzle out who this might be. There were only two unaccounted for, and one was her father, Armin Dhurvasula. Her mind reeled at the thought that this impossible creature—so altered by gene mods that he’d lost his humanity completely—might be her father.
She tried to speak, but her voice was lost. She coughed, shivering in the cold spray of the ocean sound, and tried again. “Who are you? What’s your name?”
“No one has used my name in . . . thirteen years.”
She stared at the wounds, at the dark blood seeping out onto the cold gray rocks below. She barely dared to speak it. “Armin?”
“No,” said the creature. It watched the coming storm with sad, wistful eyes. “My name was Jerry Ryssdal.”
Kira felt a rush of emotion—loss and sadness, that the man she’d found was not her father, and joy, that her father was not this thing dying slowly on the beach. Guilt, that she took joy in any aspect of another man’s death. She wondered if some of those emotions were his—his sadness at dying, his joy at fixing the weather. His guilt for destroying the world.
Jerry Ryssdal was the one she knew the least about; Vale had said he lived in the south, near the eternal fires of old Houston. He’d changed himself, Vale said. Kira had never known what to make of that, but it was obvious now. A brutal barrage of gene mods to help him survive in the toxic wasteland. He’d dedicated his life to restoring the world—not the people in it, but the world itself. Somehow, impossibly, he’d done it.
The first winter will be hard, she thought, repeating his words. She’d never known a real winter; very few people had. There hadn’t been one since the old war, before the Isolation War, when buttons were pushed and hell was unleashed and the world had been changed forever. Not forever, she thought. It’s changing back now. But any change this drastic will be painful to endure.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“It’s not enough to go after Delarosa,” said Marcus. “We have to warn the rest of the island as well.”
“Agreed,” said Vinci. “We need to do both.”
“You can’t do either one,” said the guard. “You’re still handcuffed and locked in the back of an old supermarket.”
“Um, you’re not really a part of this conversation,” said Marcus.
“I’m sitting ten feet away from you.”
“Then plug your ears,” said Marcus. “And sing to yourself for a few minutes, too. We’re about to discuss our plans for escape.”
“Shut up, Valencio.” Woolf sighed and turned to the guard. “Soldier, if you’re in a talkative mood, I’d love to hear your justification for going along with all this. I don’t care where Delarosa sets off that nuke, it’s going to kill what few of us are left.”
The guard glowered at them and returned to his former silence, leaning back in his chair and folding his arms with a frown.
“How about this,” said Marcus, still addressing the guard. “You’re stuck here guarding us, which isn’t helping our plans or yours. How about we find some common ground: Let’s all start traveling south, to warn everyone about the nuke, and we promise we won’t slow you down or cause any trouble. Even as a loyal fan of the nuclear solution, surely you agree that people need to be warned.”
“We’re not going to just warn the humans and ignore what Delarosa is going to do to the Partials,” said Vinci.
“Well—” Marcus stopped, trying to find the right words. “I was—that was kind of going to be the part of the scheme I didn’t tell him out loud. Like, he would come over to free us because he was swayed by my brilliant and well-considered plan, and then when he got close you could jump up and . . . knock him out or something.”
Woolf groaned.
“You’re a Partial,” said Marcus. “You could beat up a guy while still in handcuffs, right?”
“That was a terrible plan,” said Vinci. “I can say without exaggeration that that’s actually the worst plan I’ve ever heard.”
