by Dan Wells
She paused a moment, then shook her head. Vale let out a long breath.
“Not many humans do.” He looked at the nuke, mud-spattered and scratched by a hundred thousand rocks and roots and whatever else it had passed through to get there. It was a simple metal cylinder, battered and dingy and absolutely terrifying. “The finger of God,” he said softly. He leaned over to grab the wheeled cart and pulled it closer. The end screwed off, and he found the inner electronics jury-rigged with a series of yellowed plastic light switches, probably scavenged from an old abandoned home. “You’re old,” he said idly, then shot her a quick glance. “Not old, of course, I’d never be so rude to a lady like yourself. But you’re old enough to remember the old world. The things we left behind. You remember how in all the movies and the holovids, everyone always had big red timers on their nuclear bombs? It looked like someone had stuck a digital alarm clock on there, though I suppose that’s still more high-tech than these things.” He gestured to the switches, their wires exposed, but he didn’t dare touch them. “The bad guy sets the bomb, or the good guy sets it accidentally, and then everybody watches as it counts down: fifty-nine, fifty-eight, fifty-seven. Tick, tick, tick. None of that for you, though.” He looked at her again. “No timer, no ‘run like hell’ period where you try to get to safety. You were just going to flip these switches and blow up right along with us.” He screwed the lid back on, then looked at Delarosa, lying bleeding on the floor. He leaned forward and pulled off her oxygen mask. “I figure it’s not much of an interrogation if you can’t even talk.”
Delarosa watched him, saying nothing. Vale said nothing back. After a moment she spoke, and Vale heard the pain in her voice.
“This is still not much of an interrogation.”
“The things I want to know you don’t have any answers for.”
She adjusted her shoulder slightly, wincing. “Such as?”
“Such as why everybody in this entire world hates everybody else. Why I can’t get four people to agree to a peaceful resolution even when I lead them by the hand ninety-five percent of the way.”
“I don’t hate you,” said Delarosa. “You or them. Not personally.”
“But you still want to blow us all to hell.”
“This is going to end in war,” said Delarosa. “Everyone in the world is dying, and there’s no hope left, and the nerves are too raw. Look back at what’s happened and tell me which part we could have avoided.”
“You could have not brought a nuke into the middle of an army,” said Vale. “You think your island got invaded? Just wait until word of this gets out.”
“You heard them talking just now,” said Delarosa. “This warhead is an excuse. You said it yourself—they’re an army, bred for battle; the humans are just as desperate. War is inevitable.”
“So you wanted to end it before it could start.”
“It seems like the only moral option.”
“‘Moral,’” said Vale. “That’s an interesting adjective to apply to ‘genocide.’”
“Destroy White Plains and the Partial population drops to whatever’s on Long Island,” said Delarosa. “We’ll be back on even footing again, give or take. The Partial leadership will be dead, and the ones left will stop waiting for orders that are never going to come. Maybe they’ll make a treaty with the humans, I don’t know, but even if they attack, the humans will be able to fight back. They’ll have the courage to fight back. They’ll have a chance.”
Vale nodded, thinking, staring at the bomb. “The situation I spoke of earlier wasn’t just smoke,” he said softly. “It’s real. Kira Walker discovered the biological mechanisms, and since then I’ve had the chance to study it out, to dig down into the science of it, and it’s real. It could save everyone.”
“Do you think anyone will go along with it?”
“I thought so,” Vale said, closing his eyes. “A long time ago. But then the Break happened and . . . No, I don’t. I told Kira that if Dr. Morgan found out about the cure for expiration, she’d enslave the entire human population. It took four soldiers less than three minutes to propose two different versions of that worst-case scenario.” He tapped the bomb, listening to the metallic clang. “I had to choose once before, you know. Humans or Partials. I chose to save a group of humans, and enslaved ten Partials to do it. It was the only way.” He sighed. “What else can I do?”
Delarosa furrowed her brow. “What are you saying?”
Vale took the cap off the warhead and looked at the jury-rigged switches. “I’m saying that I still think the end of all this is a choice between the species.”
“Are you serious?”
Vale flipped a switch. “There’s a combination, I assume?”
Delarosa took a deep breath, her voice almost reverent. “Yes.” She hesitated. “Okay. On, off, on, off. Right to left.”
Vale raised his eyebrow. “That’s the secret password?”
“It kept it from going off accidentally,” said Delarosa. “Beyond that, the simpler the better. I figured if I made it easy enough, even if you caught me someone might trigger it accidentally.”
Vale looked at the switches, flipping the first three in turn. “On, off, on.” He looked up. “Any last words?”
“My shoulder hurts,” said Delarosa. There was steel in her voice. “Get it over with.”
Vale closed his eyes, speaking not to her but to the entire world. “I’m sorry.”
Off.
PART 3
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
The hospital shook, and Kira stumbled. “What was that?”
The noise continued, a distant rumble, deep in the bones of the earth.
Green raised his rifle at Armin, and one of the Ivies saw the move, perhaps even anticipated it, raising his own rifle at Green. Armin leapt through a side door and out of sight. The entire exchange was so fast Kira barely even registered it.
“Holy—” Marcus spluttered, but that was all Kira heard before Green fired a long, loud burst into the hallway, scattering the Ivies, and pulled him and Kira back into the stairwell. The Ivies took cover and returned fire, but the three companions were already diving down the first flight of stairs, throwing themselves to the floor. Bullets riddled the door above them, tearing through the wood in a furious hail of splinters and shredding the drywall on either side, only to ping and ricochet off the thick concrete steps. At the first break in the shooting Green fired back, and urged the other two farther down the stairs. The rumble they had felt hadn’t gone away; instead it was gathering in intensity.
“We can’t leave,” Kira shouted. “That’s my father!”
“Your father wants to kill you,” said Green.
“I have to talk to him,” Kira insisted, trying to get back up. “I have to stop him.”
Green threw her back down, shouting to get through to her. “We’ve lost the advantage up there—they have the numbers, they have the high ground, and they have cover. Put your head above those stairs and they will shoot it off.”
“But they have a rotor on the roof,” Kira snarled, trying to wrench free of him. “They’re not trying to occupy the floor, they’re trying to get away!”
Another storm of bullets ripped through the air, and the three crouched down, covering their heads. Marcus crawled to Kira’s side and shouted in her ear, barely audible above the gunfire.
“There’re stairs at the other end of the hall!”
Kira nodded, and they crawled down out of the line of fire. “Each floor is a long T shape,” Kira explained to Green. “We’re on one branch of the T, but there’s another staircase on the end of the other branch, where we can get up behind them.”
“You don’t think they’re watching it?”
“I think they’ll take their blood and run,” said Kira. “I intend to stop them before that happens.” They reached the seventh floor and burst out into the hallway, running at full speed. Green dropped to the floor, holding the door open behind him and raising his rifle like a sniper—bu
t instead of looking behind him, he was looking forward to the far end of the hall. Kira didn’t stop to question; if the Ivies linked him at that staircase they might not think to look for anyone at the other. She pulled out her handgun as she sprinted, cursing herself for dropping her rifle, praying she could get to the stairs and behind the Ivies before Armin had a chance to escape. Marcus puffed behind her, struggling to keep up. She poured on the speed, ready to slam into the door and race up the stairs, when suddenly it opened on its own and an Ivie peeked out into the hall, assault rifle up and ready. Kira panicked, ready to throw herself to the side, when a loud crack split the air and the Ivie went down, a red hole blossoming between his eyes.
“Go!” Green shouted, and Kira didn’t even slow down, thanking him silently as she pelted up the stairs. She heard boots above her, and then the roar of a vicious windstorm; Armin and his soldiers were already fleeing to the roof.
“We don’t know where they all are,” said Marcus, holding her arm to stop her. “If there are still some on the eighth floor, and we go up past them to the roof, we’ll be surrounded.”
Kira concentrated on the link. “You’re right,” she said, pointing. “A big group up top, and a smaller group still down here.”
“That’s so weird,” said Marcus. “You can . . . feel them?” The look on his face wasn’t shocked or horrified, but it broke Kira’s heart just the same: For the first time in his life, he was looking at her as a stranger, someone he could only barely understand. She tried to ignore her sudden emotional vertigo and whispered her strategy.
“I can’t feel much detail,” she said. “Not like they can. I can’t tell how many there are, or pinpoint their locations. I figure there are one or two left on this floor, and a few more than that on the roof.” The wind was howling wildly outside, as if a storm had risen up out of nowhere, and it had dragged their pheromonal data away and left her blind. “You stay here and watch that door like your life depends on it, because it does. Shoot at it the instant it moves—don’t wait for a clear shot, just fire.”
“You’re not going up there alone.”
“I’m not letting him get away,” said Kira. She racked her gun and ran up the next flight of stairs, steeling herself for . . . she didn’t know what. Four or five Ivies with assault rifles, she thought, and clenched her teeth as she thought of Green’s words. They have numbers and high ground, and who knows what kind of armaments on that rotor. I have a stupid handgun and . . . well, better cover than they do, probably. But what am I going to do? Kill the soldiers? Shoot my father? She remembered her father’s fevered rant about a world tearing itself apart with violence; the Ivie she’d shot was still bleeding on the hospital floor.
What else can I do?
She reached the roof access door and put her hands on it gingerly, just barely pushing it so she could peek out, but something was holding it closed. She shoved harder and it gave, only to slam closed again. The wind, she thought. What’s going on out there? And what was that rumble we felt? Marcus screamed below her, opening fire; she prayed he would be safe, and shoved against the door with everything she had. It flew open with a bang and she stumbled out, whipped by a raging windstorm that slammed the door shut behind her, and through her flying hair she saw the rotor lift off, a dull-gray jet with a belly like a cargo bus, and two massive fans in the place of wings. Her father stood in the open door, watching her wordlessly, and then the rotors tilted and slammed her back into the door. She ran forward as soon as the pressure released, shouting into the gale-force wind for him to stop, to come back. The rotor flew south, and she watched it shrink to a dot in the slate-gray sky. With its engines gone the fierce wind grew bone-chillingly cold, and she shivered as she watched him disappear.
“You okay?” asked Marcus. She hadn’t even heard him come up behind her. She nodded. His voice was a mixture of awe and terror. “What happened?”
“I didn’t make it in time,” she said softly. “They were already in the rotor when I—”
“Not that,” said Marcus, and took her by the shoulder. “That.” He turned her around, facing north toward the mainland, and she gasped. Out across the fields and forests, beyond the low hills of the island’s northern face, the sky was red and roiling, burning like a low flame. A massive mushroom cloud dominated the horizon, miles wide and towering into the atmosphere.
Green joined them on the roof, his link data so black with despair that even Kira could feel it. It made her sick. His voice was soft and ghostly. “White Plains is gone.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Mohammad Khan died at 8:34 p.m., in a small house on the North Shore. The disease had brought him to the brink of death; add the pressure the winter conditions had put on his body, and it was simply too much for a weeks-old baby to handle. Isolde was in the basement, holding him and crying, completely inconsolable. Ariel stood by the back windows, overlooking a steep, rocky bluff above the sound, and looked west to the mainland. To the mushroom cloud.
The Partials were gone.
They were her enemy, but they were also her people. The only real, biological link she had in the world, behind all the lies and deceptions, and she’d never even known them. There were still Partials on the island, of course, though she figured the group that had killed Senator Kessler was gone now. Dead of the same plague that killed Khan, she thought, but the thought gave her no joy, no vindictive triumph at the parity of their deaths. Nobody needed to die in that building, and yet six people did, and three more were wounded, and now Khan’s gone and White Plains is gone and . . . everything’s gone. Xochi had taken a bullet in the hip, and another in her hand; Hobb had taken two in his back, which Nandita said had pierced his lung and liver. As poorly as Hobb was doing, Ariel wondered if Isolde might be the next to die. She was physically unharmed, but her soul was destroyed.
Nandita herself had been clipped in the shoulder, the lightest of the wounds, but her gene mods had accelerated her healing so dramatically that the hole was already starting to close.
Ariel played with the gun in her hands, flicking the safety on and off. On and off.
Even if we could travel, we don’t have anywhere to go. That child was the entire purpose of our journey—protecting him, getting him to safety, curing his disease. He gave us a direction and a reason to hope. A reason to stay together. Now that he’s gone, what do we do next?
On and off. On and off.
Ariel knew exactly what to do next; she’d been planning it since the day Khan was born. Help Nandita save him, and then . . .
She turned and walked downstairs.
It was warmer down there, the windows blocked with old clothes and couch cushions, and a broken nightstand burning slowly on the bare cement floor of the laundry room. The house was barely half a mile from the country club, but still farther than Xochi or Hobb could have traveled on their own. Ariel had dragged them here, sliding them over the snow on a makeshift sled while the Partials, terrified of the infant bioweapon, had fled just as quickly in the other direction. For all Ariel knew, they’d gotten back to Riverhead before they died, and given the disease to everyone else. She looked at Hobb, bandaged like a ragged mummy and sedated on the floor, still completely unaware that his son was dead. He’d risked his life to save the child, which Ariel had never expected. She crept past him, past Xochi, past the wailing form of Isolde, to the last room in the narrow hallway. Nandita was sitting in the dark.
“The mushroom cloud is gone,” said Ariel. “No sign of anyone chasing us.”
“I imagine they’re somewhat preoccupied,” said Nandita. “Under the circumstances.”
Ariel sat across from her. Nandita had to see the gun in her hand, in silhouette at the very least, but she said nothing about it.
On. Off.
“You think Hobb’s going to last the night?”
“I don’t know,” said Nandita.
“I can’t help but think it’ll be easier for him if he dies,” said Ariel. “He sacrificed himself to save
his son, and now he has to wake up and hear that his sacrifice didn’t mean anything.”
“His child did not survive,” said Nandita. “That doesn’t mean his sacrifice didn’t mean anything.”
The fire spit and crackled behind them.
On. Off.
Ariel wanted to shoot her now, to raise her hand and fire, but she didn’t. She wanted to rage and scream and yell and make this woman pay for the hell she’d put her through—for the hand she’d had in this entire, world-ending calamity. She didn’t do that either. She watched the orange lights from the fire dancing weakly on the wall, just out of reach of the room’s dark shadow. “I saw what you did with the chemical trigger,” said Ariel at last. “The night you dumped it in the fire, after Erin Kessler said she wanted to use it.”
“I didn’t want her to try anything stupid,” said Nandita.
“Looks like we didn’t do enough to stop her,” said Ariel.
“Looks like.”
On. Off.
“Why did you do it?” asked Ariel.
“Create the Partials?” asked Nandita. “End the world? Destroy your childhood? My list of crimes is long, child. I’m afraid you’ll have to be more specific.”
“Why did you let them shoot us?” asked Ariel. She gripped her gun more tightly, though she still hadn’t pointed it anywhere but the floor. “You can control Partial soldiers with a thought—you could have stopped that gunfight before a single shot was fired. And yet you didn’t.”
“I . . .” Nandita stopped, a motionless form in the darkness. “I guess I decided that if I couldn’t stop Erin, I shouldn’t be able to stop the Partials.”
“You didn’t want to control them?”
“I did not.”
