Fragments

by Dan Wells

  “Don’t give up yet,” said Marcus, and waggled his radio. “Most of the reports I get on here are Partial battles—one of the other factions is still attacking the ones who have occupied the island.”

  “So we get crushed between two Partial armies?” asked Ariel. “I thought you were trying to cheer me up.”

  “What I mean is that they’re distracted,” said Marcus. “They can’t focus all their energy on finding her, because they spend half their time fighting off other Partials.”

  “And we spend almost all our time hiding from Partials,” said Ariel. “They still come out ahead.”

  Marcus blew out a puff of air, deflating as he sank back and stared at the floor. “I was just trying to find a bright side, but I guess we don’t have any of those left.” He played with the broken Sheetrock, shifting the pieces with his foot. A thought began to dawn on him. “Maybe we do.”

  “We have a bright side?”

  “We have a second Partial army.”

  Ariel raised her eyebrow. “That’s the worst bright side I’ve ever heard of.”

  “No,” said Marcus, growing more excited. “Think about it: Dr. Morgan has raised a massive army of Partials, with the express purpose of raiding our island and holding us hostage, and another army of Partials is attacking her for it. Partials don’t just attack things for no reason—they’re soldiers, not . . . barbarians. The only reason to cross the sound and attack Morgan’s forces is because you’re trying to stop her, and the only reason to try to stop this invasion is because you disagree with it.”

  Ariel frowned, obviously skeptical. “So the second group of Partials is on our side?”

  “If A hates B and C hates B then A and C are allies,” said Marcus. “That’s the . . . transitive property of battlefield ethics, which I just made up. But it’s true.”

  “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” said Ariel.

  “I knew there was a phrase like that somewhere.”

  “So how does that help us?” asked Ariel. “I’m pretty sure one of us could get out of East Meadow, slip through the Partial patrols, if the other makes a big enough distraction, but what then? Head north through the most occupied territory on the island, into the middle of an inter-Partial battle zone, and hope you can tell which group is which? You’ll end up back here in less than twenty-four hours, assuming you live through it at all.”

  “We go off the island,” said Marcus, shaking his head. “We let the soldiers do the fighting, and we go around them to talk to the leaders in the back.”

  “You want to just march into the mainland, all alone, and find a group of Partials.”

  Marcus laughed. “Who am I—Kira? I’m not doing this alone, I’m going straight to the Senate.”

  “The Senate fled East Meadow in the invasion,” said Ariel. “What makes you think you can even find them?”

  “Because Senator Tovar used to run the Voice,” said Marcus, “and I know where some of the old Voice hideouts are. You just help me escape, I need to get to the JFK airport.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Kira looked at her three companions, nodding as if to convince herself that her words were true. “The Failsafe was RM. It was created by ParaGen, under the direction of the government, as a way to control the Partial army.”

  Samm’s face was solemn. “It was designed to kill Partials?”

  “It was a kill switch,” said Heron. “If the Partials ever got out of hand, boom: Activate the Failsafe, problem solved.”

  “That’s a really good idea,” said Afa, heavily doped on painkillers but still relatively lucid. His thoughts all seemed clear, but his voice was slurred and his inhibitions, if he had any, were missing altogether. “Aside from the genocide, of course. No offense.”

  “You’re a sweetheart,” said Heron, though her face told a different story.

  “So the Failsafe was built into us,” said Samm. “It was a biological self-destruct button.”

  “Which killed the wrong people,” said Afa.

  “I don’t think so,” said Kira. She held up the screen and flipped through the file tree, looking for a specific one; when she found it, she held it up for all to see. “Here’s a cached email from the earliest days of the RM epidemic, attached to an article about a mystery disease that seemed to appear out of nowhere; the records don’t say exactly when the Failsafe was activated, or who did it, but my guess is that it happened about three days earlier. This particular email is from Nandita to my father.” She turned the screen back toward herself and read out loud, “‘New Super-Disease Claims Seven Human Lives in San Diego. Dozens of other cases may be related.’” She looked up. “The body of the email just says, ‘Quicker than we thought.’ Not ‘Oh no, it’s targeting the wrong people,’ just ‘Quicker than we thought.’”

  “So they may have targeted humans on purpose,” said Samm. “Which . . . doesn’t make any sense at all.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” said Kira, “which is why I’m not sold on the idea yet, I’m just pointing out that it’s a possibility.”

  “Are you going to speculate wildly on the rest of the information?” asked Heron. “Or just this part? I want to know when I should start paying attention again.”

  Kira mentally rolled her eyes, but stopped herself from doing it for real. “That’s the thing,” she said. “Most of the rest of the information is pretty clear. We don’t get any sort of viral formula or anything, but there are records in here that detail almost everything else. We know how they did it: They designed the pheromone glands that run the link so that they could start pumping out viral spores when triggered by a specific chemical. We know why they did it: because they were worried the Partial army could rebel, or worse, and they wanted an easy way to shut it down; not the most ethical decision they’d ever made, but there you go.” She put her hand on the glowing screen. “There are records in here where they debate it, there are records where they plan it, there are records where they talk about the specific details of contagion, trying to predict how quickly it would spread. But all those discussions were about Partials, and then the virus attacked humans, and there are literally no emails in the entire batch that talk about how weird that is. Nothing from the Trust, anyway. There is one email from Noah Freeman, the ParaGen CEO, to the board of directors, that seems to support this theory.” She called up the email on her screen and read from it. “‘We cannot confirm that the Partial team is working to undermine the Failsafe project, but just in case we’ve hired new engineers to imbed the Failsafe in the new models. If the team betrays us, the Failsafe will still deploy.’”

  “That seems to confirm what you were just saying,” said Samm.

  “Right,” she said. “We know the Trust built RM into the Partial genome, and this email tells us the board knew that part of it. But we also know the Trust built the cure into them as well, but they did it secretly. It never gets mentioned in any of the email discussions between the Trust and their bosses, and this email from the CEO implies that they knew the Trust was trying to undermine the Failsafe, but didn’t know how. That ‘undermining’ must be the cure. It only gets mentioned between Trust members a couple of times, and only under powerful encryption. Without Afa to break it for us, we would never have been able to read them.”

  Afa perked up. “They used a Paolo-Scalini level six crawler with Dynamic—”

  “We don’t actually care,” said Heron. “The point is that it’s secret, which is weird. They didn’t want their bosses to know they were building a Failsafe to the big scary Failsafe they wanted.”

  “Which seems like proof that the first Failsafe was designed to attack humans on purpose,” said Samm. “If it was a mutation, the preconstructed cure wouldn’t be able to stop it.”

  “Absolutely,” said Kira, nodding in agreement. “The pieces all fit together a little too well to be an accident.”

  “What about expiration?” asked Heron. “That’s ostensibly the other reason we’re out here, right? Does it say h
ow to stop it?”

  “That’s another thing that seems to have been a secret,” said Kira. “Encrypted emails and everything. Some of the Trust knew about it; others, such as Morgan, apparently didn’t. Without reading weeks of emailed conversations between the members of the Trust, I can’t say why.”

  “Probably because some of them objected,” said Samm. “You said there were arguments about the Failsafe, right? So I assume there were people who opposed it?”

  Kira nodded. “There were. My father, for example, thought it was unconscionable to create new life forms with kill switches.” She couldn’t help but smile at this bit of goodness from her father, knowing that he opposed something she hated so strongly. Even knowing that she had no biological connection to him, or perhaps because she knew it, these other connections carried so much more weight.

  Afa nodded, almost compulsively, drawing pictures on the floor with his finger as he talked. “So the Trust had a plan they didn’t tell ParaGen, but between them they still disagreed, or they each had their own plan and they didn’t tell each other. Maybe both, or maybe somewhere in the middle.”

  “Right,” said Kira. “There was a plan—at least one.”

  “But what about the expiration date?” asked Heron again. “You said there was something there—what was it?”

  “Just theories and projections,” said Kira. She held out the screen. “You can read them for yourself if you want: long talks about the need for a Partial expiration date, and how long the shelf life should be, and how it should work, and who was going to build. On and on and on. But no formulas, no genetic codes, no medical details of any kind.”

  “Just like the virus,” said Samm. “I thought this data center had all of ParaGen’s files?”

  Afa kept doodling with his finger. “So did I.”

  “Then where’s the rest of it?” asked Kira. “Another tower? I don’t know if we’re going to get that generator running again.”

  “I looked through their entire directory,” said Afa. “Everything from ParaGen was on that tower.”

  “But it’s obviously not,” said Heron, “so where’s the rest?”

  “I don’t know,” said Afa.

  “Maybe we need to check the directory again,” said Samm, but Kira shook her head.

  “It’s clear they didn’t want the most important pieces of their plan in the cloud, as Afa calls it. The rest of the files are exactly where we thought they were.” She sucked in a breath, dreading the next part: “And we’re going there.”

  Heron shook her head. “You don’t mean Denver.”

  “Of course I mean Denver.”

  “We’re not going to Denver,” said Heron. “We gave this a shot and it didn’t pan out, now it’s time to be reasonable and go back home.”

  “There’s nothing for us back home,” said Kira.

  “There’s life!” said Heron. “There’s salvation, there’s rational thought. We talked about this before—”

  “And we decided to go to Denver,” said Kira. “That was our plan from the beginning. We thought we could get what we needed out of this place, but we couldn’t—we tried and we couldn’t. Now we have to keep going.”

  “My leg is broken,” said Afa.

  “I know.”

  “The bullet hit the shinbone—”

  “I know,” said Kira. “I know, and I’m sorry. What else can we do? Just turn around and give up because the long shot didn’t pan out?”

  “Denver was the long shot,” said Heron. “Chicago was the only sensible part of the plan.”

  “We came out here to find the Trust,” said Kira. “To find ParaGen, to find their plans, to find their formulas, all so we could cure these diseases—”

  “We can cure them by going back,” said Heron.

  “No, we can’t,” said Kira. “We can delay them, we can work around them; maybe if Dr. Morgan gets really lucky studying me, there’ll be something she can do about the expiration date. But RM will still be there, and babies will still die, and there is still nothing we can do about it.”

  Heron’s voice was as cold as ice. “So if you can’t save both, you’re going to let both die.”

  “I can save both,” said Kira. “We can save both, together, by going to Denver and finding their files.”

  Heron shook her head. “And if they’re not there?”

  “They’re there.”

  “Where next?” asked Heron. “All the way to the coast? Across the ocean?”

  “They’re there,” Kira said again.

  “But what if they’re not?”

  “Then we keep going!” Kira shouted. “Because they’re out there somewhere, I know it.”

  “You don’t know anything! It’s just what your desperate, messed-up psyche wants to believe.”

  “It’s the only explanation that connects everything we’ve found so far. I’m not giving up and I’m not turning back.”

  The room was silent. Kira and Heron stared at each other, fierce as lions.

  “I don’t want to go to hell,” said Afa.

  “You’re going to get us killed,” said Heron.

  “You don’t have to come.”

  “Then you’ll still get yourself killed,” said Heron, “and if you’re the key to correcting the expiration date, that amounts to the same thing.”

  “Then come with us,” said Kira. “We can do this, Heron, I swear to you. Everything the Trust did, every formula they used, every genome they ever created, is all there just waiting for us to find it. We will find it, and we’ll take it back, and we’ll save everyone. Both sides.”

  “‘Both,’” said Heron. She took a deep breath. “Us or the humans. You’d better do your damnedest, then, because if it comes down to one or the other, I assure you: It will be us.” She turned and stalked out of the room. “If we’re going, let’s go, every minute we waste is another death back home.”

  Kira took a breath of her own, adrenaline still coursing through her. Afa watched Heron leave and then spoke too loudly. “I don’t like her very much.”

  “That’s the least of her problems,” said Kira. She looked at Samm. “You were awfully quiet that whole time.”

  “You know where I stand,” said Samm. “I trust you.”

  Kira felt a rush of tears and wiped her eyes with her sleeve. “Why?” She sniffed. “I’m wrong a lot.”

  “But if there’s any earthly way for you to succeed, you’ll move mountains to make it happen.”

  “You make it sound so simple.”

  Samm held her gaze. “Simple isn’t easy.”

  “We should call home first,” said Afa. “That guy you keep talking to—we need to let him know we’re gonna be late.”

  “No,” said Samm, standing up. “We just got attacked—I don’t know if they were a guard post or if they followed us, but either way, we’re in more danger than we realized. We can’t let anyone even know we’re alive, let alone where we’re going.”

  “We don’t have to say where,” said Afa, “we could use a code name. Like Mortorq—that’s a screwdriver.”

  “No,” said Kira. “Anything we say is too much of a clue. We go, and we go in secret.” She looked at the screen in her hand, then shoved it in her backpack. “And we go now.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  The ruins of the JFK airport were surrounded by a wide ring of flat, featureless runway, forcing any attackers to approach through the open. A dedicated assault with armored vehicles could take it easily, but there were few of those left in the world, and Dr. Morgan’s guerrilla army had none of them. The Voice had held it against the Grid with just a handful of spotters and snipers, and now the outlaws and the Grid together were prepared to hold it against the Partials. Marcus crossed the open runways uneasily, praying that the defenders recognized him as a human. And that they bothered trying to recognize him at all.

  The JFK expressway leading into the airport had been bombed out, along with most of Terminal 8, to give an advancing forc
e less cover to hide behind. Marcus headed instead to Terminal 7, and as he drew close he saw snipers in the shadows, tracking him slowly with their rifles. “Stop there,” a voice called out. Marcus stopped. “Drop your weapons.”

  “I don’t have any.”

  “Then drop everything else.”

  Marcus wasn’t carrying much, just a backpack full of rock-hard candy and a couple of liters of water. He set it down on the ground and stepped away, stretching out his arms to show that there was nothing in them.

  “Turn around,” said the voice, and Marcus did as he was told.

  “Just a skinny little Mexican kid,” said Marcus. “Oh wait! I forgot.” He reached into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out a folded paper and stubby pencil. He held them up for inspection, then set them carefully on the ground.

  “Are you making fun of us?” asked the voice.

  “Yes.”

  There was a long silence, until at last he saw a man in a doorway wave him in. He jogged to the open door to find Grid soldiers waiting with machine guns. He looked at them nervously. “You guys are human, right?”

  “Every Partial-killing cell of me,” said the soldier. “You one of Delarosa’s?”

  “What?”

  “Senator Delarosa,” said the soldier. “Are you working for her? Do you have a message?”

  Marcus frowned. “Wait, is she still . . .” He remembered meeting Delarosa in the forest, when he and Haru were retreating from the first Partial attack. She’d been hiding in the woods and attacking patrols. “Is she still fighting Partials?”

  “With the full support of the Grid,” said the soldier. “She’s damn good at it, too.”

  Marcus pondered this, remembering her more as a terrorist than a freedom fighter. I guess you hit a point where they all blend together, he thought. When things get desperate enough, anything goes—

  No, it doesn’t, he thought firmly. At the end of the war, we have to be as good as we were when we started it.

  “I’m just a guy,” said Marcus. “No message or special delivery or anything.”