Fragments

by Dan Wells

  “Are you okay?”

  “I feel strange,” he said. “Exhausted, like I haven’t slept in days.”

  Kira couldn’t help but feel a twinge of guilt. I don’t feel tired at all—was Samm really pushing himself this much harder than I was? Was I pulling so little of my own weight on this journey, and didn’t even know it? “Do you need to rest?”

  “Not here,” said Samm. “We need to get inside.”

  The tall brush extended nearly to the edge of the building, where they could enter through any number of floor-to-ceiling openings—giant windows destroyed in the Partial attack. Almost the entire ground floor was open around the perimeter, supported by a series of central pillars. There was nothing but reception desks and waiting areas; any records they could find would likely be in the offices above, and Kira spied a stairwell door standing partly open. She pointed it out to Samm, and he nodded, his chest rising and falling in slow, deliberate rhythm. She counted softly under her breath: “One, two, three,” and then they leapt up and ran, bolting across the rubble-strewn floor to the door beyond. Kira reached it first, several steps ahead of Samm, and when he staggered through, she slammed it shut behind him. He leaned heavily against the wall, gasping for breath, his eyes closed.

  “I don’t think anyone saw us,” she said. “We can rest here for a minute before moving up.”

  “If I rest, I’ll fall asleep,” said Samm. He struggled to open his eyes, but his lids seemed heavy and unresponsive. “Keep moving.”

  “Are you going to be okay?”

  “We have to keep moving either way,” said Samm, “so it doesn’t matter.”

  Kira tried to protest, to tell him that they could come back later, but he wouldn’t listen. “We won’t get another chance at this. I can make it.” He gripped the railings with his hands, one on either side, and raised a leg that looked as heavy as lead. Kira inserted herself under one of his arms, wrapping his hand around her shoulders, and put her own arm around his waist, helping him along. His breathing was deeper now, almost as if he were already asleep. His steps were arrhythmic, and sometimes it took him three or four tries to find the right height for a stair.

  “You’re doing fine,” said Kira, though she knew something wasn’t right. What the hell is going on? “Just a few more.” She held him tightly, supporting almost his full weight as they climbed. “That’s right, just a few more.” At the top of the first flight of stairs she opened the door, and he collapsed through it onto the floor. The smell of earth and plants filled the air, and she saw footprints of cats and birds in the dust that covered the carpet. “Samm, are you okay?” It didn’t look like anyone outside could see them in this spot; it was as good a hiding place as any. “Samm, talk to me.”

  “Not . . .” His voice was slow and weak, as if he had to force each word through a heavy screen, and they had no force left when they emerged. He rolled his head back and forth, opening his eyes as wide as he could, struggling to stay conscious. She waited for him to finish the sentence, but when he finally spoke again, it was something different. “Heron . . . here.” Another pause. “Asleep.” He turned his head toward her, but his eyes were dazed and unfocused. “Find . . . it.”

  “Find ‘it’?” she asked. “Find what?” She shook him, whispering urgently in his ear, but nothing roused him. He’s asleep—he told me he was asleep. And apparently Heron’s here somewhere. Kira willed herself to use the link, to detect some sign of Heron’s data anywhere in the air around her. She’d never been able to use it at will; only in combat could she actually rely on it, when her adrenaline seemed to amplify its effect. But my adrenaline’s high now, she thought. This thing with Samm has me scared to death, and I’m not detecting anything. Are the combat pheromones simply stronger—or am I just designed to detect the combat pheromones and nothing else?

  She checked Samm again, his pulse and his breathing. They were normal. Now that he’d stopped fighting and settled into sleep, his body functions seemed to have normalized. She stood up, trying to figure out what she should do next—should she stay until he woke? Should she leave him here and keep going? The latter seemed like the only viable option, but she didn’t like it—what if something happened to him while she was gone? She dragged him over to the wall and propped him up on his side, his back to the wall and his front held up by a pair of desktop computer towers she pulled from nearby cubicles. He was sleeping so soundly she worried that if he threw up or drooled he’d be too inert to react, and would choke to death. This would at least keep him safe from that.

  It’s almost like he’s been sedated, thought Kira. But why would someone do that to him—and how could they have done it? Did Calix slip him a drug? Why drug him and leave? She shook her head. I can ask him more when he wakes up. Right now I’m here, at the end of our search, and I don’t know how long we have before they come looking for us. And if we leave now, Samm is right, there’s no guarantee we’ll have another chance to find what we came for. I have to find the records.

  She silently apologized to him, and then rifled through the desks on the floor, searching for a directory or a map—some hint of where to start looking. Obviously the Trust wouldn’t be mentioned by that name anywhere, at least she didn’t think so, but she knew most of their names from the records they’d found in Chicago. She repeated them again in her mind: Graeme Chamberlain, Kioni Trimble, Jerry Ryssdal, McKenna Morgan, Nandita Merchant, and Armin Dhurvasula. My father. She found a small directory and scanned it for their names, but found nothing.

  She decided to try another tack, approaching the problem from another angle: What clues had she already gathered, and what pieces did she already know? It took her a moment to align her thoughts; she had been so busy getting here the last few weeks and had thought of little aside from survival. She had to remind herself of the mysteries she was trying to solve. Dr. Morgan had been assigned to create the Partials’ incredible physical attributes: their strength, their reflexes, their resistance to disease, and their incredible ability to heal. Jerry Ryssdal had worked on their senses. Kira’s father had created the link, and the entire system of pheromonal communication. She still didn’t know about Trimble. Last of all came Graeme Chamberlain and Nandita, who had been assigned to the Failsafe project. The world-ending plague they had come to know as RM. They’d learned in Chicago that the Failsafe was designed to kill the Partials if they ever got out of hand—it had been requested by the American government, and mandated by the ParaGen executives, and that mandate seemed to be the defining incident that sparked the lead scientists to form the Trust in the first place. And somehow, when the virus finally appeared, it killed humans instead. That couldn’t possibly be what the Trust decided to do—she couldn’t allow herself to think that anyone, let alone her father and the only mother figure she had ever known, would willingly, knowingly, unconscionably destroy so many people. And Graeme had killed himself, which didn’t tell her anything but still left her deeply unsettled.

  Still, she thought, the Trust had been fractured, even as they tried to make their plans. Dr. Morgan knew nothing about the expiration date, for example, but somebody must have programmed it into their DNA, someone with a plan. There were others, too, the names Morgan had screamed when she thought Kira was a spy: Cronus and Prometheus. Were they code names for some of the people on this list? Or new people altogether? And where did Dr. Vale fit into this?

  Kira turned back to the directory, searching for anything that might relate to the Trust’s plan: expiration. Failsafe. Virus, virology, pathology, epidemiology—she searched for every synonym she knew. She searched for “laboratory,” for “research,” for “genetics,” she even searched for RM. . . . Wait. She stared at the directory. There was no RM, but there was an RD. Is that a reference to the virus? Maybe an earlier version of it? But there is no way something so secret would be here on a directory so general it doesn’t even have the lead scientists’ names. She remembered her confusion with the term IT, and how it had turned out to be an ac
ronym: information technology. RD must be the same thing, maybe . . . reference database? Research database?

  Research and development.

  If the Trust were anywhere, they were there. But where is Floor C? The floors here are all numbered. She looked for a map, scrounging through every desk she could find, but on her third pass through the main hallway she stopped at the top of the stairs, staring not at them but at the doors beside them. Three sets of double doors, all in a row.

  Elevators.

  The Preserve had an ongoing, self-sustaining power grid. The elevators in the other buildings still worked. If they still worked here, finding Floor C would be as easy as looking at the buttons. Getting there would be as easy as pressing one. She stepped forward, her finger hovering over the call button. She pushed it.

  Deep in the bowels of the building a motor hummed to life, and Kira felt the floor vibrate as the gears and pulleys turned. Clanks and groans echoed through the elevator shaft, and Kira stepped back as the door before her wrenched halfway open with a loud screech. The elevator beyond was only partly lined up with the door, leaving a wide gap at the bottom that plunged deep into darkness. Having power to run them doesn’t mean anyone’s been maintaining them for the last twelve years, Kira thought. It’s amazing the elevators still work at all. The doors tried to close, but had damaged themselves so much in opening that they couldn’t shut again. Kira hesitated in the doorway, trying to decide if she trusted the stability enough to climb in and look at the buttons. She peered into the pit below, seeing dark red lights at the bottom of a shaft that looked to go down at least seven stories. That’s five levels below ground, she thought. There must be one for maintenance, maybe two. And three full subterranean stories.

  A, B, and C.

  She decided to avoid the elevator, and instead peeked into the shaft and around the corners, searching for a maintenance ladder. She found one she could reach relatively easily, but she still had a moment of terrifying vertigo as she stretched out over the deep black pit. With her hands firmly on the metal rungs, she swung the rest of her body out into space, found the ladder with her feet, and began climbing down. Each floor was marked, and she breathed a sigh of relief when she climbed down past 1 and found A waiting below it. She kept going, stopping on Floor C, and searched for an exit. Next to the ladder was a maintenance door; she twisted the handle, and it opened smoothly.

  The hallway beyond was brightly lit. The air was fresh and well circulated. Far away, a faint echo in the emptiness, she heard footsteps.

  Kira’s heart caught in her throat, and she found herself suddenly paralyzed with fear. Was that Heron—was she already here? Or was it somebody else? Had they heard all the noise she’d made with the elevator? Was there one set of footsteps, or more? Were they coming or going? She didn’t know, and not knowing made her too afraid to move. After a moment she paused, forcing herself to think. No matter what it is, I should go through the door. I can’t just leave, and this could be my only chance to find out what I am. She hesitated, trying to psych herself up, wondering if there was a security system inside that would attack her. She hadn’t set off any alarms by opening the door. She took a deep breath and drew her handgun from where she’d hidden it in the back of her pants. She stepped through.

  The hallway was bright, not just because of the lights, but because the walls and floors and ceiling were white, like a hospital. She could feel the faint hum of something through the floor, like the motor of the elevators but constant, like a background buzz. The power generator? she thought. Or an air circulator. There was definitely a faint breeze, neither hot nor cold but simply air in motion. She heard another cluster of footsteps, so small she thought it had to be just one person. She strained at the link, trying to see if it was Heron, but felt nothing. Kira fumbled in her waistband for her handgun, pulling it out and checking the chamber and magazine, making sure it was loaded and ready to go. She held it before her carefully, walking softly on the balls of her feet. She could hear somebody walking, but she was determined they wouldn’t hear her.

  Floor C was a lab, far more intact than the upper stories. Whatever the Partials had done to this place, the destruction hadn’t penetrated this deep. Kira walked past offices and conference rooms, past laboratories and showers, past clean white rooms full of equipment she didn’t even recognize. Was this where Vale was making his cure? That would make sense; ParaGen would undoubtedly have the best genetic engineering equipment in the Preserve. Was this equipment the reason he said it wasn’t “portable”? Maybe it was Vale she could hear down here. Kira quickened her pace.

  She heard the footsteps again, and as she drew closer she heard a voice, murmuring and indistinct, someone talking softly. Kira walked as quietly as she could, still wary of who she might find, or what he or she might be doing. Would they attack an intruder? Would they take her presence as a threat? What equipment were they using, and how were they using it? Would they kill her to protect their secret?

  It doesn’t matter. I’ve come this far. I need to know.

  She rounded the final corner, stepping into a vast room, and gasped. Before her in two long lines were ten metal tables, each bearing an emaciated, almost skeletal man. Snaking up from each was a cluster of tubes and cords and cables, some dripping nutrients into the bodies while others bore away what looked like waste or recirculated blood. Their faces were uncovered, but a small tube sprouted up from the neck of each figure, punching straight through the skin and curling up into the tangle of tubes that hung above them. In any other situation she would think they were dead, but she could see a frail rise and fall of their chests, see their hearts thumping slowly inside their fragile ribs. They were living corpses, unconscious and lost to the world. They looked like they’d been there for years.

  “What’s going on?” she whispered.

  “They’re Partials,” said Dr. Vale. Kira looked up to see him on the far side of the room; her pistol rose up almost involuntarily to point at him, and he raised his hands. “You wanted to know how I synthesize the cure,” said Vale. “I don’t—I harvest it directly.” He motioned toward the tables. “Behold: the cure for RM.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  Kira stared in shock. “What is this?”

  “This is salvation,” said Vale. “Everyone you’ve met here, every child you’ve seen, what you’ve called a miracle . . . It’s here because of these ten Partials.”

  “This is . . .” She stopped, stepped forward, and shook her head, still struggling to process what she was seeing. “Are they asleep?”

  “Sedated,” said Vale. “They can’t hear or see you, though I suppose our voices might drift through the back of their dreams.”

  “They dream?”

  “Perhaps,” said Vale. “Their brain activity is not an important part of the process; I haven’t paid any particular attention to it.”

  Kira stepped forward again. “They never wake up?”

  “What would be the point?” asked Vale. “I can tend them more easily in their sleep—they’re far less trouble this way.”

  “You don’t ‘tend’ them,” said Kira. “They’re not plants.”

  “By strict biological definition, no, but the metaphor is apt.” Vale walked toward one, checking the tubes and wires that connected him to the apparatus in the ceiling. “They are not plants, but they are a garden, and I tend them carefully to harvest the crop that keeps the human race alive.”

  “The pheromone,” said Kira.

  “The technical name is Particle 223,” said Vale, “though I’ve taken to calling it Ambrosia.” He smiled. “The food of life.”

  “You can’t do this,” Kira found herself saying.

  “Of course I can.”

  “Of course you can, but . . . we’d always known this was a possibility, but . . . it’s not right.”

  “Tell that to the thousands of lives they’ve saved, and the hundreds more they’ll save this year alone.” Vale’s smile faded, and his face grew solemn. “
Ten for two thousand, that’s two hundred lives each. We should all be so benevolent.”

  “But . . . they’re slaves,” said Kira. “They’re worse than slaves, they’re . . . your creepy human garden.”

  “Not human,” said Vale firmly, “things. Living things, yes, but mankind has used living things as tools since his first sentient thought. A bush in the wild is simply a bush—under human care it becomes a hedge, a wall to keep us safe. Berries become inks and dyes, mushrooms become medicine. Cows give us milk and meat and leather, horses pull our plows and carriages. Even you used horses to cross the toxic wasteland, a job I’m sure they would never have chosen on their own.”

  “That’s different,” said Kira.

  “Not different at all,” said Vale. “A horse, at least, is a part of the world. They exist today because a million years of natural selection failed to kill them: They earned their right to live. The Partials were grown in a lab, made by and for the aid of humanity. They’re . . . seedless watermelons, or blight-resistant wheat. Don’t let their human faces fool you.”

  “It’s not just their faces,” said Kira hotly, “it’s their minds. You can’t talk to one and tell me they’re not real people.”

  “Even computers could talk, by the end,” said Vale. “That didn’t make them people either.”

  Kira shook her head, closing her eyes in anger and frustration. She was so repulsed by the revelation she could barely think. “You have to free them.”

  “And then what?” asked Vale. Kira looked up to see him gesturing broadly, encompassing not just the laboratory but the Preserve, perhaps the entire world. “Should we go back to the way your people live? Struggling in vain to cure a disease that can’t be cured, watching thousands of your own children die so that ten men—ten enemies, who rebelled and murdered you—don’t have to suffer?”