by Dan Wells
Kira shook her head. “I’m a rifle girl, but that’s mostly just at home. It wouldn’t be very useful inside the lab.”
“I’ll give you mine,” said Isolde. “Town hall is swarming with soldiers, and you just became zookeeper to a hyperintelligent predator. You need it more than I do.”
Kira looked out the window at the empty street. “I guess we may as well go get it,” she said softly. “The party’s dead anyway.” She walked out with Isolde, paused on the porch, and waited a few long seconds before stepping down and leaving.
Marcus never came.
Dr. Skousen led Kira down a long hall. “This used to be a quarantine room,” he said, pointing toward the heavy steel door at the end of the corridor. “We haven’t used it for that, or for anything else, really, in years. The custodians spent all night cleaning it out. I’m afraid that the seals aren’t all as tight as we’d like them to be, but we’ve got the salvage crews working overtime looking for new medical supply stores and new hospitals and clinics — anywhere that might have the right kind of plastic for the doors and windows. We’ll be safe enough for now.”
And I’ll be locked inside with a Partial, thought Kira. She clutched her stack of vials and notebooks and other equipment, trying not to drop them as she matched Skousen’s brisk pace.
He lowered his voice, whispering covertly as they turned the final corner. “We’ve spent the night searching it for anything that could be a weapon, cleaning it, weighing it — anything that required it to be unrestrained. Now it’s strapped down, and it’s all yours.”
They reached the door, a seven-foot steel barrier flanked by two soldiers in helmets and body armor. One of them was Shaylon Brown, the private she’d met on the Asharoken salvage run, and he smiled as he turned to unlock the door. Kira looked at Skousen, keeping a tight grip on her precarious load of equipment.
“Anything else I need to know?”
“Learn everything you can,” he said gravely. “I didn’t want you to do this, and I still think it was idiotic to attempt, but now that we have one … this is a rare opportunity, and I honestly don’t know how long the other senators are going to allow it, five-day promise or not. Make sure you report everything directly to me, especially if you find something … ominous. The last thing we want is a panic.”
“Got it,” said Kira. “Well then.” She turned to the door, took a deep breath, and walked past the soldiers. “Thanks for keeping me safe, guys.” If you need me, I’ll be locked inside here with the monster.
The entryway was a short tube of clear, flexible plastic, with a soft electric hum from a grate on the floor — an electromagnetic grid designed to pull foreign particles from her shoes. There’s supposed to be a— She looked around for the air jets just in time to get blasted in the face by an artificial whirlwind, sweeping her clean and pulling dust and hair and other contaminants down to the same electric grid. She managed to keep her grip on her vials and papers, and when the air stopped, she pushed forward into the room itself.
The Partial lay on an operating table in the center of the room; it was strapped down tightly with thick leather restraints, and the table was bolted to the floor. It was awake, its eyes alert, watching her as she stepped into the converted room. The walls were lined with counters and medicomps and other equipment, all clean and well-lit. She had Isolde’s semiautomatic on her hip.
She’d never been more terrified in her life.
Kira stood for a moment, saying nothing, then crossed to the wall and set her things on a counter. The sample vials rolled free and she paused to gather them up, placing them one by one in a plastic rack. She swallowed, staring at the rack, willing herself to turn and face the Partial. It was nothing — it was one man, not even a man but a teenager, all alone and tied up. She’d faced it and others like it under far worse conditions only a few days before. And yet things felt different here; everything seemed off and out of place. A Partial in the wilds was an enemy, and she knew how to think about it, but a Partial here, in East Meadow, in the same room…
She saw a glint of light in the corner of her eye, and turned to see the lens of a small camera mounted in the corner. It was obviously new and out of place, mounted blockily on the wood of the counter with thick screws. She turned to scan the room and saw five more: one in each corner, and two higher up to get specific angles on both the Partial’s table and her own workstation. Mkele’s work, she assumed, and she felt some of her nervousness lift at the thought that he and his soldiers were watching her so closely. If the Partial tried anything, they’d see it and respond.
Kira let out a breath she didn’t realize she was holding. She couldn’t decide if knowing Mkele was watching made her feel more safe, or less. She walked past the bound Partial to the window.
She was on the second floor, looking out through a strip of tall trees to a wide parking lot full of sagging cars. Many of the parking lots in town were empty — not much business at the local restaurants while civilization was collapsing around you — but the hospital had been packed and overflowing eleven years ago, and their cars remained like ghostly reminders.
I need to take a blood sample, Kira told herself, forcing herself back to the task at hand. I need blood and tissue. I went all the way to a war zone to cut the hand off an enemy soldier, I can take a biopsy from the thing lying tied up fifteen feet away.
She walked back to the sample vials she’d brought with her — blood samples she’d taken from Marcus. Relics of her first attempt at studying RM, before Manhattan and the Partial and everything else. Before Marcus didn’t come. She still had all the notes she’d taken from the blood, full descriptions of platelet counts and white cell counts and glucose and electrolytes and calcium levels and the vast, terrifying mass of viral structures. Every human being was a carrier, poisoning their own children long after the Partials had disappeared. Were the Partials carriers as well? Was this whole catastrophe useless?
She breathed deeply, wiped her face, and turned to look at the Partial — not a faceless thing in a black visor but a man, a boy barely older than she was, tied to a table and stripped almost to nothing. With his shirt off, she could see his body was toned and muscular, not bulging like a bodybuilder but simply fit: strong and lean and capable. Genetic perfection, as Isolde had put it. Kira tried to summon her zeal from the fight in Manhattan, tried to imagine herself cutting off its hand for study. It had brown eyes, like hers. It looked back calmly.
Dr. Skousen had said that they’d washed the Partial, but Kira looked again and saw there were flecks of something around its face and head. She stepped closer, trying to get a better look, then closer again, peering at its face. It was flecks of blood, dried and black, ringing its mouth and eye and dotting its ear on the other side. She reached out to brush away its hair, paused with her hand halfway, and dropped it back to her side.
“I take it they beat you?”
The Partial said nothing, simply watching her through dark eyes. She could feel its anger like the heat from an iron stove, radiating out in waves. She steeled herself and reached out again, and this time the Partial turned on her suddenly, jerking its head and straining at its bonds. Kira jumped back involuntarily, her heart racing, and reached for her gun. She didn’t pull it out, merely felt it, solid and reassuring in her hand. She forced herself to calm down and stepped forward again, standing straight. After a moment she pulled out the gun anyway and held it up for the Partial to see.
“I was part of the group that captured you,” she said. “I’m not trying to threaten you, I’m just telling you how serious I am. We’ve got five days together, and if you want to spend them fighting, I am more than ready.”
It watched her, eyes cold and hard, as if studying her for any break it could use, any hole in her defenses it could slip through—
— and yet behind the cold eyes it was terrified. She could tell, just by looking at it, that it had never been this scared in its life. She took a step back, looking at the situation from its perspe
ctive: It was alone, a prisoner of war, beaten and chained and strapped down to an operating table, and now she was holding a gun on it.
Kira looked down at the gun in her hand and put it away. “In case you couldn’t tell, everyone here is pretty much terrified of you. We don’t know what you can do or how you work. For all we know, you’re a biological weapon with legs.”
She paused, waiting, but he stayed silent. She prompted him with her hand, but still nothing. She sighed. She wasn’t sure what she was waiting for from him.
He watched her closely, and she felt uncomfortably like a bug in a jar. Who was really studying who?
“Fine, then,” she said. “If you don’t want to talk, that’s fine. I don’t think I would in your situation either, frankly, but then again I don’t know if I could help myself. Humans are very social creatures; we like to communicate in order to feel—”
“You talk too much.”
Kira stopped, eyes wide. His voice was dry and hoarse from days of disuse — as far as she knew, it hadn’t said a word since they’d captured it, now more than fifty hours ago. She almost wasn’t sure she’d heard him right. The first human to communicate with another species in eleven years, she thought, and he tells me to shut up. When the initial shock wore off, she almost started laughing.
“Point taken,” she said, nodding. “But first let me explain what I’m going to do. Most of our tests here are going to be sensor-based, noninvasive stuff, looking at your organs, that sort of…” It closed its eyes, pointedly ignoring her, and she trailed off. “All right then, no medical explanations.” Kira walked to a side counter, rooted through the drawers, and came back with a sterilized glass tube and a handful of little instruments. “Let me at least warn you, though, this finger poker is going to hurt a bit — it’s nothing horrible, just a spring-loaded pin about two millimeters long. Are you going to let me use your finger, or are we going to fight again?”
He opened his eyes, saw the finger poker, and looked up at Kira’s face. After a long moment, he unrolled his fist and laid out his fingers.
“Thank you.” She shook a few drops of ethanol onto a ball of cotton and swabbed his index finger. His hands were firm and warm. The poker was about the size and shape of a dental floss container, and she pressed it against his fingertip. “Brace yourself.”
He barely flinched. The pin jabbed into its fingertip, and she pulled it away quickly, pressing a skinny glass tube against the wound. It slowly filled with blood, more slowly than usual, and she squeezed its finger, pressing out more. The flow stopped before she could even fill the tube.
“Your blood pressure might be low,” she commented, sealing up the tube with a frown. “Usually I can fill two vials on one finger. Unless…” She peered in closer, watching the blood in the tube as it started to congeal. She looked at its finger, prodding the hole gently. It had already sealed itself closed. “That’s amazing,” she whispered. She held the glass tube up to her eye; the blood was turning a rusty brown, firming up until it was capped on both ends by a small, solid scab.
She looked back at the Partial. It said nothing.
Kira’s first impulse was to poke it again, deeper this time, but she recoiled from the idea almost as quickly as she had it. She wasn’t here to torture it, and fast healing or not, it could still feel pain. Its flinch at the finger poker had been proof enough of that. She didn’t have the stomach to wound it just to watch how it reacted.
And yet … wasn’t that what the Senate wanted? Wasn’t that what she was here to do? She wouldn’t just go cutting him with knives, but they had told her to study him, and if the Partial resistance to RM was based on a powerful self-regenerative system, then she would have to test the limits of his healing power and determine how, if at all, they could use it for themselves. If she couldn’t find the answer elsewhere, she would have to look there.
Could it take a gunshot? What would happen to the bullet? Her gut warred with her scientific curiosity. She shook her head and set down the scabbed-over tube.
“I’m not going to torture you,” she said, going back to the drawers and retrieving a small plastic syringe and a short, sharp needle. “But I do have to get another blood sample. The medicomp needs liquid blood to give me a good picture of what’s going on in there, so if you scab over on instant contact with air, we’ll have to keep air out of the equation for as long as possible.” She fitted the syringe with the needle, found a tube of saline solution, and drew it in and out of the needle until she was fairly certain all the internal space had been filled with liquid. She swabbed the vein on the Partial’s inner elbow and held the needle above it. “Get ready for another poke.”
This time it didn’t flinch at all. She drew a cubic centimeter of blood and started to tape a cotton ball to the hole in its arm, but quickly realized that it was, of course, already healing over. She felt a little foolish and turned away, putting the entire syringe, needle and all, into the medicomp. The blood was still liquid. She stripped off her gloves and started tapping the screen, calling up blood tests and liver screens and everything else she could think of, triggering the “comprehensive scan” message that had identified the virus last time. With Marcus. She tapped yes and waited, practically holding her breath, while the medicomp catalogued the blood.
She hadn’t allowed herself to think about Marcus yet; she hadn’t ever really had time. Less than twenty-four hours ago she was still in the back of a Defense Grid truck, pulling into East Meadow for her secret hearing with the Senate. Marcus hadn’t come to Xochi’s last night — and she hadn’t gone to look for him — and then in the morning she’d come straight here. Was he still mad at her? Was she even still mad at him? Yes, she was — of course she was — but at the same time she could see his side. She knew now that he had been … what? Trying to protect her? She didn’t need to be protected, not when she was the only one trying to do something here. But was he right about RM — that it couldn’t be cured, and they were ruining their lives by trying? She couldn’t believe that, couldn’t even allow herself to think it. She was going to cure the damned thing, and that was all there was to it. But then what did she think she understood about Marcus?
That he was scared, and thought he was going to lose her. She could understand that. She’d been half convinced she was going to die herself.
The medicomp chirped, and Kira looked back at the screen. It had higher-than-average electrolytes in its blood, a glucose level that looked borderline diabetic, and a white cell count so high she couldn’t help but take its temperature, fearing an infection. It was 98.6 degrees exactly, just as she was. Maybe its physiology had a slightly different baseline of normal? The results that would indicate illness in a normal human patient, but as far as she knew, they were normal for a Partial. She copied the details down in her notebook, marking the anomalies she wanted to go back and study later.
But the most important part of the scan was what was missing after she’d gone through it all. It had no trace of RM whatsoever.
No RM. She looked up, ecstatic; the Partial was still lying on the table, staring silently at the ceiling, and somehow still managing to look dangerous. Anyone else in that position would look like they’d given up, but there was something about it — the tension in its muscles, the alert flicker of its eyes — that told Kira its mind was racing.
In that moment it didn’t matter. Kira felt like laughing — the Partial had no trace of RM in its blood, just like she’d predicted. Its body could destroy or expel the virus completely. All she had to do was figure out how.
She tapped the screen quickly, fingers dancing across the surface as she pulled up the files on the virus. Now that she knew the Partials didn’t carry it, she had to figure out how, exactly, the humans did — what was the infection process? It wasn’t enough to just say, “They got sick”; she needed to know how the virus traveled from person to person, and what happened when it got there, in precise microbial detail. She needed to watch the process in a human and in a Partia
l, to see how they differed. She pulled up the image of the virus again, the yellow-tinged blob that lived in the blood. You look like a balloon, she thought, but you killed 99.996 percent of the human race.
She needed to focus. What information did the file already have? Size, for one thing: four hundred nanometers. That was huge for this scale — definitely big enough to be stopped by a good air filter. She glanced across the room to the plastic tunnel by the door, wondering what kind of filter it used. A system like that should be able to stop a four-hundred-nanometer virus, she thought. Four hundred nanometers should keep it away from a fetus, as well; nothing that big should be able to cross the placental barrier. That could explain why the babies don’t get sick until after they’re born.
Kira paused, caught by a sudden thought. If the virus is big enough to be contained, why can’t we deliver infants in a contained environment? They scrubbed the room, they sterilized their tools, they wore gas masks — they did everything they could think of, yet the virus still got through.
I’m not the first person to ask that question, she thought. Marcus and Dr. Skousen both said that people have been researching this since the Break. That means there’ll be records somewhere of their findings. She called up the database files in the microscope, searching for studies of all their clean-room births, and found several. None had been successful, obviously; the rate of sickness and the onset of RM was virtually identical to that of normal births, as if the clean room had shown no effect at all. Attached to the records was another set of studies, this time focusing on the existence of an RM variant found only in the air. Kira opened this with interest — she knew that RM was airborne, of course, but the actual structure of the airborne virus was not exactly entry-level medicine, and they hadn’t talked about it yet in any of her classes. The report contained more images, similar to those in her blood sample but much smaller: between twenty-three and thirty-one nanometers. Kira frowned. Something that small would be almost impossible to catch, even with a clean room. She looked at the Partial, feeling a surge of her old anger.
