by Dan Wells
Heron smiled. “A truce? I’m impressed, Samm; you may have a future in espionage.”
Kira saw a flash in the corner of her eye, the glint of light on a hypodermic needle. She screamed and felt it prick into her neck. The effect was almost instant: Her eyes grew heavy, her mind seemed to warp and bend. The world grew dark and thick, and Kira had time for one last thought before she fell unconscious.
I’m going to die.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Beep. Pssssssssh.
Beep. Pssssssssh.
Kira was heavy — before she perceived anything else, she could feel her own weight, her body too weak for her muscles to move. She was lying down.
Beep. Pssssssssh.
There was a noise, rhythmic and soft, somewhere near her head. Near? Yes, she was sure of it. Wherever she was, the noise was nearby. She tried to roll her head, but her neck wouldn’t turn; tried to open her eyes, but her lids were too leaden to move.
Beep. Pssssssssh.
There was another noise, a white-noise buzz in the background of her perception. She focused on it, tried to parse it, to understand it. Voices. A low murmur.
“… the subject…”
“… burn mark…”
“… tests positive…”
They were talking about her. Where was she?
Beep. Pssssssssh.
She was in a hospital. She remembered being under the bridge, Samm betraying her, the girl, Heron, injecting her with something. Was she being healed? Or studied?
“… all normal except…”
“… ready to proceed…”
“… preparing first incision…”
Kira moved her hand, a herculean effort, dragging ten tons of flesh and bone across three inches of table. The voices stopped. Her hand hit a barrier, a leather restraint; she could feel one on her other hand as well. She was tied down.
“She moved. Didn’t you sedate her?”
Kira opened one eye, then squinted it shut again at the brutal shock of bright lights. She heard a rustle and a sharp metal crash.
“Get those out of her face, she’s waking up.” Samm’s voice. She opened her mouth, suddenly aware of a plastic tube stretching past her tongue and down her throat. She gagged, coughing, trying not to retch, and the tube slid out like a long, slick snake. She coughed again, swallowed, cracked one eye the tiniest fraction.
Samm was standing over her.
“You,” she coughed, “bloody bastard.”
“We have to begin,” said a voice.
“Stop,” said Samm. “She’s awake!”
“Then we sedate her again. With a bigger dose this time.”
“You bloody”—she coughed again—“bastard.”
She could see better now, her eyes adjusting to the light. She was surrounded by women in hospital robes and surgical masks. She was in some kind of operating room, but it wasn’t like any operating room she’d ever seen. Metal arms hung from the ceiling like the limbs of a giant insect, scalpels and syringes and a dozen other instruments poised mere inches from Kira’s face. The walls were glowing with a muted, multicolored light — computer screens, the walls were computer screens, alive with graphs and charts and scrolling numbers. She saw her heartbeat, the thin line spiking in perfect unison with the pounding in her chest; she saw her temperature, her blood oxygen level, her height and weight in precise thousandths of a measurement. She turned her head again and saw her own face, scrubbed and topped with a plastic hat, her body stripped and bare, strapped down to the flat metal table. Her eyes were wide with terror. She gasped and the image gasped with her, the wall-size face twisting into a rictus of fear, a live camera feed of her dying moments filling the room like a horror show. She panicked; her breathing accelerated; her heart pumped; the graphs scrawled mad, thumping lines three feet high across the walls.
“I’m sorry,” said Samm. “I tried to tell them you came willingly—”
“You were not asked to bring a volunteer,” said a stern voice. A woman stepped forward. Her blue mask hid her face, but her eyes were the color of polished gunmetal, cold and unfeeling. “You have succeeded where your entire squadron failed. Do not risk your commendation now by interfering.”
Samm turned back to Kira. “They’ve asked me to be here, to talk to you, so you’d have someone you trusted—”
“I don’t trust you!” she shouted. Her voice echoed through the operating room, raw and ragged. “I helped you! I rescued you! I believed everything you said! Every word about surviving together or not surviving at all — and it was all a lie?”
“I was telling the truth,” said Samm. “When we reached the mainland, I was trying to keep you away from them until I could explain things — that you’d come to try to help us.”
“Then let me go!” Kira sobbed. The face on the wall sobbed with her, a mockery of her despair. She moved her legs, struggling against the restraints; she pulled on her arms, vainly trying to cover her chest and groin. She felt exposed and vulnerable and helpless. “Get me out of here.”
“I…” Samm’s face went rigid again, the same concentration he’d shown before — she could almost see his body seize up as the link took hold, forcing him to obey his superior officers. “I can’t.” He let out a breath, the tension gone, his muscles relaxing. “I can’t,” he repeated. “I obey my orders.” His expression darkened.
“Very good,” said the woman. She stepped forward, and one of the metal arms swung around with her, shining a light in Kira’s face, blinding her again. “Samm says you came willingly?”
“I did,” said Kira. “I came to help you.”
“And you think your dark-age technology is of any value to us? You barely understand how your own genetics work, let alone ours.”
“It doesn’t matter anymore, it was all lies.”
“Some of it was,” the woman agreed, “some of it was not. I am surprised Samm told you about our plight, our ‘expiration date,’ but that much, at least, was true. That’s why you’re here.”
“I’m a medic,” said Kira. “I’ve focused my studies on pathology and reproduction, trying to find a cure for RM. I can use that knowledge to help you.”
“Your human studies are worthless,” said the woman. “I assure you our needs lie in a completely different area.”
“I’ve studied Samm, too,” said Kira, “not like this—” She paused suddenly, thinking how much of Samm’s experience had been like this. How much of it had been worse. “My people did not treat him well,” she said slowly, “and I’m sorry for that, but I helped him. I studied him noninvasively. I was humane.”
The woman smirked. “Humane? Even the word is an insult.”
“You have a genetic deficiency that we don’t,” said Kira. “You’re immune to RM and our babies are not.” She pleaded with the woman. “We need each other.”
“The last time Partials and humans tried to work together, it didn’t work out so well,” said the woman. “I think we’ll take our chances on our own.”
Another metal arm swung into place, a bright hypodermic needle gleaming at its tip. Kira started to protest, but the needle darted forward like the tail of a scorpion.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
The needle pierced Kira’s chest, a sharp sting almost instantly dulled by the slow, spreading numbness of a topical anesthetic.
“You can’t put me under again,” Kira insisted, trying to sound stronger than she felt. The steel-eyed doctor shook her head.
“We’re not putting you under, girl, we’re prepping you for this.” She held up a syringe in her white-gloved hand, much bigger than the other, with a thick needle nearly four inches long. Kira shuddered at the sight of it, inching away as far as she could in her restraints. “Don’t worry,” said the doctor, though her voice carried no hint of compassion. “That anesthetic is excellent; you won’t feel a thing. It’s important that you be awake for this test so we can observe your responses — we were going to wait, and perform a different experiment
first, but since you’ve woken up early, we may as well get started.” The doctor turned away, and another arm of the spiderlike medical robot swung down and pricked Kira’s thigh, drawing a vial of blood into a clear glass syringe.
Kira’s heart was racing. “What was that?”
The doctor spoke idly over her shoulder as she studied one of the wall screens. “Since you’ve proven somewhat resistant to our sedatives, we’re going to analyze your blood and mix one custom. We need you awake for now, but it wouldn’t be good for anyone if you wake up during the next test.”
Kira fought against her tears, irrationally determined not to let these monsters see her cry. I am stronger than my trials. She saw movement from the corner of her eye and cringed as a sudden fluid shape blotted out the light. She bit back a scream, but the shadow moved past her face and settled over her body; it was Samm, spreading a blanket to cover her.
“We need her chest exposed for the injection,” the doctor snapped.
“Then you can move it,” said Samm. “If she’s going to be awake, at least give her some dignity.”
The doctor paused, studying Samm with narrowed eyes, then nodded. “Fine.”
Samm leaned in close to Kira’s face. “I tried the captain on a radio, but Dr. Morgan is outside the command structure — she’s on special assignment from the Trust. She’ll be hard to stop.”
“Go to hell,” said Kira.
Samm looked down, no longer meeting her eyes, and walked away silently.
Kira could hear the other doctors discussing in low tones, manipulating one of the wall panels with their fingertips.
“… other subjects … pheromone… RM.…”
Kira’s ears snapped to attention, all her energy focused on trying to hear exactly what the doctors were saying. She couldn’t see past them to the image they were looking at, but as she concentrated, their words became clearer.
“… so we’ll inject her, and see how she reacts. We’re looking for the time it takes the particle to be absorbed, the range and coverage it achieves, and any hint of necrotic activity.”
It’s their last-minute prep, thought Kira.
But what are they going to inject me with?
Dr. Morgan hefted the big syringe and turned toward Kira; the others moved with her, spreading out around the table. The medical spider spun into place, grippers and pincers and lights and scalpels all hovering above her like a spiky metal nightmare. As the doctors left the wall panel, Kira saw the images they’d been looking at — recognized them immediately from her own study of Samm: a magnified picture of the Predator, the stage of RM that appeared in the newborn’s blood, and beside it the Lurker, the one she’d found in Samm that shared so much of the Predator’s structure.
Dr. Morgan pulled back the sheet, exposing the top of Kira’s chest. “We have reason to believe that this is going to make you very sick, very quickly.” She held the syringe over Kira’s heart. “We’ll be monitoring your vital signs, of course, but we need you to tell us anything else you may experience: pain in your joints, shortness of breath, loss of vision or hearing. Sensory details our instruments can’t detect or interpret.”
“You’re injecting me with the Lurker,” said Kira, already feeling her body starting to panic, and struggling to keep her breathing even and calm. “The particle you produce, the inert version of RM. What are you expecting it to do?”
“A version of RM? I told you your knowledge was useless to us.” She plunged the needle into Kira’s chest — she could feel it sliding in, pain and pressure and a horrifying sense of invasion. The anesthetic isn’t working! Dr. Morgan pressed down on the plunger, and Kira gasped at the sudden flood of fire in her chest, pumping directly to her heart and from there to the rest of her body, filling her in seconds. Her breath caught; her hands grasped involuntarily at the edge of the table, scrabbling for anything solid to hold on to. The injection seemed to take ages, and when Dr. Morgan finally pulled out the needle, Kira whimpered, imagining she could still feel the fluid as it coursed through her.
“No reaction yet,” said a masked doctor, her eyes fixed firmly on the wall. Another shined a light in Kira’s eyes, checking her dilation with one hand and her pulse with the other.
“Everything normal.”
“We’re not sure how quickly this works,” said Dr. Morgan, watching Kira closely. “We haven’t experimented on humans since just after the Partial War.”
Kira breathed deeply, summoning her control after the violation of the injection. The particle still rotated slowly on one of the screens. Am I going to die? She said the Lurker’s not a new version of RM — then what is it? And what are they expecting to see?
She remembered one of their snatches of overheard whispering and looked back at the images on the wall: the virus and the Lurker, so similar and yet so unlike a virus. It had always confused her, dealing only with her own incomplete information, but here with the Partials she knew more. She had heard them talking about it.
“You called it a pheromone,” said Kira.
Dr. Morgan paused suddenly, looking at Kira quizzically. She followed Kira’s eyes to the images on the wall, then looked back at Kira. “You know this particle?”
“We thought it was a new stage of RM, because it looked so much like the other, but you called it a pheromone. That’s why Samm was producing it — it’s part of your link data.”
Dr. Morgan glanced to the side of the room, beyond Kira’s field of vision, and Kira could tell from her eyes that she was frowning. She looked back at Kira. “Your knowledge is more extensive than I expected. I confess that when you — a human, of all things — told me you were a medic, I didn’t really take you seriously.”
Kira fought down a wave of nausea, still reeling from the pain of the injection. She composed herself again and looked at Dr. Morgan. “What does it do?”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out.”
“Is it part of the link?” asked Kira. “Is the whole RM virus just a side effect of your abilities?”
“Over the past twelve years I’ve catalogued every pheromone the Partials produce,” said Dr. Morgan. “I’ve isolated every particle, I’ve tracked them back to the organ that produces them and the stimulus that triggers their production, and I’ve determined their precise purpose and function. Every one of them.” She nodded at the image on the wall. “Except that one.”
Kira shook her head. “Why would you have a pheromone with no purpose? Everything about you was built with a purpose.”
“Oh, there’s a purpose,” said Dr. Morgan. “Everything at ParaGen had a purpose, as you say. One of those purposes was a fixed time of death, and it is our suspicion that this pheromone might somehow be related to it. If we can study certain reactions, we might be able to combat it.” She gestured at the images behind her. “As you can see from the wall screen, the pheromone doesn’t react with other Partials, and it doesn’t react with humans. It reacts with RM.”
Suddenly Kira saw the two images in a new light: not as versions of each other, but as a combination. The Predator didn’t just look like the Partial pheromone, it was the Partial pheromone, with an airborne RM Spore wrapped around it. That was how the Spore became the Predator — not on contact with blood, but on contact with the pheromone. On contact with blood, the Spore turns into the Blob. Kira’s mind filled with the image of the newborn baby’s blood, the bizzarre Predator virus multiplying like mad and yet not causing any damage to the cells. Samm was right there: he’d been breathing the Lurker into the air for days. It got into the sample, attached itself to the Spore, and rendered the virus inert.
That was the secret of RM. That was the cure. A tiny little particle inside their greatest enemies.
“When the humans fell, we began to research the question of Partial sterility, to see if we could undo it.” Dr. Morgan seemed oblivious to Kira’s shock — or was interpreting it as uneducated bewilderment. Kira struggled to hide her emotions as the doctor kept talking, suddenly terrifie
d at the prospect of this cold, calculating woman in possession of so powerful a secret. If Dr. Morgan was concerned about Kira’s reaction, she didn’t show it. She walked to the wall, tapped the screen, and called up a series of other files — other faces, other human girls, as pale and wide-eyed as Kira, strapped to the same table and subjected to the same experiments. “We needed a nonsterile control for our experiments, and naturally this led us to the study of humans. It was only after the last girl died that we noticed the link between our pheromone and RM: Somehow the virus is absorbing the pheromone into itself, though how and why we have no idea. Eventually we were caught up in … other concerns, but when the crisis of the expiration date began to surface, we realized we needed to take up the studies again.” She turned back to Kira, idly playing with the empty syringe in her hands. “And here you are.”
Kira nodded, bursting with her secret, trying not to give it away. I need to get out of here. I need to get home.
I can save Madison’s baby. I can save them all.
“Still no change,” said another doctor, monitoring Kira’s vital signs. “If the reaction is occurring, it’s not having any measurable effect.”
“It’s not occurring,” said another doctor in a completely different tone. “And it’s not going to.” Everyone in the room looked toward her, even Kira. The doctor tapped a panel, and it expanded to fill the whole wall, showing lists of acronyms and abbreviations that Kira immediately recognized as a blood test. “She doesn’t have any of the virus in her blood.”
“That’s impossible. Even humans immune to the symptoms carry the virus.”
“You’re right.” The doctor paused. “She has the coding.”
The room went silent. Kira looked at the doctors’ faces, registering their shock. In the space behind her she heard Samm’s voice dripping with confusion. “What?”
“Let me see that,” said Dr. Morgan, stalking across the room to the wall screen. She tapped it furiously, dragging charts across the wall and zooming in and out on a rapid flurry of images. She stopped on a strand of DNA, not a scoped image but a graphical re-creation, and stared at it with enough intensity to burn a hole through the plating. “Who performed the scan?”
