chapter FIFTEEN
“I wasn’t going to kill her,” said the female Partial. She stepped away from the trip wire and took off her helmet, and Kira recognized her as well: jet-black hair, gorgeous Chinese features, and dark eyes that glittered with a terrifying genius. This was Heron, the Partial who’d captured her before and taken her to Morgan. The girl smirked dismissively, looking at Kira the way someone would stare at a lost kitten—someone who didn’t really like kittens. “I was only trying to scare her.”
Samm bent down to help Kira to her feet, and she rose uncertainly, still trying to process what was happening. “Samm?”
“It’s good to see you.”
“What . . . why are you here?”
“Because we finally found you,” said Heron, and pointed at the ceiling. “Everybody knows you’re on the radio, but we’re the only ones who’ve figured out you were in Manhattan.” She bowed with mock respect. “We chose to keep that information to ourselves.”
Samm retrieved Kira’s rifle from the floor. “We’ve known somebody was in this building for a few days, but we also recognized the signs of the same bomber who’d almost blown us up twice already, and so we took our time coming in. We didn’t know for sure that you were in here until”—he paused, tilting his head as if calculating—“thirty seconds ago. When I saw your face.” He handed Kira the rifle.
Kira took it, puzzled. “You didn’t—” She stopped herself, realizing that she’d almost blurted out, right in front of Heron, that she was a Partial. She was going to ask why they hadn’t felt her on the link, since she’d been able to feel them so clearly, but she didn’t know if Samm had told her or not. She would ask him later, in private.
Kira pushed those thoughts aside and looked back at Samm. “You could have just knocked. . . .” She sighed and shook her head. They couldn’t just knock, because if they were wrong, and this had been anyone other than Kira, they’d be exposing themselves to far greater danger: a rival faction of Partials, or Afa’s megaton booby trap. I wonder how far Afa got, if he got away at all.
“A better answer to your question,” said Samm, “is that we’re here because we needed to find you. You’re in danger.”
“Dr. Morgan is trying to find you,” said Heron, and paused just long enough to make Kira uncomfortable before adding, “We’re here to make sure she doesn’t.”
Kira looked back pointedly. “You’re not with her anymore?”
“I’m with myself,” said Heron. “Always.”
“But why?”
Heron glanced at Samm, almost imperceptibly, but didn’t answer.
“She’s helping me,” said Samm. “Dr. Morgan has put all her efforts into looking for you.”
Kira nodded, phrasing her next question carefully. “How much does she know?”
“I know you’re a Partial,” said Heron, “if that’s what you’re asking. Some kind of crazy Partial none of the doctors could identify.” She smiled slightly, raising her eyebrow. “I take it you’re still keeping this a secret? You never told your human friends before you left them?”
“It’s not that easy,” said Kira.
“It’s the easiest thing in the world,” said Heron, “unless . . . You’re still trying to play both sides, aren’t you? Partial and human at the same time? Trying to save both? Not gonna work.”
Kira felt herself growing angry. “You’re suddenly the expert on my life?”
Heron raised her hands in mock defensiveness. “Whoa, tiger, where’d all the hostility come from?”
Kira nearly snarled. “The last time I saw you, you were strapping me down to an operating table. You worked for Dr. Morgan then, and I don’t see why I should trust you now.”
“Because I haven’t killed you yet.”
“I don’t think you understand trust very well,” said Kira.
“You can trust her because I trust her,” said Samm. He paused. “That is, assuming you still trust me.”
Kira studied him, remembering how he’d betrayed her—and how he’d saved her. Did she trust him? A little, yes, but how much? She blew out a long breath of air and gestured helplessly. “Give me a reason.”
“I defected from Dr. Morgan’s faction when I freed you from the lab,” said Samm. “Heron followed us, waited for you to leave, and after we had discussed everything we’d seen, she proposed a plan: finding our own cure for the expiration date. That’s why we had joined Morgan’s faction in the first place, but her methods had become . . . distasteful.”
Kira raised an eyebrow. “That’s an understatement.”
“The expiration date is going to kill us in less than two years,” said Heron, and Kira heard a flash of cold anger in her voice. “Every single Partial in the world, dead. Faced with genocide, Morgan’s methods don’t seem quite so extreme.”
Kira glanced at Heron, then back at Samm. “And yet you still left her.”
“We left because of you,” said Samm. Kira felt a flush of warmth creep through her body, but listened quietly as Samm continued. “Discovering that you were a Partial changed everything, Kira—you are literally, right now, exactly what we’ve hoped to be for almost twenty years.”
“Lost?”
“Human.” Samm tapped the photo of her as a little girl. “You age. You grow. You aren’t enslaved to a chemical caste system. Dr. Morgan’s preliminary scans of your body suggest that you’re not even sterile.”
Kira furrowed her brow. “How do you know this?”
“We’ve been spying on her ever since you left,” said Samm, “trying to stay one step ahead. She’s looking for you everywhere—the entire Long Island invasion is a last-ditch effort to find you and finish her experiments.”
“But how can she not know what I am?” asked Kira.
“Dr. Morgan is convinced that the secret behind our expiration date has something to do with you,” said Samm. “She’s still experimenting on humans, but her main focus is on two things: She wants to find you, and she wants to find the Trust.”
“You mean the rest of the Trust,” said Kira. Samm frowned, confused, and Kira explained. “Dr. Morgan is part of the Trust,” she said. “McKenna Morgan, specialist in bionanotechnology and human augmentation. She worked at ParaGen for years—I’ve got her whole résumé upstairs.”
Samm frowned. “How could she work at ParaGen if she’s part of the Trust? They’re not human scientists, they’re Partial generals and doctors who stepped up to lead us after the Break.”
Kira pursed her lips. “We’d better go upstairs.”
Afa was gone, leaving nothing but a smoking hole in the wall of the eighth floor: He’d used a small shaped charge to blow a hole between this building and the adjacent one, and slipped out while Kira was fighting Heron and Samm. He’d taken his backpack, but he hadn’t blown them up, and Kira knew he’d come back soon—he couldn’t stand to leave his library for long. In the meantime she led Samm and Heron to one of the records rooms, a former sound booth with a wide table and a ring of co-opted filing cabinets. This was where Afa stored his most extensive, most valuable records about the inner workings of ParaGen, and Kira had been going through them steadily during her breaks from the radio. As the Partials grew more canny, and the human army retreated away from effective radio range, those breaks were getting longer and more plentiful.
“This one first,” said Kira, hanging her oil lantern on a hook in the wall, and setting out a printed sheet from an old company email. “It’s a meeting request from the financial manager to the top staff of the ParaGen labs. This part at the top is a list of email addresses—it’s like code names, kind of, that the computer system used to deliver messages to people.”
“We’re familiar with email,” said Heron.
“Hey,” said Kira, “this technology is all new to me—I was five when you blew everything up, remember?”
“Go on,” said Samm.
Kira looked at the two Partials, noting for the first time how different they were: Samm, like before, was straightforward; he didn’t say half of what he felt, but what he did say was simple and utilitarian. He’d explained his taciturn nature as a side effect of the link: It carried most of their emotional information, so their speech didn’t need to. Partials used their voices to convey ideas, and their pheromones to convey the social context of those ideas: how they felt about it, how nervous or relaxed or excited they were. For a human observer not connected to the link, it made the Partials seem cold and robotic. Heron, in contrast, was a remarkably human communicator—she used facial tics, voice modulation, slang, even body language in a way Kira hadn’t seen from any other Partials. Well, thought Kira, any other Partials but me. I can barely detect the link, though, and I grew up without any access to it at all. I talk like a human because I’ve been communicating with them my whole life.
What’s Heron’s explanation?
Samm was looking at her expectantly, and Kira turned back to the printout. “I’ve cross-referenced this email list with some of the other records Afa’s got in here, and I think these six people are the Trust—maybe not the whole Trust, but I’m pretty sure most of the Trust ringleaders were in this group.” She pointed to each address as she named them off. “Graeme Chamberlain, Kioni Trimble, Jerry Ryssdal, McKenna Morgan, Nandita Merchant, and . . .” She paused. “Armin Dhurvasula. Some of those names probably look familiar.”
“General Trimble runs B Company,” said Samm. “We’ve known for a while she was part of the Trust—but like I said, the Trust are all Partials, not humans. And this Dr. Morgan—there’s probably more than one Dr. Morgan in the world, there’s no guarantee this is the same one.”
“Take a look at her info page,” said Kira, handing him a stack of papers, “printed from the company website. There’s a photo.”
Heron took the stack, Samm reading over her shoulder as she flipped through it. They paused on the photo, studying it carefully; it wasn’t the best quality, but the image was unmistakable. Kira had only been with the doctor for a few minutes, but her face was scarred into her memory. It was the same woman.
Heron set down the papers. “Dr. Morgan is a Partial. She’s on the link—we’ve all felt it. She’s been with us since before the Break. She’s immune to RM. Hell, she survived a gunfight with Samm in close quarters back when you escaped—that’s a sure sign of heightened Partial reflexes. There’s no way she’s a human.”
Kira nodded and dug into another filing cabinet. “One of these records is a report from a corporate investigator; apparently some of the members of the Trust had been giving themselves Partial gene mods. The company leaders flipped out when they found out about it.”
“Partial gene mods?” asked Samm. “What does that even mean?”
“Before they got into the business of biosynthetic organisms,” said Kira, “ParaGen got its start in biotech, making genetic modifications for humans—they’d fix congenital defects, improve people’s strength and reflexes, even do cosmetic mods like breast augmentation. By the Break, nearly every person born in a hospital in America had some sort of genetic modification customs built by ParaGen or another biotech firm. This report doesn’t go into detail, but it specifically says ‘Partial gene mods.’ I think some of the members of the Trust were using the same technology they made for you—us—on themselves.”
“They gave themselves the link and then used it to control us,” said Heron. Her voice dripped with venom.
“So they made themselves into . . . half-Partials,” said Samm. He didn’t show it as obviously, but Kira could tell he was just as disturbed as Heron was, though maybe not so angry. He paused, then looked at Kira. “Do you think maybe that’s what you are?”
“I thought the same thing,” she answered, “but there’s no way to know for sure without a closer look at the bioscan Morgan took of me. Every doctor in the room seemed pretty certain I was a Partial, though, not just a hybrid. They spoke of Partial-specific codes written on my DNA. But I’m not ruling anything out.”
Heron looked back at the list. “So Morgan’s part of the Trust. So is your friend Nandita.” She looked up, staring at Kira, and Kira got the sudden sense that she was being analyzed—not by a scientist, but by a predator. She half expected Heron to pounce forward and take a bite from her neck.
Kira looked down, too uncomfortable to hold the girl’s gaze. “Nandita left me a message,” she said. She fished the photo from her backpack pocket and handed it to Samm. “I found this in my house three months ago; it’s the reason I left. That’s Nandita, that’s my father, Armin Dhurvasula, and that’s me in the middle. Kira . . . Dhurvasula.” It still felt strange to say it. For all she knew, it might not even be her name. She’d never been officially adopted, as far as she could guess, because all the papers she’d read from the time period implied that Partials weren’t legally defined as people. She wouldn’t bear her father’s surname any more than a dog would, or a television.
Samm stared at the photo intently, his dark eyes flicking back and forth across the image. Heron seemed more interested in the various Trust-related documents scattered across the table. “So your father created you at ParaGen,” said Samm. “He knew you were a Partial. And so did your guardian on Long Island.”
“But she never told me about it,” said Kira. “She raised me like a human—I think my dad did, too. At least I don’t remember any reason to think that he didn’t. But why?”
“He wanted a daughter,” said Samm.
“You were part of their plan,” said Heron, shaking her head. “All of us are. We just don’t know what it is, and what each member’s part was in creating it.” She held up another email, one Kira had been looking at the night before. “This says Dr. Morgan was assigned to ‘performance and specifications.’”
“I think that means she programmed your super-soldier attributes,” said Kira. “Each member of the Trust had a part in the creation of the Partials, and her part was all the extra gizmos that make you what you are—enhanced reflexes, enhanced vision, accelerated healing, stronger muscles, and so on and so on. The rest of the team tried to make you as human as possible; it was Dr. Morgan who made you . . . more.”
“And she’s still doing it,” said Samm. He set the photo down and looked at Kira somberly. “I’ve overheard some reports about Morgan messing with the Partial genome, and Heron says she’s seen it in person.”
Heron raised an eyebrow, still sifting through the pages on the table. “Apparently she can’t stop tinkering.”
“Is she trying to just work around the expiration date?” asked Kira. “Maybe she can’t find the genes that kill you after twenty years, so she’s adding in new mods to try to dampen them.”
“Maybe,” said Samm, “if something like that is even possible. But she’s mostly doing more . . . well, like you said: augmentation. Making certain Partials stronger or faster. They say she has a whole squad that can breathe underwater. She’s drifting further way from the human template.”
“Sounds like she’s turned her back on humanity across the board,” said Kira. “Or maybe just given up on it.”
“She had help at ParaGen,” said Heron, picking up another sheet of paper. “Look. Jerry Ryssdal was assigned to the same project, or another part of it.”
Kira nodded, marveling at Heron’s ability to sort through the information scattered across the table. It had taken Kira days to find these connections, but Heron was putting it all together in a matter of minutes. “I don’t know exactly what Ryssdal’s contribution was,” Kira said, “but I think you’re right. Some of them worked in pairs.”
“But not all?” Samm prompted.
Kira shrugged. “I honestly have no idea. We’re talking about the biggest secrets of an incredibly secretive company, and the even more secretive inner circle that was apparently working both for and against them. Even the basic information is buried in layers of security and coded emails, and I can’t even be sure if the clues I’ve found are real or just disinformation designed to throw people off the trail. Afa’s spent years on this, even before the Break, but it’s just . . . incomplete. We don’t have the answers.
“He’s . . .” Kira paused, not certain how to articulate the big man’s condition. “He’s been alone for a very long time, let’s put it that way. I think it kind of broke his brain, but even broken he’s a genius. He was collecting information on the end of the world before it even ended. He’s got stuff about the Isolation War, and the biotech industry, and the Partials, and . . . everything. He worked for ParaGen, running part of their computer system, which is where most of this stuff comes from.” She gestured around the room, and Samm nodded appreciatively.
Heron received the information more passively, seeming to soak it up while studying a full array of documents at once. Her eyes flicked back and forth as she read the papers before her, and a dark frown crept across her face. “This isn’t good,” she said.
Samm looked up. “What?”
“Morgan is a part of the Trust—we have two conflicting ideas of what the Trust is, but they both say she was a part of it. And the Trust seems to be the group that created the Partials.”
“We know all that already,” said Kira. “None of it’s awesome news, but it’s not exactly terrible, either.”
“That’s because you’re not paying attention,” said Heron. “Start putting the pieces together: Morgan built the Partials, but she didn’t know about the expiration date until the first generation started dying three years ago. Why didn’t she know? The cure for RM is built into the Partial pheromone system, but she didn’t know about that, either. You’re some kind of new-model Partial, and she had no idea you even existed.”
The implications hit Kira like a punch to the gut, and she sank into a chair. “That’s not good.”
“I’m not seeing it,” said Samm. “The three things you just mentioned have nothing to do with the physical augmentation package she worked on, so it makes sense that she didn’t know about them. Why is this a big deal?”
“Because it means they’re not who we thought they were,” said Kira. “They’re not what we thought they were. I’ve been out here for two months trying to find the Trust because I thought they had it all together—a group of geniuses or whatever with a plan for exactly how everything was supposed to work. Cures for RM, details on expiration, answers to how I fit in, everything. But now that we’re finally learning about them, they’re just . . .” She sighed, understanding, finally. “If everything Heron is saying about Morgan is true, then they’re just as fragmented as everybody else. They kept secrets from each other; they messed with each other’s work. I was relying on them for answers, but I’m starting to think they might not have them, either.”
“And if they don’t have them,” said Heron, “nobody does.”
Samm paused, lost in thought. Kira thought about the problem from different angles, going through everything she knew about the Trust. Each member of the Trust would still have certain answers to her questions, right? She could still find them, like Nandita had told her to, and she could still learn something. If there wasn’t a plan in place, she could make one. The pieces were all here. And perhaps there was a member of the Trust out there who did know it all, who oversaw the project, who could tell her how these pieces fit together. How she fit together.
She had to believe.
Samm broke the silence. “What about the scientists who worked with you directly?” he asked. “Your father, and Nandita: What were their contributions?”
“My father did the pheromone system,” said Kira, “which I suppose makes sense—I don’t have the full link, but I have a version of it. He may have built it custom.”
“Which parts of it do you have?” asked Heron.
“I have no idea,” said Kira. “I knew you were waiting for me on the stairs, and you knew I was waiting for you, but right now I can’t sense either of you at all.”
Heron raised an eyebrow, a motion half-mocking, half-curious. “We knew you were on the stairs because you’re about as stealthy as a moose. There was no link data coming from you at all—and there isn’t any now.”
“But I felt you,” said Kira. “I knew exactly where both of you were.”
“Interesting,” said Heron.
Kira turned to Samm. “What about you?” She thought about the connection she’d felt with him in the lab, and suddenly grew anxious. “Do you feel anything?” She felt stupid for asking, like a schoolgirl, and couldn’t bring herself to ask the second part of the question: Did you feel anything?
Samm shook his head. “Nothing . . . right now.”
“And before?” Heron asked.
“I . . . can’t be sure.”
What’s that look in his eyes? thought Kira. Why are these stupid Partials so hard to read?
“Maybe all she can do is receive,” said Heron, “with no ability to transmit.”
“Or the transmitter’s been turned off somehow,” said Samm. “I don’t know why, though.”
“To hide me from other Partials,” said Kira, “or to protect me from them. I’ve never gotten any of the ‘command’ data you’ve talked about, either. When Dr. Morgan tried to force you to obey her, I didn’t feel a thing.”
Samm’s expression was dark. “Count yourself lucky.”
“I wonder if she’s a spy model,” Heron mused. “Strength and reflexes slightly boosted, physically attractive, heightened intelligence, human communication skills, and apparently engineered for independence. It fits.”
“You have spy models?” asked Kira.
Heron laughed, and Samm cocked his head in the most human expression of confusion she’d seen from him yet. “What do you think Heron is?”
“But if I’m a spy, then what’s my mission?” asked Kira. “Am I going to wake up someday with a data download telling me to assassinate a senator? How could they have even planned something like that five years before the Break?”
“I have no idea,” said Heron. “I’m just saying it’s a possibility.”
“Moving on,” said Samm. “Dhurvasula built the pheromone system, but what about Nandita?”
“That’s another of our big holes,” said Kira. “Nandita and one other guy, Graeme Chamberlain, were working on something called the Failsafe. Of all the things that went into making the Partials, this is clearly the most secret. I have absolutely no records that explain what the Failsafe was, or what it did, or even who ordered it.”
“What do you know about this Chamberlain?” asked Samm. “I’ve never heard of him before.”
“That I can tell you,” said Kira, “but it’s going to creep you the hell out.” She opened a manila folder and pulled out a single sheet of paper: a death certificate. “As soon as he finished building the Failsafe, he killed himself.”
The three fell silent. Kira had gone through Afa’s records as thoroughly as she could, and they simply didn’t have the information they needed—they raised some tantalizing questions, like this one about Chamberlain, but they never actually answered them. All the most important secrets were still locked away somewhere: Who was the Trust? Why did they create RM? What was the Failsafe?
What am I? Kira thought. What purpose do I have in all this? Without more information, there was no way to know.
It was Samm—always pragmatic, always straightforward—who broke the silence again. “We have to go.”
“Where?” asked Kira.
“To ParaGen,” said Samm. “To wherever they were when they did all this—when they made all these decisions. If the information’s not here, that’s the only other place it could be.”
“That’s not going to be easy,” said Heron.
Kira nodded. “The ParaGen headquarters were in Denver. I’m not really up on my old-world geography, but I’m pretty sure that’s not close.”
“It’s not,” said Heron, “and the road to get there is, by any estimation, hell.”
“How horrible could it be?” asked Kira, gesturing around. “We’ve made it through this, didn’t we? Is Denver any worse?”
“We honestly don’t know about Denver,” said Samm, glancing at Heron, “but most of the Midwest is virtually uncrossable, thanks to Houston. It was the biggest oil and gas refinery in the world at the time of the Break, and without anyone to keep it operating properly, it started to fall apart. Eventually it lit on fire—a lightning strike, maybe, we don’t know for sure—and it’s still burning ten years later, creating a cloud of toxic fumes a thousand miles wide. The entire Midwest is a toxic wasteland, everywhere those gases have been blown to by the Gulf wind.”
Kira raised her eyebrow. “And this is your plan?”
Samm’s face remained stony. “I wasn’t intending to enjoy it, but if it’s the only way, it’s the only way.”
“It’s not the only way,” said Heron. “We could call in Dr. Morgan right now and end this entire thing—the search, the war, everything. We know now that even if she doesn’t know everything about RM and expiration, she knows more than she’s let on, and the information we have might be enough for her to come up with a plan to cure us. And we wouldn’t have to cross this nightmare wasteland to do it.”
“She’ll kill Afa,” said Kira.
“Probably.”
“She’ll kill everybody,” said Kira, feeling an edge of steel in her voice. “She wants to solve the expiration date—”
“That’s exactly my point,” said Heron.
“—but I’m trying to solve them both,” said Kira. “Expiration and RM. They’re connected through the Partials, and through ParaGen, and if we can find the ParaGen records, we can find the answers we need. If we give up and side with Morgan, the humans die.”
“The humans will live,” said Heron, “because Morgan will stop killing them looking for you.”
“So they’ll die in a few decades,” said Kira, “but they’ll still die. RM won’t be cured, and they won’t be able to reproduce, and the human race will go extinct.”
“Did it ever occur to you that maybe it’s time for them to go extinct?” Heron asked. Kira felt like she’d been punched in the face. “Maybe humans are just done,” said Heron, “and it’s time for the Partials to inherit the Earth.”
Kira’s voice was a hiss. “I can’t believe you would say that.”
“That’s because you still think you’re one of them,” said Heron.
“It’s because I care about people and don’t want them to die!”
“There are Partials dying every day,” said Heron. “Do you care about them?”
“I told you, I’m trying to save everyone—”
“And what if you can’t?” asked Heron. “A journey across the continent is incredibly dangerous—what if we don’t make it? What if we get there and can’t find any answers? What if it takes us so long the Partials all die before we get back? I don’t want to risk their lives just because you couldn’t pick a side!”
Heron’s eyes were practically flaring with anger, but Kira met them fearlessly and stared straight back. “I’ve picked a side,” she said darkly. “And everyone’s on it. And that’s exactly who I’m going to save.”
Heron glared at her, practically snarling. Samm spoke with his typical stone-faced demeanor. “If we’re going to go, we need to go now—the sooner we leave, the sooner we get back.” He looked at Heron. “And we’ll need you, or we’ll never make it.”
Kira looked at them both, steeling her courage. “If we do this, we have to do it right. Any records we find will be stored on computers, under heavy encryption: Do either of you know how to get past that kind of security?”
Samm shook his head; Heron only glared.
Kira blew out a long, low breath. “Then we need to find Afa.”