chapter SEVENTEEN
Marcus ran from tree to tree down Kira’s old street, eyes searching constantly for anything out of the ordinary—a rustle of leaves, a face or a body, a broken door or window. The Partial army was barely half an hour away, battling what was left of the Grid’s desperate last stand. He needed to leave East Meadow altogether, but there was something he had to do first.
Xochi’s house was closed and shuttered, like all the other houses in the city. He knocked on the door, eyeing the trees suspiciously—this was, after all, the house where Heron had accosted him.
Marcus heard a bolt slide, and Xochi opened the door. “Come in,” she said quickly, bolting it solidly again behind him. The house smelled like basil and nutmeg and coriander, a cacophony of competing aromas. Xochi set down the shotgun she’d been holding, going back to her frenzied packing, and Marcus stood uncomfortably in the middle of the room.
“What brings you here?” asked Xochi, looking up from her half-filled backpack. “I thought you’d be halfway to our safe house by now.” Xochi and Isolde had picked a central point on the island where their group of friends could flee and rendezvous if—or when, really—the Grid defense failed. Marcus didn’t answer right away, still trying to think of how to start—he had so many questions, but was this a topic she’d even want to talk about? Xochi frowned, noticing his indecision, and gestured toward the kitchen. “Do you need anything? Water? I got a bushel of lemons I’m not taking with me, I could whip up some lemonade.”
“That’s okay.”
“It takes like thirty seconds, it’s fine if you want some—”
“No, thank you,” said Marcus. He worked his chin and lips, as if warming up his mouth for the conversation, but it was just a stalling tactic. He still wasn’t sure how to start. He sat down, then stood up nervously and gestured to the couch. “Sit down.”
Xochi sat solemnly. “What’s going on, Marcus? I’ve never seen you like this before.”
“I talked to Kira,” he said. Xochi’s eyes went wide, and Marcus nodded. “Three weeks ago was the first time, when Haru and I were on the front lines. Six, maybe eight times since. I don’t know where she is, but she’s been listening to our radios and the Partial radios and feeding us information—nothing that could win us the war, obviously, but enough to keep Haru and me from getting killed.”
“Is she okay?”
“She’s fine,” said Marcus. “Better than we are, at least, though that’ll change pretty quick if they can find her. Dr. Morgan is pouring every resource she has into this.”
Xochi nodded. “That’s what Isolde told me. Apparently this entire invasion is about finding her. Do you know why?”
“I don’t,” said Marcus. “Kira won’t tell me. She’s been acting strange ever since Morgan’s lab, like they did something to her that she doesn’t want to talk about.”
“It was a pretty traumatic experience,” said Xochi.
“I know,” said Marcus quickly, “I know, but I mean . . . Let me ask you this: What’s your earliest memory of Kira?”
Xochi played with the straps of her backpack, rolling them into little cylinders as she spoke. “It was at school, the old one by the hospital. I’d been in the farms with Kessler for a couple of years, but we fought like tigers—even then—and so when I turned eight she sent me into East Meadow for school.”
Marcus almost smiled at the memory. “You beat up Benji Haul on your first day.”
Xochi shrugged. “He had it coming. I spent the afternoon in detention, and Kira was in there for, I can’t remember, starting a fire with all the phosphorus from the lightbulbs or something—one of those crazy brainiac schemes you and Kira were always getting into.”
“What about Nandita?” asked Marcus.
Xochi frowned. “What about Nandita?”
“When was the first time you met her?” asked Marcus. “Soon after that?”
“Not for another year at least,” said Xochi. “I never came here because I was confined to the school—Kessler’s orders—and I never saw Nandita there because I always ran and hid when they did presentations or fairs or whatever. I had enough problems with my own fake mom, I didn’t need to hang out with anybody else’s. Why are you asking about Nandita?”
Marcus leaned closer. “I haven’t told you everything,” he said. “Do you remember the Partial that followed Samm after we left Morgan’s lab? An assassin or something; Samm said she was watching when we got into the boat to come home.”
“I remember that it happened, yeah,” said Xochi. “Why?”
“Because she was here,” said Marcus. “Four or five weeks ago, in this backyard.”
“Here?”
“She was looking for Kira,” said Marcus, “but she was also looking for Nandita. She had a photo of Kira and Nandita together, before the Break, standing in front of the ParaGen building.”
Xochi froze. “Nandita never knew Kira before the Break.”
“That’s what I thought, too,” said Marcus. “Did either of them ever actually say it?”
“She talked about meeting the girls,” Xochi spluttered. “She told these little stories about finding each one of them, one by one—”
“What was the story about Kira?”
Xochi stuck out her lower lip, thinking. “She found her on the mainland,” she said, “in a refugee camp. A big group of soldiers, US or NADI or whatever, marched in one day with a whole ton of survivors they’d picked up, and Nandita saw Kira cussing out one of the guards because he didn’t have any pudding.”
Marcus raised an eyebrow. “Cussing him out?”
Xochi laughed. “Have you met Kira? She’s a fireball now, and she was a fireball then. Nandita used to call her the Little Explosion. Besides, she was five years old and she’d just spent who knows how long with no one to talk to but soldiers; she probably had a monster vocabulary. The soldier kept apologizing about the pudding, and this skinny little girl kept calling his mother into serious moral question, and Nandita swooped in to teach her some manners.” Xochi smiled distantly. “I think she thought the situation was just too adorable to pass up, but she always insisted she did it to teach her.”
“To teach her?”
“That’s all she’s talked about,” said Xochi, “the whole time I’ve known her: She needed to teach her girls. I don’t know what—I’m the one she taught herbology.”
“If Nandita knew Kira before,” said Marcus, “why would she pretend like she didn’t?”
“You said the picture was taken in front of a ParaGen building, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, if she was involved with ParaGen, it’s not all that surprising that she’d keep it a secret,” said Xochi. “Some ParaGen employees got lynched in the first days after the Break, before the Senate got organized and started imposing order. If I’d worked for the company that made the Partials, even as a janitor, I wouldn’t have told anyone.”
“But what does that have to do with Kira?” Marcus asked.
“I’m working on that part,” said Xochi, pursing her lips. “How about this: Nobody who landed on this island had ever met any of the others. The population of the US dropped from four hundred fifty million to forty thousand. That’s like one out of every twelve hundred people—the chances that any of them knew each other were ridiculous, and in the few cases where two survivors did know each other, like Jayden and Madison, Dr. Skousen and his doctors interviewed the living daylights out of them, trying to find anything that might be a correlating factor of survival. If Nandita waltzed in claiming she and Kira went way back, they would never have rested until they found every possible piece of information. And if one of those pieces said that Nandita worked at ParaGen, she was probably very reasonably afraid of being held prisoner and interrogated, or worse—maybe killed, if the people were angry enough.”
“‘Every possible piece of information,’” said Marcus, half to himself. “I almost wish they’d done it.”
“Killed Nandita?”
“Interrogated her,” said Marcus. He put his finger on the low wooden coffee table, tracing patterns in the grain of the wood. “Every possible piece of information about the two people the Partials are tearing our island apart to find.” He nodded. “Yeah, I kind of wish they’d done it.”
“You need to tell the Senate about Heron,” said Xochi.
“I’ve told Mkele,” said Marcus. “I’m not stupid. Mkele’s looking for Nandita, but I’m not too anxious to tell the Senate that I was in contact with the enemy.” He moved his finger slowly around the whorls of a knot. “I guess we’re still afraid of being lynched,” he said. “Afraid of being caught. Do you know what the others told me?”
Xochi narrowed her eyes. “What others?”
“Your other sisters,” said Marcus, “Madison and Isolde. They got evacuated in the first group, to protect the children, so I talked to them quickly before they left. They said Kira wasn’t the first girl Nandita adopted.”
Xochi cocked her head. “Really? I mean, I never assumed she was until we started talking about that photo, but now it seems kind of weird that she wasn’t.”
“By the time she had Kira, she already had the other one,” said Marcus. “Ariel.”
Xochi nodded, as if this piece of information was especially profound. “Ariel moved out a couple of years ago,” she said, “before I moved in. I didn’t know her well, but she never got along with any of the other girls, and she hated Nandita like you wouldn’t believe.”
Marcus counted them off on his fingers. “Ariel in Philadelphia, Kira in a refugee camp, Isolde here on the island, and Madison a full year later when Jayden got chicken pox—he stayed in quarantine, Madison stayed here, and the situation worked so well she never moved out. Madison said Nandita fought like a lion to get her moved here instead of somewhere else.”
“Why?”
“Anybody’s guess,” said Marcus. “But Madison does remember the first thing Nandita said when she brought her to the house: ‘Now you can teach me.’”
Xochi frowned. “What does that mean?”
“I don’t know,” said Marcus, standing up, “but there’s only one person left to ask.” He walked to the door and drew back the bolt. “You head to the rendezvous point. I’m going to go find Ariel.”