chapter TWENTY
“I can’t lose this backpack,” said Afa. “I’m the last human being on the planet.”
“He’s getting worse,” said Samm. Buddy the horse was tamer now, snuffling as Samm patted his neck. Kira was convinced that he and Bobo were brothers, but it might have just been their coloring. They’d been traveling for a week now, and were in the midst of the Appalachian Mountains. Afa had gone through map after map, circling and underlining little roads and towns and peaks, finally insisting on a detour to the top of Camelback Mountain, an imposing giant promising a thousand-foot climb. There was a radio repeater there, he claimed, and with one of his mini Zoble solar panels he could get it up and running again to keep them in contact with the Long Island radios. Heron, to her credit, didn’t object, and they made the trek up a winding road through what looked like an old ski resort. The top, however, brought nothing but disappointment: It wasn’t a mountain at all but the leading edge of a massive plateau stretching west as far as the Partials could see. Heron scrounged the place for usable equipment, while Afa collapsed in a heap of maps and faulty calculations, insisting that this was wrong, that the mountain was here, they were just in the wrong place. It took them nearly two hours to calm him down, and then only when they agreed to stop for the night and rig up the Zoble anyway. Mountain or plateau, there was still a radio repeater, and Kira marveled at the massive latticework of the old metal tower. Afa assured them he’d set everything up correctly, but night had fallen before he finished, and there was no way to know for sure until the morning. The waiting, the inability to do anything productive, made Kira antsy. She decided to brush Bobo’s coat, and Samm joined her.
“I know that we need him,” Samm said, his voice low. “I just don’t know if he’s going to be much use to us at this point.”
“Is that how you think of him?” asked Kira. “Some kind of tool?”
“You know that’s not what I meant,” said Samm. “I’m telling you that I’m worried. We’ve only been out here a week, and there are at least three weeks to go before we make it to Chicago, probably more. By the time we get there, he’ll be a basket case.”
“Then we need to help keep him calm,” said Kira, and as if on cue Afa stood up, waddling to the horses with his backpack clutched in his arms.
“We need to go back,” he said, trying to pick up Oddjob’s saddle with one hand. “All my records—everything we’re looking for. I’ve already found it, we don’t need to go to a data center, we need to go back. It’s right there. It’s safe—”
“Easy, Afa,” said Kira, taking the saddle from him as gently as she could. His agitation was spreading to the horses, and Samm did his best to keep them calm. “Come here,” she said, taking the big man’s hand and leading him back to the fire. “Tell me about your collection.”
“You’ve seen it,” he said, “but you didn’t see all of it. You didn’t see the sound room.”
“I loved the sound room,” she said, keeping her voice soothing. “That’s where you had all the ParaGen emails.” She kept him talking, hoping the topic would cheer him up, and after nearly half an hour he seemed to calm down. She laid out his bedroll, and he slept with his arms around the backpack like a teddy bear.
“He’s getting worse,” said Samm again.
“Which is impressive,” said Heron, “considering how bad he was to begin with.”
“I’m taking care of him,” said Kira. “He’ll make it to Chicago.”
“You’re talking as if the worst that can happen is he falls apart and turns useless,” said Heron. “I’m expecting him to snap and kill us. Yesterday he thought Samm was trying to steal his backpack; the day before that, he thought you were trying to read his mind. He’s accused me of being a Partial twice today.”
“You are a Partial,” said Samm.
“All the more reason I don’t want him to get violent over it,” said Heron. “There are three different chemicals in this repeater station that could be used to build a bomb, and I guarantee this idiot savant knows how to use all three of them. He’s every bit as brilliant as you said he is, but he is completely broken, and that is not a combination I am comfortable traveling with.”
Kira studied Heron in the firelight, flecks of orange light and deep brown darkness dancing over her. She looked tired, and that by itself made Kira scared. Heron had thus far been invulnerable, more capable than Kira had dared to hope, but if she never slept for fear of a madman’s betrayal . . . Kira whispered softly, “What do you want to do?”
“Me?” asked Heron. “I want to go home and save the Partials. I thought I made that clear.”
“He has a screen in his pack,” said Samm, “and a Tokamin to power it—which might also explain his mental problems, if the radiation’s gotten to him. Anyway, maybe he can show us what we need to do when we get to Chicago, in case he doesn’t make it.”
“I’ll talk to him tomorrow,” said Kira. “He trusts me most.”
“Just stop trying to read his mind,” said Heron. “I hear that bugs him.”
Kira watched the two Partials—the two other Partials, she reminded herself—and wondered. What would happen when they reached Chicago? Would it be infested with Watchdogs, or dragons, or something even worse? Would Afa betray them, or would Heron? No matter how much they bantered, Heron always stayed aloof, always stayed an observer more than a participant. What was she observing? Who was she observing for?
Kira slept against a tree, her back to the fire, her hands on her rifle. In the morning they tested the solar panels, and the radio repeater fired up instantly. Afa had done it all without a hitch. Samm nodded, and though he didn’t say it, Kira got the distinct impression that he was impressed—surprised, almost certainly, but still impressed. Kira patted Afa on the back. “Good job.”
“The Zobles are extremely durable,” he said, though his voice seemed off. “They use a mad cow matrix around doped silicon crystals to increase efficiency.” Kira nodded, unsure how much of his response had been meaningful science, and how much was pure gibberish. His intelligent persona was mingling with his childlike one, which might be good or bad in the long run. Kira was worried that whatever mental scaffolding allowed him to function was starting to break down.
“Let’s test the radio,” she said. He complied, flipping it on and turning the knob carefully, falling into the easy patterns of a technical task he’d done countless times before. He turned, and listened, and turned, and listened, until finally he hit on a man-made—or Partial-made—signal. Kira leaned in closely while Afa fine-tuned the connection.
“. . . retreated. Our sources on the island say it’s only . . .”
“Partials,” said Heron.
“Can you tell which ones?” asked Kira. Afa shushed them, his head cocked toward the speakers.
“. . . killing a new one every day.”
“Northerners,” said Heron. “Trimble’s people, from B Company.”
“What are they talking about?” asked Kira.
Heron narrowed her eyes. “Probably the expiration date.”
“We need to find Marcus,” said Kira, and gently pulled Afa away from the tuning dial. She and Marcus had set up a rotating schedule of frequencies back when they’d been communicating during the invasion, hoping it would make them harder to listen in on. She added the days in her head, calculating which frequency they’d be using today, and hoped he was still listening. She turned the dial and clicked on the microphone. “Flathead, this is Phillips, are you there? Over.” She clicked off the mic and waited for a response.
Heron smirked dismissively. “Flathead and Phillips?”
“That was his nickname in school,” said Kira. “What can I say? He had a kind of a flat head. I started using it to call him couple of weeks ago, because I knew he’d know it was for him, and nobody else would.” She shrugged. “Just another layer of paranoid security. Phillips just seemed like the natural counterpart.”
“Flathead and Phillips are two types of screwdrivers,” said Afa. “Also Frearson and hexhead and clutch and—”
“Yes,” said Samm, touching him reassuringly on the shoulder, “we know.”
“Don’t touch me!” Afa yelled, whirling to his feet. Samm backed off, and Afa yelled again, his face red with fury. “I never said you could touch me!”
“It’s okay, Afa,” said Kira, trying to calm him down. “It’s okay, just hush—I’m going to call again, so we need it to be quiet.” The appeal to technical necessity seemed to work, and Afa sat down again. Kira clicked on the mic. “Flathead, this is Phillips, are you there? Come in, Flathead. Please respond. Over.” She clicked off, and they listened to the static.
“And clutch,” said Afa softly, “and square head, and Pozi, and Mortorq—”
“Phillips, this is Flathead.” Marcus’s voice was garbled and staticky, and Afa’s hand shot forward to tweak the dial. The voice phased in and out. “. . . in very weak, where . . . you in over a week. Over.” Marcus’s voice resolved into a clear signal, and Kira waited for him to finish before smiling and clicking on the mic.
“Sorry about the downtime, Flathead, we’ve been busy. We had to . . .” She paused, considering carefully the best way to tell him where they were without giving everything away to anyone else listening in. “Move. We had to move our base camp; they were too close to finding us. Our communication will be intermittent from now on. Over.”
“That’s good to hear,” said Marcus. “I was worried.” There was a long pause, but he hadn’t said “over,” and Kira wasn’t sure if she should try to speak again or not. Just as she reached for the mic button, Marcus spoke again. “Are you still monitoring radio traffic? Over.”
“We’ve had very intermittent access, like I said,” Kira answered. “What’s up? Over.”
There was another pause, and when Marcus spoke again, his voice was pained. “Dr. Morgan’s taken over the island. She’s conquered the whole thing—not controlling it, not like Delarosa did when she seized power, more like . . . like a zoo, almost. Like a ranch. They’re rounding up everyone they can find, trapping them here in East Meadow, and then killing them. A new one every day.” His voice had faded to a shattered whisper. “Over.”
Kira gasped.
“That’s what we heard that other person talking about,” said Afa, and Kira shushed him with a curt wave of her hand. She clicked the button to talk, already knowing the answer to her question, but compelled to ask it anyway.
“Why are they killing people?” She hesitated before signing off. “Over.”
“They’re looking for Kira Walker,” said Marcus. He was still refusing to give away her identity, but she could hear the pain in his voice, and hoped no one else was listening in on the frequency.
“I warned you it would get bad,” said Heron. She gestured at the radio. “I warned him, too.”
“Shut up,” said Kira.
“You need to turn yourself in,” said Heron.
“I said shut up!” Kira roared. “Give me a minute to think.”
“I haven’t told anyone where she is,” said Marcus, still keeping up the ruse. “Not that I even know where she is, but I haven’t told anyone the parts I do know. If she turns herself in . . . it’s up to her. I’m not going to make that decision for her. Over.”
Kira stared at the radio, as if it could crack open and reveal some miraculous answer inside it. She’s killing someone every day, she thought. Every day. It seemed terrifying, horrible, unconscionable, but . . . Was it really any worse than what was already happening to the Partials? Sure, they weren’t being executed, but they were still dying. She had insisted to Heron that this quest was more important than stopping those deaths; it was more important to find ParaGen, to find the Failsafe. To see what answers it held and solve this problem forever, for both sides, not just a Band-Aid but a real, permanent cure. If she was willing to leave the dying Partials behind, she had to be willing to leave the dying humans, too, or it was all an act. It was all lies.
She shuddered, growing weak and nauseated at the thought of so much death.
“I don’t want to be in this position,” she said softly. “I don’t want to be the one who everybody’s hunting, who has to choose who lives and who dies.”
“You can whine about it or you can fix it,” said Heron. “Go back now, and you could save both sides: we have a shot at curing the Partial expiration, and Morgan stops killing humans.”
“It saves them for now,” said Kira. “I want to save them forever.” She paused, still staring at the radio, then turned to Heron. “Why are you here?”
“Because you’re too stubborn to turn around.”
“But you didn’t have to come with us,” said Kira. “You’ve been against this mission from the beginning, but you came anyway. Why?”
Heron looked at Samm. “The same reason you did.” She looked back at Kira. “The same reason you trusted me: because Samm trusted me, and that was good enough for you. Well, Samm trusts you, and that’s good enough for me.”
Kira nodded, watching her. “And if we keep going?”
“I’ll think you’re an idiot,” said Heron, “but if Samm still trusts you . . .”
“Your signal’s starting to break up,” said Marcus. His voice was growing garbled as well. “Where are you? Over.”
“We can’t tell you,” said Kira. I can’t even tell you who I’m with. “We’re looking for something, and I wish I could tell you more, but . . .” She paused, not certain what to say, and eventually just said, “Over.”
They waited, but there was no response.
“Passing atmospheric conditions,” said Afa. “Our reception might have been temporarily boosted or broken by clouds or storms or virga.”
“I still trust you,” said Samm. “If you think this is the way to go, I’ll follow you.”
Kira looked at him, long and hard, wondering what he saw in her that she didn’t. Eventually she gave up, shaking her head. “What about the Failsafe?”
“What about it?” asked Samm.
“We don’t know what it is, but the word means something that can’t go wrong—or something designed to jump in and fix things when they do. What if the Failsafe can solve all our problems, and all we have to do is find it and activate it?” She thought about Graeme Chamberlain, the member of the Trust who’d worked on the Failsafe and then killed himself as soon as he was done. She shivered despite the heat. “What if it’s something horrible, and right when we think we’ve fixed everything, the Failsafe jumps out and screws it all up again? We don’t know what it is. It could be anything.”
“How do you know it even matters?” asked Heron.
“Because it has to,” said Kira. “The Trust had some kind of plan. The cure for the human disease is in the Partial pheromones, plus there’s me, a Partial something-or-other living in a human settlement. None of this is by accident, and we have to figure out what it all means.” She paused. “We have to. It’s the same old argument I used to have with Mkele: the present or the future. Sometimes you have to put the present through hell to get the future you want.” She held the radio to her mouth. “We’re going on,” she said simply. “Over.”