chapter TWENTY-FOUR
Afa had been shot through the thigh by a bullet from one of the invaders?? guns—the only shot that had been an actual bullet. The rest of the shots turned out to be tranq darts, presumably intended to incapacitate their victims. The same bullet had also shattered Afa’s screen, and Kira wondered which had been the true target: the man, or the data? Had the Partials followed them here to capture them, or to stop them from learning what was on the computer? Had it been both?
Kira couldn’t help but wonder if it had been neither. She glanced at Heron, slowly regaining consciousness on the floor. Had she shot Afa? Had Samm? What motive could either of them possibly have for doing so, and why now? If they were colluding with the attackers, why go through the ruse of pretending to get tranqed? That would only make sense if they knew they were going to lose, and if they knew they were going to lose, why bother with the attack at all? It didn’t make any sense, and Kira knew it; the most likely explanation was that the Partial attackers had come to kill Afa and capture the others. Even so, Kira couldn’t shake the lingering doubts. How could the Partials have even found them, unless someone had provided them with a location? She cursed herself for not keeping one alive to interrogate, though she had to admit that she’d barely made it out alive as it was.
Kira finished binding Afa’s wound while he was still unconscious, and checked each attacker in turn, pulling out their weapons to count the bullets. One of them, in fact, had a sidearm that was short one bullet. Kira couldn’t tell how long ago the weapon had been fired, but it didn’t seem likely that a trained soldier would enter combat with anything less than a full clip, and so this was likely the one who’d shot Afa. But “likely,” she knew, wasn’t the same as “true.”
“Scavenging ammo?” asked Heron. Kira turned to find the Partial spy standing behind her, looking disheveled but alert. Kira slapped the clip back into the gun and dropped it on the fallen Partial’s chest.
“This one shot Afa,” she said, and rose to her feet. She tried to keep her voice casually curious. “Why do you think they shot him and tried to tranq the rest of us?”
“They were probably shooting the screen to kill the light,” said Heron. “They were prepared for the dark and we weren’t—standard ambush procedure. Those tranq darts don’t have the penetrating power to shatter a piece of glass like that.”
“That makes sense,” Kira admitted, and it did. Maybe. She shook her head. “Shooting the screen almost guaranteed hitting Afa in the process. If they were trying to take us alive, why risk hitting him somewhere lethal?”
Heron smirked, and pulled the Partial girl’s helmet off. Her face was Chinese, like Heron’s, and strikingly gorgeous. “She’s espionage. There was no risk.”
“How many?” asked Samm. He came around the corner of a computer tower, still shaking off the effects of the drug; he was groggy, and his speech was slurred. Kira added “recovering from sedatives” to her long list of things Heron seemed to be better at than the other Partials. She wasn’t kidding when she said she was designed to be superior.
“Three,” said Kira, looking down at the girl’s body. “One spy and two soldiers, I guess, though I’m obviously not as familiar with the model types as . . . whoa.” She knelt down, seeing something strange under the folds of the Partial’s hair. She brushed it back, revealing three rows of frilled slits on the girl’s neck. “Heron, do you have gills?”
Heron crouched down, pulling the girl’s head to the side to inspect her neck. “These are Morgan’s,” she said. “Special operatives, complete with Morgan’s recent ‘adaptations.’ Check the others.” They pulled the helmets off the two males, finding the same gills. Heron whistled. “Not exactly soldiers at all, then.” She looked up at Kira. “And you killed two of them?”
“Skin of my teeth,” said Kira. “These look like wet suits under their armor. Do you suppose they swam here? We’re right on the shore of Lake Michigan, and unless there are any talking freshwater sharks you haven’t told me about, traveling by water would be a lot safer than traveling by land.”
“Part of the way, maybe,” said Samm. “They’d still need to cross Michigan on foot, it’s too wide to go around it.”
“They seem perfectly capable of breathing on land,” said Kira. “They could have done both.”
“It doesn’t check out,” said Heron. “If they’d followed us from Manhattan, they wouldn’t have bothered sending gilled agents, because they wouldn’t have known where we were going—for all they know we were headed to the plains, or west into the toxic wasteland. If Morgan had agents stationed here already, though, some kind of outpost in Chicago, what better agents to guard a flooded city than ones with gills?”
Kira nodded. “That’s true. Or—” She stopped herself, not wanting to propose the other explanation so brazenly: Or one of you is a spy, and used our radio to tell them exactly where we were and where we were going.
“Or what?” asked Heron.
“Nothing,” said Kira. She looked at the gills again, avoiding Heron’s eyes, though the faint touch of the link hinted at her feelings: LACK OF TRUST. BE ON GUARD.
CONFUSION. Kira was pretty sure that was from Samm, and felt a wave of relief. If he was confused, then he wasn’t in on it. She’d have to find a way to talk to him in private before Heron did.
“Take their gear,” said Samm. “I’ll dump the bodies in a closet upstairs.” He and Heron began cleaning up the mess of the battle, but Kira went back to Afa. He was breathing better now, thanks to the painkillers she’d given him, but he was still unconscious. The shards of his screen lay around him in pieces, the gray side handle still attached to the server with a cable. The screen was like a smaller version of the glass desk upstairs; the glass was just the monitor, and all the processing and memory were housed in the frame; in this case, in the handle on the side. The server itself seemed undamaged, and for all she knew the data transfer was still going, dumping all of ParaGen’s secrets into the handle. Without a screen, though, they wouldn’t be able to read it.
This is a data center, she thought. It’s filled with business computers, and since everyone who worked here was probably a tech nut like Afa, it will have other devices as well. There’s bound to be another screen somewhere. She checked Afa again, making sure he was okay, and swept the shards of glass away from him as much as possible before heading back upstairs to the offices. She started in the corner offices, hoping that their extra prestige might mean an extra computer or two, but found nothing: several docks, but none of the screens to dock in them. They’re designed to be portable, Kira thought. Anyone who had one probably took them home. She kept looking, checking each office one by one before starting in on some of the cubicles. It reminded her of the offices she’d searched in Manhattan, and the memory gave her an idea. On a hunch, she left the cubicles and searched the back halls and rooms for anything marked with the initials Afa had had on his door: IT. Information technology. She finally found the IT office on the first floor, knee-deep in water. The IT director was still there, dead at his desk, his upper body covered with slime and his lower body stripped clean of everything but bone. She held her breath, sorting through his shelves, and found a screen slightly smaller than Afa’s in the desk drawer. She fled back outside, gagging and closing the door behind her, and made sure to rinse herself off in the cleaner water outside before heading back upstairs, where she found Afa had woken.
“My screen got shot,” he said. His voice was soft and vapid—he had again regressed to the “confused child.” Kira sighed, knowing that an attack like this had made it inevitable, and sat down beside him to comfort him. He looked at her with worried eyes. “Where’s my backpack?”
“It’s right over there,” she said, checking his pulse. Elevated but normal. “How do you feel?”
“My screen got shot,” he said, trying to stand. He screamed in pain the instant he put weight on his leg, and collapsed back to the floor.
“Forget the screen,” said Kira. “I’ve got a new one, but you’ve been shot, too. You need to take it easy.”
“I need my backpack.”
“You’ve been shot, Afa, right here in your leg—”
“I need my backpack!” His eyes quivered, on the verge of tears, and Kira stood up to bring him his backpack, wondering if maybe he had another screen in there and she hadn’t had to actually spend all that time with the dead IT director. She dragged the pack over to him and he clutched it to his chest, rocking back and forth. “I can’t ever leave my backpack,” he said. “I’m the last human being on the planet.”
“He looks bad,” said Samm. Kira nodded, too exhausted to care about whatever Samm still thought about Afa; besides which, he was right.
“He’s retreated inside his own head,” she said. “It will be a while before we get him out again.”
Samm jutted his head toward the server, and the screen handle still connected to it. “Did we get everything?”
Kira held up the handle. A small green light still shone at the tip of it. “I don’t know. I don’t dare disconnect it in case it’s still transferring data.”
“How long will it take?”
Kira shrugged, gesturing at Afa. “The only one who knows is currently singing a lullaby to his backpack. And he’s losing blood, and I don’t have the antibiotics I need to help him, and I have dead guy soaking into my pants, and I’m really starting to wish that a whole lot of things had gone differently.” She took a deep breath, surprised at her own outburst.
“You’re under a lot of stress,” said Samm.
Kira felt tears coming close to the surface, and wiped one from the corner of her eye. “Yeah, what else is new?”
Samm stayed silent for a moment, and picked up the screen she’d brought up from downstairs. “You think we can plug this into the other one?”
“It only has one port,” said Kira, wiping her eyes again and sitting up straighter. “We can’t connect the new screen until we disconnect the server, and I don’t want to mess with it if it’s still downloading.”
“Then we’ll set up a perimeter and stay here for the night,” said Samm. He glanced around the room, computer towers obstructing visibility in every direction. “We can’t stay here, though—there’s no good way to guard it, plus the generator was damaged in the battle. And the exhaust pipe. It’s pumping the whole place full of burning paint thinner.”
“Great,” said Kira. “Life wasn’t crappy enough yet.”
Samm rose to his feet and held out his hand for Kira. She took it, standing to face him. They didn’t turn away. She looked in his eyes and felt . . . something. The link was still hard to interpret sometimes.
Samm looked away first. “I’ll grab his arms,” he said, stepping behind Afa. “Let’s get him somewhere safe.”
Kira jolted awake at two a.m., certain that something was wrong. She looked around wildly, grasping for her gun. “Who’s there? Are we under attack?”
“Calm down,” said Heron. “The generator just shut off. The change in background noise probably woke you.”
“I’ll go check it out.”
“It’s probably just out of gas, and we’re not getting it restarted anytime soon.”
“Then I’ll get the screen handle,” said Kira. “If we’ve gotten all we’re going to get, I’d rather have it in here with us than down there by itself.”
“Take your gun,” said Heron. Her expression was unreadable in the dark, and the link, from what Kira could tell, was silent. “There might be more fish monsters.”
“Thanks,” said Kira. She checked Afa’s pulse and breathing, almost by reflex at this point, and went downstairs. The poison gas, they’d discovered, was heavier than air, so the top floor was the safest place to be. Kira turned on the flashlight on the edge of her gun, comforted to have the rifle leading the way in case anybody was actually down there. The halls were dark, the stairs empty, the building silent except for the soft sound of drips and the lapping of water. Computer towers loomed around her in the data center, casting long shadows as the beam of her flashlight danced over them. The smears of blood from the earlier battle turned the scene from eerie to menacing, and Kira walked softly, holding her breath as she passed between the monoliths. Exhaust swirled around her shins and ankles, and the air tasted bitter. She found the handle, unplugged it from the server, and retreated upstairs as fast as she dared. When she got back to their camp she sat down on her bedroll, grabbed the second screen, and plugged in the cable.
“You’re going to read it now?” asked Heron.
“What are we waiting for?”
“Good point,” said Heron, and sat down behind her, peering over her shoulder.
Kira blinked as the screen flared to life, and dialed down the brightness to a tolerable level. A small icon in the center of the screen told her it was still trying to connect to the other handle, and she held her breath as the little hexagon spun around and around and around. It paused, then spun again. “Oh, come on,” she whispered. A minute later it stopped. CONNECTION COMPLETE. She opened the download folder and scrolled through the massive list, eventually giving up and just opening the search tab. “What do I look for?”
“The Trust?” offered Heron. “RM? Expiration? Your own name?’”
Kira typed in K-I-R-A and hit search. The little hexagon spun around but returned nothing. “What?”
“Maybe you’re in there under a different name.”
“I’ll try my father.” She typed his surname: D-H-U-R-V-A-S-U-L-A. The hexagon spun again, the machine thinking quickly, and soon it was spitting out results, file after file sliding by so fast she couldn’t even read the titles. She stopped it at 3,748 results and cleared the search. “We’ll have to narrow that down, I guess. How about . . .” She thought, chewing on her lip, then typed a new word:
F-A-I-L-S-A-F-E.
The hexagon spun. Twelve results. She opened the first file in the list and found it to be an email to her father from Bethany Michaels, chief financial officer of ParaGen. Kira read it out loud.
“‘The joint chiefs have one final request for the BioSynth army; a sort of Failsafe. I know you insist on the unimpeachable loyalty of the BioSynths—I know that it’s hard-wired into their brains and so on—but I think this is a very reasonable request, given the BioSynths’ capabilities, and not one we could choose to ignore in any case.
“‘In conjunction with the engineered army, we need an engineered virus. If the army malfunctions, or rebels, or in any way gets out of hand, we need to be able to push a button and, essentially, turn them off. We need a virus that will destroy the BioSynths without harming anyone or anything else. I trust your team will have no problem with the design or implementation.’”
Kira stared at the screen.
“The Failsafe is RM,” said Heron. “Your own government ordered it.”
Kira’s voice was a whisper. “And then it killed the wrong people.”