CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Dark shapes moved in the water. Kira helped Green into the boat, pulling it as close to the little stone dock as possible before easing him down into the center. The night air was slowly clearing her head of the concentrated pheromones, but Green was still lost in chemical memories, curling into a fetal position down in the aluminum belly of the boat. Kira stepped over the slim black line of the water, but stopped with her foot in midair before turning, gritting her teeth, and walking back to the house. She needed a weapon.
She clambered back up the wooden stairs to the balcony, took a deep breath, and ran into the bedroom, feeling her way through the sudden darkness. The dead Partial lay on the floor, his rifle beside him, and she grabbed it and ran back out. She didn’t dare to breathe until she was back down the stairs, and sucked air greedily in the cool darkness of the wooded yard. When she reached the boat Green was still lying on the floor and panting, but his eyes were open. She stepped in carefully, trying not to think about what might be lurking in the water beneath.
“Where am I?” asked Green.
“Outside, on the boat,” said Kira. “Stay quiet.” She picked up an oar and dipped it gently in the water, all the time expecting a gilled Partial to grab it and yank, pulling her over the side. She untied the boat and it drifted away from the dock—ten inches, twenty inches, five feet, ten. The shore fell away sharply, the inky lake deep and impenetrable. Who was down there, watching? How many of them? What did they see or think? All it would take was one Partial, one pale and clammy hand, to reach up and tip the boat, and then both she and Green would be in the water, sinking and helpless, dragged down by dead-eyed monsters. She rowed carefully, evenly, not daring to rush. If the enemy Partials got suspicious enough to come up and check, they’d link their dead companions immediately, and Kira and Green would be exposed. The interrogators had rowed out to the island, and she had to make the others think that now they were rowing back, returning their weapons to dry storage before diving back down to their home.
Why would they live under the water at all? she wondered. They can obviously survive on dry land, at least for a while. Morgan and Vale had both told her that heavy gene mods can degrade a person’s sanity. Was that what had happened here—Partials living underwater, killing other Partials and nailing their hands to pikes like savages? How much of their minds is man, and how much is . . . something else?
Two hundred feet to the closest island. One hundred. Fifty. Twenty. A small wooden dock sat low in the water ahead of them, and beyond it another house lost among the trees. Her map was gone, and all her equipment, but she remembered the bay’s basic geography; if this was the large central island she thought it was, there would be a causeway about two miles down connecting it back to the western shore of the lake. They could cross there . . . if the causeway was still up.
Ten feet left. Five.
The boat bumped up against the dock and Kira leaped out, looping the rope around a short pole and reaching out a hand for Green. The wooden planks under her feet and the dark black water all around her brought back sharp, terrifying memories of the dock where she’d been captured, and she imagined another pale Partial bursting up from the lake to seize her outstretched arm, but nothing did. Green grabbed her hand and stood up, steadier now than before. She checked the rifle slung over her back, nervously reassuring herself that it was still there, and led Green up toward the house. The path here was well-worn, further proof that the Partials stored their water-sensitive gear on dry land nearby.
Which means there might be more of them waiting here, she thought. Kira tried to feel them on the link, but without the heightened awareness that came with combat or terror, the data—if any existed—was too weak for her limited abilities to detect. She whispered to Green. “Can you link anyone up here?”
“Not right now,” he said softly, “but they come here often.”
“Tell me if it gets stronger,” said Kira, and pressed forward. The path led up from the dock through a wooded backyard, a former lawn now thickly overgrown with weeds and vines and saplings. The home there was large, old and once luxurious, now sagging and decrepit but obviously used by the Ivies; the windows were boarded over, and the footpath through the underbrush led straight to the door. Green didn’t alert her to any Partials hiding inside, and she could sense none herself but chose not to enter, just in case. They were clear now; their best plan was to put as much distance between them and the lake as they could before the Ivies realized they were gone.
They left the trail to give the house a wide berth and broke through the trees onto a cracked asphalt road that wound north through a parade of faded lakeside homes. By silent agreement they broke into a run, the only sound their shoes slapping wetly against the road. They ran half a mile before Green risked speaking.
“Do you know where we’re going?”
“Sort of.”
“That’s good enough?”
“I had a map before I was captured,” said Kira. “There’s a causeway up here—if we’re on the right island.”
“And if we’re not?”
“Then we have to cross the water again,” said Kira. “So let’s hope we’re on the right island.”
They ran in silence for a moment, and then Green asked another question. His voice was dark and worried. “What happened back there?”
“In the house?”
“I thought I was back in China again. Like, I literally thought I was there, in the middle of the Isolation War, in one of the subway tunnels we used to take their larger cities, except . . . I never had to fight in those tunnels. Other units did, but not mine.”
“I got the drop on the first guard because they didn’t know I was there,” said Kira. “The only way to get the second was to use the link against him.”
“I thought you weren’t on the link.”
“It wasn’t my data,” said Kira. She hesitated. “I borrowed it from the other dead Partial.”
He shot her a probing look. “Borrowed?”
“Extracted via combat knife,” said Kira. He looked horrified, and she felt queasy at the memory. “Look, I wish I didn’t have to do it, but it was the only way. Normally you don’t link the data until it’s out in the air, diffused, but inside the pheromonal glands it’s still liquid, and intensely concentrated.” She shrugged helplessly. “Apparently his unit did fight in the subway tunnels, and we remembered it through his link data.”
“Who—” said Green, stopping abruptly. Kira checked her steps, almost tripping, and looked back at him. He peered at her in confusion. “Did you just say ‘we’ remembered it?”
Crap, thought Kira. It wasn’t that she desperately needed to keep her nature secret, it was just that she hadn’t told him before, and she didn’t want it to look like she’d been withholding something from him. She cleared her throat.
“You’re not on the link,” Green insisted. He walked toward her, furrowing his brow. “Maybe it’s the concentrated data, like you said—when it’s that strong, maybe humans can sense it too?”
This could be a way into recruiting Green to my cause, she thought. If he thinks humans can sense link data, even only in a case like this, he could see a stronger connection between the species. He might be more open to helping me, helping the humans.
Except it’s not true. If we’re going to work together—the two of us, or the two species—we have to trust each other. We can’t start that relationship with a lie.
She shook her head. “I’m not a human.”
“You said you were.”
“I thought I was,” said Kira, “for my whole life. I grew up with them. I still feel human. But I’m a Partial.”
“Partials link,” he said simply. “Partials don’t age. You don’t look like any Partial model I’ve ever seen.”
“I was a new model,” said Kira. “A prototype for a new line, after the war. That’s why Dr. Morgan wanted to study me, because she thought my DNA would help her cure expiration. But it didn’t work. I don’t have any of your heightened abilities—none of the strength, none of the reflexes, maybe some slightly accelerated healing. And I can link, sort of, but only one way.”
Green looked shocked. “You mean you can . . .” His mouth hung open, and he covered his mouth and nose with his hands, almost like he was protecting his breath. “You mean you can link me but I can’t link you? You can feel everything I do, without giving anything back?”
“Not all of it,” said Kira, though she was definitely linking him now: a confused mixture of shock and disgust. She realized that as naked as she felt knowing Green knew her secret, he must have felt even worse knowing that she could shamelessly, imperceptibly, unstoppably eavesdrop on his every emotion. The Partials were accustomed to sharing everything with one another, living in a permanently communal emotional state, but to have that state invaded by an outsider—one who didn’t share her own emotions in return—must feel like a violation.
“I’m sorry,” said Kira. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I should have.”
“Just . . . run,” said Green, breaking back into a jog as he ran past her up the road. “We need to get out of here before anyone notices we’re gone.”
Kira followed him but kept a respectful distance where she couldn’t link him. Even so, running in his wake, she caught the occasional whiff of confusion or sadness or fear.
Samm never reacted like this, she thought, but he had time to get used to it. We practically lived together for weeks before we found out I was a Partial. And Heron . . . who knows what Heron thinks about anything? She used to deal with humans all the time, so maybe it’s not a big deal for her.
But it is a big deal. To Green, and likely to others.
They reached the causeway a few minutes later, and Kira practically shook with relief to see it still intact. They kept to the center as they crossed, staying as far from the water as they could. As a gesture of goodwill, Kira deferred the next decision to Green.
“Where to now?”
Green grunted softly as they jogged past a boathouse with an open parking lot. “If we cut south, we’ll have miles to run before we’re clear of the lake,” he said. “Obviously they can come up on land just fine, but I figure the more we can avoid water, the better.” Sure enough, the road curved more and more to the left, before finally just turning sharply and leading them straight south. The road appeared to be the edge of the little lake community, with nothing but forest on the far side, and the two of them plunged into the trees to cut across and leave the lake behind.
“Watch out for border markers,” said Kira. “I found them on my way in—they used link data, concentrated like in the house, to set up a perimeter and warn people away. If you start to get freaked out for no reason, that’s the reason.”
Green said nothing but nodded in acknowledgment.
They picked their way silently through the thick forest, and it wasn’t long before they reached another road, but soon this, too, turned south, and they set back off into the woods. They crossed two more hills and a narrow stream before the sun began to come up, and when the next road turned out to be a wider, two-lane highway, they decided to risk a little southward travel. Almost immediately, though, the road cut back east toward the lake, as if the land itself was determined to twist them around and lead them back to danger. They struck out into the trees once more, but Kira was exhausted and starving and cold. Finally she stopped them in the backyard of an abandoned house.
“We need to figure out where we are.”
Green nodded toward the house. “Think they have a map?”
“You check the bookshelves, I’ll check for a den or an office.”
Green shook his head. “You never look in a house for a map, you look in the cars.” He led her around to the front, where two cars sat in the driveway. Kira started toward them, but he shook his head. “Too nice—all the rich humans had maps on computers, especially in their cars, and a lot of the middle-class ones, too. You want to find a paper map, find the oldest, nastiest car you can see.”
Kira thought the plan was ridiculous, but Green was talking to her again, and she didn’t want to ruin it. She followed dutifully down the wooded residential road, him on one side and her on the other. The houses in this neighborhood were all large, and set back from the road, which made the cars harder to see; it also made Kira despair of finding an older-looking car, but she persevered. The road turned south, as all of them seemed to, but they were miles from the lake, and they were making better time here than in the trees. Finally she spotted one—no more rusty than the other cars, but with a notably different shape; longer lines and squarer corners. She caught Green’s attention and the two trotted over.
“I’ve been scavenging old-world ruins for as long as I can remember,” said Kira, “but I’ve never bothered with cars.”
“Humans practically lived in their cars,” said Green.
Kira nodded. “Sure, but we were always looking for food and medicine. Sometimes you get lucky and find a survivalist who died halfway home with a trunk-load of canned food, but it was rarely ever worth our time.”
“Watch and learn.” Green walked to the passenger side and leaned in the window, pressing a button on the dashboard to pop open a small box. “This is called a glove compartment,” he said, rifling through it. “Aha.” He pulled himself back out and held up a folded Connecticut road map, in better condition than Kira had ever seen. “The compartment has a watertight seal, so the items were protected from the weather. Let’s figure out where we are.”
“Rita Drive,” said Kira, reading a weathered road sign. “A little horseshoe street off a larger road.”
Green spread the map on the hood of the car, and after some searching finally found it. Kira’s heart sank when she tapped the spot.
“We’re surrounded by lakes.”
“They’re all over this area,” said Green. He traced a winding path. “I think our best bet is to cut across this field, then follow this road, this road, and . . . this road. We might have to jump some fences, but we’ll be clear of the lakes without getting close to any of them.”
“One problem,” said Kira, and tapped her finger on a portion of his proposed route. “I came in through this gap here, trying to avoid the major roads, and that’s where I ran into the very first border marker.”
“That puts the border a lot farther from the lake than I expected,” said Green.
Now that they were out of combat, Kira’s link sense was dulling again, and she couldn’t tell how he felt about their situation—frustrated? Scared? His voice was impassive. “I wondered why we hadn’t run across any yet.”
“Be grateful that we haven’t.”
“Maybe this way,” said Green, “off the edge of the map. We can find a New York map when we cross the border.”
“That’s no good,” said Kira, thinking back to the map she’d had before. “West of here is just more lakes—there are hundreds of them. I don’t know if the Ivies patrol them, but I want to avoid them just in case. Our best bet is south.”
“South to where?” asked Green. “We may as well have this conversation now, if we’re planning our travel. I’m a deserter, so I can’t go near Morgan’s territory, and after the Ivies I’m a little leery of trying to meet up with any of the other factions.”
“I know how you feel,” said Kira. “My plan was to visit as many of the smaller factions as I could, but now . . .” She hoped the others weren’t as violent as the Ivies, and hoped even more that none of them had anything as creepy as a “Blood Man,” but how could she be sure? Should she risk it? If even one more faction captures me for some kind of . . . ritual sacrifice . . . is it worth it?
I’m trying to save the world, she thought. That’s worth anything.
She looked at Green. “I’ve never told you why I came here.”
“I was wondering about that.”
“Dr. Morgan is dangerous,” said Kira. “I assume I don’t have to tell you that, seeing as how you ran away from her.”
Green said nothing, and Kira continued. It was the first time she would propose her plan to anyone, and she was grateful it was just one person instead of a big group. She didn’t know how to present it. She already felt weird about starting with Morgan, and backtracked a bit.
“The humans are dying of RM,” she said, “and the Partials are dying of expiration. What I discovered while studying Morgan’s files is that the cure for one is the same as the cure for the other: Partials produce the cure for RM, and humans in turn are able to produce a particle that inhibits expiration in Partials. Both of the cures were engineered this way. So the only way to save both species is to live together. In peace, preferably.”
Green’s silence betrayed his skepticism. Kira went on.
“I mean we have to coexist, closely. Live in the same area, work together . . . basically just act like we’re one species instead of two.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“I’m trying to explain it,” said Kira. “The transmission of the particles would be almost impossible to replicate in a lab, not on the scale we’re talking about—tens of thousands of humans and hundreds of thousands of Partials. The two species can cure each other, but they’d have to be constantly breathing the same air. They’d have to live together without fighting.”
Green said nothing, thinking. After a moment he looked at her again. “And Dr. Morgan?”
“What about her?”
“You started this by saying she’s dangerous.”
“Right,” said Kira. “When I figured this out I left, because I didn’t trust her. She’s more likely to enslave humans than work with them.”
“So you didn’t trust Morgan, and you came out to try to find other groups of Partials who’d be more amenable to the idea of coexistence.”
“Exactly.”
Green paused for a long moment. “You’re sure that this process you’re describing works? That it’s really all this simple?”
“I crossed the entire continent looking for the people who built RM—the same ones who built the Partials—and the only thing I learned for sure is that everything they did was part of a plan. That plan has gone horribly, terribly wrong, and the people who made it have all gone crazy or just . . . given up. But the plan is still there, written on our DNA. And it’s all we’ve got.”
“So Partials cure humans and humans cure Partials.” He looked at her. “Where does that leave you?”
Kira took a breath, feeling a shadow of the same despair she’d felt in Morgan’s operating room, convinced that she was useless. “I can’t cure anything,” she said softly. “And I don’t think I expire. I don’t know where that leaves me.”
Green looked up at the sky, the blue growing lighter as the sun rose. “We need to rest, but I don’t want to stop before we get out of Ivie territory.”
“That’s probably wise.”
“We’ll go west, like I said before—maybe there are lakes over there, but if the Ivies have marked a border around this lake, I’m hopeful that means the others are safe.”
Kira felt leery of the idea, but she had to admit that cutting straight west was the fastest route away from their captors. “Maybe west for now,” she said, “but as soon as we’re out of danger, I have to get back to this mission. With or without you.”
He folded up the map, not saying anything. “Do you know where you’re going next?”
“As much as I want to talk to the other factions, I lost everything in that lake,” said Kira, “all my maps, all my notes, everything. I don’t know where any of the other factions are, and even if I did, I don’t know if I can spare the time to walk to where they are. Some of them are weeks away.”
“That’s not an answer to my question,” said Green.
“What I’m saying is that I have to go back to Long Island,” said Kira. “I don’t trust Morgan, but her soldiers might listen to reason. The ones in the occupation have already been living with humans for months now—perhaps they’re even seeing the effects of the process I just told you about. If I can convince anyone, it’s them.”
“And the humans?”
“They’ll be just as hard to convince,” said Kira, nodding. “But either way, they’re on Long Island. I have to go there.”
“You realize this isn’t taking us out of danger,” said Green. “We’ll have to go through Morgan’s territory, and into a war zone. We won’t even be getting away from the Ivies, because they’re headed in the same direction. The Blood Man said he was going after humans next.”
“Then I’ll stop him too,” said Kira, but paused. “Wait. Did you say ‘we’?”
“You’re talking about saving the world,” he said simply. “Of course I’m coming.”