CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Armin Dhurvasula stared back at Kira, his dark eyes flickering, considering her. She could feel his emotions on the link, wonder and uncertainty and a fierce determination, so strong it left her gasping. Her father took a step forward, as if trying to see her better, and a broad, almost childlike smile spread across his face.
“Kira!” he shouted. He ran toward her, wiping his hands on a towel. “Kira, you’re alive!”
Green raised his rifle to fire, but Armin froze him in place with a surge of link data so powerful Kira felt her own knees buckle. Marcus grabbed her arm, holding her up, and when Armin drew close she gripped Marcus tightly.
“Don’t touch me,” she hissed at her father.
“Kira,” said Armin. “You can’t know how happy I am to see you. I thought for sure you’d died in the Break—obviously you were immune to RM, but when I finally made it home again, you were gone.”
“I was . . . alone for weeks.”
“It was a chaotic time,” said Armin. “But you’re here now, and we can do so much together—”
“What are you doing?” she demanded. “You’re the Blood Man? You’re the one leaving dismembered bodies all over the . . . everywhere? How could you do this?”
“I’m saving them,” he said simply. “The world’s ending—you thought it ended in the Break, but that was just the gunshot; the last thirteen years have been a long, slow bleeding, twitching in an illusion of life, preparing for this moment—this true death. The Partials will die in a few months, and the humans not long after. Jerry’s impossible winter will only hasten the inevitable. How long do you really think we have?”
“So just because we’re dying means it’s all right to murder everyone?” asked Kira. “Like we’re some kind of . . . sociopathic playground now? What’s wrong with you?”
“I do not enjoy what I’m doing,” said Armin. “Don’t think me heartless for accepting the inevitable—no more than an oncologist is being cruel when he tells a cancer patient that he only has a month to live. That doctor isn’t a monster, he’s simply doing his job. The difference here is that I can do something no oncologist has ever been able to do; no doctor, no politician, no holy man. I can save them, Kira.”
“By killing them?”
“By harvesting the best of them—their strength, their will, their creativity. All of it encoded in their DNA.” He held up a jar of blood and tissue, then peered into her eyes. “Kira, what do you think is going to happen when the world ends?”
“We survived it once,” she said. “We can survive again.”
“We can’t.” He shook his head. “We had a plan for the world, you know. I still believe it would have worked. I designed that biology myself, and it was flawless. But it’s all gone now. It was human nature that made it impossible, human and Partial.”
“So I was right,” said Kira. She looked at Green and Marcus, then back at her father. “I solved the puzzle; I discovered the process you engineered: the secrets buried in RM and expiration and the Partial DNA. I knew there was a plan, and that the plan was for peace, because I knew you.” Her eyes darkened, and she stared at the jar in his hands in horror. “At least I thought I did.”
“That dream is gone now.”
“How can you say that?” she asked. “You were determined to care for the life you’d created; you fought for Partial rights before the Partials even existed. You knew they were destined to be a second-class species, not even accepted as people, and you devised the entire plan to ensure that Partials and humans had to see each other as equals if they wanted to survive. You tried to eliminate racism on a biological level, for all time.” She gestured to the jar of tissue, to his gloved hands red with drying blood, to the Ivies behind him standing silent in the doorways of murdered patients. “How did you go from that to this? How could you ever convince yourself that this was the only way?”
Armin’s face grew more serious, and he repeated his question in a somber tone. “Do you know what’s going to happen when the world ends? We call it the end of the world, but it’s only the end of us. The world will go on, the planet and the life that lives on it. Rivers will keep flowing, the sun and the moon will keep turning, vines will creep up across the cars and the concrete. There will come soft rain. The world will forget that we were ever here. Human thought—the glorious zenith of five billion years of evolution—will go out like a candle, gone forever. Not because it was time, not because the world moved past us, but because we, as a people, were fools. Too selfish to live in peace, and too proud to stop our wars long after they ceased to have any real meaning. Your precious human souls, your Partial brothers and sisters, all of whom you seem to think can live together in peace, are out there right now tearing this island to shreds, fighting and killing and dying not because they see a way out, not because they have a cure or a clue or a solution to any of their problems, but because that’s what they do. The only thing left of any value on this entire planet is their lives, but that’s not worth anything while the other guy still has his, so they kill each other. They are in a desperate race toward the final death. The winner will be the last one standing, and his prize is the final and most terrible solitude this world has ever known.”
Kira wanted to protest, but her eyes fell to the body of the Ivie she’d shot, barely thirty feet away, its blood spreading thickly across the floor. She thought of the people she’d killed to get here, the bodies in her wake. A collapsed apartment building in New York City. The Manhattan Bridge. Afa Demoux. Delarosa and her nuke. Kira’s own bloody hands, as red as her father’s, stabbing a dagger into the skull of a dead Partial soldier.
“These people are already dead,” said Armin. “Leaving them alive is no mercy, for they’ll only be killed by someone else, and yet I can’t abandon them. I’ve played my part in their destruction, don’t think I’ve forgotten that. Don’t think I’ve forgiven myself. But Jerry has set the stage for a new beginning. And when the snows melt and the sun returns and the world erupts in young green leaves, I will make sure that someone’s there to see it. I will make sure there are eyes to behold it, and minds to understand it, and voices to carry on our story. You are breaking yourself in pieces to give a dying man a few more seconds of life. I’m going to take that man’s blood and build a child and a future and a legacy that will last for another five billion years. To cover the Earth and reach out into the stars and fill the universe with poetry and laughter and art. To write new books and sing new songs.”
Kira felt unable to look away from the Ivie’s body and everything it represented. Too much blood. Too much loss. “You’re going to build a new species.”
“Human and Partial will be no more,” said Armin. “There will only be one species, one perfect species. I’ve done it before. I’ve unlocked the human genome and arranged it in perfect order, like notes in a symphony. I’ve honed the genetic template for the human form through dozens of generations of Partial technology, and you know that better than anyone. Because you’re the final result.”
Kira looked up, meeting his eyes, and he smiled.
“You,” he said, “my daughter, built on the model of my own DNA, polished and refined through countless drafts until I had eliminated all trace of flaw or imperfection. I had hoped some of the late-model Partials had survived, for they would be the ideal starting point for this new world, the first brushstroke on our new, blank canvas.”
“Okay,” said Marcus, stepping forward to place himself between Armin and Kira. “This whole conversation has been freaking me out, but that last sentence took it down a whole other path.”
“You want my DNA too,” said Kira. “My blood in a jar to take back to your lab.”
“I want you,” said Armin. “Your body and your mind.”
“I won’t go with you.”
“You don’t have a choice.”
“There’s always a choice,” said Kira. “I learned that from someone who was more of a parent to me than you could ever be.” She drew herself up as tall as she could. “If you want my blood, you’re going to have to take it.”
Armin sighed, and the energy in his face fell away like dead skin, leaving nothing behind but a dull, emotionless stare. “You’ve heard what I’m planning,” he said softly. “You understand that there is no other way.”
He pulled a small metal tube from a sheath on his belt, like a rounded trowel, sharpened on one end. The precise size and shape to puncture a human body and sluice out all the blood and tissue within. “None of us is more important than this. Not even my own daughter.”