CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
The snow started again soon after the explosion, and Kira could only hope that the weather would diminish the spread of the fallout. Green said the windstorm was a side effect of the bomb, brought on as the fires in White Plains sucked in air like the eye of a tornado. They waited in the hospital for Falin and the others, and Kira led them all to Nandita’s house, hoping to find some trace of her sisters. The wind slashed the falling snow into their faces, stinging their cheeks and eyes as they hiked through the city. When they arrived at the home it was empty.
“Sandy said that Haru was here in East Meadow,” said Marcus. “If he knew about the nuke, he would have gone straight to Madison, and she wouldn’t have left without Ariel and Isolde. They’re probably . . . south, I guess. That’s where everyone’s going. They wouldn’t dare try to evacuate through Manhattan, with all the bridges all booby-trapped, so I’m guessing boats.”
“Do you have that many boats?” asked Green. “Thirty-five thousand people is a lot to move over water.”
“We have fishing villages all along the southern beaches,” said Kira. She closed her eyes as she spoke, collapsing on the old living room couch, battered and broken. She tried to remember the last time she hadn’t been running, either from or to something. Even the effort of searching through her memory made her tired.
“The fishermen have some boats, but not many,” said Marcus. “Still, they’re better than nothing. I think Nandita has an old atlas in here somewhere. . . .” He searched the bookshelves and pulled out a thick hardback, thumping it down on the coffee table and flipping through it to find a map of Long Island. “Most of the island’s protein comes from fish, caught either here, by Riverhead, or here, in the Great South Bay. There are a few smaller communities out here as well, on Jones Beach. The Riverhead boats are out of reach, but there’s a pretty sizable fleet of sailboats in the bay, and while it would probably take several trips, they could start ferrying people to the mainland . . . here, I guess.” He pointed to the Jersey shore. “If they follow the coast past Long Beach and Rockaway, they can cut across to New Jersey pretty easily, without ever getting out into the high seas and deep water.”
“So if we want to meet up,” asked Falin, “do we go to Jones Beach or look for the boats in the bay?”
“If I was trying to coordinate this I’d send everybody due south,” said Marcus, looking at the map, “to get as far from the blast as possible, then west as far as they can go. If the boats are just shuttling back and forth here, between Breezy Point and Sandy Hook, they can evacuate the island a lot more quickly.” He looked at Green. “Which is a long way of saying that we have a better chance of finding them if we stick to the beaches.”
“Unless the fishermen haven’t been able to get their boats out of the bay,” said Falin. “What if the Partials are holding them? They might need our help.”
Marcus leaned back on the couch, shaking his head. “Obviously you have never had the pleasure of meeting a post-Break fisherman. Where do you go if you’re so traumatized by the end of the world that you can never trust civilization again? Some of them live in the woods, hunting deer and wild cats and whatever else, but most of them became fishermen: They’re independent, they’re mobile, and if they don’t want to trade with our farms, they can ignore the rest of the world completely. That’s where Kira’s sister Ariel went when she left this place—straight out to Islip on the fringe of a fishing commune. I’d bet you no more than a handful of those fishing communities were ever rounded up by the Partials during the occupation at all. They could sail out to Fire Island or hide in Oyster Bay, and pretty much avoid the invasion the same way they avoided our society for the last decade.”
“Then who’s to say they’re going to help at all?” asked Green. “Even if the other humans found the fishing communities, how do we know they agreed to let those humans use the fishing boats?”
“Oh, they definitely found each other,” said Marcus. “Some of these causeways are miles long—we used to travel on them a lot when we did salvage runs—and when a fisherman sees a few thousand people crossing over he’s going to get curious, and when he finds out what’s going on, word will spread fast. I suppose it’s possible some of them won’t help, but I’d bet you dollars to doughnuts most of them will. They won’t want to stay on an irradiated island any more than the rest of us, and when they leave, they’re more likely to take us with them than not. They’re not evil, just . . . antisocial.”
Green nodded. “So what do we do?”
“We follow the other refugees,” said Marcus. “South on the causeways, then west on the beaches. We take as many of the final refugees as we can—we empty East Meadow completely—and then we follow the route the others took until we manage to catch up to them.”
Green asked another question, but Kira wasn’t listening anymore. Marcus’s analysis of the island was solid, and his plans were sound, but . . . how much of it really mattered anymore? Even if they could flee, what were they fleeing to? What hope did humans alone have for survival? They had Green and Falin and a few others, but four Partials, or even forty, couldn’t save thirty thousand humans. Who even knew how many Partials were left? And surely any chance at reconciliation was consumed in the nuclear blast.
Kira stood up and walked into the kitchen, smelling the herbs that reminded her so much of home. Nandita had gone missing two years ago, and after all that had happened Kira knew she’d never see the old woman again, but this kitchen, and these herbs, brought back a flood of fond memories. Xochi had kept up the garden after Nandita left, and the ceiling was hung with sprigs of dried rosemary, sheaves of brittle brown basil and bay leaves, fragrant bunches of chamomile. Kira stared at the mess—they had obviously left in a hurry when they fled the city—and after a long moment she opened a cupboard, pulled down the blackened metal teapot, and went to the sink to fill it up. The faucet dribbled for a second and went dry; apparently the cold had been too much for their aging water system, and the pipes had finally frozen and burst. She thought about using the pump in the backyard, but eventually just opened the side door and scooped a hefty chunk of snow into the teapot. Xochi had left a pile of split logs stacked neatly by the wood-burning stove, and Kira built her fire carefully inside the cast-iron monster. Her hands moved almost by themselves, remembering the years past, night after night, doing the same thing under Nandita’s watchful eye. Sometimes Madison’s. The specks of snow that had landed on the outside of the teapot melted quickly as the stove warmed up, and then hissed into steam as it grew even hotter.
“Thirsty?” asked Marcus. He was standing in the doorway from the living room, watching her with tired eyes.
“No,” said Kira blankly. “I just needed something to do.”
Marcus nodded and walked to the counter, staring at the array of herbs. “Let’s see. Mint, chamomile, lemongrass, rose hips, ginger—what sounds good?”
“Whatever.” Kira put another stick in the fire, keeping the heat even. It didn’t really matter, since she was only boiling water, but it was something she was good at. The fire was something she could control. She felt the heat with her hand and watched the pot.
Marcus fiddled with the herbs a bit, pulling out three of the chipped porcelain mugs and a metal mesh ball for each. He sniffed them, making sure they were clean, and dropped a few leaves into each ball as he spoke. “So that was your father.”
“Yep.” Kira didn’t know how to feel about Armin, and so refused to feel anything. She tested the heat again, trying to gauge the perfect temperature for the tea.
“I saw a picture of him once,” said Marcus. “Heron showed it to me.”
Kira looked up at this. “Heron?”
“You remember that Partial assassin who captured you when we went north with Samm? She showed up here one night last year, out of the blue. Showed me a picture of you as a little girl, standing between Nandita and that guy from the hospital. Armin . . . Walker, I guess?”
“Dhurvasula,” said Kira, looking back at the stove. “I couldn’t remember my last name when the soldiers found me after the Break, so they gave me one. I might be Kira Dhurvasula, I don’t know. I don’t know if he legally adopted me or what.”
“If you were an experiment, you might not legally ex—” He stopped. “Never mind.” Marcus finished with the last mesh ball and dropped one into each mug. “Is the water close?”
“Yeah,” said Kira. The teapot had already started to give short, feeble whistles, gearing up for a full boil. They watched in silence, and when it piped loudly she took it off the stove and poured a steaming stream into each thin mug. The aroma of the tea rose up in a cloud, calming her, and she breathed deep. Chamomile.
“Is he going to come after you?” asked Marcus.
It was a question Kira hadn’t allowed herself to think about yet, but now that it was out in the air there was no avoiding it. “Probably.”
“He said you were a new model,” said Marcus. “Some kind of ultimate refinement of the Partial design. If he’s collecting . . . artisanal DNA, or whatever, he’s going to want yours.”
“I used to wonder what I was for,” said Kira. She looked up at him, meeting his eyes for the first time that evening. His face was a warm bronze, almost glowing in the firelight, and his eyes were as black as the clouded, starless sky. “When I found out I was a Partial, I thought that they must have built me for some grand purpose. Something evil, maybe, like I was a bomb carrying a new strain of RM, or a spy just waiting to be activated. I hoped, though, that just maybe I was the key to saving us all, the cure for everything or a hybrid model, or something that could bring the two species together.” She smiled, but it felt sour and forced, the kind of smile that led almost instantly to tears. “Turns out I’m useless, at least as far as saving the world goes.” She wiped her eye. “I don’t carry the cure for RM, and while I don’t think I expire, I can’t do much to keep other Partials from doing so. Now Armin wants me for my DNA, and I can’t help but wonder if that’s all I’m good for. I used to wonder if I was really going to live through this, but now I can’t help but think that maybe . . . I shouldn’t.”
“Don’t say that.”
“I thought I was made for something terrible,” said Kira, “and then I thought I was made for something great, and now it turns out I wasn’t made for anything. I’m just . . . here.”
“You mean like everybody else?” asked Marcus. His eyes were kind, almost smiling, but Kira looked away.
“It’s not like that,” she said.
“It’s exactly like that,” said Marcus. “Nobody has a . . . destiny. I mean, nobody has some kind of inescapable path for their life. This mug was made from clay, and that clay could have been anything at all until somebody made it into a mug. People aren’t mugs, we’re clay. Living, breathing, thinking, feeling clay, and we can shape ourselves into anything we want, and we keep shaping ourselves all our lives, getting better and better at whatever we want to be, and when we want to be something else we just smooth out the clay and start over. Your lack of ‘purpose’ is the single best thing about you, because it means you can be whatever you want.”
She closed her eyes, her chest swelling with hope, her heart crying out to believe him, but she couldn’t. Not yet. “What about the Partial soldiers?” she asked. “They were built for one thing, and one thing only—are they locked in one place? They can’t even disobey orders without working against their own biology. What are they supposed to do now?”
“Believing that they had no choices is the attitude that ended the world,” said Marcus. He paused, staring at the floor, and then spoke again. “I had a friend named Vinci—I suppose after the nuke you might never get the chance to meet him, but he was a good man. He was Partial infantry, a sentry in Trimble’s army, but he was also funny, and clever, and smart enough to see that his world wasn’t working, and brave enough to try to change it. He remade himself as much as any human ever has. Look at Green, or Falin.” He shrugged, and his voice grew distant. “Look at Samm.”
“Samm changed,” said Kira, nodding. “So did Heron.”
“You saw Heron again?”
“We were almost friends,” said Kira, and stared at the swirls of her tea. “Not quite, but almost.”
“She helped you get to Denver?”
Kira nodded. “I came back with Morgan, but Samm and Heron stayed behind to help the survivors. I thought one day I might see them again, but then the snow made travel almost impossible, and now with the bomb, I just . . .” She thought about Samm, and their final moments. Their one and only kiss. She searched for the right words to express feelings she wasn’t even sure of. “I miss them, but I’m glad they’re not here. I’m glad they’re safe. I hope they stay safe, and stay in Denver, and if I’m right about the cures, they can live long, happy lives way after the rest of us all die of cancer or hypothermia or . . . bullets. Or crazy madmen who want to kill us and steal our blood.”
Marcus took a sip of his tea. “You make it sound so dangerous here.”
Kira laughed—not a loud laugh or a strong one, barely a chuckle, but more genuine than anything she’d felt in a long time.
“Dangerous and hopeless,” said Marcus. “But I don’t believe it is. You weren’t ‘designed’ to cure RM, but you did it anyway. You weren’t designed to cross the toxic wasteland, but you did that too, and then you escaped from I don’t know how many bad guys, and crossed through the middle of a war zone, and while every other group of weary, bloodied refugees is getting smaller and smaller, yours is getting bigger. You’re teaching people, and you’re recruiting people, and it’s not because you were built that way, or because you had some kind of glorious destiny to fulfill, but because you’re you. You’re Kira Walker. You’re not going to save the world because you’re the chosen one, you’re going to save it because you want to save it, and nobody in this world works harder for what they want than you do.”
Kira put down her mug. “I’ve really missed you, Marcus.”
He grinned. “I’ll bet you say that to all the guys.”
She had loved him once, but then she’d changed and he hadn’t. Now that she’d found him again . . . “You’re not the man I left.”
“It’s been kind of a busy year.”
“Put down your mug.”
He blinked, surprised, then set his mug on the table just before she stepped into him, wrapping her arms around him and kissing him fiercely. He kissed her back and she pressed him against the counter, holding him tightly, needing him more in this moment than she’d ever needed anything. Outside the storm raged, the mainland burned, and the island cowered in fear. Kira forgot it all and kissed Marcus.