Fragments (19 page)

A red light flashed on the wall panel, and Kira heard a violent clatter shake the
building. “Antipersonnel mine,” said Afa. “It’s called a Bouncing Betty—when someone
walks by, the mine jumps up about four feet in the air, like a ball from a Little
League pitching machine, and then explodes out, like this, in a ring.” He demonstrated
with his hands, showing an expanding halo of destruction in a single plane. “Nails
and shrapnel and buckshot, right at gut level. They’re wearing armor, but it can still
do a lot of damage without bringing down the building frame.” Kira nodded, her stomach
queasy, watching the next light in the row. If the Bouncing Betty had stopped them,
no more lights would come on. The threat would be over, and all they had to do was
clean it up. Kira prayed—

The second light came on.

“They’re moving through the east hallway,” said Afa, his hands curled in front of
him like an infant’s, weak and fetal. His face was streaked with sweat.

“How do we get out?” asked Kira. There was a fire escape, she knew, but it was laden
with traps as well, and she hoped there might be a faster way down. Afa swallowed,
staring at the lights, and Kira asked again, “How do we get out?”

“They’re in the east hallway,” he said, “coming up on the shotguns. They’re motion-sensored,
not wired like the mines—they won’t know what’s coming until it’s too late.” The third
red light came on, and Kira heard a distant crack. She waited, gritting her teeth
in desperation, and the world paused.

The fourth light blinked to life.

“No,” Kira muttered, shaking her head. Afa was looking up and down the hall, his hands
opening and closing on some imaginary tool. He had no guns, and barely tolerated Kira’s;
he did everything by trap, distant and impersonal. If they made it up here, he was
helpless.

“Afa,” said Kira, grabbing his elbow. “Look at me.” He kept searching for something,
moving his head, and Kira placed herself firmly in his field of vision. “Look at me:
They’re going to come up here, and they’re going to kill us.”

“No.”

“They’re going to kill you, Afa, do you understand me? They’re going to kidnap me
and kill you, and burn this entire building to the ground—”

“No!”

“—with all your records in it. Do you understand? You will lose everything. We have
to get out of here.”

“I have my backpack,” he said, pulling away from her and snatching up the massive
backpack from the floor, never more than a few feet away from him. “I never lose the
backpack.”

“We need to take it and go,” said Kira, pulling him toward the studio. She had a few
seconds to grab her things and then they had to run, as far and as fast as they could.
She thought about the radio station upstairs, about Marcus and the way she’d helped
him. Dr. Morgan had taken control of East Meadow, and every other population center
on the island, and it was all Kira could do to use the radios and keep Marcus one
step ahead of his pursuers. She was about to lose it all. Afa resisted, pulling away
to go back to the sensor panel, and Kira ran to the studio without him, quickly gathering
her things to flee.

“They’ve passed the conference room,” he said. “They’re moving slowly. They’re past
the second Bouncing Betty in the east hallway, moving on to the—there’s more now.”

Kira stood up, her bag half-packed with the last of her survival gear. “What?”

“One in the east hallway and one in the west. There’s another group.” He spluttered,
his voice growing wilder and higher. “I didn’t see anyone else come in! I’ve been
watching the monitors—I would have seen them come in!”

Kira snapped her pack closed, leaving the bedroll and sprinting back down the hall.
“It’s not more,” she said. “They’ve split up.” She pointed at the seventh light. “There’s
a central hallway here, right? It’s the same on every floor. This is a two-man kill
team just like a dozen others I’ve been following on the radio—they don’t need a second
team, they just split up the first—” She paused, midsentence. “They’re split,” she
said again, as if it meant something entirely different this time. “They’re alone.
Afa, where do the separate hallways join the third floor?”

“The stairs,” he mumbled.

“Yes,” said Kira, placing herself in his eye line again. “I know it’s the stairs,
but I need specifics. You built this entire system, Afa, you know where they’re going
next. This one.” She pointed at a red dot. “Where will that dot reach the third floor?”

“The back stairs,” he said, practically stuttering in fear. He reached for the manual
bomb trigger and she stopped him, pulling his hand away. “The service stairs. They
come up from the delivery room in the back.”

“Perfect,” said Kira. She wrapped his hand around his backpack and pushed him gently
away from the control panel. “You need to save this backpack, do you hear me? Do not
blow up the building—if you blow it up, you will lose your backpack.”

“I can never lose the backpack.”

“Exactly. You find whatever escape route you have planned and you take it—you run
far away, and you don’t come back for a week. If the Partials go away, I’ll be here
be waiting. Now go!”

Afa turned and ran down the hall, and Kira shouldered her pack and ran the other way,
swinging around the last doorway and practically throwing herself down the stairs.
Sixth floor. Fifth floor. If she could reach the third floor first—if she could get
there while the Partials were still split up, still alone, right where she knew they
were coming—she could ambush the first and retreat before the second arrived as backup.
She had a chance to kill both of them, but it was only a chance. Fourth floor.

Third.

She slowed, placing each step carefully, listening at the corner before moving around
it. The stairwell was clear. She dropped to her knee, raising the rifle to her cheek,
peering around the corner into the second floor. Moldy carpet stretched away in the
darkness. The metal door had been completely removed, hauled upstairs as armor for
one of Afa’s mini bunkers—that was where Kira would retreat, she decided. Kill the
first, fall back to a bunker, and wait for the second to make a mistake. If the Partials
even made mistakes.

The second floor was empty, but the signs of chaos were clear. A pattern of holes
in the walls and blackout curtains showed that the latest round of Bouncing Betties
had gone off exactly as planned, but there didn’t seem to be any bodies. The floor
was dimly lit by the holes in the curtains, and a small flame flickered in the wall
near the back. Kira waited, trying to remember what the last trap on the floor had
been—something incendiary, she thought, and it obviously hadn’t gone off. The Partial
was still inside.

Kira waited at the top of the stairs, her rifle aimed and ready. As soon as a Partial
appeared in the doorway, it was as good as dead.

She waited.

Maybe I was too noisy,
she wondered.
It heard me coming and went the other way—or worse, it’s waiting for me. I could retreat
back up the stairs, but then I lose my advantage. I can’t take both Partials at once.
If there’s any chance I can ambush this one, I have to take it.

How far has the other one gotten? This is the service stairwell, but the other hall
leads to the main stairwell. Has the Partial reached it yet? Did it go upstairs? Did
Afa get away?
She hoped that Afa had been smart enough to run, that he wasn’t sitting in the hallway
with his finger on the trigger of the bomb, ready in his paranoia to destroy his entire
life’s work—and he and Kira with it—just to keep it from the Partials.
I need to get back up there,
she thought,
and I need to stay here, and I need to run away. I don’t know what to—

And then she knew, as firmly and as strongly as if she’d seen it with her own eyes,
that there was a Partial creeping toward her on the third floor.

The third-floor doorway, like the second, had been cannibalized for Afa’s bunker.
The door was open, and the Partial would have a clear shot at her as soon as it came
around the corner.
It’s the link,
she thought,
it’s the only way I could know this so clearly. It’s broadcasting everything we’re
doing. I don’t have the full complement of sensors that Samm described, but apparently
I have enough to sense where they are—and maybe enough to give myself away.
She patted her jacket, wishing she had something she could throw—a grenade or even
a rock to distract them with—but all she had was the rifle, and by the time she had
a clear shot with that, it would be too late. She had to move. She shifted to the
balls of her feet, ready to race down the stairwell to the first floor, when she got
a second impression, as clear as the first, that there was another Partial in the
stairwell below her. They hadn’t paused inside the doorway, waiting, they’d jumped
ahead and completely encircled her. There was nowhere to go but into the second floor,
still rigged with one last trap. She jumped to her feet and ran.

The Partial agents didn’t shout to each other, for the link warned them of danger
in much more effective silence, but Kira still felt it in her head like a chemical
scream:
SHE’S RUNNING
. Feet clattered on the stairs behind her, and Kira fired a burst from her rifle into
the stairwell below, keeping the second Partial from sniping her as she raced past
into the second-floor death trap. Kira tumbled through the open door and scrambled
back to her feet, looking around wildly for the final trap, but Afa had hidden it
too well. A Partial pounded through the door behind her and Kira spun, tracking shots
across the wall in a deadly line headed straight for the attacker’s chest. The Partial—obviously
a woman, but with her face obscured behind a visored helmet—paused when she saw Kira,
then converted her charge into an acrobatic roll; she pulled her rifle in close to
her chest, tucked herself into a ball, and somersaulted under Kira’s spray of bullets
before Kira had time to correct its course. The Partial came up just feet away from
her, firing almost immediately, and Kira had to dive to the side to stay clear. The
Partial followed with uncanny speed, pressing the attack, lashing out with a devastating
kick that knocked Kira’s rifle from her hands. Kira stumbled into a conference room,
recovered her feet, and sprinted past the rotting wooden table to the second door
at the far end of the room, just three steps ahead of the Partial. She came back into
the hall and ran back to the door, only to collapse with a crash as the Partial tackled
her from behind, knocking the air from her lungs. Kira fought for breath, wrestling
madly with the Partial, managing to connect a solid elbow slam to the side of the
attacker’s helmet. She reeled back and Kira rolled away, crawling another few feet
before the Partial, already on her feet, kicked her thigh out from under her. Kira
grunted in pain, falling to the side, and when she looked up the Partial was a few
feet away, her boot raised over a tiny trip wire, her hand pointed to a spot above
Kira’s head. Kira looked up and saw the nozzle of Afa’s incendiary trap, a flamethrower
aimed directly at her head. All the Partial had to do was stomp down, and a jet of
flame would roast Kira alive. She cringed, staring at the Partial’s featureless visor,
and heard a male voice cry out.

“Kira!”

Kira froze. She’d know that voice anywhere. Her jaw dropped as he stepped out of the
stairwell, his helmet in his hands.

“Samm?”

“I
wasn’t going to kill her,” said the female Partial. She stepped away from the trip
wire and took off her helmet, and Kira recognized her as well: jet-black hair, gorgeous
Chinese features, and dark eyes that glittered with a terrifying genius. This was
Heron, the Partial who’d captured her before and taken her to Morgan. The girl smirked
dismissively, looking at Kira the way someone would stare at a lost kitten—someone
who didn’t really like kittens. “I was only trying to scare her.”

Samm bent down to help Kira to her feet, and she rose uncertainly, still trying to
process what was happening. “Samm?”

“It’s good to see you.”

“What . . . why are you here?”

“Because we finally found you,” said Heron, and pointed at the ceiling. “Everybody
knows you’re on the radio, but we’re the only ones who’ve figured out you were in
Manhattan.” She bowed with mock respect. “We chose to keep that information to ourselves.”

Samm retrieved Kira’s rifle from the floor. “We’ve known somebody was in this building
for a few days, but we also recognized the signs of the same bomber who’d almost blown
us up twice already, and so we took our time coming in. We didn’t know for sure that
you were in here until”—he paused, tilting his head as if calculating—“thirty seconds
ago. When I saw your face.” He handed Kira the rifle.

Kira took it, puzzled. “You didn’t—” She stopped herself, realizing that she’d almost
blurted out, right in front of Heron, that she was a Partial. She was going to ask
why they hadn’t felt her on the link, since she’d been able to feel them so clearly,
but she didn’t know if Samm had told her or not. She would ask him later, in private.

Kira pushed those thoughts aside and looked back at Samm. “You could have just knocked.
. . .” She sighed and shook her head. They couldn’t just knock, because if they were
wrong, and this had been anyone other than Kira, they’d be exposing themselves to
far greater danger: a rival faction of Partials, or Afa’s megaton booby trap.
I wonder how far Afa got, if he got away at all.

“A better answer to your question,” said Samm, “is that we’re here because we needed
to find you. You’re in danger.”

“Dr. Morgan is trying to find you,” said Heron, and paused just long enough to make
Kira uncomfortable before adding, “We’re here to make sure she doesn’t.”

Kira looked back pointedly. “You’re not with her anymore?”

“I’m with myself,” said Heron. “Always.”