Fragments (41 page)

Then they passed another truck on a crossroad, and then another.

Then they got to the city itself.

Marcus had spent so much time in the ruins of a city that seeing one in prime condition
was shocking, and somehow disturbing. Instead of pedestrians the streets were full
of cars; instead of lamps and candles the homes were lit with electrical light—porch
lights, streetlights, ceiling lights, even light-up signs on the buildings. The entire
city seemed to glow with them. More subtly, but more confounding once he noticed it,
the buildings all had windows. Windows had been one of the first things to go after
the Break, with freeze-thaw cycles shifting the frames of unheated buildings, and
flocks of birds and other animals finishing off the rest. In East Meadow only the
populated homes had windows, and the bottom few floors of the hospital where they
worked to maintain them, but everywhere else they were broken. Nearly every window
they’d passed in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and New Jersey had been broken. But not here.
It was like a city from before the Break, pulled forward in time, untouched by the
apocalypse that had destroyed the rest of the world.

But even that, Marcus told himself, wasn’t quite true. The Partials were an army,
and this was a city at war, without a civilian in sight.
Except me,
he thought.
I’m the first noncombatant this city’s seen in twelve years.

I hope I can stay a noncombatant long enough to finish this job and get out of here.

Mandy drove them to a large building in the center of town, ringed with sandbag barricades
and topped with searchlights and snipers. The mood was dark, and every Partial soldier
seemed to be watching for something—an attack, most likely, though Marcus couldn’t
help but worry about what could make even the Partials look so nervous. Vinci led
them in, explaining to each new layer of security—and there were several—that he was
bringing an envoy from the humans to talk with General Trimble, and that he had already
confiscated their weapons. Marcus felt, inversely, less safe with each new level of
guards and protocols, as if they were walking into a prison instead of a government
building. Running lights glowed softly in the walls and ceiling, giving the place
an unearthly feel that only heightened his anxiety. Vinci brought them to a large
room on the top floor, a kind of plaza with benches and low tables, ringed with apartments
and topped by a wide, latticed skylight. A guard behind them locked the door to the
outer hall.

“This is where you’ll stay,” said Vinci. “It’s not the best accommodations, but on
reflection, probably better than what you’re used to.”

“No question about that,” said Marcus. “Where’s the chocolate fountain? I’m honestly
going to be a little disappointed if it’s not strapped to the back of an enchanted
polar bear.”

“We’re not here to stay,” said Woolf. “We’re here to meet with Trimble. Is she here?”

Vinci shook his head. “She’s busy,” said Vinci. “Just wait here.”

“Wait how long?” asked Marcus. “An hour? Two hours?”

One of the outer doors opened, revealing a small but tidy apartment beyond, and a
woman stepped out eagerly. Her face fell when she saw them. “You’re not Trimble’s
men?”

“You’re not Trimble?” Woolf asked her. He looked at Vinci. “What’s going on here?”

“I’ve been waiting since yesterday,” said the woman. She walked toward them, and Marcus
guessed that she was somewhere in her late fifties—still fit and attractive, as all
Partials apparently were, but not one of the young-looking pilots like Mandy, or the
supermodel serial killers or whatever Heron was. That meant, as far as Marcus knew,
that this woman was a doctor, and he stuck out his hand to shake.

“Hello, Doctor.”

She didn’t take his hand, only looked at them sternly. “You’re humans.”

“You’ve been waiting since yesterday?” asked Woolf. He turned on Vinci. “Morgan is
killing our people—we are dying, in war and in hospitals, every day. Every hour. You
have to get us in sooner.”

“But not before me,” said the Partial doctor. “We all have business that can’t be
delayed.” She looked at Vinci. “Are you her assistant? Can you get her a message?”

“I’m just a soldier, ma’am.”

“Is she not here?” asked Marcus. “I mean, is she out on the front lines or something?
Is she in a different city? We can go to her if that’s easier.”

“She’s here,” said the doctor, pointing at a set of wide double doors on the northern
wall. “She just . . . isn’t available.”

“What is she doing that she can’t even see us?” asked Woolf. “Is she busy? Who is
she talking to if she isn’t talking to any of the people who need her?”

“We’re in the middle of a war,” said Vinci. “She’s leading that war from a central
hub; she can’t just leave it for everyone who comes to visit.”

One of the human soldiers sneered, a huge man rippling with muscles. “We could force
our way in.”

“That’s not the best tactic when we’re trying to be diplomatic,” said Woolf.

“Is there anything you can do to hurry it up?” asked Marcus. He gestured to the doctor.
“I mean, I know you’ve probably thought of everything already, but . . . I don’t know,
can we send her a message? Can we tell her why we’re here? We’re the first humans
in the city in twelve years, proposing a peace treaty and a medical alliance, that’s
got to pull some weight.”

“I know it’s important,” said Vinci. “That’s why I brought you here. But I warned
you it would be hard, and you’re going to have to be patient.”

“That’s entirely reasonable,” said Marcus. “We’ll wait.”

“Except it’s the same story they told me yesterday,” said the doctor, raising her
eyebrow. “My report is just as vital, almost certainly more so, but Trimble sees people
on her own schedule, when she wants to, and not before.”

“Then we’ll wait,” said Woolf. “As long as it takes.”

Marcus wondered how many people would die, both here and at home, while they waited.

T
he doctor introduced herself as Diadem, but said no more than that. Her hostility
toward Marcus and the rest of the humans was palpable, and not, it seemed, simply
because they took her place in line to see Trimble. Add in the constant watch of the
armed Partial guards, and the mounting threat of the imminent Partial war, and the
room was starting to feel more and more like a pressure cooker. Marcus worried that
if they didn’t get in to talk to Trimble soon, the soldiers were going to explode.

Minutes turned into hours. Every time the clocked chimed they would roll their eyes
or sigh as the time slowly trickled away; every time a door opened every head jerked
up to see if it was finally their turn to see Trimble. The sun tracked a slow arc
across the wide skylight overhead, and Partial soldiers would bustle in and out of
the room, whispering anxious conversations that Marcus could only guess at. None of
his guesses were happy. Commander Woolf was going stir-crazy, pacing up and down and
trying, unsuccessfully, to ask their Partial guards what was going on. They wouldn’t
even let him get close, waving him off first with their hands and, when he pressed
the issue, with their rifles. The background activity increased, and Marcus felt the
tension in the room like an angry spirit, hot and ranting. He decided to try talking
to Diadem again, asking her what was going on, but all she did was stare at the soldiers
in what Marcus was beginning to realize was a Partial scowl.

“They’re preparing for battle,” she said at last. “The war is coming to White Plains.”

“But Morgan’s forces are all on Long Island,” said Marcus. “Who are they fighting?”

Diadem refused to answer.

When night began to fall, Marcus despaired of ever seeing Trimble at all, and swore
not to fall asleep and risk losing his chance in the middle of the night. He kept
himself occupied by examining the various bits of technology scattered throughout
the room—objects so arcane he could only barely recognize them, but that the Partials
apparently used every day. On an end table he found a small plastic stick and picked
it up, certain that he knew what it was but completely unable to remember—something
out of his childhood, he knew, but what? It was covered with buttons, and he pressed
a couple of them to see what happened, but nothing did. Diadem watched him with the
calculating eyes of a hungry insect.

“Do you want to watch something?” she finally asked.

“No thanks,” he said. “I’m trying to figure out what this thing is.”

“That’s what I meant,” she said. “It’s a remote—it runs the holovid.”

“I knew I’d seen one before,” said Marcus. “Most of the houses in East Meadow had
the wall units, all speech- and motion-activated; I haven’t seen a hand remote like
this since I was a kid.”

“I have a wall mount at home,” said Diadem, and it seemed she might be willing to
make a little conversation. Marcus gave her his full attention. “But the waiting room
is so big, and with so many people, the sensors would get confused with only voice
or motion controls. It’s kind of funny using these old primitive things, but whatever
works, I guess.”

“What you call primitive I call futuristic,” said Marcus, still staring at the remote.
“You have a nuclear power plant that gives you more energy that you know what to do
with. We have a handful of solar panels that barely keep our hospital running. My
friend has a music player, but I haven’t seen a working holovid in twelve years.”
He stood up, searching the room for a projector. “Where is it?”

“You’re standing in it.” Diadem stood up and took the remote from him, pointing it
at the skylight; one click dimmed the glass, keeping out the glare, and another click
lit up a bright holographic mist in the center of the couches, projected down from
hundreds of tiny lights in the skylight’s latticed framework. Marcus and Diadem were
standing in the middle of the gently shifting photonic mist, different vid icons moving
lazily back and forth like sediment in a pool. Marcus stepped out to get a better
view, grinning like a little boy as he recognized first one title, then another. He
realized with amusement that all the titles he knew were the kid shows—
Windwhisper the Dragon
,
Nightmare School
,
Steambots
—the stuff he barely remembered from just before the Break. Most of the titles were
“grown-up movies,” the cop dramas and medical romances and alien invasion gorefests
his parents had never let him watch. As he looked through the menu, the other humans
were clustering around it as well, as fascinated as he was. Marcus realized that they
must have looked ridiculous, a bunch of slack-jawed yokels awestruck by a piece of
commonplace technology, and wondered if Diadem had turned on the holovid just to be
amused by their reactions to it. Just as quickly he realized that he didn’t care.
This was a part of his life that he’d lost, and seeing it again was almost heartbreaking.

“What do you want to watch?” asked Diadem.

Marcus’s first impulse was
Windwhisper
, his favorite cartoon as a child, but the soldiers were all standing right there,
and he felt a little foolish. He searched the shifting mist for an action movie, but
before he could find one that looked good, the soldier beside him, the same giant
bull from before, smiled broadly and said, “
Windwhisper
! Loved that show.”

He’s a soldier now,
thought Marcus,
but he was only seven or eight when the world ended.

Diadem swung the remote, scattering the holographic mist and grabbing the
Windwhisper
icon, and suddenly there it was, a giant hologram filling the center of the room
as the cute purple dragon soared across the opening credits. “Windwhisper!” came the
theme song, and Marcus and the soldiers sang the next line in unison with it: “Spread
your wings and fly!” They watched the entire episode, laughing and cheering, reliving
for half an hour the childhood they’d lost, but minute by minute the magic seemed
to seep away. The colors were too bright, the music too loud, the emotions too broad,
and the decisions too obvious. It was hollow and sickly, like eating too much sugar,
and all Marcus could think about was:
Is this really what I missed? Is this really all the old world was?
Life since the Break was hard, and the problems they had were painful, but at least
they were real. When he was a kid, he’d spent hours in front of the holovid, watching
show after show, effect after effect, platitude after platitude. The episode ended,
and when Diadem looked at him with the remote poised for another, he shook his head.

She turned it off. “You look awfully sad for someone who just watched a friendly purple
dragon knock a wizard into a lake made of marshmallow cream.”

“Yeah, I guess,” said Marcus. “Sorry.”

She put the remote away. “You seemed to enjoy the beginning, but not the end.”

Marcus grimaced, flopping onto the couch. “Not really. It’s just that it’s . . .”
He didn’t know how to phrase it. “It’s not real.”

“Of course it’s not real, it’s a cartoon.” Diadem sat beside him. “A 3-D cartoon with
photo-realistic backgrounds, but still—just a story.”

“I know,” said Marcus, closing his eyes, “that’s not the right word, but it’s . . .
I used to love watching the Evil Wizard get it,” he said. “Every week he’d have another
scheme, and every week Windwhisper would stop him: one up, one down. Problem surfaced
and solved in twenty-two minutes. I used to think that was awesome, but . . . it isn’t
real. The good guy’s always good, and the Evil Wizard is always, well, evil. It’s
in his name.”

“There were not a lot of children’s shows about ambiguity and unsolvable moral quandaries,”
said Diadem. “I don’t think most five-year-olds were ready for that.”

Marcus sighed. “I don’t think any of us were.”

Vinci came and talked with them after dark, apologizing again that they weren’t able
to see Trimble yet, and bringing stories of the world outside: The war was going poorly,
raging closer and closer to the city.