Fragments (45 page)

Afa died days later, the travelers still lost in the pale yellow wasteland.

They buried him in dirt that smelled like broken batteries, and crouched in a fiberglass
shed while the acid rain poured down to dissolve his flesh and bleach his bones.

“What the hell are we doing?” asked Heron. Samm looked up at her; Kira, too tired
to move, lay in the corner with her eyes closed.

“We’re saving people,” said Samm.

“Who are we saving?” asked Heron. Kira looked up, her head loose on her neck, her
movements shaky and uncoordinated from weeks of malnutrition, exhaustion, and fear.
“Have we saved anybody? We’ve killed somebody. We killed two horses. Afa lived for
twelve years on his own, completely alone, in the one of the most dangerous parts
of the world, and now he’s dead.” She spit onto the ground and wiped her mouth on
her sleeve. “Let’s face it: we’ve failed.”

Samm peered in the dark at his careworn map, nearly falling apart at the creases.
Poison rain drummed down on the fiberglass over their heads. “We’re in Colorado now,”
he said. “We have been for a few days. I’m not a hundred percent certain of where
in Colorado, but based on how fast we were traveling before, I’m pretty sure we’re
. . . here.” He pointed at a spot on the map, far from any roads or cities.

“Yay,” said Heron, not even looking. “I’ve always wanted to be here.”

“Heron’s tired,” said Kira. She was herself on the verge of tears, practically broken
by Afa’s death. But she couldn’t quit now. She sat up to take the map from Samm and
her own hand shook with the effort. “We’re all tired. We’re genetically perfect super-soldiers,
designed to keep going under the harshest conditions, and we can barely move. We need
to conserve our strength if we’re going to get to Denver.”

“Are you kidding?” said Heron. “You aren’t still planning on completing this idiotic
mission, are you?” She turned to Samm, incredulous. “Samm, you know it’s time to do
what we should have done weeks ago. Turn around.”

“If I’m right,” said Samm, “we’re barely a day’s journey to Denver. We could get there
tomorrow.”

“And do what?” Heron demanded. “Find another ruined building? Risk our lives to get
its generator running? Beat our heads against the computer because everything we want
to look at is trapped behind firewalls and encryptions and passwords and who knows
what other kinds of security? Afa was the only one who knew how to get past that;
without him we don’t even know how to navigate the filing system.”

“We’re too close to give up,” said Samm.

“We’re not close to anything,” said Heron. “We’re going to go, and we’re going to
find nothing, and this entire trip has been a waste of everyone’s time. We’re not
going to cure RM, we’re not going to solve the expiration date, we’re not going to
do anything but die in a wasteland.”

She lurched to her feet. “I’m not even going to say it.”

“Say what?” Kira demanded. “‘I told you so’? ‘We should have turned around after Chicago’?
‘We should never have left New York in the first place’?”

“Take your pick.”

Kira struggled to her feet, panting with the exertion. “You’re wrong. We came here
with a job to do. If we don’t do it, Afa will have died for nothing. All of us will
have. And we’ll take the whole planet with us.”

“Come on,” said Samm, but the girls ignored him. Heron reached Kira’s side before
Kira even realized she was moving, and her fist slammed into Kira’s chin like a sledgehammer.
Kira staggered back, already bracing herself to pounce back and attack before her
mind had fully processed the punch, but before they could go any further Samm shoved
himself between them. “Stop it.”

“She’s out of her mind,” said Heron. “We had a chance if we’d gone back east after
Chicago—we could have gone to Dr. Morgan, we could have even gone to Trimble. Anything
would have given us a better chance than this. What’re you looking for, Kira?” she
asked, looking at Kira over Samm’s shoulder. “What is this about? Is this even about
saving our race? Or the humans? Or is this whole insane expedition all just so you
can figure out what the hell you are? You selfish little bitch.”

Kira was speechless. She wanted nothing more than to bash Heron’s head against the
ground, but Samm kept himself solidly between them. He faced Heron solemnly, keeping
Kira back with his arm.

“Why’d you come with us?” asked Samm.

“You said you trusted her!” Heron snarled. “You told me to come, so I came.”

“You haven’t done what you’re told since the day I met you,” said Samm. “You do what
you want, when you want, and if anyone gets in the way, you take them out. You could
have stopped us at any time. You could have incapacitated me and kidnapped Kira and
brought her to Morgan and done everything exactly the way you wanted, but you didn’t.
Tell me why.”

Heron looked at him fiercely, then scowled at Kira. “Because I actually believed her.
She talked about researching everything ParaGen had done to find some sort of cure,
and for some stupid reason I thought she meant it.”

“I did,” said Kira, thought the fight had gone out of her voice. She felt drained
and empty, as hollow as the fiberglass shed they were hiding in.

“And you,” Heron spat, looking at Samm. “I can’t believe you’re still siding with
her. I thought you were smarter than this—I thought I could trust you. That’s what
I get for believing in something, I guess.”

Heron’s words were clearly meant to cut Samm deeply, and it broke Kira’s heart to
hear them, knowing how they must make him feel. But if they did affect him, he didn’t
show it. Instead, he held up a hand to silence Heron and turned to Kira, his eyes
dark with fatigue. “You say you
did
mean it. Do you still?”

Kira was reeling from Heron’s accusations, and felt even more empty as she searched
for an answer. Was she really doing this—putting them through all this hell, starving
her friends and torturing the horses and killing Afa—just for her own selfish reasons?
She didn’t know what to say, and they stood in tense silence for what felt like an
eternity.

“Intentions are all I have left,” she said at last. “We’re going to go there, and
whatever we find, it’ll be more than we have now. At least there’s a chance. At least
. . .” She trailed off. She had run out of words.

“You’re out of your mind,” Heron said again, but stopped when Kira turned away and
sat, collapsing in a heap as her legs buckled. She lay down on the floor of the shed
and wished she could cry.

H
aru Sato slunk through the warren of tunnels under JFK, keeping far from the other
soldiers when he could, and nodding to them passively when the tight hallways made
it impossible to keep his distance. He kept his weather-beaten hat pulled low over
his face, avoiding eye contact, hoping no one would talk to him or ask where he was
going. If they found out he’d fled his unit, he’d be arrested—or worse. It was not
a good time to be a traitor.

Mr. Mkele’s office was in the middle of a long hall, what looked like it used to be
a shipping office, now converted to the last, dying nerve center of human civilization.
Morgan’s forces had taken East Meadow, had rounded up every other human they could
find on the island; in a matter of days, they would come for this hideout and the
human world would end. Their time as the dominant species was over. And what pitiful
resistance they could mount was managed out of this failing office.

Well,
thought Haru,
this office and Delarosa’s roving base camp. And Delarosa’s more dangerous than we
ever knew.

A single soldier stood guard in front of the closed office door, his uniform wrinkled
and dirty. There was no time for pleasantries anymore. Haru glanced up and down the
hall, seeing it relatively empty; most of the remaining Grid soldiers were upstairs
on defense, or out in the wilderness attacking Morgan’s flanks. For the moment, Haru
and the guard were alone. Haru glanced around again, set his resolve, and walked toward
him.

“Mr. Mkele is busy at the moment,” said the guard.

“Let me ask you a question,” said Haru, stepping in close. At the last minute he turned
to the right and lifted his arm, like he was pointing at something, and as the guard
turned his head to follow, Haru slammed his knee into the man’s gut, bringing his
left arm behind to catch the rifle slung over the man’s shoulder. The guard reached
for it, still doubled over and too shocked to breath, but Haru maneuvered him swiftly
into place for another knee, in the face this time, and the man collapsed. Haru opened
the door, shoved the unconscious man through it, and stepped in after him. Mkele leapt
to his feet, but Haru had already locked the door tightly.

“Don’t call out,” he said. “I’m not here to hurt you.”

“Just my guards.”

“I went AWOL last night,” said Haru. “I couldn’t risk him raising an alarm.” He laid
the man gently in the corner. “Just give me five minutes.”

Mkele’s office was full of papers—not cluttered, as if he simply failed to throw anything
away, but full, and from the looks of it very efficiently organized. This was a man
who used his office not for show or for storage, but for long hours of work and study.
Mkele was sitting behind his desk with a map of Long Island spread out before him,
marked here and there with the sites of Partial attacks, Grid counterattacks, and—Haru
couldn’t help but notice—some of Haru’s own allegedly secret activities with Delarosa
and her warriors.
I guess I’m not as good at keeping secrets as I thought. Maybe he already knows.

No,
thought Haru.
If he knew what Delarosa was planning, he wouldn’t be nearly this calm.

“You’re turning yourself in,” said Mkele.

“If you want to look at it that way,” said Haru. “I’m delivering intel, and if some
of that intel reflects poorly on me, I’m prepared to face the consequences.”

“It must be very important intel.”

“What did you do before?” Haru asked. “Before the Break?”

Mkele stared at him a moment, as if deciding how to answer, then gestured at the map
before him. “This.”

“Intelligence?”

“Mapmaking,” said Mkele. He smiled faintly. “In the wake of apocalypse, we must find
new areas of endeavor.”

Haru nodded. “Were you familiar with the Last Fleet? I don’t know its real name, I
was seven when it happened. The fleet that sailed into New York Harbor and got bombed
to hell and back by the Partial air force. They call it the Last Fleet because it
was our last chance to defend ourselves against the Partials, and when it was gone,
the war was over.”

“I know it,” said Mkele. His face was calm—intent without appearing nervous. Haru
pressed forward.

“Do you know why the Partials destroyed it?”

“We were at war.”

“That’s why they attacked it,” said Haru. “Do you know why they attacked it with such
overwhelming force that they sank every ship in the fleet and killed every sailor
onboard? They’d never done that with any other attack or counterattack in the war.
I’ve heard the stories a thousand times from the older guys in the Defense Grid—how
the Partials who had typically been much more interested in pacification and occupation,
suddenly decided to obliterate an entire fleet. They say it was a message, the Partials’
way of saying, ‘Stop fighting now or we’ll make you regret it.’ That always seemed
pretty reasonable to me, so I didn’t question it. Yesterday I learned the truth.”

“From who?”

“From Marisol Delarosa,” said Haru. “She’d started requesting strange equipment, stuff
that didn’t fit any of her known methods, so I followed her.”

“What kind of equipment?”

“Scuba gear,” said Haru. “Acetylene torches. Stuff that didn’t make sense from one
drop to the next, but they all started adding up to the same thing.”

“Underwater salvage,” said Mkele, nodding. “I assume this means she’s been exploring
the Last Fleet?”

“The Last Fleet wasn’t destroyed as a message,” said Haru. “It was carrying a nuclear
missile.”

Mkele’s face tensed immediately, and Haru continued. “It was the US government’s ‘final
solution,�� to land a nuke on the Partial headquarters in White Plains and knock out
the majority of their military operation in one move, even at the expense of one of
the most densely populated areas in the entire country. They needed to sail in close
to bypass the Partials’ missile defense systems; it was a suicide mission even before
the Partials figured out what they were doing. Some old man in Delarosa’s team was
a navy chaplain before the Break, and he started talking about the same final solution.
That’s what gave her the idea. He knew all kinds of things once she started asking
the right questions. The missile was on an Arleigh Burke–class destroyer called
The Sullivan
.” He leaned forward. “I tried to warn you by radio, but my unit sided with her. I
can’t stop her alone, so I came as fast as I could. If nothing goes wrong with their
operation, they’ll have the warhead in hand by tonight.”

Mkele whispered, “God have mercy.”

T
hey saw the mountains first—massive peaks that rose up from the plains of the Midwest
like the wall at the edge of the world. The tops were white with snow, even in the
summer. They reached the outskirts of the city soon after, a suburb called Bennett,
washed pale by the acidic rainfall, the streets stained a sulfurous yellow and the
brown plants dry and brittle. The dead plains lapped at the edge of the city like
an ocean of poison grass, and no birds perched on the eaves or the power lines. The
cities Kira had grown up with, even the massive ones like Chicago and New York, had
stood like monuments in an overgrown cemetery, marking the site of death but covered
with vines and moss and the signs of new life. Denver, in contrast, was a mausoleum,
lifeless and bare.

The travelers had distributed their gear between the horses, Kira leading Bobo while
Samm led Oddjob; the mare seemed morose without Afa strapped onto her back, and Kira
wondered if even the animals’ diet of canned vegetables and instant oatmeal—the only
clean food they could find in the toxic wasteland—was starting to take its toll. If
they’d lost Afa back in Chicago, or sent him back on his own, they could have loosed
the horses and spared them the horrors of the journey completely, but to loose them
in the middle of the poison plains would have been the height of cruelty, and Kira
wouldn’t hear of it. They had lost Afa, but she would save his horse if it meant her
own life.