Partials (22 page)

“Somebody’s depressed,” said Jayden.

Xochi punched him in the arm. “Does anyone want some more home fries?”

“Ooh, me,” said Isolde, sitting up. “Forget extinction—I’m dying the day all our vegetable oil finally runs out.”

Xochi passed her the plate and stood up. “I’m sick of ‘Antonio, on His Bar Mitzvah.’ Any requests?”

“Phineas,” said Kira. “No—Nissyen. He always cheers me up.”

Xochi sorted through her basket of players, glancing quickly at the generator to make sure there was power. Isolde took a bite of potato and pointed at Kira with the other half, talking with her mouth full.

“I think you’re just spooked,” she said. “All joking aside, that thing almost killed you in the field, and now you have to work with it.”

“Not with it.”

“With it in the room,” said Isolde. “You know what I mean. I think it’s scary.”

“I think you’re scary,” said Xochi. She plugged in a music player—
TO NISSYEN FROM LISA
—and bubbly techno started playing in the background. “You’re the most elegant one of us,” Xochi continued, sitting next to Isolde, “and here you are flinging fried potatoes around like you’re an outlands street vendor.”

“I may be a little drunk,” said Isolde seriously, pointing at Xochi with her half-chewed fry. She raised her eyebrow. “Senator Hobb gave me some champagne.”

“Ooh la la,” said Xochi.

“Maybe beacuse the hearing went better than expected?” said Isolde. She shrugged. “I wasn’t going to say no.”

“But they didn’t get anything they wanted,” said Kira, sitting up straighter. “Four dumb kids forced them into…” She stopped. “Unless that’s what they wanted all along.”

“They wanted it alive?” asked Jayden. “They wanted you to study it?”

“I don’t know,” said Kira. “None of it makes sense.” She looked out the window. Still nothing.

“Doesn’t it make you a little suspicious, though?” asked Xochi. “If the Senate is running some kind of weird scheme here, how many other things are they doing that we don’t know about?”

“You’re being paranoid,” said Jayden. “What kind of horrible conspiracies do you think they’ve got going?”

“They’re hiding a Partial inside the city limits,” said Xochi. “If they’re capable of that, why not more?”

The room went quiet.

“Attacks against the farms,” said Xochi. “Accused Voices disappearing in the middle of the night. We accept these things because we think we know the reasons behind them, but what if we don’t? What if the reasons we’ve been told all along are just lies?”

“I’ve been Senator Hobb’s assistant for nearly a year,” said Isolde, “and I can guarantee you I’m not keeping any dangerous state secrets.”

“You’re defending the honesty of a group that you know, firsthand, is lying to the people of East Meadow,” said Xochi. “And they’re doing it too effectively to be first-timers. The only surprising thing about it is that any of you are surprised.”

“I think Xochi’s right,” said Kira. She felt a pit in her stomach, slowly growing deeper and darker as she thought through Xochi’s logic.

“Why are you so desperate to attack them?” asked Jayden. “Listen, Xochi, I’m sorry your mom is a bitch, but she’s not the entire Senate. And what about the Defense Grid? You’re talking about people who defend us and keep us safe—people who die in the outlands so that you can sit here with your monogrammed music players and your fancy foods and whine about how oppressed you are.”

“Not counting your own fiasco,” said Xochi hotly, “when’s the last time a soldier actually died in combat?”

“Last year, in the Voice raid on the Hampton farms.”

“And how do you know that was the Voice?” Xochi demanded.

“Why would they lie to us?”

“How do you know there wasn’t just some disgruntled farmer,” Xochi pressed, “who refused to send in his quota, so the Long Island Bloody Defense Grid went out to rough him up a little?”

“Why would they lie to us?” Jayden repeated.

“Because it keeps us in line!” Xochi shouted back. “Look at everything we go through—armed soldiers in the streets, invasive searches of everyone going in and out of the market; they’ve even started searching homes. The Senate says jump and we ask how high because they’ve convinced us the Voice will kill us if we don’t. Our boys go to war, our girls get pregnant, and we always do everything they say and it never changes anything. Nothing ever gets better. You know why? Because if it gets better, we don’t have to listen to them anymore.”

Kira flicked her eyes from person to person, shocked by the outburst. Everyone else seemed as shocked as she was.

Jayden grumbled and stood up. “You’re insane,” he said, walking to the door. “I’ve got better things to do with my time than waste it here.”

“Idiot,” Xochi muttered, and stormed into the kitchen.

Kira looked at Isolde, who looked back with wide, startled eyes.

“They’re not evil,” said Isolde. “I work with them every day—they’re just people. Hobb’s really trying to do his best.” She paused. “You should take your own gun tomorrow. We have no idea how strong the Partials are, or what they’re capable of. Do you have a handgun?”

Kira shook her head. “I’m a rifle girl, but that’s mostly just at home. It wouldn’t be very useful inside the lab.”

“I’ll give you mine,” said Isolde. “Town hall is swarming with soldiers, and you just became zookeeper to a hyperintelligent predator. You need it more than I do.”

Kira looked out the window at the empty street. “I guess we may as well go get it,” she said softly. “The party’s dead anyway.” She walked out with Isolde, paused on the porch, and waited a few long seconds before stepping down and leaving.

Marcus never came.

Dr. Skousen led Kira down a long hall. “This used to be a quarantine room,” he said, pointing toward the heavy steel door at the end of the corridor. “We haven’t used it for that, or for anything else, really, in years. The custodians spent all night cleaning it out. I’m afraid that the seals aren’t all as tight as we’d like them to be, but we’ve got the salvage crews working overtime looking for new medical supply stores and new hospitals and clinics—anywhere that might have the right kind of plastic for the doors and windows. We’ll be safe enough for now.”

And I’ll be locked inside with a Partial
, thought Kira. She clutched her stack of vials and notebooks and other equipment, trying not to drop them as she matched Skousen’s brisk pace.

He lowered his voice, whispering covertly as they turned the final corner. “We’ve spent the night searching it for anything that could be a weapon, cleaning it, weighing it—anything that required it to be unrestrained. Now it’s strapped down, and it’s all yours.”

They reached the door, a seven-foot steel barrier flanked by two soldiers in helmets and body armor. One of them was Shaylon Brown, the private she’d met on the Asharoken salvage run, and he smiled as he turned to unlock the door. Kira looked at Skousen, keeping a tight grip on her precarious load of equipment.

“Anything else I need to know?”

“Learn everything you can,” he said gravely. “I didn’t want you to do this, and I still think it was idiotic to attempt, but now that we have one … this is a rare opportunity, and I honestly don’t know how long the other senators are going to allow it, five-day promise or not. Make sure you report everything directly to me, especially if you find something … ominous. The last thing we want is a panic.”

“Got it,” said Kira. “Well then.” She turned to the door, took a deep breath, and walked past the soldiers. “Thanks for keeping me safe, guys.”
If you need me, I’ll be locked inside here with the monster
.

The entryway was a short tube of clear, flexible plastic, with a soft electric hum from a grate on the floor—an electromagnetic grid designed to pull foreign particles from her shoes.
There’s supposed to be a—
She looked around for the air jets just in time to get blasted in the face by an artificial whirlwind, sweeping her clean and pulling dust and hair and other contaminants down to the same electric grid. She managed to keep her grip on her vials and papers, and when the air stopped, she pushed forward into the room itself.

The Partial lay on an operating table in the center of the room; it was strapped down tightly with thick leather restraints, and the table was bolted to the floor. It was awake, its eyes alert, watching her as she stepped into the converted room. The walls were lined with counters and medicomps and other equipment, all clean and well-lit. She had Isolde’s semiautomatic on her hip.

She’d never been more terrified in her life.

Kira stood for a moment, saying nothing, then crossed to the wall and set her things on a counter. The sample vials rolled free and she paused to gather them up, placing them one by one in a plastic rack. She swallowed, staring at the rack, willing herself to turn and face the Partial. It was nothing—it was one man, not even a man but a teenager, all alone and tied up. She’d faced it and others like it under far worse conditions only a few days before. And yet things felt different here; everything seemed off and out of place. A Partial in the wilds was an enemy, and she knew how to think about it, but a Partial here, in East Meadow, in the same room…

She saw a glint of light in the corner of her eye, and turned to see the lens of a small camera mounted in the corner. It was obviously new and out of place, mounted blockily on the wood of the counter with thick screws. She turned to scan the room and saw five more: one in each corner, and two higher up to get specific angles on both the Partial’s table and her own workstation. Mkele’s work, she assumed, and she felt some of her nervousness lift at the thought that he and his soldiers were watching her so closely. If the Partial tried anything, they’d see it and respond.

Kira let out a breath she didn’t realize she was holding. She couldn’t decide if knowing Mkele was watching made her feel more safe, or less. She walked past the bound Partial to the window.

She was on the second floor, looking out through a strip of tall trees to a wide parking lot full of sagging cars. Many of the parking lots in town were empty—not much business at the local restaurants while civilization was collapsing around you—but the hospital had been packed and overflowing eleven years ago, and their cars remained like ghostly reminders.

I need to take a blood sample
, Kira told herself, forcing herself back to the task at hand.
I need blood and tissue. I went all the way to a war zone to cut the hand off an enemy soldier, I can take a biopsy from the thing lying tied up fifteen feet away
.

She walked back to the sample vials she’d brought with her—blood samples she’d taken from Marcus. Relics of her first attempt at studying RM, before Manhattan and the Partial and everything else. Before Marcus didn’t come. She still had all the notes she’d taken from the blood, full descriptions of platelet counts and white cell counts and glucose and electrolytes and calcium levels and the vast, terrifying mass of viral structures. Every human being was a carrier, poisoning their own children long after the Partials had disappeared. Were the Partials carriers as well? Was this whole catastrophe useless?

She breathed deeply, wiped her face, and turned to look at the Partial—not a faceless thing in a black visor but a man, a boy barely older than she was, tied to a table and stripped almost to nothing. With his shirt off, she could see his body was toned and muscular, not bulging like a bodybuilder but simply fit: strong and lean and capable. Genetic perfection, as Isolde had put it. Kira tried to summon her zeal from the fight in Manhattan, tried to imagine herself cutting off its hand for study. It had brown eyes, like hers. It looked back calmly.

Dr. Skousen had said that they’d washed the Partial, but Kira looked again and saw there were flecks of something around its face and head. She stepped closer, trying to get a better look, then closer again, peering at its face. It was flecks of blood, dried and black, ringing its mouth and eye and dotting its ear on the other side. She reached out to brush away its hair, paused with her hand halfway, and dropped it back to her side.

“I take it they beat you?”

The Partial said nothing, simply watching her through dark eyes. She could feel its anger like the heat from an iron stove, radiating out in waves. She steeled herself and reached out again, and this time the Partial turned on her suddenly, jerking its head and straining at its bonds. Kira jumped back involuntarily, her heart racing, and reached for her gun. She didn’t pull it out, merely felt it, solid and reassuring in her hand. She forced herself to calm down and stepped forward again, standing straight. After a moment she pulled out the gun anyway and held it up for the Partial to see.

“I was part of the group that captured you,” she said. “I’m not trying to threaten you, I’m just telling you how serious I am. We’ve got five days together, and if you want to spend them fighting, I am more than ready.”

It watched her, eyes cold and hard, as if studying her for any break it could use, any hole in her defenses it could slip through—

—and yet behind the cold eyes it was terrified. She could tell, just by looking at it, that it had never been this scared in its life. She took a step back, looking at the situation from its perspective: It was alone, a prisoner of war, beaten and chained and strapped down to an operating table, and now she was holding a gun on it.

Kira looked down at the gun in her hand and put it away. “In case you couldn’t tell, everyone here is pretty much terrified of you. We don’t know what you can do or how you work. For all we know, you’re a biological weapon with legs.”

She paused, waiting, but he stayed silent. She prompted him with her hand, but still nothing. She sighed. She wasn’t sure what she was waiting for from him.

He watched her closely, and she felt uncomfortably like a bug in a jar. Who was really studying who?

“Fine, then,” she said. “If you don’t want to talk, that’s fine. I don’t think I would in your situation either, frankly, but then again I don’t know if I could help myself. Humans are very social creatures; we like to communicate in order to feel—”