Partials (43 page)

“Do you have a plan to get back out?” asked Kira.

“Honestly, I’m kind of shocked we made it this far,” said Marcus. “Are you okay?” He noticed her bare shoulders and frowned. “Are you…”

“Yes,” said Kira, looking around for her clothes. There was nothing in the room but a tray of syringes and some debris from the broken spider. She pointed at one of the doctors. “You, give me your lab coat.”

“They’re getting closer!” shouted Jayden.

The doctor didn’t move, but a grim gesture of Xochi’s pistol encouraged her to take off her surgical smock. Dr. Morgan shouted with rage.

“Damn it, Samm, stop them!”

Samm’s hand came down on Marcus’s shotgun, discarded on the table where he’d left it to help with Kira’s ties. Kira swore, diving away from Samm off the far side of the table, but the Partial soldier simply stood there, staring straight ahead.

“Samm,” Dr. Morgan began, and suddenly Samm brought up the shotgun and fired—not at Kira or her friends, but at Morgan. She dodged, shockingly nimble, and the wall screen behind her exploded in sparks and shards of glass. Xochi began firing as well, but Morgan was too quick; round after round tore into the wall screens while the doctors screamed and cowered on the floor. Dr. Morgan danced ahead of the bullets, all too quickly working her way toward the door. Samm leaped across the room, fired and missed again, and the third time the shotgun clicked on an empty chamber. He spun it around, gripping the barrel with a roar, and drove it into the back of Morgan’s skull as she made a final dive for the hallway. The doctor slumped to the floor, and Xochi pumped a round into her thigh.

“And stay down!”

“She was too strong,” said Samm, and grabbed the ammo belt from Marcus’s shoulder. “I’m sorry that it took me so long. How many are outside?” He slid a shell into the chamber, then another and another, quickly and methodically.

Kira rose to a crouch, watching Samm in wonder.
Is he really on our side?
Jayden turned warily, sizing him up, then looked back at the open door.

“Just four,” he said, “around that near corner. The main body of their force is tied up with the rival Partials.”

Samm checked his gun quickly, making sure the safety was off. “Cover me.”

Jayden fired out with his rifle, clearing the hall, and Samm dove past him in a blur, rolling to the far wall and then dashing down the corridor toward the enemy position. Jayden stopped firing, and the Partials peeked out just in time for Samm to come barreling into them, shotgun blasting.

Kira took the doctor’s offered surgical smock and pulled it on, wrapping the back all the way closed with a pair of ties around her waist. For good measure she took the doctor’s mask and hairnet as well, and finally her shoes.

Samm came back, his face and shoulder bleeding. “Hallway’s clear. I think we can make it to the jeeps, but we have to go now.”

“I’m getting really sick of trusting this guy,” said Xochi.

“He’s coming with us,” said Kira.
There’s something I have to talk about, that I can’t talk about with anyone else
. She gave him a long glance, wondering what it meant now—if she was really a Partial, if she was really an agent, if she was really everything they thought she was.

“We have to go,” urged Marcus.

“One thing first,” said Kira. She scooped up the last syringe from the tray in the corner: a sample of the Partial pheromone.

The cure for RM.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

S
amm drove, the only one of the five who really knew how. Marcus examined Kira’s wounds in the backseat: It seemed the Partials had done little more than give her a few shots, draw some blood, and prep her for a surgery that never happened. The burn on her leg was almost fully healed, but the sight of her own shin, nearly scarless, seemed suddenly strange and alien; a sign not that the regen box had worked better than normal, but that her own body was healing well beyond the human standard. Just like Samm.

She looked at him, saw him looking back at her in the rearview mirror. Their eyes locked for a moment, silent. The others didn’t know, and Kira and Samm had said nothing.

Am I really a Partial? How could I not have known? Partials heal quickly, but this is the first major injury I’ve ever really had, so I’ve never had a chance to see my own healing abilities in action. I’ve never really been sick, either—does that mean anything?
She racked her brain for anything else she knew about them.
Partials are sterile, and that’s never come up. Partials are fast and strong and agile, but is that only the soldiers?
She remembered Dr. Morgan, screaming frantically about secret Partial designs and some kind of inter-faction war.
If I’m not a soldier, what am I? How many groups are out there, and what do they want? And why would any of them plant a Partial agent in a group of human refugees?

“You’ve been quiet,” said Marcus.

“I’m sorry,” said Kira. “I’ve had a lot to think about.”

This time it was Marcus who glanced at Samm, studying him silently, thinking. He looked back at Kira, then down at her leg. “Looks like you’re doing great. You’re sure they didn’t do … anything else?”

Kira felt caught; she felt claustrophobic in the back of the car, even with the windows down and the wind gusting wildly. “What do you mean?”

Xochi raised an eyebrow. “We find you buck naked, strapped down to a table. What do you think he means?”

“Nothing like that,” said Kira quickly.

“You said they knocked you out, how do you know they didn’t do something while you were—”

“Nothing happened,” said Samm. His jaw was hard, his eyes cold. “I never left her side for a second. They didn’t do anything to hurt her.”

“But they were going to,” said Marcus, “and you didn’t really do a whole hell of a lot about it until we showed up.”

“I did everything I could!”

“Stop arguing,” said Kira. “It’s the link—he couldn’t disobey them.”

“That’s not making me any happier about having him here,” said Jayden. He was in the other front seat, watching the passing ruins with the shotgun ready for action.

“I helped you this time,” said Samm. “I helped you get away. What more do you want from me?”

“Everybody just calm down,” said Kira. “I’m pretty sure we have more important things to worry about right now.”

“More important than whether we can trust the enemy soldier taking us who knows where?” asked Xochi.

“I’m driving east,” said Samm, “away from the controlled zones.”

“And into the uncontrolled zones,” said Marcus. “That sounds safe.”

“Our people aren’t like yours,” said Samm. “We don’t have the Voice and bandits and all these little outlying … nonconformists. If there’s no faction of the army out here, there’s nothing out here. Everything west of here is full of people trying to find us, so we’re heading east until we think we’ve lost them. Then we’ll… I don’t know what we’ll do then. Hide.”

“We’ll find a boat and go back to East Meadow,” said Kira. Marcus looked at her in surprise.

“Are you serious? After what we did when we left?” He shook his head. “They’ll kill us.”

“Not when they find out what I’m bringing back.” Kira glanced down at the syringe in her lap, and Marcus’s eyes followed. He frowned at it, then looked back at her in shock.

“You don’t mean…”

Kira nodded. “I’m ninety-nine percent certain.”

“What?” asked Xochi.

“The cure for RM,” said Kira. Jayden turned around, eyes wide, and even Samm lost control of the car for just a split second, swerving and regaining direction. Kira held up the syringe. “I found a particle in Samm’s breath that bore a resemblance to RM, though it wasn’t a virus. It turns out it’s one of their pheromones that they don’t have any use for—all it does, literally its only function, is to bond with RM. The RM particles I saw in the newborn’s blood is really an inert form of RM created through interaction with the pheromone.”

Marcus furrowed his brow. “So the infants die because we don’t have any Partials around?”

“Exactly. But if we can get this into their system early enough—right at birth, maybe even before birth through some kind of intrauterine injection—they’ll resist the virus and we can save them.” She gripped the syringe tightly. “Madison was close to delivering when we left East Meadow, and Arwen might already be dying. But we can save her.”

Marcus nodded, and Kira could see the wheels turning in his head, parsing all the data to the best of his ability. After a moment he looked up. “This might be true.” He nodded again. “Based on what I’ve seen of your work, which is admittedly little, it does sound … possible. But are you willing to stake your life on it?”

“Are you willing to stake our species against it?”

Marcus looked down. Xochi caught Kira’s eye but said nothing.

The trees broke, and the road rose up to a bridge across a narrow inlet from the sound. “There are boats down there,” said Jayden, but Samm shook his head.

“We need to keep going. They’re going to send someone after us as soon as they finish with the other group of Partials; for all I know both groups are going to come after us. We need to put as much distance behind us as possible before they get organized enough to follow.”

“What we need is to get out of this car,” said Jayden. “Make some distance first, yes, but then we hide this thing and never look back. It’s too loud—they’ll be able to hear us halfway across the continent.”

“She’ll still be able to find us,” said Samm.

Marcus looked up. “Who?”

“Heron. Special Ops. No matter what we do to cover our tracks, she’ll find us.”

The car made good time—not too speedy, because the roads were buckled and treacherous, but still faster than they could have gone on foot. Across the bridge they joined a major highway, taking the time to glance back for pursuers, but there was nothing they could see. Several miles later the road turned sharply north, and they left it to drive south through a rural, wooded suburb. The roads were narrow and twisty, curving back on themselves in unpredictable patterns, and soon they gave up on the car and left it on a side street nearly buried in overhanging foliage. Kira stopped to scour the closest house for clothing, but the area was thick with humidity, and everything inside was rotted and unusable.

Samm could smell the ocean, but none of the humans could; Kira swore she could smell it too, a salty bite on the edge of her perception. She didn’t tell anyone. They cut a path south and west, winding carefully through already sparse neighborhoods now almost fully reclaimed by nature. Saplings grew up not just around but in the houses, kudzu and mold and moisture breaking them down until their roofs were caved in and their walls were sagging with untended life. Flowers sprouted from porches; weeds sprang up from furniture half glimpsed through shattered windows. When they reached the harbor, Kira breathed deeply, as if freed from an airless cavern.

“We’re on the wrong side,” said Marcus, pointing. “Houses over here, wharf over there.”

“Looks like bigger houses to the south,” said Jayden. “One of them’s bound to have a private dock.” They skirted the waterfront, half searching for a boat and half watching behind for an ambush. Kira had seen Heron in action; she’d lost a fight to her in seconds. She didn’t want to have to fight her again.

“There,” said Xochi, and they broke into a run. A long white dock stretched out from the shore, beaten by the elements until it was practically driftwood, and at the end bobbed a wide motorboat with a tattered canvas awning. Jayden leaped in, looking in the dashboard compartments for a set of keys, while Samm searched the dock itself for extra tanks of gas. Neither found anything, and they cursed and ran to the next house along the shore. This one had a small sailboat, which none of them could pilot, but it had a small motor, and the keys were in the ignition. The engine turned over on the seventh try. Samm found gas cans, but they were empty.

“You’ll need extra just in case,” he said. “We’re much farther east than our last crossing, and the sound here is two or three times as wide.”

He took the cans toward the house, ready to take gas from the cars, but Kira stopped him. “What do you mean,
you’ll
need gas?” she asked. “You’re not coming?”

Samm shook his head, looking out at the water, up at the house, anywhere but at Kira. “Your people will kill me.”

“The Partials will kill you, too,” said Kira. “You’re a traitor now. At least with us you’ll have … something, friends, I don’t know. We can help each other.”

“You’re a wanted terrorist,” he said. “Lot of good we’d do each other.” He began moving toward the house.

She watched him, then looked back at the others. “I’m going to help him with the gas.” Marcus glowered at the dock but said nothing.

Samm and Kira trudged up the short hill to the house, which turned out to be some kind of beachhead resort. The parking lot was filled with cars, one of them even sporting a skeleton, and Samm got to work crawling underneath and puncturing their gas tanks with his knife, letting the degraded, sludgy fuel drip down into the cans. Kira wanted to talk to him, to ask him about what she was—just to say it aloud,
I am a Partial
, but she didn’t dare. She paced uselessly, hemming and hawing, starting and stopping, so afraid to talk that she could barely even think. Finally she gave up, and she let the old habits take over, eyeing the old cars for anything she could salvage. Most of the cars were packed with luggage—people fleeing the virus? Fleeing the country?—and the tightly sealed suitcases revealed clothes in much better condition than the rags she’d found before. She found clean underwear, rugged jeans that mostly fit, and an armful of shirts and socks that she brought with her just in case.

“So,” said Samm. He was sitting on the ground, the gas cans scattered around him.

Kira paused, holding the clothes. “So.”

Kira looked at him, at his face, at his eyes. She’d felt so close to him, and now… Was it the link? Maybe she really could do it, in some smaller way, and that’s what she’d been feeling. She shook her head, lost in conflicting emotions. Had their connection been nothing but some kind of Partial biological quirk, or had it been real?