“We don’t know,” said the other Partial, “but we’ve heard stories.”
Ariel stared at them in shock, wondering what could be so terrifying as to make the Partials abandon their interrogation, and Nandita abandon her hiding spot. A heartbeat later she decided it didn’t matter what it was—if they were scared of it, she was too. She brought up Isolde’s handgun, a thick semiautomatic, and saw Xochi do the same with Madison’s. They waited, crouching in the ruins, their eyes trained on the door.
And then it came.
Ariel felt it first—not with her body, but somewhere in her mind. It was a presence, simultaneously massive and invisible. She staggered, and saw Isolde do the same. It’s the link, she thought. We’re feeling it on the link. Khan, quiet a moment ago, began screaming, almost as if he could feel it too.
A shadow crossed the doorway, and moments later a massive shape appeared—humanoid, but wildly inhuman. It was dark red or purple, covered with what looked like rough plates of hide armor; Ariel couldn’t tell if they were part of its body or something removable. It was so large it had to stoop to look through the door, and considered them a moment with tiny black eyes. Its voice was deep, though Ariel saw no mouth.
“It’s time to get ready,” said the thing. “Prepare yourselves for snow.”
“Who are you?” Cedric demanded, but the creature ignored the question.
“Tell the others,” it said, and straightened to leave. Cedric fired a single shot from his rifle, hitting the thing’s leg. Ariel couldn’t tell if it did any damage. The creature stooped back down in the doorway, its pace measured and deliberate, and Ariel saw some kind of flaps flare open on its shoulders, like giant nostrils. The two Partials dropped unconscious, and Ariel felt a moment of wooziness, like she was about to pass out. She grabbed Xochi for stability, struggling to keep her eyes open, and noted with numb interest that Isolde and Nandita seemed just as unstable. The creature watched them for a moment, as if waiting to see whether they’d fall, then spoke again. “Don’t follow me,” it said. “I already know. You have to tell the others.” It paused a moment, and Ariel got the sudden and unmistakable impression that the thing was surprised. Its surprise washed over her like a thick, viscous wave, and it was all she could do not to yelp in reflected terror.
“Nandita,” said the creature. Ariel didn’t know where its surprise ended and her own began.
“Who are you?” Nandita demanded.
“It’s almost here,” said the creature. “I’m fixing it, and it’s almost done.”
“What are you fixing?” demanded Nandita. “Who are you?”
“I’m me,” said the creature. “The world will be fixed. There will be snow again.”
It turned and walked away.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Samm stood in the center of the hospital cafeteria, watching the Partials react to their latest bit of news. All nine were awake now, gathered here in wheelchairs and hospital beds, most of them still too weak to walk and some of them far worse. Number Eight, a soldier named Gorman, was still on oxygen, his lungs too atrophied to function completely on their own. None of them were officers, but they’d served together before the Break, and they all looked to Gorman as their leader.
“Twelve years,” said Gorman. His face was gaunt, his eyes watery and sagging. He was physically eighteen, like every Partial infantryman, but he was so sickly he looked decades older. “That’s . . .” He paused, lost for words. “Twelve years.”
“Almost thirteen,” said Samm. “I don’t know exactly when you were sedated, but it’s 2078 now.” He glanced at Heron, silent in her corner, and then at the door—it didn’t lock, but Calix had promised to keep everyone out so they could have some privacy. So far she’d done her job well, and the meeting had remained Partials-only.
“The rebellion started in 2065,” said a soldier in a wheelchair. “We might be a month or two off, but that’s close enough to thirteen to make no difference either way.” Samm had learned his name was Dwain.
“The last thing I remember was coming here,” said Gorman. He gestured feebly at the complex in general. “It was when RM was in full swing, when the brass finally decided the humans weren’t coming back from it. We’d been assigned to search the ParaGen compound, to see if there was something we could do about the plague, and then . . . well. Here I am.”
“You don’t remember who sedated you?” asked Samm.
“There was no ‘who,’” said a soldier named Ritter. “I was in full gear when it happened—I don’t remember exactly, but it must have been on a patrol. I think it was . . .” He flashed a burst of frustration across the link. “I don’t remember. In one of the lab buildings, maybe this one, for all I know. It was like a chemical attack.”
The other Partials linked their agreement, and Samm nodded. “The same man who imprisoned you had one other, a soldier named Williams, who he modified to produce a targeted Partial sedative in his breath. We . . . have no way to change him back.”
Everyone shifted uncomfortably.
“The world you woke up in is not the world you left,” Samm continued. “I’ve already told you about the Break, and RM, and the Preserve. What happened to you was done out of a fear of extinction, and while that doesn’t make it excusable, it at least makes it understandable. Outside of the Preserve, the world is empty. The only other settlements on the continent—and as far as we can tell, the entire world—are back east: the humans have gathered on Long Island, in a town called East Meadow, where there’s approximately thirty-five thousand of them.”
The room filled with surprised link data, followed almost immediately by a crashing wave of confusion as the full implications of the Break finally hit home. Dwain was the first to speak.
“Only thirty-five thousand humans? As in, anywhere?”
“That’s the entire world population of the species,” said Samm. “There may be small pockets here and there, but within the next hundred years, at the most, they’ll be extinct.”
“So where are the Partials?” asked Gorman. “We were immune to RM, and there’s no way a group of thirty-five thousand could subdue all million of us in the army.”
Samm felt his chest constrict, and he hesitated before speaking, as if there was some way he could save them from the news he was about to give. “The Partials are just north of them,” he said, “in our old headquarters in White Plains. All”—he paused—“two hundred thousand of them.”
“Two hundred thousand?” asked Ritter. “You’re joking.”
“I am not.”
“What happened to the rest of us?” demanded Gorman. “Did the humans attack? We heard rumors of a naval assault, but then we came here and . . .” His voice broke, and the swirl of link data through the room turned bitter with sadness. “They did it, didn’t they? The Last Fleet broke through and slaughtered our army.”
“The Last Fleet was stopped,” said Samm. “The humans didn’t kill anyone.”
“At least not directly,” said Heron.
Gorman shot her a look, then turned back to Samm. His voice was weak, still wheezing on the respirator, but his link data practically sparked with indignation. “Then what happened?”
“About three years ago the first generation started dying,” said Samm. “The first wave of Partials they built for the war, all the veterans who were first on the shores in the Isolation War, just . . . died. Healthy one day and then rotting the next, like a piece of fruit left out in the sun. We discovered that every single one of us was built with an expiration date. On or around our twentieth birthday, every Partial dies.” Samm paused a moment, giving them a moment to absorb it. “The next batch goes in one month; the final batch—my batch—has about eight. Depending on when you came out of the vats, you have between four and thirty-two weeks to live.”
The room was silent, each Partial sitting quietly, thinking. Adding. Even Heron was silent, watching Samm with deep, dark eyes. Link data crackled through the air in a disjointed blend of confus
ion and despair.
“You say it kills everyone?” asked Gorman.
Samm nodded. “It’s not a disease, it’s built into our DNA. It’s unstoppable, incurable, and irreversible.”
“Twenty years?”
“Yes.”
“And you say this is 2078?” asked Gorman.
Samm frowned, confused by the string of questions. He had expected some disbelief, but Gorman’s linked confusion was growing less heartbroken every second. “October. Why?”
“Soldier,” said Gorman, “we’re Third Division. Out of the vats in 2057.” He opened his eyes wide, as if even he could barely believe what he was about to say. “Five months ago we all turned twenty-one.”
Samm stared at him. “That’s impossible.”
“Obviously not.”
“No one has ever lived through expiration,” said Samm, “we’ve tried everything—”
“How do we know this expiration date is even real?” asked Ritter.
“I’m not making this up, if that’s what you’re implying,” said Samm.
“If he’s lying about this, he could be lying about everything else,” said Dwain.
“I’m not lying,” said Samm. “It is 2078, and the world is dying, and somehow you’ve been saved from that and we need to figure out how—”
In a blur of motion Heron stepped out from the wall, pulled a combat knife from a sheath on her belt, and grabbed Ritter by the shoulder. Before Samm could even blink, Ritter was down on the floor, his chair clattering away across the tile, Heron’s knee on his chest and her knife pressed down against the skin of his throat. “Tell me the truth,” she said.
Samm jumped to his feet. “Heron, what are you doing?” He was joined by a chorus of cries from the others, most of them too weak even to stand up. Gorman struggled against the breathing tubes around his neck, trying to rise, but the effort was too much and he sagged back into bed. Outrage coursed across the link in waves.
“How old are you?” asked Heron. She pressed the knife closer against his throat. “Don’t make me show you how serious I am.”
“He can barely breathe,” shouted Dwain. “How’s he supposed to say anything with you crushing his rib cage?”
“Then somebody answer for him,” said Heron, “before I put him out of his misery and start looking for a new hostage.”
“We’re twenty-one,” said Gorman, coughing out the words between deep, thirsty breaths from the respirator. “Everything we’ve said is true. We’re twenty-one years old.”
Heron stood up, dropping her knife back into her sheath almost as quickly as she’d drawn it. She offered Ritter a hand up, but he batted it away with a scowl and lay gasping on the floor.
She looked at Samm. “Something here is keeping them alive.”
Samm raised an eyebrow. “Something in the life support?”
“Is it really going to be that simple?” asked Heron.
“How do you know it isn’t the coma?” asked a Partial named Aaron near the wall.
Samm glanced over at the soldier. He considered the idea. “It could have been, but I think it’s unlikely. If slowing a person’s metabolism postponed expiration, we’d have seen more variation in the dates.”
“Not the coma itself,” said Aaron, “I mean the coma’s cause. The sedative. What if the humans who did this to us built in a way to keep us going?”
Heron still hadn’t taken her eyes off Samm. “Is Williams the cure?”
“That would be ironic,” said Samm.
“That would be useless,” said Gorman. “You’ve seen what that thing did to us. Even if it gives us thirteen new years, is that really a solution? We’ll still die after twenty, plus a massive stretch of physical and mental torture in the middle of it.”
“Different usage could have different effects,” said Heron. “Use it in small doses and it’s just a really good sleep aid that helps keep you alive longer.”
“He’s not a sleep aid,” said Dwain, “he’s a member of our squad, and you can’t use him like this.”
“That can’t be it anyway,” said Samm. “Dr. Morgan took Vale specifically to look for a cure for expiration. If he already had one, he would have said something.”
“Saying something would have forced him to reveal what he’d done to these ten,” said Heron. “Morgan would have flayed him alive, and half the humans in the Preserve.”
“I have half a mind to do the same,” said Gorman.
“They’ve done nothing to you,” Samm snapped.
Gorman waved his hands in a feeble gesture that included the respirator, the gurney, and the entire room full of sickly, crippled Partials. “You call this nothing?”
“I call it Dr. Vale’s work,” said Samm, “not theirs.”
“We’re not just talking about the coma,” said Gorman. “What about everything else? We started a war to get away from human oppression—a war that you’re telling us literally ended the world—and now, thirteen years, later we wake up to what: more oppression. Worse oppression. Our entire species is dying, and you come in here like somebody’s pet Partial trying to tell us how bad the humans have it. Do you have any spine, soldier? Do you have any self-respect at all?”
Samm said nothing. He didn’t even have to look at them to feel their disgust, their anger, their pity filling the air like a poison cloud. He’d tried to be their friend, their guide to the new world they’d woken into, but all they saw him as was a traitor. He opened his mouth to protest, to tell them that he wasn’t just a human tool, to explain everything that had happened and all his reasons, but it was . . . It was too much. He looked at Gorman, but shouted to the hall.
“Calix!”
He waited, wondering if she’d wandered away, praying that she hadn’t locked the door. It felt like a lifetime, but it was barely a second before the door opened. Calix stood in the doorway, balancing on her good leg.
“You need anything?”
He kept her in his peripheral vision, his eyes on Gorman. Listen closely, he thought, hoping that the soldiers were paying close attention. “Have the hunters reported back yet?”
She blinked, a tic Samm had come to recognize in her as confusion. It wasn’t the question she’d expected, but she answered it. “Phan bagged a deer; he and Frank are bringing it back. Should be here soon.”
“And the harvest?”
She blinked again. Her voice was more hesitant this time, probing him for answers. “Everything’s picked, they’re still . . . canning the fruits and beans and stuff, is . . . everything okay?”
“Everything’s great,” said Samm, watching Gorman closely. “How about the beehives? We getting enough honey?”
If she was still confused by his questioning, she kept it to herself this time. “Yields aren’t as high as last year, but we’re doing okay,” she said. She paused a moment, then added, “Certainly enough to feed ten extra mouths.”
“Great.” Samm phrased his next sentence carefully—not a request, but not a command. “I know I told you to keep these guys’ diets light and bland for the first little bit, but they’ve been through a lot, and I think they deserve a little something extra. That honey candy Laura makes is amazing. Let’s get them some.”
Calix grinned; she’d helped Laura make the most recent batches and loved showing them off. “Lemon or mint?”
Samm looked at the Partials. “Lemon or mint?”
Dwain shook his head in disbelief. “You’re bribing us with candy?”
“We’ll take mint,” said Gorman. Calix nodded and closed the door, and Gorman scowled at Dwain. “That wasn’t a bribe, it was a demonstration.” He shot a hard glance at Samm. “He’s showing us they’re equals.”
“We’re working together,” said Samm. “Partners, friends, whatever you want to call it.”
“What do you want to call it?” asked Heron. Samm gave her a quick glance but didn’t answer.
“But why?” asked Gorman. “After everything that’s happened, after everything you’v
e told us about the humans and the world and all the million things wrong with it . . . Why?”
Samm was still looking at Heron when he answered. “If you want to survive in this world, you need to stop asking why people work together, and just start working together.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Kira crouched in the shade, surveying the destruction before her. She guessed the ashes were at least a month old, maybe more. Animals—maybe foxes, probably cats, and by the looks of it at least one wild pig—had already ravaged the site, dragging clothes and backpacks through the dirt, scattering the remnants of old, weathered equipment. Picking clean the bones.
Kira picked up a scrap of an old armored vest and turned it over in her hands before dropping it with a thump back into the dust. Dr. Morgan’s records of the smaller factions were accurate, but apparently out of date; she had sent a patrol out in this direction, but there was no report of this battle. The corpses might be Morgan’s soldiers, rival soldiers, or a mix of both. Kira wondered if there were newer, more complete records hidden in a drive somewhere, encrypted and secret, or if Morgan had simply stopped bothering to complete them. They were both equally possible, but Kira’s gut told her the latter was more likely. Morgan was obsessed, pursuing the cure for expiration with fanatical zeal. Everything else was being left by the wayside, including the people Morgan was trying to save. This forgotten battleground might very well be the last attack she’d ordered. Kira prayed that it was.
A small breeze lifted the ashes from an old grenade blast. Kira sat on a fallen log, staying under the trees and keeping her back to the water, where attack was less likely, and pulled out her map. She was in a thick beech forest on the shores of the North Stamford reservoir—about ten or twelve miles from Morgan’s headquarters in Greenwich—where Morgan’s scouts had marked the location of a possible recon camp for a faction of Partials called the Ivies. Obviously the recon camp was gone, but what about the rest of the Ivies? Kira hadn’t been able to find clear data on each faction’s beliefs or alignments, but the file on speculation listed the Ivies as “strongly opposed to medical experimentation.” That marked them as potential allies for Kira, and their suspected territory was relatively close.