“Well, yeah,” said Kira, nodding, “of course. But I’m not in no-man’s-land anymore — I’m in a military base. That’s got to be, like, the safest place on the island.”
Mkele watched her calmly. “Have you ever seen a Partial, Miss Walker?”
“In person? No. I was only five during the war, and no one’s seen any since then.”
“How can you be sure?”
Kira frowned. “What do you mean? No one’s seen one in years, they’re … well, I’m alive, for one thing, so apparently none of them have seen me either.”
“Let us assume,” said Mr. Mkele, “just for the moment, that whatever the Partials are planning is larger in scope than the murder of one teenage girl.”
“You don’t have to be insulting about it.”
“Again, I apologize.”
“So is that really what this is about?” Kira asked, with more than a hint of exasperation. “Partials? Really? Don’t we have more important threats to deal with?”
“If a Partial were planning something big,” he said, ignoring her question, “some insidious attack on us or our resources or any other aspect of our lives, the most effective way would be to infiltrate us directly. They look exactly like us; they could walk among us without any fear of discovery. You’re a medic; you should know this as well as anyone.”
Kira frowned. “The Partials are gone, Mr. Mkele — they backed us up onto this island and then disappeared. No one has seen one anywhere — not here, not on the border, not anywhere.”
Mkele flashed a small, mocking smile. “The innocent complacence of a plague baby. You say you were five when the Partials rebelled; the world you see is the only world you’ve ever known. How much of the rebellion do you remember, Ms. Walker? How much of the old world? Do you know what even one Partial is capable of, much less an entire battalion?”
“We have bigger problems than the Partials,” said Kira again, trying not to lose her cool. It felt like the same old attitude she got at the hospital — from every adult, really, a stubborn, brutal insistance on dealing with yesterday’s problems instead of today’s. “The Partials destroyed the world, I know, but that was eleven years ago, and then they disappeared, and meanwhile RM is continuing to kill our children, tensions are rising because of the Hope Act, the Voice are out there raiding farms and stealing supplies, and I don’t think—”
“The Voice,” said Mkele, “look even more human than the Partials.”
“What’s your point?”
“This is the point, Ms. Walker. The Partials may indeed be gone, but they hardly need stage an outright attack on the island if tensions between the settlement and the Voice progress any further. RM is performing a more insidious function than even the Partials devised: our inability to produce healthy children and the measures we’ve subsequently taken to try to deal with it—”
“You mean the Hope Act.”
“Among other things, yes … they are tearing the island apart. I have a hard time believing that what happened to your team yesterday didn’t have something to do with this, and unless there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary, I’m going to assume that it was part of a plan to destabilize the human civilization and thus to hasten our extinction.”
“You are an incredibly paranoid person.”
Mkele tilted his head to the side. “I’ve been charged, as I said, with the safety of the human race. It’s my job to be paranoid.”
Kira’s patience was wearing thin.
“Fine, then — let’s get this over with. What do you want to know?”
“Tell me about the veterinary clinic.”
“What?”
“The clinic you and Marcus Valencio were assigned to salvage — tell me what you saw there.”
“I thought you wanted to know about the bomb.”
“I have already spoken to other witnesses who were present both before and during the explosion, and their information trumps yours in that area. The clinic, on the other hand, you experienced directly. Tell me about it.”
“It was a clinic,” said Kira, searching for something interesting to say. “It was the same as every clinic we salvage — old, smelly, falling apart. There was a pack of dogs living in it, and, um … what else do you want to know?”
“Did you see any dogs when you were there?”
“No, why? Is that important?”
“I have no idea,” said Mkele, “though it does seem odd that a pack of wild dogs would fail to defend their home against a group of invaders.”
“I guess so,” said Kira. “Maybe the salvage group that went through a few days earlier scared them all off.”
“It’s possible.”
“Um, what else…,” said Kira. “We started on the meds, and then the bomb went off after just a few minutes, so we didn’t get a chance to test the X-ray machine.”
“So you saw the front exterior, the foyer, and the medicine storage.”
Kira nodded. “Yeah.”
“Did you see anything out of the ordinary?”
“Nothing comes to mind. Except…” She paused, remembering the marks in the dust. “Now that you mention it, the pill bottles had all been messed with before we got there.”
“Messed with?”
“Moved,” said Kira, “like someone had gone through them or something. Like they were looking for something.”
“How recently?”
“Not very long. There were smudges and tracks and marks all through the dust, both up in the cupboard and down on the counter.”
“It could have been, as you suggested with the dogs, the grunt salvage crew that went through before you.”
“I guess,” said Kira, “but I’ve never seen any of the grunt crews go through the meds like that.”
Mr. Mkele pursed his lips, thinking. “Do any of the drugs you found there have recreational uses?”
“You think one of the grunts was trying to get high?”
“It is one of many possibilities, yes.”
Kira closed her eyes, racking her brain to remember the names of the medicines. “I’m not sure — it’s all kind of rote at this point, you know? You know which ones last and which ones don’t, and you toss them in the piles without really thinking about it. But these vet clinics always have painkillers, stuff like Rimadyl, and a big enough dose of almost any painkiller will get you high. It might also kill you, though, unless you use the military nanoparticle stuff that obviously wouldn’t be in a veterinary clinic. Aside from that, though…” She paused, thinking. If she were a Voice, living in the wilderness and getting into fights with the Defense Grid, she’d have bigger concerns than recreational painkillers. She started to see where Mkele was coming from, and thought about the clinic as a military target. “Clinics like that have a lot of meds a group of rebels might find really useful,” she said. “Antibiotics, antiparasitics, flea powders and shampoos — there’s any number of things a band of forest raiders could make good use of.”
“Interesting,” said Mkele. “You’ll have to forgive my ignorance on the subject of veterinary clinics, but do you think there’s any way to find a record of their inventory? It might be possible to determine, within a small margin of error, exactly what might have been present, missing, or tampered with.”
“I doubt they have anything on paper,” said Kira, “but the clinic had a computer system. You could hook it up to a generator and hope they stored their inventory on the hard drive. If they stored it on an exterior network, you’re probably out of luck.” They used computers in the hospital, thanks to the solar panels, but the old world had used them for everything, all linked together in a worldwide network Kira couldn’t even fathom. It had collapsed along with the power grid, and everything on it had been lost forever.
“We’ll do that,” said Mkele, nodding. “Is there anything else you think might help us?”
