“Keep it down,” said Kira. She glanced out the window again, peering through a small gap in the shades. “If anyone hears you — if anyone even finds out that we told you — there’s going to be some serious hell to pay.”
“Mkele probably wants to try to interrogate it,” said Jayden. He and Haru started their sentences in hard labor the next morning, but the Senate had given them the night to gather their things. Haru was at home with Madison, but Jayden had come to Nandita’s place. Nandita was gone, off on another herb-collecting trip; Kira shuddered to think of the explaining she’d have to do when Nandita got back. She could take insults from people she hated, but it was the disappointment from someone she loved that always broke her down. She started tearing up just thinking about it and forced herself to think of something else.
“I think you may be forgetting a key fact here,” said Isolde. “Apparently Partials are smoking hot. If you’d have told me that before you left, I would have gone to Manhattan with you.”
“Come on, Isolde, that’s gross.” Kira grimaced.
“You saw it, same as I did,” said Isolde. “That thing is an Adonis. Do something for me: When you get to spend your five days alone with that genetic perfection, try to find time for a close physical examination. Just for me.”
“It’s not even human,” said Jayden.
“In what sense?” asked Isolde, continuing to bait him. “It’s got all the right parts in all the right places. If this is what Para-Gen was going for when they started making artificial people, now I’m even sadder that it went nuts and tried to kill us.”
“The questions in this hearing were nothing,” said Jayden, finally deciding to ignore her. “All slow-pitch softball. Tonight they’re going to put it in a subbasement somewhere, torture it, and learn everything they can. A night with some Grid soldiers in a soundproof room will take the fight right out of it.”
“Now you’re really turning me on,” said Isolde.
“Shut up,” said Jayden, and Xochi laughed.
“But why do they want me in charge?” asked Kira. “There are researchers with more experience than me, there are more skilled lab techs, there are—”
“I know,” said Xochi. “Anybody in that hospital would be better for this than you. No offense.”
“None taken,” said Kira. “That’s what I’ve been saying all night.”
“Right,” said Xochi. “So think about it: Why put your most junior student in charge of something that important unless you want to guarantee that it’ll go wrong? Or to use her as a scapegoat when the whole thing blows up in their faces?”
“I’m sure there’s a better reason than that,” Kira said, though at heart she wasn’t sure at all. She looked out the window again, scanning the dark street. Nothing.
“I don’t think he’s coming,” said Xochi.
Kira turned back quickly. “What? No, I was just … looking at the trees. At the open street that isn’t teeming with panthers and poison ivy.”
“The world across the line was pretty different,” said Jayden, nodding. “I don’t know how to describe it.”
“It’s because there weren’t any people,” said Isolde. “Manhattan’s gone more primal than Long Island because there’s never anyone scaring away the animals or stomping down the plants.”
Jayden laughed thinly. “There are forty thousand people on Long Island,” he said. “There used to be millions. Sometimes I think this island doesn’t even know we’re here.”
“It’s not just Manhattan,” said Kira, “it’s everywhere — we saw a panther in Brooklyn. We saw a baby antelope — a little antelope fawn, probably two months old at the most. Someday they’ll wonder where all those weird, two-legged animals went, and then they’ll take a drink from a river, and look up at the clouds, and then they’ll forget they were ever even thinking about us at all. Life will go on. There’s no point even leaving a record behind, because there will never be anyone, ever again, who can read it.”
“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
