Partials

legs. “You’ve got a few new cuts on here, but they’re not bleeding, obviously, and you should be okay.” She rolled them back down. “None of these wounds has ever gotten infected.” She wondered if Samm’s body produced some kind of natural antiseptic or antibiotic, and made a mental note to check it out later — through some means other than just stabbing him with a dirty knife. “You should be fine,” she said, and walked to the computer.

Kira noticed immediately that the files had been read: her DORD images, her preliminary notes on the pheromones, even her handwritten notes in her notebook. Someone had moved them, sorted them, paged through them. Is Skousen checking my work? she wondered. Is he duplicating it? Some of the files were new; he’d done studies of his own while she was away. She didn’t know if she should be grateful someone was watching, or indignant that they didn’t trust her results. She was nearly too tired to care.

I only have three days left, she told herself. Stop whining and work. She struggled to concentrate on the DORD images, looking for any discrepancy between Samm’s physiology and that of a human, but she kept thinking about what he said yesterday. The sincerity in his voice. What if he was telling the truth — what then? If the Partials had never created the virus in the first place, then who did? The Lurker in his breath, whatever it was, proved that he had some relationship to RM, but that didn’t mean he made it. The Partials were soldiers, not geneticists; they had doctors, but they weren’t necessarily capable of this level of engineering. What if the similarity meant something else entirely?

What if it was a sign of common ancestry? What if RM and the Partials were both created by the same third party?

Kira closed her eyes, trying to remember what she’d learned in school. What was the name of the company? Para-something? It was so hard to remember the details of the old world — names and places and technologies that simply had no meaning in modern life. Food companies were easy, because the ruins were all around her: Starbucks and Panda Garcia and a dozen more like them. She could even remember eating at some of them as a child, before the Break. Genetics companies, on the other hand, were completely outside the realm of her experience. She’d learned the name in her history class, but they hadn’t made a big deal about it. It was the government who’d commissioned the Partials, Para-something was just the contractor.

Para-Genetics, she remembered. They were called ParaGen. Haru had mentioned them the other day. But what could they have to do with RM? Certainly they hadn’t created it — they were human too. It doesn’t make sense.

“Did you have a mother?” asked Samm. The question broke Kira’s train of thought in an instant, and she looked at him quizzically.

“What?”

“Did you have a mother?”

“I … of course I had a mother, everyone has a mother.”

“We don’t.”

Kira frowned. “You know you’re the second person in the last twelve hours to ask me about my mother?”

“I was only curious.”

“It’s okay,” said Kira. “I never really knew my mother. I guess that makes us more alike than we thought.”

“Your father, then,” said Samm.

“Why do you want to know about him? I was five when he died, I can barely remember him.”

“I’ve never had a father either.”

Kira scooted her chair closer, coming around the edge of the desk. “Why are you so curious?” she asked. “You never talk, for two solid days, and now this morning all of a sudden you’re obsessed with families. What’s going on?”

“I’ve been doing some thinking,” he said. “A lot of thinking. You’re aware that we can’t reproduce?”

She nodded warily. “You were built that way. You were … well, you were intended to be weapons, not people. They didn’t want self-replicating weapons.”

“Yes,” he said. “The Partials were never intended to exist outside the infrastructure that created us, but we do, and now all those old design parameters are—” He stopped suddenly, glancing at the cameras. “Listen, do you trust me?”

She hesitated, but not for long. “No.”

“I suppose not. Do you think you ever could?”

“Ever?”

“If we worked together — if we ever offered a truce. Peace. Could you learn to trust us?”

This is where he’d been angling since day one — since she’d asked him what he was doing in Manhattan. He was finally willing to discuss it, but could she trust him? What was he trying to get from her?

“I could trust you if you proved yourselves trustworthy,” said Kira. “I don’t… I don’t know that I distrust you on principle, if that’s what you’re asking. Not anymore. But a lot of people do.”

“And what would it take to earn their trust?”

“Not having destroyed our world eleven years ago,” said Kira. “Short of that… I don’t know. Putting it back together.”

He paused, thinking, and she watched him carefully — the way his eyes twitched, as if examining two different objects in front of him. Every now and then they flicked toward one of the cameras, just a fleeting glance. What is he planning?

She looked him in the eyes. When in doubt, don’t hold back. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because the only hope, for either of us, is to help each other. To work together.”

“You’ve said that before.”

“You’ve asked about our mission. That was it, Kira — we were coming here to try to make peace. To see if we could work together. You need our help to cure RM, but we need you just as much.”

“Why?”

He glanced at the camera again. “I can’t tell you yet.”

“But you have to tell me — isn’t that why you’re here? If you came on a mission of peace, what were you going to say? ‘We need your help, but we can’t say why’?”

“We didn’t know how much you still hated us,” said Samm. “We thought perhaps we could persuade you with an offer to work together. When I was captured and brought here, when I saw what’s going on here … there was no way. But you, Kira, you listen. More than that, you understand what’s at stake. That no price is too high to pay when it means the survival of your species.”

“So just tell me,” she pleaded. “Forget the cameras, forget whoever’s listening on the other side, and tell me what’s going on.”

Samm shook his head. “It’s not just a matter of them not believing me,” he said. “If they find out why I’m here — the instant they know the reason — I’m a dead man.”

It was Kira who glanced at the camera this time, suddenly filled with unease, but Samm shook his head and glanced at his wounds. “It’s okay, they know I have a secret.”

She folded her arms and sat back in her chair. What could be so dangerous he’d be killed just for saying it? Something they didn’t want to hear — or something they did? She racked her brain, searching for a theory that made sense. Was he really a bomb, like they’d initially feared, and Samm thought the Senate would kill him to get rid of him? But what did that have to do with peace?

Peace. It was exactly what she had hoped for when she was talking with Marcus the day before. She wanted to reach out and touch it, to taste it, to know what it felt like not to live in constant fear. They hadn’t known true peace since the Hope Act was established, and the Voice rebelled and the island started its slow spiral into chaos. They hadn’t even known it in the years before that — the desperate rebuilding after the Break, the Break itself and the Partial rebellion, even the Isolation War that sparked the creation of the Partials in the first place. She had lived in a world of discord since the moment she was born, and the world before had been no better. They were on the brink of destruction, and everyone had their own solution, but Kira had been the only one to suggest that they might need the Partials. That they might need to work together.

That is, she’d been the only one until now. Now a Partial was suggesting the same thing.