Partials

“No,” she said slowly, suspicion creeping through her like a spider. “It’s too perfect. It’s like you’re saying exactly what I want to hear.” She shook her head. “I don’t believe you.”

“Why would we want anything else?” asked Samm. “It’s the most basic instinct of life — to outlive yourself. To build another generation that’s going to see tomorrow.”

“But you’ve never even known family,” said Kira. “You didn’t have families, you didn’t grow up, you have no idea what it’s even like. What if creation is just a phantom instinct, held over from some lost shred of DNA?”

Like a flash, Kira remembered a dog — it was giant in her memory, a growling mass of muscle and teeth. It chased her through a park or a garden, something green with grass and flowers, and she was terrified, and the dog was almost on her, and suddenly her father was there. He was not a strong man, he wasn’t big or powerful, but he put himself between her and the dog. He was bitten, and she thought it was very bad. He did it to save her. That’s what fathers did.

“What do you think it says about us that we don’t have any parents?” She looked up and caught Samm’s eye. “I don’t mean us, I don’t mean kids, I mean no fathers at all — a whole society, two whole societies, with no parents at all. What do you think that’s done to us?”

Samm said nothing, but he held her gaze. There was a tear in his eye — the first time she’d ever seen him cry. The scientist in her wanted to study it, to take a sample, to find out how and why and what he was crying. The girl in her simply thought of the Hope Act and wondered if a law like that could ever pass if a voter knew it would be forced upon his own daughter.

Kira looked at the screen, seeing not the image but her memory of Manhattan: of the Partial attack; of Gabe’s body lying slumped in the hall where the Partials had shot him. If they were on a mission of peace, why did they shoot him? She frowned, trying to reconcile that event with Samm’s protestation of innocence. They didn’t even try to talk to us first. It doesn’t make sense.

She racked her brain for more memories, trying to call up anything that would support what she desperately wanted to be true. What was it the Partials said right before we blew up the apartment? She struggled to remember. “Which group is this?” She’d heard it clearly — at least she thought she had. Which group of what? Had they been expecting someone else, maybe a group of bandits or the Voice? Was it pure luck that they’d found Kira instead, the one human who seemed willing to listen?

Or was Samm simply telling her exactly what she wanted to hear?

The doors opened with a sudden buzz, and the decontamination blowers roared to life. Shaylon came through the tunnel, clutching a plastic syringe full of blood, and ran to her in a rush.

“The nurse said to give you this,” he said quickly, holding out the syringe. “She said you’d know what to do with it.”

“You’re not allowed in here,” said Kira.

“She said it was an emergency,” said Shaylon, then stopped and looked at Samm. “So that’s him?”

She took the syringe gingerly; the tube was still warm from the blood inside. “What is it?”

“She said you’d know,” said Shaylon. “It’s from the maternity ward.”

Realization dawned, and Kira’s eyes went wide. “It’s from a newborn! One of the mothers had her baby!” She rushed to the counter, pulling out slides and vials and pipettes in a flurry. “Do you know which one?”

“She said you’d know what to do with it!”

“I do know,” said Kira. “Calm down.” Please, God, don’t let it be Madison. She piped a drop onto a slide as quickly as she dared and dashed to the medicomp. “This is uninfected blood, do you understand? The babies are born healthy and then the virus hits them, and we have only minutes, maybe less, before the virus morphs and attacks.” She punched in the commands and raced back to the counter, preparing another slide. “There’s an airborne virus and a blood-borne virus, and I’m trying to catch them as they transform from one to the other. Turn on the microscope.”

“Which one’s the microscope?”

“This one.” She flew across the room with the slide in hand, opening the viewing chamber and slamming the slide home. She flicked on all the switches, drumming on the scope anxiously while it slowly hummed to life, and when the screen flickered on she started the viewer, telling the computer to search for viruses. A small ping told her it had already found one of the airborne forms, and she called up the image immediately. The tiny virus appeared on the screen, a red highlight in a sea of gray. It was already beginning to change, but it was a still image, trapped partway from one form to the next; the scope was advanced, but nothing could take moving video at this level of magnification. More pings sounded as the medicomp found more viruses. “If we get enough good pictures,” said Kira, “at different stages of the transformation, we can probably reconstruct the entire process.” She told the medicomp to take another image of the same area, to see if the airborne virus had completely converted to its larger form.

The computer popped up a small notice: Partial match.

Shaylon pointed at it, his voice terrified. “The baby’s a Partial?”

“No, it means the object it found only partially matches the records in the database.” Just like the Lurker, she thought. “We’ve got something that’s kind of RM-ish, but isn’t a virus.” She pulled up the image and stared in shock: She didn’t recognize it. “That’s not good.”

“What is it?”

“It’s a new form of the virus,” said Kira, turning it on the screen to get the best possible view. “The airborne Spore is supposed to turn into the blood-borne Blob — they’re the only two variations of RM in our entire database.” She looked desperately for anything she could understand. “This is new.”

She ticked her fingers across the screen, dissecting the image as best she could, pulling it apart to see what made it work. The computer was right — it was a partial match for the Blob, bearing many of the same protein structures in the same basic arrangement, but beyond that it was completely new — and unlike the Lurker, it was definitely viral. Is this because of Samm? Is this new virus a result of the Lurker? Kira tagged the image and told the computer to search its database again, looking for anything that matched it more closely. There were five hits, all in the archive of newborn blood tests: mostly premature babies, plus one stillbirth, all more than eight years ago. It didn’t show up enough to stand out, but it did show up, and years before Samm got here. That means it’s not Samm’s fault. But then where did it come from?

Kira tapped back into the main medicomp imager. If it’s not that common, she thought, then maybe it’s just a mutation. Maybe this is the only instance of it in the sample, and I just happened to pick exactly the wrong spot to start looking. She told the scope to find more of it in the blood samples, and it pinged almost immediately, then pinged again, then again and again and again, even more pings now than when it was searching for the airborne Spore. It’s everywhere. Kira called up image after image, the new virus filling every screen, multiplying like mad. Frantically she called up a new search, looking for the Spore again, but there was nothing. The computer had saved the original images, but the structure itself had disappeared from the blood. Every instance of the Spore had morphed into this one — this Predator — and they were still replicating.

Shaylon spoke slowly, his voice thin and nervous as he looked at Samm. “What is that?”

“I have no idea.” Kira gritted her teeth and dove into the growing pile of reports and scans and images, determined to find what she was looking for: the process of evolution from Spore to Blob, the details that would tell her how the virus functioned — the individual chemical steps behind every process. It was like trying to drink from a waterfall.

Shaylon froze, his finger on his earpiece, then dropped into a crouch. “Get down.”

“Why? What’s going on—”

“Get down!” said Shaylon fiercely, pulling her to the floor behind the metal bulk of the microscope. “There’s someone here, someone sneaking around. They think it might be a jailbreak.”

Kira glanced around the edge of the computer; Samm was watching them with interest. Is someone really coming for you? Her gun was on the counter, tucked safely in its holster, far out of reach from where she was hiding; if somebody came now, she wouldn’t be able to get it in time.

She glanced back to see Shaylon listening intently to his earpiece. “They think it’s outside,” he said softly. “You stay here, I’m going to look out the window.” He rose to a crouch and ran to the far wall, his body low, his rifle at the ready. Kira glanced at Samm, then at the door, then ran to the counter and grabbed the pistol, pulling it with her to the floor. She had cover from the window, but not from the door. Was the second soldier still out there? She