Partials

That was the secret of RM. That was the cure. A tiny little particle inside their greatest enemies.

“When the humans fell, we began to research the question of Partial sterility, to see if we could undo it.” Dr. Morgan seemed oblivious to Kira’s shock — or was interpreting it as uneducated bewilderment. Kira struggled to hide her emotions as the doctor kept talking, suddenly terrified at the prospect of this cold, calculating woman in possession of so powerful a secret. If Dr. Morgan was concerned about Kira’s reaction, she didn’t show it. She walked to the wall, tapped the screen, and called up a series of other files — other faces, other human girls, as pale and wide-eyed as Kira, strapped to the same table and subjected to the same experiments. “We needed a nonsterile control for our experiments, and naturally this led us to the study of humans. It was only after the last girl died that we noticed the link between our pheromone and RM: Somehow the virus is absorbing the pheromone into itself, though how and why we have no idea. Eventually we were caught up in … other concerns, but when the crisis of the expiration date began to surface, we realized we needed to take up the studies again.” She turned back to Kira, idly playing with the empty syringe in her hands. “And here you are.”

Kira nodded, bursting with her secret, trying not to give it away. I need to get out of here. I need to get home.

I can save Madison’s baby. I can save them all.

“Still no change,” said another doctor, monitoring Kira’s vital signs. “If the reaction is occurring, it’s not having any measurable effect.”

“It’s not occurring,” said another doctor in a completely different tone. “And it’s not going to.” Everyone in the room looked toward her, even Kira. The doctor tapped a panel, and it expanded to fill the whole wall, showing lists of acronyms and abbreviations that Kira immediately recognized as a blood test. “She doesn’t have any of the virus in her blood.”

“That’s impossible. Even humans immune to the symptoms carry the virus.”

“You’re right.” The doctor paused. “She has the coding.”

The room went silent. Kira looked at the doctors’ faces, registering their shock. In the space behind her she heard Samm’s voice dripping with confusion. “What?”

“Let me see that,” said Dr. Morgan, stalking across the room to the wall screen. She tapped it furiously, dragging charts across the wall and zooming in and out on a rapid flurry of images. She stopped on a strand of DNA, not a scoped image but a graphical re-creation, and stared at it with enough intensity to burn a hole through the plating. “Who performed the scan?”

“The computer did it on its own,” said the other doctor. “We asked for a full analysis, and it’s part of the package.”

“She’s not on the link,” said Samm. Kira’s heart flipped in her chest, the implications of their words starting to come clear.

“What are you talking about?” she asked. She tried to sound strong, but her voice cracked.

Dr. Morgan turned to face her, ripping off her mask and looming over Kira’s bed like a tower of seething stone. “Who sent you?”

“What?”

Morgan screamed it again. “Who sent you?” Kira didn’t answer, and Dr. Morgan threw the empty syringe across the room, shattering it against the picture of the DNA. “Who’s trying to infiltrate my plans now — Cronus? Prometheus? What are they planning? Or maybe it’s not me they’re after,” she said, turning away with wild eyes. “Maybe they’re planning something else, and now that I’ve stumbled onto it I can use it against them.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Kira protested.

“You were with the humans until Samm brought you here,” said Dr. Morgan, crouching over Kira with her eyes wide and her teeth bared. “Tell me what you were doing there. What was your mission?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“You’re a Partial!” Dr. Morgan shouted. “It’s all right there on the wall! You have no RM in your bloodstream, you have bionanites sweeping your blood clean of our sedatives, you have the damn ParaGen product tags coded into your damn DNA. You are a Partial.” She stopped suddenly, staring down at Kira; on the wall screen behind her Kira saw her own face twisted in shock and confusion. The doctor’s expression changed slowly from anger to fascination, and her voice dropped to a whisper. “But you didn’t know that, did you?”

Kira opened her mouth, but no words came out. A chaos of protests and realizations and questions ran madly through her head, starting and stopping and derailing one another uselessly until her mind was a white noise of abject terror. She heard a loud boom, saw Dr. Morgan shouting at her through a haze of confusion, heard another boom, then Samm’s voice cut through the chaos.

“Explosions. We’re under attack.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Dr. Morgan looked up wildly, screams and gunshots echoing from beyond the closed door. The doctors scrambled; the medical insect reared up, knives and other lethal attachments clicking and rotating and locking into place. Samm rushed to the door, securing it tightly, then stood back.

“They’re here for Kira,” he said.

“Of course they’re here for her,” Dr. Morgan snapped, “but who are they? Which faction?”

“We need to get out of here,” said one of the other doctors.

“We’re not armed,” said Samm, shaking his head. “We’re not prepared for an attack. Our best plan is to stay here and hope the other soldiers repel it.”

“This room doesn’t seal,” said one of the doctors, nodding at the heavy door. “Anyone who passes will link us.”

“They’ll know we’re here,” said Dr. Morgan, “but not her. That could buy us precious time.”

“That’s what doesn’t make sense,” said Samm. “How can she be a Partial if she doesn’t link?”

“Only the military models link,” said Dr. Morgan. “At least, the way we’re used to. It was part of the soldier enhancement package. But ParaGen made other Partials for other purposes.”

Kira was shaking her head, only dimly aware of what anyone was saying. I’m not a Partial. Once again, faced with a problem, her mind seemed to split in two: on one side a scientist, counting all the reasons she could never be a Partial. I age, and they don’t. I don’t link, and they do. I don’t have their strength or reflexes, and I definitely don’t have their miraculous healing. But even there she had to stop herself, suddenly unsure. My leg recovered abnormally quickly from the burn, without any of the expected side effects from the regen box.

She shook her head. More than anything else, I don’t remember being a Partial — I grew up in a human house, I have a human father. I went to school in East Meadow for years. I’ve never been contacted by Partials, approached by Partials, nothing. It makes no sense at all.

And yet even as she analyzed her life, behind it all was the other side of her, the emotional side, the lost child crying in the darkness: Does this mean I never had a mommy?

The sounds of battle were getting closer.

“It’s ridiculous,” said one of the doctors. “Why bury a Partial agent in the human population? One who doesn’t even know what she is? What possible reason could there be?”

“Maybe it was an accident,” said one of the doctors. “Maybe she got lost in the chaos, fell in with the refugees, and ended up on the island without knowing why she was there?”

“Everything had a purpose at ParaGen,” said Dr. Morgan. “Everything. She isn’t an accident.” She looked up. “If we can figure out what she’s supposed to do, we can use her against them.”

The room shook with the sound of a gunshot against the door; doctors yelped and jumped back; Samm and Dr. Morgan stayed as firm as iron.

“They’re here,” one of the doctors said, panicked. “What do we do?”

“Get me down from here,” said Kira, still strapped to a table in what was about to become a battlefield. “Untie me!”

“Get behind the spider,” another doctor hissed, moving to the far corner of the room. The others followed, eyeing the spiky arms warily, slinking around the outside of the room.