Kira felt caught; she felt claustrophobic in the back of the car, even with the windows down and the wind gusting wildly. “What do you mean?”
Xochi raised an eyebrow. “We find you buck naked, strapped down to a table. What do you think he means?”
“Nothing like that,” said Kira quickly.
“You said they knocked you out, how do you know they didn’t do something while you were—”
“Nothing happened,” said Samm. His jaw was hard, his eyes cold. “I never left her side for a second. They didn’t do anything to hurt her.”
“But they were going to,” said Marcus, “and you didn’t really do a whole hell of a lot about it until we showed up.”
“I did everything I could!”
“Stop arguing,” said Kira. “It’s the link — he couldn’t disobey them.”
“That’s not making me any happier about having him here,” said Jayden. He was in the other front seat, watching the passing ruins with the shotgun ready for action.
“I helped you this time,” said Samm. “I helped you get away. What more do you want from me?”
“Everybody just calm down,” said Kira. “I’m pretty sure we have more important things to worry about right now.”
“More important than whether we can trust the enemy soldier taking us who knows where?” asked Xochi.
“I’m driving east,” said Samm, “away from the controlled zones.”
“And into the uncontrolled zones,” said Marcus. “That sounds safe.”
“Our people aren’t like yours,” said Samm. “We don’t have the Voice and bandits and all these little outlying … nonconformists. If there’s no faction of the army out here, there’s nothing out here. Everything west of here is full of people trying to find us, so we’re heading east until we think we’ve lost them. Then we’ll… I don’t know what we’ll do then. Hide.”
“We’ll find a boat and go back to East Meadow,” said Kira. Marcus looked at her in surprise.
“Are you serious? After what we did when we left?” He shook his head. “They’ll kill us.”
“Not when they find out what I’m bringing back.” Kira glanced down at the syringe in her lap, and Marcus’s eyes followed. He frowned at it, then looked back at her in shock.
“You don’t mean…”
Kira nodded. “I’m ninety-nine percent certain.”
“What?” asked Xochi.
“The cure for RM,” said Kira. Jayden turned around, eyes wide, and even Samm lost control of the car for just a split second, swerving and regaining direction. Kira held up the syringe. “I found a particle in Samm’s breath that bore a resemblance to RM, though it wasn’t a virus. It turns out it’s one of their pheromones that they don’t have any use for — all it does, literally its only function, is to bond with RM. The RM particles I saw in the newborn’s blood is really an inert form of RM created through interaction with the pheromone.”
Marcus furrowed his brow. “So the infants die because we don’t have any Partials around?”
“Exactly. But if we can get this into their system early enough — right at birth, maybe even before birth through some kind of intrauterine injection — they’ll resist the virus and we can save them.” She gripped the syringe tightly. “Madison was close to delivering when we left East Meadow, and Arwen might already be dying. But we can save her.”
Marcus nodded, and Kira could see the wheels turning in his head, parsing all the data to the best of his ability. After a moment he looked up. “This might be true.” He nodded again. “Based on what I’ve seen of your work, which is admittedly little, it does sound … possible. But are you willing to stake your life on it?”
“Are you willing to stake our species against it?”
Marcus looked down. Xochi caught Kira’s eye but said nothing.
The trees broke, and the road rose up to a bridge across a narrow inlet from the sound. “There are boats down there,” said Jayden, but Samm shook his head.
“We need to keep going. They’re going to send someone after us as soon as they finish with the other group of Partials; for all I know both groups are going to come after us. We need to put as much distance behind us as possible before they get organized enough to follow.”
“What we need is to get out of this car,” said Jayden. “Make some distance first, yes, but then we hide this thing and never look back. It’s too loud — they’ll be able to hear us halfway across the continent.”
“She’ll still be able to find us,” said Samm.
Marcus looked up. “Who?”
“Heron. Special Ops. No matter what we do to cover our tracks, she’ll find us.”
The car made good time — not too speedy, because the roads were buckled and treacherous, but still faster than they could have gone on foot. Across the bridge they joined a major highway, taking the time to glance back for pursuers, but there was nothing they could see. Several miles later the road turned sharply north, and they left it to drive south through a rural, wooded suburb. The roads were narrow and twisty, curving back on themselves in unpredictable patterns, and soon they gave up on the car and left it on a side street nearly buried in overhanging foliage. Kira stopped to scour the closest house for clothing, but the area was thick with humidity, and everything inside was rotted and unusable.
Samm could smell the ocean, but none of the humans could; Kira swore she could smell it too, a salty bite on the edge of her perception. She didn’t tell anyone. They cut a path south and west, winding carefully through already sparse neighborhoods now almost fully reclaimed by nature. Saplings grew up not just around but in the houses, kudzu and mold and moisture breaking them down until their roofs were caved in and their walls were sagging with untended life. Flowers sprouted from porches; weeds sprang up from furniture half glimpsed through shattered windows. When they reached the harbor, Kira breathed deeply, as if freed from an airless cavern.
“We’re on the wrong side,” said Marcus, pointing. “Houses over here, wharf over there.”
“Looks like bigger houses to the south,” said Jayden. “One of them’s bound to have a private dock.” They skirted the waterfront, half searching for a boat and half watching behind for an ambush. Kira had seen Heron in action; she’d lost a fight to her in seconds. She didn’t want to have to fight her again.
“There,” said Xochi, and they broke into a run. A long white dock stretched out from the shore, beaten by the elements until it was practically driftwood, and at the end bobbed a wide motorboat with a tattered canvas awning. Jayden leaped in, looking in the dashboard compartments for a set of keys, while Samm searched the dock itself for extra tanks of gas. Neither found anything, and they cursed and ran to the next house along the shore. This one had a small sailboat, which none of them could pilot, but it had a small motor, and the keys were in the ignition. The engine turned over on the seventh try. Samm found gas cans, but they were empty.
“You’ll need extra just in case,” he said. “We’re much farther east than our last crossing, and the sound here is two or three times as wide.”
He took the cans toward the house, ready to take gas from the cars, but Kira stopped him. “What do you mean,
Samm shook his head, looking out at the water, up at the house, anywhere but at Kira. “Your people will kill me.”
“The Partials will kill you, too,” said Kira. “You’re a traitor now. At least with us you’ll have … something, friends, I don’t know. We can help each other.”
“You’re a wanted terrorist,” he said. “Lot of good we’d do each other.” He began moving toward the house.
She watched him, then looked back at the others. “I’m going to help him with the gas.” Marcus glowered at the dock but said nothing.
Samm and Kira trudged up the short hill to the house, which turned out to be some kind of beachhead resort. The parking lot was filled with cars, one of them even sporting a skeleton, and Samm got to work crawling underneath and puncturing their gas tanks with his knife, letting the degraded, sludgy fuel drip down into the cans. Kira wanted to talk to him, to ask him about what she was — just to say it aloud,
