“My brother’s dying!” screamed Madison. “Let them help him!”
Kira struggled to sit up, careless of her own wound, and carefully examined Jayden’s back; he’d been hit by multiple rounds. A moment later Marcus joined her, carefully removing Jayden’s backpack to see how much damage had been done. Kira didn’t see if Haru had let him move, or if he’d just come anyway.
The soldiers from the hall were in the doorway now, guns trained on them.
“She…,” said Jayden, though his voice was almost too quiet to hear, “has … the cure.”
“What did he say?” asked Madison.
“He said idiot Voice lies,” said Haru. “Don’t even listen to him.”
“He said I have the cure,” said Kira. She turned painfully, dragging her bloody leg. Was it just her imagination, or was the wound already starting to heal? She clutched the cure in her hand and held it up. “It’s right here.”
“You’re not getting anywhere near my daughter,” said Haru.
“I’m going to save her,” she said again, grabbing the wall and pulling herself, inch by agonizing inch, to her feet. She rested her weight on her good leg and tried to ignore the other, willing herself to stand through sheer mental force. “I have sacrificed everything I had, and everything I am, to save your daughter. Are you really going to be the one to stop me?”
“You’re a Partial agent,” said Haru. “You’re in league with them — God only knows what you’re trying to do to my daughter, but I will die before I let you do it.”
“I’m fine with that plan,” said Xochi.
“He’s dead,” announced Marcus, falling back from Jayden’s body. He looked up at Haru, gasping for breath and reeling from exhaustion. “He died for this, Haru. Don’t do this.”
Madison wailed in despair, and the child in the crib wailed with her, an incoherent cry against a world that brought nothing but pain. Kira stared at Haru fiercely. “You have to let me try.”
“Try?” asked Haru. “You mean you’re not even sure?”
Kira paled, thinking of all the ways she could be wrong, all the ways the injection could fail.
“I don’t have any data for you,” she said. “I don’t have any facts, my studies were all lost when the lab exploded, and the cure itself has never been tested. I don’t have anything that can prove to you that what I’m doing is right. But Madison,” she said, looking her adopted sister straight in the eye, “if there is one thing you know about me, one thing at all, it’s that I always try to do the right thing. And no matter how painful this has been, no matter how much hell we’ve been through and how many of us have died, this is the right thing to do.”
“Shut up!” screamed Haru, shoving the pistol forward. Kira ignored him, keeping her eyes on Madison’s.
“Madison,” she said again, “do you trust me?”
Slowly, tearfully, Madison nodded. Kira held up the cure, still wrapped on the belt, and Madison stepped forward.
“Madison, stay back,” growled Haru. “I am not letting you give our baby to that traitor.”
“Then shoot me,” said Madison fiercely. She planted herself squarely between Haru and the incubator; his hand quivered, faltered, and dropped to his side.
Kira collapsed to the floor, and Marcus ran to the cupboards on the wall to find a needle for the syringe. The soldiers in the doorway didn’t move, watching the whole thing with their guns pointed at the floor. Xochi helped Kira to her feet and took her to the incubator; Kira could feel the heat from the tiny body’s fever like a pit of dying coals. Marcus handed her a needle and swabbed the child’s arm with disinfectant.
Kira prepped the injection, hesitating over the red, screaming body. Right now the Blob virus was roaring through her like a pack of wild dogs, ripping and tearing, eating her from the inside. This syringe, this pheromone, would save her.
Kira leaned forward. “Hold her still.”
Madison held the baby close, Marcus and Xochi stopped moving, even Haru fell silent in the background. The entire world seemed focused on this single moment. Arwen’s thin, hoarse crying filled the room like smoke, the final, desperate sparking of an engine about to fail. Kira breathed, steadied her arm, and gave the baby the shot.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
“We have discovered a cure for RM.”
Cheers rang through the coliseum, applause and shouts and cries of joy. It wasn’t news — something so world-shaking could hardly be contained, and the news of Arwen’s recovery had spread like wildfire — but still the people cheered. Senator Hobb smiled at the crowd, his giant holographic head mimicking the expression in the air above him. Kira sat neatly on the stand behind him, crying again and wondering, as she had a thousand times in the last week, if it was all really true. If it was all really happening. She caught Marcus’s smile from the audience, and smiled back. It was real.
Hobb raised his hands to call for order, smiling indulgently as the crowd continued to celebrate; they wanted their chance to cheer, and he seemed happy to give it to them. Kira marveled at the man’s capacity for change — not two weeks ago he was helping to turn the island into a totalitarian state, and it had collapsed catastrophically around him, and yet here he stood, smiling and clapping. Kessler had managed to maintain her seat as well, and Kira stole a glance at her on the other end of the stand. The other members of the subcommittee had not been so lucky.
Hobb quieted the crowd again, and this time they followed, growing hushed as Hobb prepared to speak. “We have found a cure for RM,” he said again. “We found it, of all places, in the Partials — in a chemical they excrete in their breath, which reacts with the virus to nullify it completely. We learned this thanks to a series of tests performed by our local hero, Ms. Kira Walker, under the supervision of the Senate.” Scattered applause filled the hall, and Hobb waited patiently for it to die down. “These tests were performed, as the rumor mill has already told you, on a live Partial subject obtained as part of a secret mission by members of the Defense Grid. We admit, shamefaced but honest, that we were not as open with you about these tests as perhaps we should have been. We feared a violent riot, and in the end that is exactly what we got. Rest assured that in the future the Senate will be much more transparent about our goals, our plans, and our methods for carrying them out.”
Kira blew out a long, nervous breath, watching the crowd for signs of unrest. Everything Hobb was saying was, technically, true, but the way he said it felt so … greasy, at least to Kira. He admitted just enough to seem repentant, while taking credit for much more of the process than the Senate had truly been a part of. The crowd wasn’t cheering him, but they weren’t booing him either.
“Arwen Sato is doing fine,” said Hobb, “more fit and healthy than we had dared to hope. We didn’t want to risk taking her from the hospital, where she is under the strictest care of both the doctors and her mother, but we did record this holo so that you could all see her.”
Hobb sat down, and the holo-image in the center of the coliseum changed from a close-up of his head to a scene from the maternity center; Kira, even knowing exactly what the movie was, couldn’t stop herself from crying as Saladin, the youngest human alive, stood beside the red-faced baby in the hospital crib to whom he was passing the honor. The sight of the child sent a gasp of awe through the audience, and Kira let herself get drawn up in it: the first human baby in eleven years that wasn’t sick, wasn’t screaming, wasn’t dying or dead.
The holo stopped and Hobb stood up, his eyes brimming with tears. “Arwen Sato is the future,” he said, echoing Kira’s thoughts. “That child, that precious little girl, is the first of a new generation — the inheritors of a world that will, we hope, be better than the one we have known for the last eleven years. Our scientists are working around the clock to replicate the compounds that saved Arwen’s life, so that we can begin applying them to
