Fragments (14 page)

“And go where?” asked Marcus. “Grant said the Partials are everywhere.”

“Go south,” said Haru. “We’ll try to catch up, but get the civilians moving now. You’ll
need all the time you can get.”

“Going ‘south’ won’t be enough,” said Marcus. “This isn’t a raid, it’s an invasion.
Even if we make it to East Meadow, they’ll be right on our heels.”

“You want to stay here then?” asked Haru. “I don’t know if they’re here to capture
us or kill us, but neither one sounds pleasant.”

“I know,” said Marcus, “I know.” He glanced toward the farmhouse, trying to work up
his courage to run. Haru rose, turned, and fired again into the trees.

“This is what I get for volunteering,” said Marcus, and ran for the farm.

A
fa slept on a king-size bed on the seventh floor of the building, in what looked like
it used to be a dressing room. Kira tucked him in like a child before searching for
a room of her own, eventually finding a vast, dark studio with stadium seats on one
side and half of a stylized living room on the other. A talk show set, she guessed,
though the logo on the back wall didn’t spark any memories. She knew that talk shows
existed, because someone had watched one in her house—her nanny, maybe—but she doubted
she could recognize even that one’s logo. Afa had filled the chairs with boxes, each
carefully labeled, but the talk show couch was empty, and she checked it for spiders
before laying down her bedroll and going to sleep. She dreamed of Marcus, and then
of Samm, and wondered if she’d ever see either of them again.

There was no natural light in the building, thanks to Afa’s logical insistence on
blackout curtains, and even less light in the studio, but Kira had been fending for
herself for too long, and jerked awake at the same time as always. She found her way
to a window and peeked out, seeing the same familiar sight that greet her every morning:
ruined buildings laced with green, and tinged with blue light as the dark sky turned
pale in the sunrise.

It didn’t sound like Afa was awake yet, and Kira took the opportunity to skim through
some of his files, starting with the boxes in the studio. They were numbered 138 through
427, one box per chair with more ringing the walls, back-to-back around the entire
perimeter of the room. She started with the nearest box, number 221, and pulled out
the page on top, a folded printout with a faded military letterhead.

“‘To whom it may concern,’” she read. “‘My name is Master Sergeant Corey Church, and
I was part of the Seventeenth Armored Cavalry in the Second Nihon Invasion.’” The
First Nihon Invasion was one of the early major defeats for the NADI forces in the
Isolation War, the world’s failed attempt to take back Japan from a suddenly hostile
China. She remembered learning about it in school in East Meadow, but didn’t remember
much of the details. The Second Nihon Invasion was the one that worked—the one where
they went back with two hundred thousand Partial soldiers and drove the Isolationists
back to the mainland, kicking off the long campaign that finally ended the war. It
was the reason the rest of the Partials had been built. Kira read more of the letter,
some kind of battlefield report, recounting the man’s experience fighting alongside
the Partials; he referred to them as “new weapons” and said that they were “well trained
and precise.” Kira had grown up knowing Partials only as bogeymen, the monsters that
had destroyed the world, and even having met Samm—even knowing that she herself was
some kind of a Partial—it was strange to see them referred to so positively. And yet
so clinically, as if they were a new kind of Jeep from the quartermaster. The master
sergeant mentioned that they seemed “insular,” that they kept to themselves and ignored
the human soldiers, but that was hardly a negative—a bit ominous, in light of their
eventual rebellion, but not immediately threatening or scary.

“This is how it started,” she said out loud, setting it down and picking up another
paper from the same box. It was another combat report, this time from a Sergeant Major
Seamus Ogden. He talked about the Partials the same way, not as monsters but as tools.
She read another document, then another, and the attitude was the same in each one—it
wasn’t that they thought the Partials were harmless, it was that they barely thought
of them at all. They were weapons, like bullets in a clip, to be spent and used and
forgotten.

Kira moved to another box, 302, pulling out a newspaper clipping from something called
the
Los Angeles Times
:
PARTIAL RIGHTS GROUPS PROTEST ON CAPITOL STEPS
. Beneath it in the box was a similar clipping from the
Seattle Times
, and beneath that another from the
Chicago Sun
. The dates in this box were all from late in 2064, just a few months before the Partial
War. Kira would have just turned five. Obviously the Partials would have been all
over the news at the time, but she didn’t remember her father ever talking about them;
now that she knew he’d been working for ParaGen, that made more sense. If he’d worked
with them, or even helped create them, he would have had a different attitude from
the rest of the world—probably a pretty unpopular attitude.
At least I hope he had a different attitude,
she thought.
Why else would he raise one as his daughter?
She vaguely remembered her nanny as well, and a housekeeper, but they never talked
about Partials either. Had her father asked them not to?

Had they even known what Kira really was?

Kira turned to the earliest numbered boxes in the room, finding number 138 and pulling
out the top piece of paper. It was another newspaper clipping, this time from the
financial section of something called the
Wall Street Journal
, describing in vague terms the awarding of a massive military contract: In March
of 2051 the US government contracted ParaGen, a budding biotechnology company, to
produce an army of “biosynthetic soldiers.” The focus of the article was entirely
on the cost of the project, the ramifications for stockholders, and the impact this
would have on the rest of the biotech industry. There was no mention of civil rights,
of diseases, of any of the massive issues that had come to define the world right
before the Break. Only money. She searched through the rest of the box and found more
of the same: a transcript from a news interview with ParaGen’s chief financial officer;
an internal ParaGen memo about the company’s new windfall contract; a magazine called
Forbes
with the ParaGen logo on the cover and the crisp silhouette of an armed Partial soldier
in the background. Kira flipped through the pages of the magazine, finding article
after article about money, about technologies being used to make more money, about
all the ways the Isolation War, despite being “a terrible tragedy,” would help heal
the American economy. Money, money, money.

Money had a place in East Meadow society, but that place was a small one. Almost everything
they needed was free: If you wanted a can of food, a pair of pants, a book, a house,
whatever it was, all it cost you was the effort to go out and find one. Money was
used almost exclusively for fresh food, things like wheat from the farms and fish
from the coastal villages—things you had to work for—and even then, most of those
commodities were traded in kind, through a barter system in the marketplace. Nandita
and Xochi had built a lucrative business trading herbs for fresh food, and Kira had
always eaten well because of it. Money, such as it was, was usually just work credits:
government vouchers for her time spent in the hospital, her reward for performing
a vital service that didn’t actually produce a tradable commodity. It was enough to
keep her in fresh fish and vegetables for lunch, but not much else. It was a minor,
almost insignificant aspect of her life. The documents in box 138 described a world
in which money was everything—not just the means of sustaining life but the purpose
of living it. She tried to imagine being happy about the war with the Partials or
the Voice, rejoicing because it would somehow bring her extra work credits, but the
idea was so foreign she laughed out loud. If that was how the old world worked—if
that was all they really cared about—maybe it was better that it had fallen apart.
Maybe it was inevitable.

“You’re real,” said Afa.

Kira spun around, startled, hiding the magazine behind her guiltily. Would he be mad
at her for looking at his records?

“Did you say I’m . . .” She paused. “Real?”

“I thought you were a dream,” said Afa, shuffling into the room. He stopped at one
of the boxes and sifted through it idly, almost as if he were petting an animal. “I
haven’t talked to anyone in so long—and then last night there was a person in my house,
and I thought that I’d dreamed it, but you’re still here.” He nodded. “You’re real.”

“I’m real,” she assured him, placing the magazine back into box 138. “I’ve been admiring
your collection.”

“It has everything—almost everything. It even has video, but not in this room. I have
the whole story.”

Kira stepped toward him, wondering how long he’d stay talkative this time. “The story
of the Partial War,” she said, “and the Break.”

“That’s just part of it,” said Afa, picking up two stapled sheaves of paper, examining
his own pen marks in the upper corners, and then reordering them in the box. “This
is the story of the end of the world, the rise and fall of human civilization, the
creation of the Partials and the death of everything else.”

“And you’ve read all of it?”

Afa nodded again, his shoulders slack as he moved from box to box. “All of it. I’m
the only human being on the planet.”

“I guess that makes sense, then,” said Kira. She stopped by a box—number 341—and pulled
out some kind of government report; a court order, by the look of it, with a round
seal stamped in the corner. She wanted answers, but she didn’t want to pressure him
again, to freak him out by saying or mentioning anything he didn’t want to remember.
I’ll keep it generic for now.
“How did you find it all?”

“I used to work in the clouds,” he said, then immediately corrected himself: “In the
cloud. I lived my whole life up there, I could go anywhere and find anything.” He
nodded at a box of dusty clippings. “I was like a bird.”

I saw your name at ParaGen,
she wanted to say again.
I know you have information about the Trust: about RM, the expiration date, what I
am.
She’d been looking for these answers for so long, and now they were right here, split
into boxes and trapped in a failing brain.
Is it just from the loneliness? Maybe his brain works fine, he just hasn’t spoken
to someone in so long he’s forgotten how to interact with people.
She wanted to sit him down and ask him a million questions, but she’d waited this
long; she could wait a little longer.
Win him over, don’t freak him out, get him on your side.

She read a bit of the court order in her hand, something about the words “Partial
Nation” being declared a sign of terrorist sympathy. Students couldn’t write or say
them on school campuses, and anyone caught using them in graffiti was subject to prosecution
as a threat to national security. She waved it lightly, grabbing his attention. “You’ve
got a lot about the last days before the war,” she said. “You’ve really worked hard
to put this together. Do you have anything . . .” She paused, almost too cautious
to ask. She wanted to know about the Trust, which Samm had implied was part of the
Partial leadership, but she worried that if she just blurted it out, like she had
with ParaGen, he might shut down again. “Do you have anything about the Partials themselves?
The way they’re organized?”

“They’re an army,” said Afa. “They’re organized like an army.” He was on the floor
now, looking at two of his boxes and the papers in them; every third or fourth one
he frowned at and moved to the other box.

“Yes,” said Kira, “but I mean, the leaders of the army—the generals. Do you know anything
about where they are now?”

“This one died,” said Afa, holding up a paper without looking away from his boxes.
Kira walked to him and took it carefully; it was an article from the
New York Times
, like some of the others she’d seen, but printed out from a website instead of clipped
from a real paper. The headline read
NORTH ATLANTIC FLEET SUNK IN LOWER BAY
.

Kira looked up, surprised. “They sank a Partial fleet?”

“The Partials didn’t have a navy,” said Afa, still sorting his papers. “That was a
human fleet, sunk by the Partial Air Force, just off the shore of Brooklyn. It was
the biggest military strike in the war, in retaliation for the death of General Craig.
I have one about him, too.” He held up another page, and Kira snatched it away, poring
over the information: “‘General Scott Craig, leader of the Partial uprising and former
mouthpiece of the Partial rights movement, was assassinated last night in a daring
strike by human commandos—’ We killed him?”

“It was a war.”

“And then they destroyed an entire fleet.” She counted up the ships in the article,
a massive group sailing north to attack the concentration of Partial forces in New
York State. The ships had been undermanned, their crews already ravaged by the plague.
“Twenty ships, and they just . . . killed everyone on them.”

“It was a war,” said Afa again, taking the papers from her hands and dropping them
back in the box.

“But it didn’t have to be,” said Kira, following him across the room. “The Partials
didn’t want to kill everyone—you said yourself that they weren’t evil. They wanted
equality, they wanted to live normal lives, and they could have done that without
killing all those thousands of people on those ships.”

“They killed billions of people,” said Afa.

“Do you know that for sure?” Kira demanded. “You have all these documents and articles
and everything else—do you have something about RM? About where it came from?”