Fragments (23 page)

“To teach her?”

“That’s all she’s talked about,” said Xochi, “the whole time I’ve known her: She needed
to teach her girls. I don’t know what—I’m the one she taught herbology.”

“If Nandita knew Kira before,” said Marcus, “why would she pretend like she didn’t?”

“You said the picture was taken in front of a ParaGen building, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, if she was involved with ParaGen, it’s not all that surprising that she’d keep
it a secret,” said Xochi. “Some ParaGen employees got lynched in the first days after
the Break, before the Senate got organized and started imposing order. If I’d worked
for the company that made the Partials, even as a janitor, I wouldn’t have told anyone.”

“But what does that have to do with Kira?” Marcus asked.

“I’m working on that part,” said Xochi, pursing her lips. “How about this: Nobody
who landed on this island had ever met any of the others. The population of the US
dropped from four hundred fifty million to forty thousand. That’s like one out of
every twelve hundred people—the chances that any of them knew each other were ridiculous,
and in the few cases where two survivors did know each other, like Jayden and Madison,
Dr. Skousen and his doctors interviewed the living daylights out of them, trying to
find anything that might be a correlating factor of survival. If Nandita waltzed in
claiming she and Kira went way back, they would never have rested until they found
every possible piece of information. And if one of those pieces said that Nandita
worked at ParaGen, she was probably very reasonably afraid of being held prisoner
and interrogated, or worse—maybe killed, if the people were angry enough.”

“‘Every possible piece of information,’” said Marcus, half to himself. “I almost wish
they’d done it.”

“Killed Nandita?”

“Interrogated her,” said Marcus. He put his finger on the low wooden coffee table,
tracing patterns in the grain of the wood. “Every possible piece of information about
the two people the Partials are tearing our island apart to find.” He nodded. “Yeah,
I kind of wish they’d done it.”

“You need to tell the Senate about Heron,” said Xochi.

“I’ve told Mkele,” said Marcus. “I’m not stupid. Mkele’s looking for Nandita, but
I’m not too anxious to tell the Senate that I was in contact with the enemy.” He moved
his finger slowly around the whorls of a knot. “I guess we’re still afraid of being
lynched,” he said. “Afraid of being caught. Do you know what the others told me?”

Xochi narrowed her eyes. “What others?”

“Your other sisters,” said Marcus, “Madison and Isolde. They got evacuated in the
first group, to protect the children, so I talked to them quickly before they left.
They said Kira wasn’t the first girl Nandita adopted.”

Xochi cocked her head. “Really? I mean, I never assumed she was until we started talking
about that photo, but now it seems kind of weird that she wasn’t.”

“By the time she had Kira, she already had the other one,” said Marcus. “Ariel.”

Xochi nodded, as if this piece of information was especially profound. “Ariel moved
out a couple of years ago,” she said, “before I moved in. I didn’t know her well,
but she never got along with any of the other girls, and she hated Nandita like you
wouldn’t believe.”

Marcus counted them off on his fingers. “Ariel in Philadelphia, Kira in a refugee
camp, Isolde here on the island, and Madison a full year later when Jayden got chicken
pox—he stayed in quarantine, Madison stayed here, and the situation worked so well
she never moved out. Madison said Nandita fought like a lion to get her moved here
instead of somewhere else.”

“Why?”

“Anybody’s guess,” said Marcus. “But Madison does remember the first thing Nandita
said when she brought her to the house: ‘Now you can teach me.’”

Xochi frowned. “What does that mean?”

“I don’t know,” said Marcus, standing up, “but there’s only one person left to ask.”
He walked to the door and drew back the bolt. “You head to the rendezvous point. I’m
going to go find Ariel.”

K
ira and Afa were waiting on the George Washington Bridge with a pile of equipment
when Samm and Heron finally appeared with the horses, not right at noon but soon thereafter.
Afa, of course, had his backpack, stuffed to the seams with originals and copies of
all his most important documents. If the worst happened, and his record stash was
raided or destroyed, he had enough in his backpack to . . . Kira wasn’t sure. To write
a really good history book about the end of the world. What they needed now were the
answers that would make it all add up: What was the Failsafe? Why did the Trust end
the world? And how could they use that knowledge to save what was left?

“This is too much,” said Heron, reining up her horse. It nickered, breathing heavily.
“We’ll have to leave most of it.”

“I’ve planned for that,” said Kira, gesturing at some of the boxes. “Afa insisted
we bring some of his larger archives, but I told him we might not have room. Remove
all that stuff and it’s really not too bad.”

“We need another horse,” said Afa, though he was shying away from the four in front
of him. “We need a packhorse, like a . . . shipping horse. A baggage carrier for all
my boxes.”

“We’ll have to leave the boxes behind,” said Samm, swinging down from his saddle.
He picked through the other supplies, nodding his head in approval. “Food, water,
ammunition—what’s this?”

“That’s a radio,” said Kira. “I want to make sure we have some way of communicating,
if it comes to it.”

“It’s too small,” said Heron. “We won’t be able to talk to anyone with a thing like
that.”

“Afa’s set up repeaters all over this place,” said Kira. “That’s what the building
was in Asharoken, and the one by where we met Samm.”

“
Captured
Samm,” said Heron, the barest hint of a smile in the corner of her lips.

“Wait,” said Samm. “All those rigged buildings, all the explosions, those were radio
repeaters?”

“I set them up,” said Afa, reorganizing the piles of equipment. “I didn’t want anyone
to find them.”

Samm was stone-faced. “You killed people over radio repeaters?”

“And record depots,” said Kira. “Most of them were also temporary safe houses.”

“That doesn’t make it any better,” said Samm.

“You knew he was a paranoid lunatic yesterday,” said Heron. “How does this change
anything?”

“Because it’s wrong,” said Samm.

“And it wasn’t wrong yesterday?”

“I’m sorry,” said Kira. “I’ve lost friends to those bombs as well.”

“Not
those
bombs,
his
bombs.”

“And I’m not happy about it either,” Kira insisted. “He was overzealous and he killed
some innocent people, but you know what? Which side hasn’t in this idiotic war?”

“He’s not a side,” said Samm, “he’s a wild card.”

“A wild card that we need,” said Heron. “We agreed to this yesterday, we’re following
through with it today. He’s unarmed—just don’t let him plant a bomb anywhere and you’re
perfectly safe.”

Samm glowered but didn’t object, and he and Kira began loading equipment onto the
horses.

“We’ll need to set up another repeater in the Appalachians,” said Afa, carefully placing
the radio in his own saddlebag. “We don’t have anything set up that can get a reliable
signal over a mountain.”

“Are you going to rig that one to explode as well?” asked Samm.

“How did you know I brought explosives?” he asked, his brow furrowed. “Kira said I
couldn’t bring explosives—”

“You can’t,” said Samm, and searched the pile fiercely, finally pulling a brick of
C4 from a pack full of food. He brandished it at Heron. “See? This is what we’re getting
ourselves into.”

“So check the rest and make sure you have it all,” said Heron, taking the brick and
throwing it over the side of the bridge. They were still over the city, not the water,
and it fell silently through the air before splatting on the pavement below.

Samm searched everything they’d brought, including Afa’s backpack, and when he was
finally satisfied, they mounted up and rode west, across the bridge and into the untamed
mainland beyond: what used to be New Jersey. Kira looked back at the boxes of extra
records, forlorn by the side of the road.

“Boxes of old ParaGen emails,” she said. “That’s going to be a weird surprise for
anyone who finds them.”

“If someone finds them,” said Heron, “then we’ve done a very poor job of slipping
away unnoticed.”

Kira had been riding horses for years, mostly on salvage runs in and out of East Meadow,
so the first days of the trip were easy for her; Heron and Samm proved to be accomplished
riders as well. Afa, to no one’s surprise, was not, which made their progress slow
starting out. He also made strange, disjointed conversation as they rode, talking
here about cats and there about internet firewall subroutines. Kira listened casually,
ignoring most of it, having learned over the last three weeks that all Afa really
wanted to do was say things out loud; he’d been alone too long to expect a response,
and she’d started to suspect that he would talk to himself just as much if there were
no one around to hear him. Samm and Heron scanned the horizon, watching the road ahead
and the buildings on the side for signs of an ambush. It was unlikely out here—as
far as they knew, nobody lived on this side of the city, or indeed anywhere else on
the continent—but it was better to be safe than sorry. The road curved north, then
south, then north again, winding lazily through the dense suburbs of New Jersey. When
night fell they were still in urban terrain, office buildings and stores and apartments
on every side. They slept for the night in an auto parts store, the horses tethered
to tall racks of rubber tires. Heron took the first turn at watch, and Kira couldn’t
help but notice that she was watching her and Afa as much as anything that might be
approaching from the outside.

Kira woke again in the middle of the night, momentarily disoriented, but as her eyes
adjusted and she remembered where she was, she saw Samm was now on watch, perched
on a desk in the corner of the room. Kira sat up, hugging her knees in the cold.

“Hey,” she whispered.

“Hey,” said Samm.

Kira sat, looking at him, not sure what to say or how to say it. “Thanks for coming
back.”

“You told me to.”

“I mean, thanks for coming to find me. At all. You didn’t have to.”

“You told me to do that, too,” said Samm. “We said we’d learn what we could, then
get back together and compare notes.”

“We did,” said Kira, scooting back to rest against the wall. “So. What do you know?”

“I know we’re dying.”

Kira nodded. “The expiration date.”

“You say that,” said Samm, “but do you really appreciate what it means?”

“Partials die after twenty years.”

“The first wave of Partials arrived at the Isolation War twenty-one years ago,” he
said. “They were created the year before that. All our leaders, all our front-line
veterans, are already dead. The closest thing we have to ancestors.” He paused again.
“I was in the last group made, and I turn nineteen in a few months. Heron’s been nineteen
for a while. Do you know how many of us are left?”

“All we ever talk about is ‘a million Partials,’” said Kira. “‘There are a million
Partials right on the other side of the sound.’ I guess that’s not true anymore, is
it?”

“We’ve lost more than half.”

Kira brought her knees in closer to her chest, suddenly colder. The room felt small
and fragile, like a house of sticks ready to crumble in the wind.

Five hundred thousand dead,
she thought.
More than five hundred thousand.
The sheer size of the number, nearly twenty times the entire human population, terrified
her. Her next thought came unbidden:
It won’t be long before we’re even.

Immediately she felt terrible, even for thinking it. She didn’t want anyone to die
anymore, human or Partial; she certainly didn’t want to “get even” with them. She’d
been angry at them before, before she started to understand them, but she’d moved
past that. Hadn’t she? She was one of them, after all. It occurred to her then that
she might have to face an expiration date as well—and moments later she realized that
she was so different from the other Partials, she might not have an expiration date
at all. The first thought terrified her, but the second stunned her with a deep, empty
sadness.
The last of Partial left. The last of my people.

Which side am I on?

She looked at Samm, his back against the wall, one leg hanging off the desk, his rifle
resting calmly next to him. He was a protector, a guardian, watching over them while
they were helpless; if anybody did come to attack them, not only would he see them
first, but they would see him first. He had placed himself in harm’s way to protect
a girl he barely knew and a man he didn’t like or trust. He was a Partial, yet he
was a friend.

That’s the whole problem,
she thought.
We still think there are sides. There can’t be, not anymore.

She felt the sudden urge to crawl up next to him, to help keep watch, to share a bit
of body heat in the bitter nighttime chill. She didn’t. She pulled her blanket to
her chin and spoke.

“We’re going to solve it,” she said. “We’re going to find the Trust, we’re going to
find their records, we’re going to find out not just why they did this but how—how
we can reverse the expiration date, how can we synthesize the cure for RM. Whatever
I’m supposed to be, and what part I’m supposed to play in it. They knew all this,
variously, and once we know it, we can save everyone.”

“That’s why I came back,” said Samm.

“To save the world?”

“I wouldn’t even know where to start,” he said. His face was a mask of shadow. “I
came to help you save it. You’re the only one who can.”