Fragments (25 page)

That night he paced the floor of his makeshift hideout, thinking about the message.
That was what this whole invasion was about, from the beginning; they wanted Kira,
and they’d do anything to get her. Why was she so important? Why did they need her
so badly?

Why hadn’t Kira contacted him?

He had no solar panels for his radio, as those had all been commandeered by the Senate
and the Grid in the earliest days after the Break, but he had a hand crank, and he
worked it furiously to keep the radio active. His days began to blur together, walking
all day in search of Ariel, and cranking all night in the hope that Kira would contact
him. When he reached Islip he found an unassuming home to hide in, and connected the
radio to an exercise bike; as he pedaled he listened to the hiss of radio static buzzing
softly through the house. In his crazier moments he thought about going to Manhattan
himself to find her, imagining all sorts of horrible scenarios: She’d been captured
by Partials, or eaten by lions, or simply trapped by a collapsing building. It was
stupid to travel alone, and he’d been stupid to let her. But stopping Kira was something
he’d never been able to do.

The radio buzzed, the wheels squeaked. When the sun began to set, he took a break
for water and an apple, grown in a heavy tree in the backyard, and then went straight
back to his pedaling. Nighttime, he knew, was the most likely time for a call, when
it became unsafe to travel and Kira settled down for the night. He pedaled until after
midnight—until his legs burned and his feet throbbed and his hands felt blistered
against the handlebars. He crawled to his bed, the radio still crackling in his ears,
and fell asleep.

In the morning he rode some more, and when he couldn’t take the walls closing him
in, he went outside for air. He rubbed his throbbing calves and set out for a walk,
looking again for Ariel.
An island in Islip,
he thought. Islip was huge, but only some of it touched the waterfront. He walked
up and down it all day, his radio in his backpack, looking for any sign of human life.
On the second day he found an island, and on the third he found an occupied house:
a trimmed lawn, a cultured garden, a stained porch that had once been wrapped in vines,
now studiously cleaned. Marcus walked up the warping wooden steps and knocked on the
door.

The sound of a racking shotgun slide was hardly a surprise, and Marcus didn’t even
flinch.

“Who’s there?”

“My name is Marcus Valencio,” said Marcus. “We’ve met before, though it’s been a few
years. I’m a friend of Kira’s.”

A pause, then: “Go away.”

“I need to talk to you,” said Marcus.

“I said go away.”

“Nandita’s disappeared—”

“Good riddance.”

“Ariel, look, I don’t know what kind of falling-out you had with them; I don’t know
why you hate them so much. I can assure you they don’t hate you. But that’s not why
I’m here—they didn’t send me, I’m not going to report back to them or tell you to
visit them or anything like that. I’m definitely not trying to find Kira to turn her
in to Morgan. I’m just trying to figure something out.”

Ariel didn’t answer, and Marcus waited. And waited. After a full minute he realized
she was probably just ignoring him, and turned to leave, but as he did he saw that
she had a small bench on her porch; not a swing, just a low wooden seat to sit and
watch the world go by. He brushed away some dirt, sat down, and started talking.

“The first question I need to ask you, assuming you’re even listening, is how you
met Nandita. I’ve talked to the other girls she adopted, and they all tell me that
by the time they met her, you were already with her. Isolde said something about Philadelphia,
that you were there when Nandita found you. That’s actually the same place Xochi’s
from, but I don’t know if that means anything. What I want to know is . . . where
did you come from, I guess? How did you meet Nandita? Was it just the standard ‘lone
little kid wandering the streets’ kind of story? We have a lot of those on the island—a
heartwarming number of them, in a weird kind of way. Your family’s dead, your neighbors
are all dead, you get hungry or scared or whatever and go out looking for something.
For me it was milk—we had plenty of cold cereal in my house, and it was the one thing
I knew how to make when I was five, so I ate it every day, for every meal, and it
didn’t take long to run out of milk. I tried a few other meals, peanut butter and
jelly on tortillas, that kind of thing. I couldn’t even work the can opener.” He laughed,
and rubbed a tear from the corner of his eye. “So anyway, I went out looking for milk.
I don’t know where I expected to find any, and the whole world was just sitting there,
you know? A couple of things were burning, like a car and a drugstore, but this was
Albuquerque, and there wasn’t a lot of foliage to help the flames spread around. A
couple of hoses were running, just running and running, making a little stream in
a gutter. But no people anywhere. I walked all the way to the nearest store I knew—my
uncle’s place, a little Abarrotes shop just a few blocks away—but it was locked, and
I couldn’t get in, so I just kept going, and going, and the entire city was just empty.
Not a single living person. I found a Walmart, eventually—walk far enough in a town
like that and you’ll inevitably find a Walmart—and I went inside to look for milk
and there was this guy, I’d never seen him before in my life, filling a wheelbarrow
with bottles of water. He looked at me, and I looked at him, and he lifted me up into
the wheelbarrow and gave me a pack of lunch meat. He even found some milk in the back
of the store, shelf-stable so it hadn’t gone bad yet, and I ate a bowl of cereal while
he gathered up everything he needed. His name was Tray, I don’t know his last name.
Tray carried me all the way to Oklahoma City before we finally met up with the National
Guard. I lost track of him, and I honestly don’t know if he even made it the rest
of the way here—I’m ashamed to say I haven’t thought about him much in the last few
years. I suppose if he’s here, he lives in the wilds somewhere, fishing or farming
or whatever. I’d have found him if he lived in town. And I don’t know why I told you
that whole story, except to say that those are the kinds of people we need—those are
the kinds of people we are. Nobody survived unless they worked together, and helped
each other, and that’s what makes RM and the Break the most over-the-top natural selection
process of all time. I don’t know how Nandita found you, but she found you, and she
saved you, and she brought you here, and now she’s missing and I’m just trying to
figure out what’s going on. What did she know, what did she do, why was she here?
Why are the Partials looking for her?”

“Nandita didn’t find me in a Walmart,” said Ariel through the window. Marcus had lulled
himself with the sound of his own talking, and Ariel’s voice startled him out of his
reverie. The curtains were closed, her voice muffled, but the words were clear. “She
came to my house. My parents had been dead maybe twenty-four hours. She came and she
took me away.”

Marcus furrowed his brow, trying to piece together the puzzle. “You think she may
have known that you were there? That she came for you specifically?”

“I think she never let me say good-bye.”

Marcus turned to look at her, but the curtains were still drawn tight across the window.
“I’m sorry,” he said. And then, because there wasn’t anything else to say: “That sucks.”

Ariel didn’t respond.

“The Partials are looking for her,” said Marcus. “They’re looking for Kira because
of what she did a few months ago, I think, but they’re looking for Nandita because
they think she knows something. She
does
know something—Ariel, I saw a photo, of Nandita and some dude with Kira in the middle.
They were at a ParaGen complex. Whatever she knew, it had something to do with Kira,
and the Partials have mounted a full assault on us in an attempt to find out what
it is. If you know what any of this means . . . please, you have to tell us.”

There was no response, not for a while. Marcus could hear Ariel’s shallow breathing
behind the curtain, and waited. It wasn’t like he had anywhere else to go.

“Nandita was a scientist,” said Ariel finally. “She did experiments.”

“On Kira?”

“On all of us.”

The inside of Ariel’s house was, Marcus discovered, full of planter boxes. “I didn’t
know you were a gardener,” he said, his eyes slowly adjusting to the darkness. With
so many Partial patrols out combing the island, Ariel had covered each window as thickly
as possible.

“I grew up with Nandita,” she said. “Gardening’s one of the only things I know.”

“Is that why you hate her?”

Ariel’s voice dropped. “I told you why I hate her.”

“The experiments,” said Marcus. He looked at her. “Are you ready to talk about them?”

“No,” she said, looking off into the street. “But that doesn’t mean it’s not time
to do it.” She closed the door, plunging the room into blackness.

Marcus let his eyes adjust, and focused on Ariel’s silhouette. “What kind of experiments?
Why didn’t the other girls say anything about this?”

Her voice sharpened. “Do you know how much I’ve tried to move on? To pretend like
I have a normal life? I got a job I didn’t need just so I’d have something to do with
myself all day; I got pregnant two years before the Hope Act said I had to. I’m even
weeding this stupid garden because . . . because that’s what people used to do, before
the Break. I’ve done everything I could, I’ve even avoided my own sisters—”

“What happened?” Marcus demanded. “What was so bad?”

“It started with breakfast,” said Ariel, looking down at the floor. “Nandita would
get up early and make us tea—chamomile and peppermint and things like that. She was
an herbalist, obviously, so she had all kinds of stuff in the house, and in her hothouse
out back. Some we could touch, like the chamomile, but some were in these little glass
droppers, with numbers on the sides like specimen jars, and those we couldn’t touch.
I didn’t think anything about it at the time—we got in trouble just for playing in
the hothouse, so it didn’t seem out of place—but one morning I got up early and came
down to help with the tea, and she was putting whatever was in the droppers into it.
I wouldn’t have thought anything about it, but when I asked what she was doing, she
looked guilty—as guilty as I’ve ever looked getting caught doing something I shouldn’t.
She played it off, just a new flavoring or something, but I couldn’t forget that look.
I snuck down again the next day to look again, and she was doing the same thing again,
with different droppers this time, keeping notes on a clipboard. She did it almost
every day, but I stopped drinking the tea.”

“Did you ever see the clipboard?”

“Once, when I snuck into the hothouse, but I think she knew I’d done it, because I
could never find it again. It wasn’t just notes on the tea, it was notes about us—how
fast we were growing, how healthy we were, our eyesight and hearing and things like
that. She always had us play games, like coordination games and memory games, and
after I saw that clipboard I couldn’t even play those anymore. She wasn’t playing
with her daughters, she was testing us.”

“Maybe she was just . . . keeping track,” said Marcus. “I don’t actually know how
a concerned parent is supposed to act, maybe that’s normal.”

“It wasn’t normal,” Ariel insisted. “Everything was a test, or a study, or an observation.
She didn’t play catch, she threw balls to test our reflexes; we didn’t play tag, we
ran time trials against each other up and down the street. When one of us cut her
finger or scraped her knee, she wrapped it up in a bandage, but not before looking
at it closely to see every gory detail.”

“Why didn’t the other girls say anything about this?” asked Marcus. “I asked them
everything I could about Nandita—everything they could remember, everything they did
together. They didn’t say anything about this.”

“I tried talking to them a few times,” said Ariel, “but they never believed me. They
never saw the droppers or the clipboard, and they thought the races were just fun
games.”

“You’d seen behind the curtain,” said Marcus, “so you saw everything else in a different
light.”

“Exactly.”

“But . . .” Marcus paused, phrasing his next words as carefully as he could. “Is it
possible—I’m not calling you a liar or anything of the kind, but isn’t it possible—that
the things you saw as a tiny little girl were completely innocent, and they just made
you . . . paranoid . . . and after that you started seeing something insidious where
nothing of the kind was intended?”

“You think I didn’t ask myself that a hundred times a day?” asked Ariel. “A thousand
times? I told myself I was crazy, that I was ungrateful, that I was making it all
up, but every time I did, I saw something else that set me off again. Everything she
did was some crazy, messed-up way to control us, to make us act a certain way or think
a certain way or I don’t even know.”

“How can you be sure that was the purpose?”

“Because it said so right on the clipboard,” said Ariel. “It was about Madison, and
it was a study of control.”

“What did it say?”

“It said ‘Madison: Control.’ Why is this so hard for you to grasp?”

Marcus shook his head. “I guess it’s just . . . so incongruous from what I saw. Did
you tell anybody?”

Ariel snorted. “Have you ever seen an eight-year-old tell an adult that her mom is
trying to control her?”

“But at least you tried—”

“Of course I tried,” said Ariel. “I tried everything I could think of, and if I’d
known what sexual abuse was, I would have accused her of that, too—anything to get
out of that house. But she wasn’t hurting any of us, and my sisters were all happy,
and I was just Angry Little Ariel. Nobody believed me, and when even my sisters wouldn’t
believe me, I figured maybe the control was already working, and they’d been brainwashed
or mind-zapped or worse. I did the only thing I could think of: I destroyed the hothouse.”