Fragments (27 page)

She shuddered, growing weak and nauseated at the thought of so much death.

“I don’t want to be in this position,” she said softly. “I don’t want to be the one
who everybody’s hunting, who has to choose who lives and who dies.”

“You can whine about it or you can fix it,” said Heron. “Go back now, and you could
save both sides: we have a shot at curing the Partial expiration, and Morgan stops
killing humans.”

“It saves them for now,” said Kira. “I want to save them forever.” She paused, still
staring at the radio, then turned to Heron. “Why are you here?”

“Because you’re too stubborn to turn around.”

“But you didn’t have to come with us,” said Kira. “You’ve been against this mission
from the beginning, but you came anyway. Why?”

Heron looked at Samm. “The same reason you did.” She looked back at Kira. “The same
reason you trusted me: because Samm trusted me, and that was good enough for you.
Well, Samm trusts you, and that’s good enough for me.”

Kira nodded, watching her. “And if we keep going?”

“I’ll think you’re an idiot,” said Heron, “but if Samm still trusts you . . .”

“Your signal’s starting to break up,” said Marcus. His voice was growing garbled as
well. “Where are you? Over.”

“We can’t tell you,” said Kira.
I can’t even tell you who I’m with.
“We’re looking for something, and I wish I could tell you more, but . . .” She paused,
not certain what to say, and eventually just said, “Over.”

They waited, but there was no response.

“Passing atmospheric conditions,” said Afa. “Our reception might have been temporarily
boosted or broken by clouds or storms or virga.”

“I still trust you,” said Samm. “If you think this is the way to go, I’ll follow you.”

Kira looked at him, long and hard, wondering what he saw in her that she didn’t. Eventually
she gave up, shaking her head. “What about the Failsafe?”

“What about it?” asked Samm.

“We don’t know what it is, but the word means something that can’t go wrong—or something
designed to jump in and fix things when they do. What if the Failsafe can solve all
our problems, and all we have to do is find it and activate it?” She thought about
Graeme Chamberlain, the member of the Trust who’d worked on the Failsafe and then
killed himself as soon as he was done. She shivered despite the heat. “What if it’s
something horrible, and right when we think we’ve fixed everything, the Failsafe jumps
out and screws it all up again? We don’t know what it is. It could be anything.”

“How do you know it even matters?” asked Heron.

“Because it has to,” said Kira. “The Trust had some kind of plan. The cure for the
human disease is in the Partial pheromones, plus there’s me, a Partial something-or-other
living in a human settlement. None of this is by accident, and we have to figure out
what it all means.” She paused. “We have to. It’s the same old argument I used to
have with Mkele: the present or the future. Sometimes you have to put the present
through hell to get the future you want.” She held the radio to her mouth. “We’re
going on,” she said simply. “Over.”

A
nother pack of Watchdogs trailed them from Camelback Mountain to the Susquehanna River
but never moved in to attack. Samm tied their food and equipment high in the trees
every night, and Heron and Kira did their best to protect the horses. Afa stopped
talking to Samm completely, and only barely to Heron; the few times he did, both girls
began to suspect he was confusing her for Kira. He was better in the mornings, when
his mind was rested, but as each day wore on he became more suspicious, more furtive;
Kira began to see a third personality emerge, a dangerous cross between the confused
child and the paranoid genius. It was this version of Afa that stole a knife from
Kira’s gear, and tried to stab Samm with it the next time he got too close to his
backpack. They got the knife away from him, but Kira worried that the struggle was
even more damaging in the long run, feeding his distrust and paranoia.

As they traveled, Kira thought about her experience with the link—about the times
she could sense something, and the times she couldn’t. She couldn’t quite puzzle it
out, but that didn’t mean it didn’t make sense, just that she didn’t yet have all
the tools she needed to make sense of it. She tried to concentrate, willing herself
to feel Samm’s emotions, or to transmit something to him, but it didn’t seem to work—unless
they were in a high-stress situation, like combat. After a few days of trying and
failing, she approached Samm about it directly.

“I want you to teach me how to use the link.”

Samm looked at her passively, though she knew he must be sending some kind of link
data to reflect his emotional state. Was he confused? Skeptical? She clenched her
teeth and tried to sense it, but she couldn’t. Or she couldn’t tell the difference
between that and what she thought she was picking up intuitively.

“You can’t learn how to link,” said Samm. “That’s like . . . learning how to see.
Either your eyes work or they don’t.”

“Then maybe I’m already doing it and I just can’t recognize it,” said Kira. “Teach
me how it works, so I know when it happens.”

Samm rode in silence for a moment, then shook his head—a surprisingly human gesture
he must have picked up from her or Heron. “I don’t know how to describe it because
I can’t imagine not having it,” he said. “It’s like not having eyes. You use your
eyes for everything—vision is so important to human and Partial function that it colors
every other aspect of our lives. Even that—the word ‘colors’ as a synonym for ‘affects.’
It’s a visual metaphor being used to describe something nonvisual. When you imagine
someone trying to function without sight, that’s how I imagine someone trying to function
without the link.”

“But vision fails all the time,” said Kira. “Blind people can still function in society,
and I bet all of them understand metaphors like ‘colors.’”

“But blindness is still considered a handicap,” said Samm, “at least among Partials.”

“Humans, too.”

“Okay then,” said Samm. “And no one would argue that blindness is a stylistic difference,
it’s literally a lessening of ability.”

“Take a look at this,” said Kira. She widened her eyes, making an exaggerated “surprised”
face, and Samm didn’t respond. “Did you see it?”

“See what?”

“I just opened my eyes really wide.”

“You do that all the time,” said Samm. “Different parts of your face and body move
constantly while you talk; Heron does it, too. I used to think she had a facial tremor.”

Kira laughed. “It’s called body language. Most of the social cues that you communicate
with pheromones, we communicate with little facial movements and hand gestures. This
means I’m surprised.” She widened her eyes again. “This means I’m skeptical.” She
raised her eyebrow. “This means I don’t know something.” She shrugged, holding her
hands to the sides, palms up.

“How do you . . .” Samm paused, in the space where a human would furrow his brow or
wrinkle his lips—something to signify confusion—and Kira assumed that he was sending
out “I’m confused” data through the pheromone link. “How do you teach that to each
other? A new member of your culture, or a new child—how long does it take them to
learn all these weird little hand signals?” He tried to emulate the shrug, looking
stiff and mechanical.

“That’s like asking a Spanish speaker why they bother with all those weird words when
it would be so much easier to just speak English,” said Kira. “Do you have to teach
the link data to new Partials?”

“We haven’t had new Partials in years,” said Samm, “but no, of course not, and I think
I see where you’re going with this. Do you really mean to say that this ‘body language’
is as inherent to human beings as the link is to Partials?”

“That’s exactly it.”

“But then how—” He stopped, and Kira could only guess what link data he was expressing
now. “I was about to say, ‘How can you understand each other over the radio when half
your communication is visual?’ but I suppose the link doesn’t transmit over the radio
either, so we’re even there. But on the other hand, Partials can still understand
each other in the dark.”

“I’ll grant you that,” said Kira, “but we also have a lot of verbal cues you don’t.
Listen to these two sentences: ‘Are you going to
eat
that?’ Now: ‘Are
you
going to eat that?’”

Samm stared back, and Kira almost laughed at what she assumed was his confusion. “I
suppose you’re going to tell me that the difference in volume changes the meaning
of the sentence? We use the link for most forms of emphasis like that.”

“I suppose that gives us a leg up on radio communication,” said Kira, and waggled
her eyebrows. “This may be the key to winning the war.”

Samm laughed, and Kira realized that laughter, at least, seemed to be fairly common
among the Partials. They probably didn’t need it, since they could express enjoyment
or humor through the link, but they still laughed anyway. Maybe it was built into
some human segment of their custom genome? A vestigial response? “Enough about body
language,” said Kira. “I want to practice the link, so hit me.”

“Hitting you won’t make the link easier to detect.”

“It’s an expression,” said Kira. “Send me some link data—start throwing it out there.
I need to practice trying to pick it up.”

They spent the next few days practicing, with Samm sending her simple pheromonal messages
and Kira trying everything she could to feel them, and to recognize which emotions
they represented. A couple of times she thought she could sense it, but most of the
time she was completely lost.

They passed through the Appalachians on a wide highway marked with a number 80, run-down
and crumbling in places, but mostly unbroken. They made better time across the river,
leaving the dog pack and, they hoped, any other potential observers far behind them.
With less fear of attack they could travel more openly, but the open stretches of
farmland only accentuated what Kira understood was a growing agoraphobia in Afa, and
he tried to stop at almost every town they passed through, holing up in a bookstore
or library and obsessively sorting the titles. Much of the area was covered with long,
low hills, and he did better when they could travel between them, comfortably hemmed
in by reassuring masses that, while not buildings, at least limited his sight line.
Kira hoped that this kind of terrain would continue all the way to Chicago, but as
they moved west, the land got flatter and flatter. When they crossed the Allegheny
River and the midwestern plains stretched out before them, Afa’s mutterings grew more
sporadic and disorganized. By the time they crossed the border from Pennsylvania to
Ohio, Kira realized he wasn’t just talking but arguing, mumbling furiously at a choir
of voices in his head.

Afa’s lone saving grace in the Midwest were the cities, which were bigger here and
more frequent; Heron, on the other hand, grew more cautious in each, always wary of
an attack by some unseen force. They stayed on Interstate 80 as much as possible,
passing through Youngstown and following it north to a place called Cleveland. Both
were eerie, empty cities, lacking the kudzu that gave such a junglelike quality to
Kira’s home on the East Coast. New York was still and silent, but the vegetation at
least gave it a feeling of life. Here the cities were dead, bare and crumbling, eroded
by wind and weather, fading monuments in a vast and featureless plain. It made Kira
lonely just to look at them, and she was as happy as Heron to leave them behind. Their
road took them along the southern edge of a rolling gray sea, which Samm insisted
was just a lake; even seeing it on the map, Kira found it hard to believe that it
wasn’t another part of the ocean she’d left behind. She’d never liked that ocean before,
feeling small and exposed on its shores, but now she ached for it. She ached for her
friends—for Marcus. Bobo nickered and shook his mane, and she patted him gratefully
on the neck. How the old world ever got by without horses, she couldn’t understand.
You couldn’t pet a car.

In a city called Toledo the lake met a wide river snaking up from the south, and they
reined in their horses on the edge of it, a ledge off which there was a fifty-foot
drop down to the raging river. There was no longer any road before them; the rubble
of the I-80 bridge lay in the river far below.

“What happened here?” asked Kira. The precipice was dizzying, the wind whipping through
her hair. “The bridge looks too new to just fall apart like this.”

“Look at the beams,” said Samm, pointing below to the metal infrastructure twisting
out of the concrete on their side of the chasm. “This was blown up.”

“That should make you happy,” said Heron to Afa. Afa was turning in circles on his
horse Oddjob, ignoring them and muttering threats that Kira guessed were only half
directed at the horse.

“We’ll have to go around,” said Samm, pulling Buddy’s head to the left to head back.
Kira stayed near the edge, peering across to the far side. The fallen bridge had made
a sort of barrier in the river, not big or tall enough to block its flow, but intrusive
enough to send the placid river roiling and bubbling over the rubble before smoothing
again on the other side.

“Who would have blown it up?” she asked.

“There was a war,” said Heron. “You probably don’t remember it, you were pretty young.”

Kira did her best not to glare at her. “I know there was a war,” she said. “I just
don’t understand which side had a good reason to blow up a bridge. You told me the
Partials focused on military targets, so they wouldn’t have done it, and the humans
wouldn’t have destroyed their own structures.”

“That’s the attitude that started the war,” said Heron, and Kira was surprised by
the angry undercurrent in her voice.

“I don’t understand,” said Kira.