Fragments (28 page)

Heron looked at her, a mixture of calculation and disdain, then turned and looked
out over the river. “Your tacit assumption of sovereignty. This bridge belonged as
much to the Partials as it did to the humans.”

“Partials were given property rights in 2064,” said Afa, staring at the road as Oddjob
turned him around and around. “These rights were never recognized by state courts,
and Partials were still unable to get loans to buy anything anyway.
New York Times
, Sunday edition, September 24.”

“There’s your answer,” said Samm, pointing down at the line of broken water as the
river rolled over the fallen bridge. “There, sticking out of the water about twenty
yards out.” Kira looked, following the line of his finger and shading her eyes against
the spots of glare off the water.

Where Samm was pointing, Kira saw a metal prong sticking out of the water, lodged
somehow in the pieces of the bridge. She pulled out her binoculars and looked again,
focusing them in on the metal, and saw that it was the cannon of a tank. The body
bulged up, just under the flow of water, wedged between two pieces of concrete and
steel. The markings on the side read 328. “There was a tank on the bridge when it
went down.”

“Probably dozens of them,” said Samm. “328 was a Partial armored platoon. I’m guessing
the local militia rigged the bridge and blew it when the Partials were crossing, killing
as many as they could.”

“They wouldn’t have done that,” said Kira.

“They did that and worse,” snapped Heron.

Samm’s voice was more gentle. “By the end of the war they were desperate enough to
do anything,” he said. “The Partial victory was already decisive, and the release
of RM made everything worse. Humans were dying by the millions. Some of them were
ready to blow up anything they could—their bridges, their cities, even themselves—if
it meant killing even one of us.”

“Really great ethics,” said Heron.

“What about the fleet off New York Bay?” Kira snapped back, whirling to face her.
“I saw it in Afa’s documents—twenty human ships brought down, all hands lost, the
most devastating attack of the war.”

“Twenty-three,” said Afa.

“Self-defense,” said Heron.

“Are you kidding me?” asked Kira. “What could the Partials possibly be defending themselves
from?”

Heron raised her eyebrow. “Why do you keep saying that?”

“What?”

“Saying ‘them’ instead of ‘us.’ You’re a Partial—you’re different, but you’re one
of us. And you’re most definitely not one of them. You keep forgetting it, but your
human buddies aren’t going to. And they will find out.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” asked Kira.

“You tell me,” said Heron. “What’s your little boyfriend Marcus likely to do to you
when he finds out what you are?”

“Easy,” said Samm. “Everybody just calm down. This argument is not going to get us
anywhere.”

“Neither is this bridge,” Kira growled, and turned Bobo’s head to lead him back down
to the highway. She wanted to yell, to scream at them both, even at Afa—that this
was their fault, that they had fought this war and destroyed the world before she
was even old enough to defend it. But this one part of it, this massive act of destruction,
she couldn’t even blame on them. That was the worst part of all. “Let’s find another
way around.”

Chicago was flooded.

It had taken them nearly a month to get there, anticipation rising with each new day.
All their solar panels were gone, powering a string of radio repeaters behind them—if
the records they found included a way to extend the expiration date or synthesize
the cure for RM, they could radio it home in seconds instead of traveling another
month back through dangerous country. Afa grew more eager as the city appeared before
them, a giant metropolis that seemed even bigger, if possible, than New York City.
It sat on the shores of another giant lake, curving around the eastern and southern
sides, and spread out into the plains as far as Kira could see—towering skyscrapers,
elevated trains and monorails, vast factories and warehouses and endless rows of houses
and offices and apartments.

All crumbling. All mired in oily, swampy water.

“Is it supposed to look like that?” asked Kira.

“Not a chance,” said Samm. They stood on the top of an office complex on the edge
of the city, surveying the scene with his binoculars. “It’s not all flooded, just
most of it; looks like there are rises and falls in the terrain, though nothing huge.
I’d bet most of the water’s just a few inches deep, maybe a few feet in the worst
places. Looks like the lake overflowed its boundaries.”

“Chicago had dozens of canals running through the city,” said Heron. “Some of your
shallow streets are going to be deep rivers, but they should at least be easy to spot.”

“Those canals were the most heavily engineered waterways in the world,” said Afa proudly,
as if he had engineered them himself. “The old-world engineers actually reversed the
flow of one of the rivers—those are the glories we used to have, when mankind kept
nature under tight control.” His eyes glowed, and Kira could only imagine what the
thought did to him; after four weeks in a wilderness run wild, a city so fiercely
technological must have felt like an answer to a prayer.

“Nature has fought back,” said Heron. “Let’s hope it hasn’t flooded your data center.”

“Here’s the address,” said Afa eagerly, pulling a folded piece of paper from his backpack;
another email printout, with a street address circled in red near the bottom. “I’ve
never been here, so I don’t know where it is.”

Samm looked at the paper, then at the gargantuan city ahead of them. “Cermak Road.
I don’t even know where to start looking.” He glanced back down at his paper, then
down at the streets below. “We’re going to need a map.”

“That tower is probably an airport,” said Kira, pointing to a tall concrete pillar
near the shores of the lake. “They’ll have an old car rental place, and that’s bound
to have some kind of local road map.” The others agreed, and they climbed back down
to their horses. The roads to the airport were mostly dry, but the few patches of
flooding still proved problematic. Some of the streets were full of shallow standing
water, others were merely muddy, but here and there a street had become a moving stream
or a rushing river. Manhole covers bubbled with encroaching lake water, pavement buckled
from leaking water mains, and sometimes entire streets had caved in and washed away,
thanks to overloaded sewer pipes far below. The smell was overpowering, but it smelled
like lake, not sewer. Humanity had been gone so long it didn’t even smell bad anymore.
It took them all day to reach the airport, and they camped for the night in a ground-floor
office. The horses they tethered to a rusting X-ray machine. As Kira had suspected,
the rental car center had a number of local maps, and they pored over them by the
light of Heron’s flashlight, planning their route for the following day.

“The data center is here,” said Samm, pointing to a spot near the coast, smack in
the middle of the thickest part of downtown. “With the lake right there, and canals
on every side, I think we’ll be lucky if we don’t end up swimming there. And we’ll
have to hope the water’s not poisonous this close to the toxic wasteland.”

“The horses will never make it,” said Kira.

Heron looked at the scale in the corner of the page, trying to calculate distance.
“That’s a long walk without them. It looks like we can take Highway 90 almost the
whole way there; if it’s elevated, like some of these have been, we shouldn’t have
any problems with the flooding until the last few blocks.”

“And then what?” asked Kira. “Leave the horses tied up to the freeway? If Chicago’s
anything like Manhattan, they’ll be eaten by lions in the first few hours. Or those
freaky talking dogs.”

Samm almost smiled. “You’re still hung up on those, aren’t you?”

“I don’t understand how the rest of you aren’t,” said Kira.

“If we leave them free enough to escape from predators, they won’t be there when we
get back,” said Heron. “If you want horses at all, we have to take the risk.”

“How far is it?” asked Kira, looking closer at the map. “We could leave them here,
or upstairs maybe—if they’re penned in, they’re not in as much danger, and we know
we could find them again.”

“I don’t want to walk,” said Afa from the other side of the room, fiddling with his
portable screen. Kira didn’t even know he’d been listening.

“You’ll do fine,” she said, but Samm shook his head.

“I don’t know if he will. I think he’s weaker now than when we started the trip.”

“If he can’t handle the walk there, he won’t be able to handle the walk back home,”
said Kira. “We leave the horses somewhere safe, and pick them up on the way back.”

Heron examined the map, tracing the route with her finger. “We go out here and get
straight on 90; it’s a toll road, but I’ve got a few quarters. That links up here,
to 94, and goes right into the heart of downtown. We get off on this big interchange
here, and it’s a straight shot across to ParaGen, maybe only a mile of surface streets.”
It was hard to tell on the map what kinds of buildings lay along the route, since
it was intended for tourists and business travelers; a few key hotels and convention
centers were called out, and a handful of famous local restaurants, but nothing that
looked convenient to their path. Finally Heron zeroed in on a building shaped like
a lopsided circle, just off the highway. “This says ‘Wrigley Field.’ That’s a baseball
stadium. There’ll be an off-ramp from the highway, and plenty of places to pen the
horses in—they’ll have food, and they’ll be contained and protected.”

Kira studied it, then nodded. “I suppose it’s our best bet, and if things don’t go
as planned, we can adapt on the road. Let’s get some sleep, and head out at first
light.”

The airport had several restaurants, and in the back kitchens they were able to scrounge
together several cans of sealed food—mostly bulk-size cans of fruit, but one place
had a rack of canned chicken, and a sagging Mexican restaurant had some gallon cans
of refried beans and cheese sauce. Most of the fruit had turned, and the beans smelled
just suspicious enough that they decided not to risk it, but the chicken and cheese
made for a tasty if slightly messy meal. They started a fire in a metal garbage can
and warmed it up as best they could, serving it on foam trays—so well-preserved they
looked like new—and eating with plastic forks from a bag in the back of an old sandwich
shop. Afa ignored them, eyes glued to his screen, eating only when Kira placed the
food directly in front of his face. He was mumbling about security codes, and they
left him to his work.

Kira took the first watch, talking softly to Bobo as he nibbled on an overgrown planter
box. Afa was still working when Heron took over at two in the morning, but when Kira
woke up at seven he was asleep in his chair, slumped down over the darkened screen.
Kira couldn’t help but wonder if he’d fallen asleep naturally, or if Heron had somehow
knocked him unconscious.

They packed up and rode out, following the map and discovering that Heron was right,
and the highway was elevated. They passed through mile after mile of Chicago as if
on a bridge through a swamp, looking down at houses and parks and schoolyards all
flooded and soggy, the oily surface of the water glinting brightly in the morning
sun. Here and there a river moved through the city, evidence of an extremely high
water table, and Kira marveled that the city had ever been dry at all. It must have
taken an immense effort for the old world to keep the lake and the rivers and even
the groundwater in check. Part of her felt proud, as Afa had been the day before,
smiling to think that she was a part of such an amazing legacy—a species so intelligent,
so capable and determined, that they could hold back the sea and turn rivers around
in their paths. To have taken this marshy coastline and turned it into a megacity
was a feat to be proud of.

Another part of her thought only of the towering pride. How easy would it be for a
civilization so amazing to reach just a little too far? To do something it shouldn’t?
To make one sacrifice or one compromise or one rationalization too many? If you can
build a city so great, what’s to stop you from building a person? If you can control
a lake, what’s to stop you from controlling a population? If you can subjugate nature
itself, why should a sickness ever get out of hand?

Kira thought about the Trust: about all their secret plans and hidden intentions.
About the Failsafe. What was it? Were they trying to save the world, or destroy it?
The answers were in the data center, and the data center was in their grasp.

They followed Interstate 90 on a straight course northwest, until at last it arced
farther west to join 94. To their dismay it began to dip down here, not just losing
its elevation but literally running below the level of the rest of the city—not under
the ground, but sunken into it. What had once been a highway was now a lazy river,
with only the tops of the tallest trucks poking out above the water.

“We’ll need to double back,” said Samm.

“And what,” asked Heron, “travel through the surface streets? You saw the sinkholes
we passed trying to get to the airport—with this much water covering everything, we’ll
never know whether we’re stepping into solid ground or an underwater pit.”

Kira looked behind them, scanning the cityscape, then back at the river. “It’s too
long for the horses to swim.”

“It’s miles,” said Heron.

“Let’s find a boat,” said Afa.

Kira looked at him. “Are you serious?”

“You said this road goes straight up to the data center, right? We know it’s deep
enough for a boat, so let’s leave the horses and take one.”

Samm nodded. “I have to admit that’s a pretty good idea. Let’s find something that
can float and carry us.”