Fragments (35 page)

“And you think that will make them our friends.”

“A equals B equals . . . look, Ariel had a much better idiom for it, I don’t remember.
But yes, we have a common enemy, so we might be able to get some help.”

Mkele watched him a moment longer, then spoke slowly. “I admit that we have had similar
thoughts, but we didn’t know how or where to contact them. Are you sure about White
Plains?”

“Very sure,” said Marcus. “Samm told us all about it—they have a nuclear reactor that
powers the whole region, so they stay there to maintain it. If we can make it up there,
which is an admittedly difficult proposition, they might be willing to work with us
to end the occupation and perhaps find some of the answers we’re looking for before
it’s too late. It’s worth a shot.”

“Shots are exactly what you’ll end up with,” said Mkele. “This is a blind mission
into hostile territory with no guarantee of safety. If you go, you’ll be killed.”

“That’s why I’m coming to you,” said Marcus. “I’m not Kira—I’m not ready to lead something
like this, I just came up with the idea.”

“So that when someone inevitably dies, it will be me instead of you,” said Mkele.

“Ideally no one will die at all,” said Marcus, “but you can plan your missions how
you like. I recommend you live at least long enough to succeed.”

Mkele tapped his fingers on the desk, a surprisingly mundane gesture that seemed to
humanize the severe man in Marcus’s eyes. “A year ago I would have chastised you for
recklessness,” said Mkele. “Today, as it happens, we’re willing to try almost anything.
I had a unit of soldiers already preparing for a mission on the mainland, and now
that you’ve given us a clear goal, we can pull the trigger. It also happens that we
have need of a medic, and of someone with experience behind Partial lines.”

“And I suppose you’re looking for a man to volunteer.”

“This is the Defense Grid,” said Mkele. “We don’t wait for volunteers. You leave in
the morning.”

K
ira and her companions were on their way to Denver.

They’d left the data center at first light, wrapping Afa’s injured leg as tightly
as they could before helping him to slog through two miles of filthy floodwater. The
rowboat was right where they’d left it, and they paddled back to their horses in silence,
Samm rowing with long, powerful strokes while Heron and Kira watched the overhanging
trees for signs of attack. A lone dog stood on a bridge to watch them float by, but
it didn’t talk or even bark, and Kira couldn’t tell if it was a Watchdog or simply
a feral animal.

The horses were unhurt but terrified, and it took Samm and Heron several minutes to
calm them down enough to be saddled. Kira rewrapped Afa’s wound with dry bandages,
and together they boosted him up onto Oddjob’s back, where he swayed and grimaced
in pain at the change of pressure on his shredded thigh muscle. Kira bit her lip,
angry that they had to take Afa even farther from home—not angry at him, or at anyone
really, just angry.
Angry that life is hard,
she thought.
Nandita raised me better than this. “If you have the strength to whine, you have the
strength to do something about it.”

They were almost halfway from Long Island to Denver already, and it would be two full
months out of their way to take Afa back home; two months they didn’t have. They couldn’t
leave him, obviously, so they had to take him, hard journey or not.
Besides,
Kira thought,
if there’s another computer system at the lab site in Denver, we’ll need Afa to access
it. He’s the only one who can.

We just have to make sure he survives.

When they were all mounted and ready, Kira led them not to the freeway but to a large
hospital on the other side. “St. Bernard’s,” she said, reading the weathered sign
at the mouth of the parking lot.

“Should we look for antibiotics in the pharmacy?” asked Heron. “Or in barrels hanging
from the collars of giant shaggy dogs?”

“As long as the dogs don’t talk,” said Kira, “I don’t much care.” The talking dogs
still freaked her out, and she’d dreamed about them again last night—of herself living
with them, wild and feral, unaccepted in both human and Partial society. She knew
it was unfair of her to hate them. They couldn’t help being what they were any more
than she could. She pushed the thought aside and entered the hospital, showing Samm
how to sort the meds they needed while Heron watched Afa and the horses. They filled
an entire satchel with antibiotics and painkillers, and mounted up to ride west.

Into the toxic wasteland.

The fastest way out of town was a railroad track, which cut across the river highway
in a straight line south-southwest, high on an elevated beam that kept them well above
the worst of the flooding. They followed it for miles, past rail yards and schoolyards
and old, sagging houses, past flooded churches and fallen buildings and across an
overflowing river. The train tracks were straight and the way was mostly dry, but
it was rocky and slow going for the horses, and they hadn’t even made it to the freeway
when it grew too dark to travel. They took shelter in a crumbling public library,
letting the horses graze on the tall, marshy grasses outside before leading them carefully
up the access ramp to the dry floor inside. Kira checked Afa’s bandages, shot him
full of painkillers, and cleaned his wound while he slept. Heron caught frogs and
lizards in the bog outside and roasted them on a fire made of old chairs and magazines.
The books in the library were old, rotted, and there was no one left in the world
to read them, but Kira made sure that none of them went into the fire. It seemed wrong.

In the morning they found that they were just a short walk to Interstate 80, the same
massive road they’d been following since Manhattan, but nearly a hundred miles farther
west than where they’d left it at the eastern edge of Chicago. They got back on it,
finding it higher and dryer than the railroad and much easier for the horses to walk
on. The followed it all day, the city sprawling out endlessly on every side: building
after building, street after street, ruin after ruin. Subcities came and went—Mokena,
New Lenox, Joliet, Rockdale—their meaningless borders blurred together into a single,
unbroken metropolis. When night fell again they reached the edge of Minooka, and the
road curved south around it, and Kira looked out for the first time on open grassland
stretching far into the west. The horizon was flat and formless, an ocean of dirt
and grass and marshland. They slept in a giant warehouse, in what Kira assumed was
an old break room for cross-country truckers, and listened as a rainstorm drummed
furiously on the broad metal roof. Afa’s wound was no better than the previous night,
but at least it was no worse. Kira curled up on her bedroll and read by the light
of the moon, a thriller novel she’d picked up in the library.
Sure this guy’s being chased by demons,
she thought,
but at least he has a warm shower in the morning.

She fell asleep with her nose in the book, and woke up wrapped snugly in a blanket.
Samm was staring out the window as the sun rose over the cityscape, and glanced at
her a moment before turning back to watch the sky grow light.

Kira sat up, stretching her back and shoulders and popping a stiff joint in her neck.
“Good morning,” she said. “Thanks for the blanket.”

“Good morning,” said Samm. His eyes were locked on the window. “You’re welcome.”

Kira stood, pausing to hang her blanket on a row of nearby chairs before squatting
down to open her pack. Heron and Afa were asleep, so she kept her voice down. “What
sounds good for breakfast this morning? I have beef jerky, an indistinguishably different
flavor of beef jerky, and . . . peanuts. All pre-Break, picked up at that place we
stopped in Pennsylvania.” She looked again in her bag. “We’re running low on food.”

“We should forage through the city before setting out,” said Samm. “We’re not far
from the toxic waste, and I don’t know if we can trust anything we find there.”

“We passed a grocery store last night,” said Kira, grabbing all three of her food
selections and placing them on the table next to Samm. She sat on the far side and
opened the peanuts. “We can head back there before we move on, but for now, dig in.”

Samm looked down at the food, selected a bag of jerky at random, and tore it open.
He sniffed it carefully before pulling out a piece of black, twisted meat as solid
as rawhide. “What do you have to do to meat to make it stay good for twelve years?”

“Define ‘good,’” said Kira. “You’ll be sucking on that thing all day before it’s soft
enough to eat.”

He tore off a strip, long and whip-thin and almost hilariously fibrous. “We’ll have
to boil it,” he said, dropping the strips back into the bag. “Still, though—edible
food that’s almost as old as we are. That cow might actually have been as old as we
are, and he died before that tree was even born.” He pointed at a twenty-foot poplar
sprouting up through the cracks in the buckled asphalt parking lot. “And yet we can
eat it. We don’t have anything in the world today that can preserve food like that.
We might never have it again.”

“I don’t know if we want to,” said Kira. “Give me some fresh Riverhead jerky any day.”

“It’s just . . .” Samm paused. “One thing after another. Cars that won’t run. Planes
that will never fly again. Computer systems we can barely use, let alone re-create.
It’s like . . . time is flowing backward. We’re caveman archeologists in the ruins
of the future.”

Kira said nothing, chewing on the soft peanuts as the sun peeked over the mountainous
city beyond. She swallowed and spoke. “I’m sorry, Samm.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“Not the caveman thing,” she said, “or the jerky or . . . I’m sorry for getting mad
at you. I’m sorry for saying things that made you mad at me.”

He watched the sun, saying nothing, and Kira tried and failed to read him on the link.
“I’m sorry too,” he said. “I don’t know how to fix it.”

“We’re in a war,” said Kira. “We’re not even in a war we can win—humans and Partials
are killing each other, and themselves, and everything they can get their sights on,
because it’s the only way they know to solve problems. ‘If we don’t fight, we’ll die.’
What we need to face is that we’ll still die even if we do fight, and we don’t want
to face that because it’s too frightening. It’s easier to fall back into the same
old patterns of hate and retribution, because at least then we’re doing something.”

“I don’t hate you,” said Samm, “but I used to. When you first captured me, when I
first woke up and saw you and realized that everyone in my unit was dead. You were
there, so I hated you more than I even knew I could. I’m sorry for that, too.”

“It’s okay,” said Kira. “I’m not exactly innocent either.” She smiled. “All we need
to do now is send each human and each Partial on a deadly cross-country trip together,
so they can learn to trust and understand each other.”

“I’m glad there’s such a simple solution,” said Samm. He didn’t smile, but Kira thought
she felt a whiff of one on the link. She ate another handful of peanuts.

“That’s what you really want, isn’t it?” Samm asked.

Kira looked at him, curious.

“A united world,” he said, still looking out the window. “A world where Partials and
humans live together in peace.” He glanced at her from the side of his eye.

Kira nodded, chewing her peanuts thoughtfully before swallowing. It was exactly what
she wanted—what she’d wanted ever since . . . Ever since she’d learned what she truly
was. A Partial raised as a human, connected to both groups without really being a
part of either one. “Sometimes I think—” and then stopped.
Sometimes I think it’s the only way I’ll ever be accepted. I don’t belong to either
group, not anymore, but if both groups joined, I wouldn’t be the weirdo anymore. I’d
just be one of the crowd.
She sighed, too self-conscious to say it out loud. “Sometimes I think it’s the only
way to save everyone,” she said softly. “To bring them all together.”

“That’s going to be a lot harder than just curing our diseases,” said Samm.

“I know,” she said. “We’ll find the ParaGen labs, we’ll find their plans and formulas,
we’ll cure RM and the expiration date and everything else, and then it still won’t
matter because our people are never going to trust each other.”

“Someday they’ll have to,” said Samm. “When it comes down to trust or extinction,
to trust or oblivion, they’ll see that they’ll have to and they’ll do it.”

“That’s one of the things I like about you, Samm,” said Kira. “You’re a hopeless optimist.”

For the first few days the road was straight and flat, almost disturbingly so. Farms
crept by on either side, reclaimed by grassland and herds of wild horses and cattle,
but each new sight seemed the same as the last, a single farm repeated ad infinitum,
until Kira began to feel that they were making no progress at all. Occasionally the
Illinois River on the south swerved close enough to be seen from the road, and Kira
began to track their progress this way. They traveled slowly, keeping the horses fed
and watered and Afa well supplied with medicines. His wound was healing poorly, and
Kira did what she could to keep his spirits up.

Three days outside of Chicago they came to an island city at the conflux of two rivers;
they crossed the Rock River into a town called Moline, finding it swampy but navigable,
but the river on the other side stopped her cold. It was the Mississippi, and the
bridges were gone.

“Not good,” said Kira, surveying the wide river. She’d heard of the Mississippi, more
than a mile wide in parts. Here it was narrower, though its widest gaps looked to
be at least half a mile if not more. Much too far for the horses to swim, especially
with Afa. “You think this was the war, or just wear and tear since then?”

“Hard to say,” said Samm.