Fragments (4 page)

Kira looked at the door, which read
AFA DEMOUX
, and below it in thick block letters,
IT
. Was “IT” a nickname? It didn’t seem like a very nice one, but her understanding
of old-world culture was sketchy at best. She checked the other doors and found that
each followed the same pattern, a name and a word, though most of the words were longer:
OPERATIONS
,
SALES
,
MARKETING
. Were they titles? Departments? “IT” was the only one written all in capital letters,
so it was probably an acronym, but Kira didn’t know what it stood for.
Invention . . . Testing.
She shook her head. This wasn’t a lab, so Afa Demoux wasn’t a scientist. What had
he done here? Had he come back for his own equipment? Was his work so vital, or so
dangerous, that someone else had come back after to take it? This wasn’t a random
looting—no one hiked up twenty-two stories for a couple of computers when there were
plenty to be had at ground level. Whoever had taken these had taken them for a reason—for
something important that was stored in them. But who had it been? Afa Demoux? Someone
from East Meadow? One of the Partials?

Who else was there?

“T
his hearing is now in session.”

Marcus stood in the back of the hall, craning to see over the crowd of people filling
the room. He could see the senators well enough—Hobb and Kessler and Tovar and a new
one he didn’t know, all seated on the stage behind a long table—but the two accused
were out of his sight. The city hall they used to use for these sessions had been
trashed in a Voice attack two months ago, before Kira had found the cure for RM and
the Voice had reintegrated with the rest of society. Without the hall, they’d taken
to using the auditorium of the old East Meadow High School instead; the school had
been closed a few months before, so why not?
Of course,
Marcus thought,
the building is the least of the things that have changed since then
. The old leader of the Voice was one of the senators now, and two of the former senators
were the ones on trial. Marcus stood on his tiptoes, but the auditorium was packed,
standing room only. It seemed like everyone in East Meadow had come to see Weist and
Delarosa’s final sentence.

“I’m going to be sick,” said Isolde, clutching Marcus’s arm. He dropped down from
his toes to stand flat on the ground, grinning at Isolde’s morning sickness, then
grimacing in pain as her grip tightened and her fingernails dug into his flesh. “Stop
laughing at me,” she growled.

“I wasn’t laughing out loud.”

“I’m pregnant,” said Isolde, “my senses are like superpowers. I can smell your thoughts.”

“Smell?”

“It’s a very limited superpower,” she said. “Now seriously, get me some fresh air
or I’m going to make this room a lot grosser than it already is.”

“You want to go back out?”

Isolde shook her head, closing her eyes and breathing slowly. She wasn’t showing yet,
but her morning sickness had been terrible—she’d actually lost weight instead of gained
it, because she couldn’t keep any food down, and Nurse Hardy had threatened her with
inpatient care at the hospital if she didn’t improve soon. She’d been taking the week
off work to relax, and it had helped a bit, but she was too much of a political junkie
to stay away from a hearing like this. Marcus looked around the back of the auditorium,
saw a seat near an open door, and pulled her toward it.

“Excuse me, sir,” he said softly, “can my friend have this chair?”

The man wasn’t even using it, just standing in front of it, but he glowered at Marcus
in annoyance. “It’s first come, first served,” he said lowly. “Now stay quiet so I
can hear this.”

“She’s pregnant,” said Marcus, and nodded smugly as the man’s entire demeanor changed
in seconds.

“Why didn’t you say so?” He stepped aside immediately, offering Isolde the seat, and
walked off in search of somewhere else to stand.
Works every time,
thought Marcus. Even after the repeal of the Hope Act, which had made pregnancy mandatory,
pregnant women were still treated as sacred. Now that Kira had discovered a cure for
RM, and there was a real hope that infants would actually survive more than a few
days, the attitude was even more prevalent. Isolde sat down, fanning her face, and
Marcus positioned himself behind her seat, where he could discourage people from blocking
her airflow. He looked back up at the front of the room.

“. . . which is just the kind of thing we’re trying to stop in the first place,” Senator
Tovar was saying.

“You can’t be serious,” said the new senator, and Marcus focused his concentration
to hear him better. “You were the leader of the Voice,” he told Tovar. “You threatened
to start, and by some interpretations actually started, a civil war.”

“Violence being occasionally necessary isn’t the same thing as violence being good,”
said Tovar. “We were fighting to prevent atrocity, not to punish it after the fact—”

“Capital punishment is, at its heart, a preventative measure,” said the senator. Marcus
blinked—he’d had no idea that execution was even being considered for Weist and Delarosa.
When you have only 36,000 humans left, you don’t jump right to executing them, criminal
or not. The new senator gestured toward the prisoners. “When these two die for their
crimes, in a community so small
everyone
will be intimately aware of it, those crimes are unlikely to be repeated.”

“Their crimes were conducted through the direct application of senatorial power,”
said Tovar. “Who exactly are you trying to send a message to?”

“To anyone who treats a human life like a chip in a poker game,” said the man, and
Marcus felt the room grow tense. The new senator was staring at Tovar coldly, and
even in the back of the room Marcus could read the threatening subtext: If he could
do it, this man would execute Tovar right along with Delarosa and Weist.

“They did what they thought was best,” said Senator Kessler, one of the former senators
who’d managed to weather the scandal and maintain her position. From everything Marcus
had seen, and the inside details he’d learned from Kira, Kessler and the others had
been just as guilty as Delarosa and Weist—they had seized power and declared martial
law, turning Long Island’s tiny democracy into a totalitarian state. They had done
it to protect the people, or so they claimed, and in the beginning Marcus had agreed
with them: Humanity was facing extinction, after all, and with those kinds of stakes
it’s hard to argue that freedom is more important than survival. But Tovar and the
rest of the Voice had rebelled, and the Senate had reacted, and the Voice had reacted
to that, and on and on until suddenly they were lying to their own people, blowing
up their own hospital, and secretly killing their own soldier in a bid to ignite fear
of a fictional Partial invasion and unite the island again. The official ruling had
been that Delarosa and Weist were the masterminds, and everyone else had simply been
following orders—you couldn’t punish Kessler for following her leader any more than
you could punish a Grid soldier for following Kessler. Marcus still wasn’t sure how
he felt about the ruling, but it seemed pretty obvious that this new guy didn’t like
it at all.

Marcus crouched down and put a hand on Isolde’s shoulder. “Remind me who the new guy
is.”

“Asher Woolf,” Isolde whispered. “He replaced Weist as the representative from the
Defense Grid.”

“That explains that,” said Marcus, standing back up.
You don’t kill a soldier without making every other soldier in the army an enemy for
life.

“‘What they thought was best,’” Woolf repeated. He looked at the crowd, then back
at Kessler. “What they thought was best, in this case, was the murder of a soldier
who had already sacrificed his own health and safety trying to protect their secrets.
If we make them pay the same price that boy did, maybe the next pack of senators won’t
think that kind of decision is ‘best.’”

Marcus looked at Senator Hobb, wondering why he hadn’t spoken yet. He was the best
debater on the Senate, but Marcus had learned to think of him as the most shallow,
manipulative, and opportunistic. He was also the one who’d gotten Isolde pregnant,
and Marcus didn’t think he could ever respect the man again. He certainly hadn’t shown
any interest in his unborn child. Now he was showing the same hands-off approach with
the sentence. Why hadn’t he picked a side yet?

“I think the point’s been made,” said Kessler. “Weist and Delarosa have been tried
and convicted; they’re in handcuffs, they’re on their way to a prison camp, they’re
paying for—”

“They’re being sent to an idyllic country estate to eat steaks and stud for a bunch
of lonely farm girls,” said Woolf.

“You watch your tongue!” said Kessler, and Marcus winced at the fury in her voice.
He was friends with Kessler’s adopted daughter, Xochi; he’d heard that fury more times
than he cared to count, and he didn’t envy Woolf’s position. “Whatever your misogynist
opinion of our farming communities,” said Kessler, “the accused are not going to a
resort. They are prisoners, and they will be sent to a prison camp, and they will
work harder than you have ever worked in your life.”

“And you’re not going to feed them?” asked Woolf.

Kessler seethed. “Of course we’re going to feed them.”

Woolf creased his brow in mock confusion. “Then you’re not going to allow them any
fresh air or sunshine?”

“Where else are they going to work at a prison farm but outside in a field?”

“Then I’m confused,” said Woolf. “So far this doesn’t sound like much of a punishment.
Senator Weist ordered the coldhearted killing of one of his own soldiers, a teenage
boy under his own command, and his punishment is a soft bed, three square meals, fresher
food than we get here in East Meadow, and all the girls he could ever ask for—”

“You keep saying ‘girls,’” said Tovar. “What exactly are you envisioning here?”

Woolf paused, staring at Tovar, then picked up a piece of paper and scanned it with
his eyes as he talked. “Perhaps I misunderstood the nature of our ban on capital punishment.
We can’t kill anyone because, in your words, ‘there are only thirty-five thousand
people left on the planet, and we can’t afford to lose any more.’” He looked up. “Is
that correct?”

“We have a cure for RM now,” said Kessler. “That means we have a future. We can’t
afford to lose a single person.”

“Because we need to carry on the species,” said Woolf with a nod. “Multiply and replenish
the Earth. Of course. Would you like me to tell you where babies come from, or should
we get a chalkboard so I can draw you a diagram?”

“This is not about sex,” said Tovar.

“You’re damn right it’s not.”

Kessler threw up her hands. “What if we just don’t let them procreate?” she asked.
“Will that make you happy?”

“If they can’t procreate, we have no reason to keep them alive,” Woolf shot back.
“By your own logic, we should kill them and be done with it.”

“They can work,” said Kessler, “they can plow fields, they can grind wheat for the
whole island, they can—”

“We’re not keeping them alive for reproduction,” said Tovar softly, “and we’re not
keeping them alive as slaves. We’re keeping them alive because killing them would
be wrong.”

Woolf shook his head. “Punishing criminals is—”

“Senator Tovar is correct,” said Hobb, rising to his feet. “This is not about sex
or reproduction or manual labor or any of these other issues we’ve been arguing. It’s
not even about survival. The human race has a future, like we’ve said, and food and
children and so on are all important to that future, but they are not the most important.
They are the means of our existence, but they cannot become the reason for it. We
can never be reduced—and we can never reduce ourselves—to a level of pure physical
subsistence.” He walked toward Senator Woolf. “Our children will inherit more than
our genes; more than our infrastructure. They will inherit our morals. The future
we’ve gained by curing RM is a precious gift that we must earn, day by day and hour
by hour, by being the kind of people who deserve to have a future. Do we want our
children to kill one another? Of course not. Then we teach them, through our own example,
that every life is precious. Killing a killer might send a mixed message.”

“Caring for a killer is just as confusing,” said Woolf.

“We’re not going to care for a killer,” said Hobb, “we’re going to care for everybody:
old and young, bond and free, male and female. And if one of them happens to be a
killer—if two or three or a hundred happen to be killers—we still care for them.”
He smiled mirthlessly. “We don’t let them kill anybody else, obviously; we’re not
stupid. But we don’t kill them, either, because we’re trying to be better. We’re trying
to find a higher ground. We have a future now, so let’s not start it by killing.”

There was a scattering of applause in the room, though Marcus thought some of it felt
obligatory. A handful of people shouted back in disagreement, but the tenor of the
room had changed, and Marcus knew the argument was done; Woolf didn’t look happy about
it, but after Hobb’s words he didn’t look eager to keep calling for execution, either.
Marcus tried to get a look at the prisoners’ reactions but still couldn’t see them.
Isolde was muttering, and he stooped back down to hear her.

“What did you say?”

“I said he’s a stupid glad-handing bastard,” Isolde snapped, and Marcus backed away
with a grimace. That was not a situation he wanted any part of. She insisted that
her encounter with Hobb had been willing—she’d been his assistant for months, and
he was very handsome and charming—but her attitude had soured significantly in the
months since.

“It doesn’t look like we’re going to be deliberating any further,” said Tovar. “I
call for a vote: Marisol Delarosa and Cameron Weist will be sentenced to a life of
hard labor on the Stillwell Farm. All in favor.”