Fragments (49 page)

Kira looked back at Vale, his maddening smile still pasted to his face. “First thing,”
she said, and turned to follow Calix as she ran down the hall.

They reached the front door and Calix looked out carefully, peering up at the thick
black storm clouds that filled the sky. “No rain yet. Come on.” She ran out, and Kira
moved to follow her, but Samm caught Kira’s arm.

“Wait,” he said, and leaned in to whisper in Kira’s ear. His voice was so soft she
could barely hear it. “Did you feel it?”

“Feel what?”

“Dr. Vale,” said Samm. “I felt him on the link. He’s a Partial.”

C
alix lived a few buildings away, and they made it just as the first acid drops fell
and splatted on the ground. “The stuff ParaGen put in the dirt helps keep the plants
safe,” said Calix, “but you don’t want the acid on you.” A large man stood in the
doorway, holding it open for them to race inside, and chided them for cutting it so
close.

“Are you trying to get yourself killed, Callie?”

“Never been hit yet,” said Calix, slapping him affectionately on the arm as she walked
past. “Thanks for getting the door.”

“Anytime. These the travelers?”

Samm surveyed the lobby of the building, packed with eager onlookers. He looked back
at the big man and nodded. “We are. We need a room for the night, if you have one.”

“He means ‘please,’” said Kira. “And thank you very much for your hospitality.”

“I have plenty of space,” said Calix, and pushed the button for the elevator.

Kira walked past her, looking for the stairs, and jumped slightly when the elevator
doors slid open. “Holy crap.”

Calix raised her eyebrow. “You okay?”

“Where I come from I just . . .” Kira shook herself slightly and followed her gingerly
into the elevator. “We don’t have enough juice to run elevators back home. I’ve never
actually been inside one.”

“Neither have I,” said Samm, though Kira knew it was a lie. He was probably trying
to avoid the inevitable question of why their past experiences had been so different.
Calix pushed a button on the inside wall of the elevator—the highest floor—and the
doors slid closed.

“This whole complex is powered,” said Kira. “Not just the hospital but everything.
Where do you get the juice?”

“ParaGen had gone fully self-sustaining a few years before the Break,” said Calix.
“We have power, running water, and of course the Preserve itself to protect us from
the wasteland. There’s even enough land to ranch cattle, if we could find any live
ones.”

“The chili at dinner had beef in it,” said Kira.

“Actually venison,” said Calix, and looked at Samm proudly. “I tracked the deer myself.
I’ve been a full-fledged hunter for two years now.”

Samm nodded, which was a huge display of emotion for him. “Very impressive.”

Kira tried not to scowl. It wasn’t like Calix had hunted some monster, like that thing
that had chased Kira back in New York.

The elevator let them off on the top floor, which Kira immediately recognized as an
office block, though most of the cubicles had been cleared away. The remaining desks
were set up along the walls, stacked with potted plants and piles of books and board
games. A number of rubber balls sat idly in the corner. “This is our courtyard,” said
Calix. “My place is back here: Conference Room Two.” Each office and conference room
they passed had been remade as a small apartment, many of them occupied, and Calix
waved familiarly at her neighbors as she passed each one. The neighbors gawked at
the newcomers but didn’t approach them. Conference Room 2 was more sparsely decorated
than most of the others, and Kira wondered if Calix was simply less of a decorator
than the others, or less experienced, or if somehow she was poorer. Their society
didn’t seem to use money, but she was beginning to realize that almost nothing here
was what she expected it to be.

Like the fact that their doctor was a Partial.

There was a single bed, which Calix graciously offered to Kira, but Kira insisted
on sleeping on the floor—on the other side of the room, where she and Samm could talk
in private once their host finally fell asleep. After the first hour of excited questions
about the world outside the Preserve, though, Kira realized that Calix was far more
likely to outlast them than the other way around. After the second hour Kira was too
sleepy to care, and felt her eyes closing as Samm continued to answer question after
question.

She slowly drifted off to sleep in her tangle of blankets on the floor, only inches
from where Samm sat. A few moments passed, her breathing becoming deep and even, and
she felt something touch the back of her hand.

He’d placed his hand on top of hers.

She woke in the morning with a start, sitting up straight and reaching for something,
though she couldn’t remember what it was. Sunlight peeked through the curtains in
the window, and Calix’s bed was empty. Samm lay asleep, as straight as a corpse, on
the floor next to Kira. Kira rolled to her feet, checked the hallway, then closed
the door firmly and shook Samm awake.

“Samm!”

He woke up like a predator, whirling into a combat stance so swiftly Kira had to duck
to avoid getting hit. He paused, scanning the room, then looked at Kira. “I’m sorry,”
he said. “This place has me on edge.”

“Same here,” she said. “We need to figure out what’s going on; we’re alone for now,
but I don’t know how long until Calix gets back.”

“The doctor’s not a Partial,” said Samm.

“You said he was.”

“He doesn’t match any Partial model I’ve ever seen,” said Samm. “I’ve been thinking
about it all night—he’s not a general or a doctor or anything else, which means there
are two possibilities. One, he’s a model like you, one we haven’t seen yet and wasn’t
mass-produced. I think this is unlikely, most obviously because you don’t emit link
data, and he does, and you age, and he clearly couldn’t be as old as he is if he started
as a child seventeen years ago. The second, more likely scenario is that he’s like
Morgan, a human with gene mods to use the link. Which leads to one pretty obvious
conclusion.”

“He’s also a member of the Trust,” said Kira. “Given everything he said about his
history with ParaGen, that makes a lot of sense; he’d worked for them since the beginning.
He was probably one of their senior scientists.”

“It also means he can incapacitate me if he chooses,” said Samm. His voice was calm
and matter-of-fact, despite the seriousness of his words. “He didn’t give me any orders
last night, but if he ever does, I don’t know if I’ll be able to disobey him.”

“You disobeyed Morgan.”

“And it took me a few minutes to do it, and with extreme concentration,” said Samm.
“Their control is almost impossible to break, the Trust even more so than the regular
officers. If he really exerts himself, at close range, I don’t know that I’ll be able
to do anything about it. Even in the best-case scenario, he can incapacitate me long
enough to come after you.”

“And in the worst-case scenario,” said Kira, “he can control me, too. Assuming he
even knows what I am.”

“Morgan didn’t,” said Samm. “But that doesn’t mean anything—obviously your father
and Nandita knew that you were a Partial, but Morgan didn’t. We don’t know what Vale
does or doesn’t know.”

“I’m beginning to realize the Trust couldn’t have been very . . . trusting,” said
Kira. “It’s as if there were at least two different groups, with two different agendas.”

Samm nodded. “That explains some the existence of some contradictory evidence, but
it doesn’t exactly explain what any of that evidence means. We need more information.”

“Which is probably in that center spire,” said Kira. “The building we were in yesterday
seemed like it was exclusively medical. If Vale gives us the runaround again, that
spire is our next priority.”

Samm nodded in agreement, then paused for a moment. “Did Nandita ever control you?”

“You mean with the link?”

“Yes,” said Samm. “Did you ever get the impression that you were being forced?”

“Not that I remember,” said Kira. She looked at him, feeling a pang of sadness for
some of the things he’d been through. “What does it feel like?”

Samm let out a breath. “It can be hard to recognize,” he admitted. He paused, and
the barest hint of a smile crept over his face. “Of course, for someone as pathologically
independent as you, it might stand out a little more.”

Kira slapped him lightly on the arm. “I didn’t know Partials could tease.”

“I’m a good learner.”

“Either way,” said Kira. “I don’t think Nandita ever controlled me with the link,
and I don’t know if Vale will even try.” She paused for a moment, suddenly concerned.
“Whether or not he knows about me, though, he has to know you’re a Partial, right?”

“I can’t imagine he wouldn’t,” said Samm, “but then I can’t imagine why he wouldn’t
say anything about it, either. What does he have to gain by keeping it secret? Unless
. . . maybe he knows we’re both Partials, but doesn’t know if we know he knows?”

Kira glanced at the door again, still closed. “It’s very possible. I think we need
to operate as if he’s hiding something. Even if it’s just in his own self-interest.
He couldn’t expose you as a Partial without exposing himself as one of the scientists
who created us. These people aren’t as militant as we are in East Meadow, but they
still don’t seem to like Partials, either. If they found out their doctor helped build
the rebel army, they might not take it very well.”

“That’s the best guess I’ve come up with, too,” said Samm. “Either way, it’s bad news
for us. He has a good thing going here, with a perfect little society, and our arrival—our
very existence—threatens all of it. If the Partials follow us here, he’s done. If
the humans follow us here, he’s done. If the truth about you or me or him ever gets
out, all the secrecy falls apart and he’s done. His best possible courses of action
would be to kill us or to keep us here indefinitely. Which is perhaps why he didn’t
offer to help us understand the cure for RM yesterday.”

Kira frowned, troubled by the apparent inconsistency. “Unless he was being truthful
earlier,” said Kira. “He said it wasn’t ‘portable.’ That might mean it needs to be
refrigerated. Obviously we can’t haul something like that back across the whole continent.
That said, at the very least he could give us the formula, or teach me the process.
But he refused. Whatever’s going on, you’re right about the danger.”

“And we still don’t know where Heron is,” said Samm.

“Right.” Kira drummed her fingers on the floor, trying to sort through the mess of
possibilities. “If she got too close, he’d detect her. He might have used the link
to capture her.”

“Heron is much higher on the link hierarchy than most of us,” said Samm. “It’s part
of the independence built into the espionage models.” He paused, thinking silently,
then sighed—a distinctly human action that he must have picked up from so much time
spent with Kira. She found it fascinating. “Still,” he continued, “she was subordinate
to Morgan, and I imagine Vale is similar in his command of the link. He could have
her imprisoned somewhere.”

“It’s also possible that she detected him first,” said Kira, “and stayed back. Knowing
Heron, that seems more likely to me. For all we know, she might be trying to find
the answers we’ve been looking for in another part of the compound.”

“The central spire,” Samm said again. “Since all the buildings here are apparently
powered, she’d be able to access the computers pretty easily. That doesn’t mean she
can access the information, though. Without Afa to hack through the security, I don’t
know how any of us are going to do that.”

“Then she’d start with physical records,” said Kira. “Assuming Dr. Vale hasn’t just
destroyed them all—if he’s trying to hide his identity, he might have destroyed a
lot of old data.”

“Assuming he’s even trying to hide,” said Samm. “There’s always the chance that we’ve
just completely misinterpreted everything about this place—maybe everybody knows who
he is. We could learn a lot more if we had somebody here we could trust for straight
answers.”

“I don’t trust Calix,” said Kira quickly, cutting him off before he could suggest
it. “She’s clearly loyal to Vale.”

“He’s their leader,” said Samm. “Why wouldn’t she be loyal him?”

“That’s my point,” said Kira. “I’m not saying she’s a spy or anything, just . . .
if we ask a lot of questions, it’ll get back to him.”

“And now you’re assuming there’s a conspiracy,” said Samm. “Just because Vale is shifty
doesn’t make everyone here an enemy. The most likely scenario is that everyone here
is just happy and oblivious.”

Kira shook her head. “Likely but not guaranteed. I don’t want to trust anyone until
I know more of what’s going on.”

“That’s the one thing this society isn’t ready for,” said Samm. Kira looked up, and
Samm smiled, just slightly, in the corner of his mouth. “You’re a rebel, Kira Walker.
Even when there’s nothing to rebel against.”

Kira smiled back. “Maybe I was made this way. Are there any rebel-model Partials?”

“We started the Partial War,” he said simply. “Rebellion is the most human thing about
us.”

The latch on the door clicked open, and Kira looked up in a rush, momentarily terrified
about being caught before realizing that nothing they were doing was outwardly suspicious.
Why wouldn’t the two newcomers be talking to each other? She only hoped no one had
heard what they were saying.

Calix pushed the door open with her hip, carrying a pair of plates piled high with
eggs and hash browns; both were liberally laced with red and green chili peppers,
and after the chili last night, Kira got the distinct impression that whoever made
the food around here liked it spicy. “You’re awake,” said Calix, setting the plates
on a table by the wall—an oddly shaped remnant of the much larger conference table
that once filled the room. She pulled forks from her pocket and gestured to the meal
grandly. “Breakfast is served. And I invited a friend, if you don’t mind; I couldn’t
carry everything by myself anyway.”