Fragments (8 page)

It was an empty crater, blown to pieces.

“T
his Senate meeting will now come to order,” said Senator Tovar. “We extend an official
welcome to all our guests today, and we look forward to hearing your reports. Before
we begin, I’ve been asked to announce that there’s a green Ford Sovereign in the parking
lot with its lights on, so if that’s yours, please . . .” He looked up, straight-faced,
and the adults in the room all laughed. Marcus frowned, confused, and Tovar chuckled.
“My apologies to all the plague babies in the room. That was an old-world joke, and
not even a very good one.” He sat down. “Let’s start with the synthesis team. Dr.
Skousen?”

Skousen stood, and Marcus placed his binder on his lap, ready in case the doctor asked
him for anything. Skousen stepped forward, stopped to clear his throat, then paused,
thought, and stepped forward again.

“I take it from your hesitance that you don’t have any good news,” said Tovar. “I
guess let’s move on to whoever’s ready to not give us the next bad report.”

“Just let him speak,” said Senator Kessler. “We don’t need a joke in every single
pause in conversation.”

Tovar raised his eyebrow. “I could make a joke when someone’s talking, but that seems
rude.”

Kessler ignored him and turned to Skousen. “Doctor?”

“I’m afraid he’s correct,” said Skousen. “We have no good news. We have no bad news
either, aside from the continued lack of progress—” He paused, stammering uncertainly.
“We . . . have had no major setbacks, is what I’m saying.”

“So you’re no closer to synthesizing the cure than you were last time,” said Senator
Woolf.

“We have eliminated certain possibilities as dead ends,” said Skousen. His face was
worn and full of lines, and Marcus heard his voice drop. “It’s not much, as victories
go, but it’s all we have.”

“We can’t continue like this,” said Woolf, turning to the other senators. “We saved
one child, and almost two months later we’re no closer to saving any more. We’ve lost
four more children in the last week alone. Their deaths are tragedies on their own,
and I don’t want to gloss over them, but that’s not even our most pressing concern.
The people know we have a cure—they know we
can
save infants, and they know that we’re
not
. They know the reasons for it, too, but that’s not exactly mollifying anyone. Having
the cure so close, but still unattainable, is only making the tensions on this island
worse.”

“Then what do you propose we do?” asked Tovar. “Attack the Partials and steal more
pheromone? We can’t risk it.”

You might not have a choice soon,
Marcus thought.
If what Heron said is true . . .
He squirmed in his seat, trying not to imagine the devastation of a Partial invasion.
He didn’t know where Nandita was, or Kira, and he certainly didn’t want to hand them
over to the Partials even if he could, on the other hand . . . a Partial invasion
could mean the end of the human race—not a slow fade, dying off because they couldn’t
reproduce, but a bloody, brutal genocide. The Partials had proven twelve years ago
that they weren’t afraid of war, but genocide? Samm had insisted so fiercely that
they weren’t responsible for RM. That they felt guilty for causing, even inadvertently,
the horrors of the Break. Had things changed that much? Were they ready to sacrifice
an entire species just to save themselves?

They’re asking me to do the same thing,
he thought.
To sacrifice Kira, or Nandita, to save humanity. If it comes right down to it, would
I do it? Should I?

“We could send an ambassador,” said Senator Hobb. “We’ve talked about it, we’ve chosen
the team—let’s do it.”

“Send them to who?” asked Kessler. “We’ve had contact with exactly one group of Partials,
and they tried to kill the kids who contacted them.
We
tried to kill the Partial who contacted
us
. If there’s a peaceful resolution in our future, I sure as hell don’t know how to
reach it.”

They were the same arguments, Marcus realized, that he and his friends had bandied
around in Xochi’s living room. The same circular proposals, the same obvious responses,
the same endless bickering.
Are the adults just as lost as the rest of us? Or is there really no solution to this
problem?

“From a medical standpoint,” said Dr. Skousen, “I’m afraid I must advocate—against
my wishes—the . . .” He paused again. “The retrieval of a fresh sample. Of a new Partial,
or at the very least a quantity of their pheromone. We have some remnants of the dose
that was used on Arwen Sato, and we have the scans and records of the pheromone’s
structure and function, but nothing can replace a fresh sample. We solved this problem
last time by going to the source—to the Partials—and I believe that if we intend to
solve it again, we will have to solve it the same way. Whether we get it by force
or diplomacy doesn’t matter as much as the simple need to obtain it.”

A rush of whispers filled the room, soft mutterings like the rustle of leaves.
It wasn’t “we” who solved this problem,
Marcus thought,
it was Kira, and Dr. Skousen was one of her biggest opponents
. Now he was advocating the same action without even crediting her?

“You want us to risk another Partial War,” said Kessler.

“That risk has already been taken,” said Tovar. “The bear, as they say, has already
been poked, and it hasn’t eaten us yet.”

“Being lucky is not the same thing as being safe,” said Kessler. “If there’s any way
to synthesize this cure without resorting to military action, we have to explore it.
If we provoke the Partials any further—”

“We’ve provoked them too much as it is!” said Woolf. “You’ve read the reports—there
are boats off the North Shore, Partial boats patrolling our borders—”

Senator Hobb cut him off, while the audience whispered all the more wildly. “This
is not the right venue to discuss those reports,” said Hobb.

Marcus felt like he’d been shot in the gut: The Partials were patrolling the sound.
The Partials had kept to themselves for eleven years—a quick recon mission here and
there, like Heron had done, but always undercover, so much so that the humans hadn’t
even known about it. Now they were openly patrolling the border. He realized his mouth
was hanging open, and he closed it tightly.

“The people need to know,” said Woolf. “They’re going to find out anyway—if the boats
get too much closer, every farmer on the North Shore’s going to see them. For all
we know small groups of them have landed already; our watch along that shore is anything
but impenetrable.”

“So our cold war’s heated up,” said Skousen. He looked gray and frail, like a corpse
from the side of the road. He paused a moment, swallowed, and sat down with a barely
controlled
thunk
.

“If you’ll excuse me,” said Marcus, and realized that he was standing. He looked at
the binder in his hands, unsure of what to do with it, then simply closed it and held
it in front of him, wishing it was armor. He looked at the Senate, wondering if Heron
was right—if one of them, or one of their aides, was a Partial agent. Did he dare
to talk? Could he afford not to? “Excuse me,” he said again, starting over, “my name
is Marcus Valencio—”

“We know who you are,” said Tovar.

Marcus nodded nervously. “I think I have more experience in Partial territory than
anyone in this room—”

“That’s why we know who you are,” said Tovar, making a rolling motion with his hand.
“Stop introducing yourself and get to your point.”

Marcus swallowed, suddenly not sure why he’d stood up—he felt like somebody needed
to say something, but he didn’t feel at all qualified to say it. He wasn’t even sure
what it was. He looked around the room, watching the faces of various gathered experts
and politicians, wondering which of them—if any—was a traitor. He thought about Heron,
and her search for Nandita, and realized that whatever he was trying to say, he was
the only one who knew enough to say it. The only one who’d heard Heron’s warning.
I just need to figure out how to phrase it without looking like a traitor myself.
“I’m just saying,” he said at last, “that the Partials we encountered were conducting
experiments. They have an expiration date—they’re all going to die—and they’re just
as invested in curing that as we are in curing RM. More so, maybe, because it’s going
to kill them sooner.”

“We know about the expiration date,” said Kessler. “It’s the best news we’ve had in
twelve years.”

“Not counting the cure for RM, of course,” said Hobb quickly.

“It’s not good news at all,” said Marcus. “Their expiration date is like pushing us
out of the frying pan and into the . . . molten core of the Earth. If they die, we
die; we need their pheromone to cure ourselves.”

“That’s why we’re trying to synthesize it,” said Woolf.

“But we can’t synthesize it,” said Marcus, holding up his binder. “We could spend
a couple of hours telling you everything we’ve tried, and all the reasons it hasn’t
worked, and you wouldn’t understand half the science anyway—no offense—but that’s
beside the point, because it hasn’t worked. ‘Why’ it hasn’t worked doesn’t matter.”
He dropped the binder on the table behind him and turned back to face the senators.
Seeing them again, staring at him silently, made Marcus feel suddenly queasy, and
he smiled to cover it up. “Don’t everybody cheer at once, I have some bad news, too.”

Tovar pursed his lips. “I don’t know how you’re going to top the first bit, but I’m
excited to hear it.”

Marcus felt the attention of the entire room bearing down on him and bit back the
urge to make another wisecrack; he cracked jokes reflexively when he got too nervous,
and he was more nervous now than he’d ever been.
I shouldn’t be doing this,
he thought.
I’m a medic, not a public speaker. I’m not a debater, I’m not a leader, I’m not . . .

. . . I’m not Kira. That’s who should be here.

“Mr. Valencio?” asked Senator Woolf.

Marcus nodded, steeling his determination. “Well, you asked for it, so here it is.
The leader of the Partial faction we ran into, the one who kidnapped Kira, was some
kind of a doctor or a scientist; they called her Dr. Morgan. That was the reason they
sent that Partial platoon into Manhattan all those months ago, and they kidnapped
Kira because Dr. Morgan thinks the secret to curing Partials is somehow related to
RM, which means it’s related to humans. Apparently they’d experimented on humans before,
back during the Partial War, and if they think it will save their lives, they’ll kidnap
as many more of us as they need, which might just be Kira again, but for all we know
it’s all of us. They’re probably having the same meeting right now, on the other side
of the sound, trying to decide how they can grab a few of us to experiment on—or if
those reports you mentioned are true, they already had their meeting and might very
well be putting their plan into motion.”

“That’s classified information,” said Senator Hobb. “We need—”

“If you’ll permit me to recap,” Marcus interrupted, holding up his hand, “there is
a group of super-soldiers”—he put down his first finger—“trained specifically in military
conquest”—he put down his second finger—“who outnumber us, like, thirty to one”—third
finger—“who are desperate enough to try anything”—fourth finger—“and who believe that
‘anything’ in this case means ‘capturing human beings for invasive experimentation.’”
He folded down his last finger and held his fist silently in the air. “Senators, the
information might be classified, but it’s a pretty good bet the Partials will be unclassifying
it a lot sooner than you think.”

The room was quiet, every eye focused on Marcus. Several long, heavy moments later,
Tovar finally spoke.

“So you think we need to defend ourselves.”

“I think I’m scared to death, and I need to learn how to stop talking when everyone
is staring at me.”

“Defending ourselves is not a viable option,” said Woolf, and the other senators stiffened
in surprise. “The Defense Grid is well trained and as well equipped as a human army
can possibly be. We have watches on every coast, we have bombs on every remaining
bridge, we have ambush sites already mapped and ready to go at every likely invasion
point. And yet no matter how well prepared we are, it will barely be a speed bump
if a sizeable faction of Partials initiate an invasion. That’s an inescapable fact
that cannot possibly be news to anyone in this room. We patrol this island because
it’s all we can do, but if the Partials ever actually decide to invade, we will be
conquered within days, if not hours.”

“The only remotely good news,” said Marcus, “is that their society is, if you’ll pardon
the comparison, even more fractured than ours. The mainland was practically a war
zone when we were over there, which could be the only reason they haven’t attacked
us already.”

“So they kill each other and our problem solves itself,” said Kessler.

“Except for the RM,” said Hobb.

“Taking everything Mr. Valencio has said into account,” said Woolf, “we only have
one real plan that has any hope of success. Step one, we sneak into that mainland
war zone, hope nobody notices us, and grab a couple of Partials for Dr. Skousen to
experiment on. Step two, we evacuate the entire island and get as far away as possible.”

The room was quiet. Marcus sat down. Leaving the island was crazy—it was their home,
it was their only safe haven, that was why they’d come here in the first place—but
that wasn’t really true anymore, was it? In the wake of the Partial War, this island
had been like a sanctuary; they’d escaped from the Partials, they’d found a new life,
and they’d started to rebuild. But that safety didn’t really have anything to do with
the island, now that Marcus thought about it. They’d been safe because the Partials
had ignored them, and now that the Partials were back—now that there were boats in
the sound, and Heron hiding in the shadows, and the vicious Dr. Morgan trying to turn
them all into experiments—that illusion of safety had melted away. Nobody had to say
it out loud, nobody had to make an official decision, but Marcus knew it was done.
He could see it in the faces of everyone in the room. The instant evacuation was broached
as a possibility, it became a certainty.