“Prepare yourselves,” said the thing, and Shon saw the slits over its collarbones flare open again, and suddenly he was staggering from fatigue, his body going numb, his eyes struggling just to stay open. He tried to speak, but the world grew dark, and all around him the soldiers were sinking to their knees, collapsing in the dirt.
Shon managed one more “Wait” before the crippling need for sleep overpowered him, and his eyes forced themselves shut. His last view was the monster’s back as it plodded slowly away.
“
Y
ou’re useless,” said Dr. Morgan. She was staring at the wall screens, filled to overflowing with data on Kira’s biology, Kira’s immune system, Kira’s DNA, Kira’s everything. They had spent weeks studying her from every possible angle, Morgan and Vale and Kira together, and they had found nothing. There was nothing in her genes that could stop or reverse or even slow expiration, no way to save the Partials from dying. For Kira it was a devastating loss, and she lay on the operating table with no energy left—not physically, not mentally, and certainly not emotionally. She felt like a raw nerve, exposed and despairing, every bit as useless as Morgan said she was. She looked across at her face on the wall screen, sideways to her perspective, gaunt and gray and checkered with scars and bandages from a dozen different invasive surgeries. Her face was a doppelgänger that had betrayed her—her own body an unsolvable riddle, and an implacable enemy.
For Morgan, the realization hit like a tidal wave. She screamed in frustration, finally giving up, and in a sudden fit of rage pulled out her sidearm and shot the screen, fracturing it into a jagged web of bright, vicious fangs. The image remained, split in serrated shards, and Kira saw her face abruptly cracked and refracted—an eye on this piece, a strand of hair on that one, the corner of a mouth made large and separate and meaningless.
“Useless!” Morgan screamed again. She stood up, spinning around with the gun extended, and Vale jumped in front of Kira, desperately trying to calm the raging scientist. Kira, for her part, was too despondent to move.
“Be reasonable, McKenna.”
“How much time did I waste on her?” Morgan demanded. “How many Partials have expired while I was in here wasting my time on a dead end!”
“That’s not her fault,” said Vale. “Put down the gun.”
“Then whose fault is it?” Morgan seethed, thrusting the gun in Vale’s face, then turning back to the damaged screen and firing three more rounds into it:
bam bam bam
, a therapy of destruction shattering the remnants of Kira’s projected face. “It’s our fault, if it’s anyone’s,” she said, more softly this time, though every bit as furious. “Even mine, though I only knew half the plan at the time. Armin’s fault, maybe, because he seems like the only one who knew the whole thing, but he’s gone.” She snarled and threw the gun on the floor. “I can’t shoot him.” She gripped the edge of a small rolling table, and Kira braced herself, waiting for the woman to throw it aside, scattering scalpels and syringes across the white tile floor, but Morgan’s rage seemed to be subsiding. Instead of throwing it, she was gripping it for support. “It doesn’t matter whose fault it is,” said Morgan. “All we can do now is look for another lead.” She stared at her computers, or through them to something else beyond, but there was no hope in her eyes.
Kira clutched the thin operating blanket tighter around her shoulders, rolling sideways on the table and curling into a ball. She watched Vale, his mouth open, preparing to speak but holding back, looking at Morgan as if trying to build up the nerve. His hesitance made Kira angry—far more than the action merited, she knew, but her nerves were worn raw. She sneered and croaked at him.
“Just say it.”
He looked at her. “What?”
“Whatever you keep trying to say. You’ve been on the verge of it all morning, just get it out.”
He took a deep breath. “It’s just that . . .” He grimaced, still staring at the back of Morgan’s head. “Look, I don’t want this to sound wrong; I’m not trying to say ‘I told you so’—”
“Don’t even start,” said Morgan.
“But I do think we need to consider the possibility that we’ve backed the wrong horse, so to speak,” said Vale, pushing forward despite her warning. “Both species are dying, and we know the cure for one of them—let’s just focus on that one, and save as many humans as we can—”
“And let the Partials die?” Morgan demanded. “Two hundred thousand people that we helped create—practically our children—and we should do nothing? Or worse yet, enslave them? Like your master plan? Lock them up in some basement dungeon as . . . what, feed stock? A temporary cure for the lucky species we deigned to save?”
“We’re past the point of options we can all agree on,” said Vale. “
Everyone is dying.
We’re running out of time, and this is a dead end, and I don’t think I’m being a monster to suggest that we need to use what little time we have left pursuing the only solution that any of us have managed to uncover.”
“The cure for RM is just as much of a dead end,” said Kira. “In another ten months every Partial will be gone, and the cure will be gone with them, and none of this will matter.” She thought again of Samm, and longed to see him again before he expired. But he was on the other side of the continent, with a toxic wasteland and a pair of solemn promises keeping them apart.
“That’s why we have to act now,” said Vale. “Extract as much of the cure as we can and store it for the future, to give us a buffer while we try to find another solution.”
“We have ten months left—” said Morgan.
Vale sighed, as if his argument was self-evident. “Ten months is nothing.”
“But we could still do it,” hissed Morgan, “and the humans will still be there when we’re done.”
“Both of you shut up,” said Kira, forcing herself to sit. She wanted nothing more than to lie down, to heal from her weeks of surgeries, to close her eyes and let this whole problem go away, but she couldn’t. She’d never been able to let go of anything, and no matter how much she cursed herself now, she pushed herself up, gritted her teeth, and stepped down to the floor. “Shut up,” she repeated. “You fight like my sisters, and I’m not in the mood.” She gathered the blanket around her, shivering in the cold room, and walked to one of the undamaged wall screens. “We’re doctors, dammit, let’s act like it.”
“We’ve been acting like it for weeks,” said Vale. “I think we’ve earned a little break for self-pity.”
“And only two of us are doctors,” said Morgan snidely. “Neither of them are you.”
“Only two of us figured out the cure for RM,” Kira countered, studying the monitors. “Go ahead and remind yourself which two.”
Morgan sneered, but after a moment she stalked to the door. “Have your little pity party,” she said to Vale. “I have work to do.” She stormed into the hall and slammed the door behind her.
“I delight in anyone who stands up to that harridan,” said Vale, “but she’s arguably the most powerful person in the world right now. You need to keep a civil tongue.”
“People have been telling me that my whole life,” said Kira, only barely paying attention to him. She stared at the vast screen, cataloguing the data in her mind, searching for some kind of order in the chaos—some final, perfect key that would pull it all together and make sense of it. “What do you see here?”
“Your entire life, reduced to numbers,” said Vale. “Cellular decay rates, gene sequences, pH levels, white cell counts and bone marrow samples—”
“The answer’s not here,” said Kira.
“Of course it’s not here.”
She felt a tiny spark of excitement, the familiar thrill of solving a riddle slowly coming back to her. “But this is the most exhaustive biological study I’ve ever seen. It’s not just my data, it’s years’ worth of studies about expiring Partials and healthy Partials and human test subjects and everything else. Whatever else you want to accuse her of, Dr. Morgan is spectacularly thorough.”
“You’re acting like that’s good news,” said Vale, “but everything you’re saying only makes our situation worse. Morgan’s a brilliant scientist, and she’s been collecting this data for over a decade, and the answer’s still not here. If you’ve already looked everywhere and you can’t find your answer, your answer doesn’t exist. There is no cure for expiration.”
Kira spun around, her eyes alive with eagerness. “Do you know how I found the cure for RM?”
“By capturing a Partial and experimenting on him,” said Vale. “Kind of puts your current situation into an interesting karmic light.”
Kira ignored the jibe. “We did everything for RM that Morgan’s done for expiration, and we ran into this same wall—we’d tried everything, we’d failed at everything, and we thought we had nothing left. We found the cure because we looked in a Partial, and we looked in a Partial because he was literally the only thing we hadn’t looked in yet. It didn’t make sense, it didn’t follow from any data we’d previously collected, it was just a hunch—an absolute Hail Mary—but it worked, by pure process of elimination. If you’ve already looked everywhere and you can’t find your answer, you haven’t looked everywhere yet.”
Vale walked toward the screen, studying the glowing words and numbers as he did. “I know the Trust kept a lot of secrets from one another,” he said, engaging more actively in her brainstorm. “But I can assure you there are no more mysterious species out there we can gather up and poke around in.”
“Not strictly true,” said Kira. “On our trip to the Preserve we were attacked by talking dogs.”
“The Watchdogs aren’t a cure for expiration,” said Vale, tapping the screen to call up a file on the semi-intelligent animals. “Believe it or not, Morgan’s already studied them, trying to see if they had the same expiration date the Partials did. They don’t carry any more potential cures than you do.”
“Which is exactly why this giant, useless data dump is such a godsend,” said Kira. “It’s like a road map that only shows ninety-nine percent of a country—all we have to do is figure out what
isn’t
on the map, and that’s where the answer is. The one percent of the territory that we haven’t studied yet.”
“Okay,” said Vale halfheartedly, flicking through a list of digital folders, “what’s not in here?” He stopped, watching as his simple touch created a cascade of innumerable folders flying past him on the screen. “How are we even supposed to know where to start?”
“We start by thinking about the people, not the numbers,” said Kira. “This isn’t just data, it’s Morgan’s data, collected by her based on her own suppositions. And she wasn’t looking for a natural, random phenomenon, she was looking for something created by another person—by Armin Dhurvasula. He had a plan for everything, you said he did, so all we have to do is figure out what it was.”
“If your plan relies on us reading the mind of a dead mad scientist who
might
have come up with a plan to save the world,
maybe
, I’m going to suggest that we’d be better off looking for another plan.”
“It’s not mind reading,” said Kira, “just . . . think about it. What were the resources Armin had to work with?”
“The entire industry of genetic engineering.”
“Divided into a specific subset of tools,” said Kira. “Each of you in the Trust had a specific job, right? What was his?”
Vale narrowed his eyes, as if suddenly caught by the viability of Kira’s line of thought. “He did the pheromones—the link system.”
Kira grimaced, pulling up the folders about Morgan’s pheromonal research. It was one of the biggest subsections in the databank. “Morgan has researched every aspect of the pheromones she could think of,” she said, shaking her head as she flicked through the list of subjects: Communication; Tactics; Vulnerabilities. Dozens of folders, each with dozens of subfolders, sitting on top of a mountain of notes and experiments and images and videos. “There’s no way she missed something in all of this.”
“She missed the cure for RM,” said Vale.
Kira almost laughed. “Yeah, okay, I’ll give you that one. That still doesn’t make this any easier to figure out.”
“So now we need to think like McKenna Morgan,” said Vale. “Why did she miss the cure under all this data?”
“Because she wasn’t looking for it,” said Kira. “She was trying to solve Partial expiration, not the human RM susceptibility, so she never thought to look in the other species.”
“So maybe we should be looking in the other species, too.” Vale put his hands over his mouth, breathing through his fingers—a nervous tic Kira had noticed several times over the last few weeks of research. He stared at the data. “Let’s approach it from this angle: Morgan missed the connection because she didn’t expect Armin to make one species the cure for the other. But this can’t be as simple as reversing that same situation, because that’s impossible—he could hide the cure for humans inside the Partials because he built the Partials. He built the pheromone system that carries the human cure. But he obviously didn’t build the human genome, and unless he ran some kind of massive gene mod program we don’t know about—”
“Holy shit,” said Kira.
“I told you to keep a civil tongue,” said Vale.
“He did run one,” said Kira. Her body was practically shaking with excitement as the revelation rushed over her. “A massive program, worldwide, that reached out to every human and altered them, right under our noses—he seeded them with active biological agents, each carrying his own, custom-built DNA. If he wanted to hide the Partial cure inside humans, he had a perfect opportunity to do so.”
Vale stared at her, his face twisted in confusion, until suddenly his jaw dropped open and his eyes went wide. He struggled to speak, but he was completely dumbfounded. “Holy shit.”
“No kidding.”
“RM,” said Vale, turning back to the wall screen and clutching his head, as if expecting his brain to burst right out of his skull. “Every human being in the world is a carrier for RM. He used the world’s most contagious virus to plant the cure in the last place anyone would ever look.”
Kira nodded. “Maybe. We don’t know for sure. But it’s a start.”