Kira’s breath caught in her throat. “Armin Dhurvasula.”
“You know him, too?”
She quickly shook her head, hoping her face didn’t give her away. “I’ve heard of him.”
“A genius among geniuses,” said Vale. “This entire thing was his plan—he devised the pheromone system, and designed the entire interaction of the Failsafe and the cure and everything else. It was a masterpiece of science. But despite his plan and our best efforts, the worst still came to pass. I promise you that we didn’t mean for it to be this devastating; we don’t even understand how RM turned out as ruthlessly efficient as it did. I suppose it’s small consolation that, when it comes down to it, this was unavoidable. From the moment we created the Partials, from the moment we thought about creating them, there was no other possible outcome. Humanity will destroy itself, body and soul, before it will learn a simple lesson.”
Kira was too stunned to speak. She had expected a plan, she had hoped and prayed that the Trust had a plan, but to learn that it was a plan of mutual annihilation—to force both species to work together or die apart—was too much. When she finally spoke her voice was small and scared, more childlike than she’d sounded in years, and the question she asked was not the one she thought she would. “Have you . . . seen him? Anywhere?” She swallowed, trying to look less nervous. “Do you know where Armin Dhurvasula is now?”
Vale shook his head. “I haven’t seen him since the Break. He said he had to leave ParaGen, but I don’t know where, or what he’s doing. As far as I know, Jerry and I are the only ones left—and Nandita, now, I suppose.”
Kira thought back on her list of the Trust. “Jerry Ryssdal,” she said. “He was one of you, too. Where is he?”
“South,” said Vale solemnly. “In the heart of the wasteland.”
“How can he survive?”
“Gene mods,” said Vale. “He came here once, in the night, and I barely recognized him—he’s more . . . inhuman, now, than even the Partials are. He’s trying to cure the Earth, so there’s something left for the meek to inherit; I told him he’d do better helping me cure RM, but he was always single-minded.”
“And there are two more back east,” said Kira. “Two factions of Partials are led by members of the Trust: Kioni Trimble and McKenna Morgan.”
“They’re alive?” His eyes were wide, his jaw open. Kira couldn’t tell if he was glad to hear it or not. “You say they’re leading the Partials? That they’ve sided with them, against the humans?”
“I think so,” said Kira. “They . . . I’ve never met Trimble, but Dr. Morgan’s gone completely mad, kidnapping humans and trying to study them so she can cure the Partial expiration date. She didn’t know about it until Partials started dying, apparently, but she’s convinced she can solve it with human biology.” And with me, she thought, but she didn’t say it out loud. She still didn’t know what she was, or what Vale would do when he found out. And she had to ask him. She felt torn between paranoia and desperation.
“Trimble knew about our plan,” said Vale. “Morgan and Jerry didn’t; they designed most of the Partials’ biology, but we weren’t sure we could trust them with the issue of the Failsafe, and since it didn’t touch their work, we didn’t need to.”
“Who are the others?” asked Kira.
“What others?”
“I found all those names in my research,” said Kira, “but I never found yours, and I’ve heard of two others that I still don’t know anything about.”
“My name is Cronus Vale,” he said, and Kira nodded in recognition.
“Cronus I’ve heard,” she said, and shot Vale a careful glance. “Dr. Morgan seems to think of you as a threat.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve met her.”
“It was not the most pleasant experience of my life.”
“She’s petty and arrogant and heartless,” said Vale. “By the end, she had all but given up on humanity as a species.”
“That sounds like her.”
“If she ever finds this place,” said Vale, “we’re all doomed. My philosophies are, as you’ve seen, somewhat opposed to hers.”
“You’re trying to protect humanity, even if it means the enslavement of the Partial race,” said Kira, and the truth was beginning to dawn on her. “What happened to your ideals? What is your plan now? For the survival of both races?”
“After twelve years, I’ve finally come to understand something,” said Vale. “Extinction has a way of making you choose sides,” said Vale. “I don’t want to hurt anyone, but if I can only save one species, I’ve made my choice.”
“It doesn’t have to be one or the other,” said Kira. “There’s a way to save both.”
“There was,” said Vale. “But that dream died with the Break.”
“You’re wrong,” said Kira, and she could feel tears welling up. “You, Armin, Nandita, and Graeme . . . all of your work was about this, about both races surviving. There must be something that I can do!”
“I promised you information,” said Vale, “and I’m a man of my word. Tell me what you need to know, and I’ll give you everything I can.”
They climbed the stairs to the hidden lab in the spire, and Kira considered the question: She had so many; where should she start? She wanted to know how RM worked, and what exactly the relationship was between the virus and the cure. If the same being produced both, how did they interact? She also wanted to know about the expiration date: how it functioned, how they might be able to work around it. Vale had been working on RM for years without cracking it, but he seemed to have no interest in the expiration date; he might know something valuable that he hadn’t followed up on yet. “Tell me about the expiration date,” she said.
“It’s really just a modification of my own work on the life cycle,” he said. “I designed the Partials to accelerate to a certain age and then sit there, freezing the aging process by continually regenerating their DNA. At the twenty-year mark, that process reverses, and the DNA is actively degenerated. They’re essentially aging a hundred years in a matter of days.”
“Samm didn’t say they age,” said Kira, “they just . . . decay. Like they’re rotting alive.”
“The effect is the same at that speed,” said Vale. “It’s not the nicest way to die, but it was the most elegant, biologically speaking.”
Kira furrowed her brow, still searching for the stray pieces to complete the puzzle. “How did you keep the expiration a secret from Morgan?”
“ParaGen was a maze of secrets,” said Vale. “Nobody trusted anybody else, and the board of directors trusted our primary scientists even less. That’s why we had to build two Failsafes.”
Kira raised her eyebrow. “Two?”
“A Partial killer, like they wanted, and the human flu that Graeme and Nandita built as part of our plan. The Partial Failsafe was never put into production, of course, but I still created it, as a cover for the rest of our plan. The board could see the Partial Failsafe, could get progress reports and testing data, and content themselves that we were following orders; meanwhile, the other Failsafe is what we eventually incorporated into the mass-produced Partial models.”