Ariel walked back into the room. She felt different. Apart. More so than she’d ever felt before.
“So you spent years trying to activate the cure,” said Madison, “and then . . . what, you left to go activate it somewhere else? Without the girls?”
“I found a laboratory, like I said,” said Nandita. “Powered and self-sustaining. I would have come back for the girls, but the political climate was not exactly friendly at the time.”
Kessler growled. “We’re not stupid—if you’d told us you were working on a cure—”
“You would have stonewalled me like you stonewalled Kira,” said Nandita. “And if I’d ever told the story I told you just now, you’d have thrown me into prison or killed me outright.”
“So stop talking and do it,” said Isolde. “You’re back because you have the cure, right? You can unlock it and we can save everyone.” She touched her belly again, and Ariel felt a surge of hope, but Nandita shook her head.
“What?” asked Xochi. “You didn’t find it?”
“Of course I found it,” said Nandita. “I had eleven years of biological data on the girls, I worked on the original project, and I had an ideal laboratory. I knew there was a trigger, and I found the exact chemical blend to pull it.” She brought out a small glass vial from a pouch around her neck and held it up; it glittered in the light. “But it’s not the cure. Someone already triggered the cure, in every Partial who has it.” She looked at Madison. “Kira discovered that while I was gone, that’s how she saved your baby.”
“So what did you find?” asked Isolde. “What does that vial unlock?”
“I have an inkling,” said Nandita. “But it’s not good.”
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
“I think we lost them,” Kira whispered, panting with exertion. They’d been running through the ruins for nearly an hour, with what felt like the entire Preserve following closely behind them. She was so tired she could barely walk, and they’d taken refuge in an old bank. “I don’t know if I can run another step. Now I know how you felt in the spire.”
“How I still feel,” said Samm. He collapsed against the wall and sank slowly to the floor, leaving a smear of blood from the wound in his arm. “Whatever sedative he used in there is an absolute killer. Patch me up.”
Kira stayed by the window nearly a minute longer, watching the road for any sign of movement or pursuit. Still nervous, she retreated to Samm’s wall and hauled out the remnants of her medkit—not a full kit, for that was back in Calix’s room, but the essentials she’d kept in her backpack with the other things she didn’t want to leave her sight: her gun, now out of ammo; a handful of water-stained documents from Afa’s stash; the computer handle, though that was now lost in Vale’s secret lab. She swabbed the gash in Samm’s arm, a bloody groove where Vale’s bullet had grazed his triceps, and gave him a handful of antibiotics to swallow.
“You’re probably not going to need these,” she said, “from what I’ve seen of your immune system, but take them anyway. It makes me feel better.”
“This isn’t your fault.”
“He was aiming at me,” said Kira. “I’m the one who pissed him off.”
“And I got in the way on purpose,” said Samm. “I told you, he’s on the link—I knew who he was going to shoot before he did it.”
“That doesn’t make me feel any better,” said Kira, searching her bag for bandages and finding that she didn’t have any. “All back in the Preserve,” she said. “Hang on, let me see what I can find.” They were hiding in the bank’s back offices, away from the street, and she stood up to search for some kind of cloth.
“Now that we have some time to breathe,” said Samm, “you can tell me why he suddenly wants to kill us. I assume we got caught slinking around in the spire.”
“I found his secret,” said Kira, opening the drawers in an old wooden desk. Plus, he found out mine, she thought, but she didn’t want to share that with Samm just yet. What would he say if he knew I was carrying the disease that could kill every Partial in the world? “He doesn’t have a new cure. He’s harvesting the pheromone from a group of Partials locked up and sedated in the spire. One of them has been modified to produce a powerful Partial sedative, which is why you passed out as soon as you entered the building. It’s how he keeps them incapacitated.”
Samm was silent a moment before speaking. “That’s horrible.”
“I know.”
“We have to stop him.”
“I know,” said Kira, “but we’ve got other things to think about first. Like you not dying of blood loss.” She found a suit jacket in a small closet and pulled it out to examine it. On Long Island it would be half mildew after twelve years in the humidity, but here in the wastes of a desert city, it was fairly well preserved. She brought it back to Samm and sat on the floor with her knife, cutting it into wide strips. “I’ve always wanted to see you in a suit.”
“We have to free them.”
Kira stopped mid-cut. “It’s not that simple.”
“We can go back. At night. We need to figure out a way to rescue Heron anyway; she’s been gone too long to not be in there somewhere. We can find her, and free the people that he’s captured, and get everyone out of there.”
“I know,” said Kira, “but it’s not that simple. The captured Partials are practically skeletons. I don’t know if they could survive outside the lab, let alone a daring nighttime rescue attempt.”
“Would you say the same thing if they were human prisoners?”
Kira felt like she’d been slapped. “I’m not saying you’re not right, I’m just saying it’s not that simple. Why are you so mad at me?”
“This is the same thing Dr. Morgan tried to do to you,” he said. “To turn a living being into a petri dish for a science experiment. I risked my life and destroyed my friendships to free you.”
“You helped capture me.”
“And then I freed you,” said Samm. “There’s a very real possibility that whatever Morgan wanted to do to you would work—that she could learn something from your biology to help stop the expiration date—but I freed you. Tell me right now that the reason you won’t go back there with me doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that those Partials are being used to save human lives.”
Kira opened her mouth to deny it, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t lie to Samm. “So you’re saying we should just let all the human children here die.” She didn’t phrase it as a question.
“You don’t know that’s what would happen—”
“I know damn well that’s exactly what would happen,” she shot back, stopping him before he could even finish. “In East Meadow that’s happened every day for twelve years, and for one of those years I was right in the maternity ward watching it. If we take those Partials out of that lab, the human children being born will die. I’m not going to let that happen.”
“But you’ll let those Partials be used like machines?” he said. She had never heard him this angry before. He sounded almost . . . human. “You’re a Partial, Kira. It’s about damn time you start to come to terms with that.”
“That’s not what this is about.”
“The hell it isn’t. What is it, shame? Are you ashamed of what you are? Of what I am? I thought you were in this to save both races, but when push came to shove you went right back to the humans. Heron has been explaining from the beginning how we might be able to save the Partials, but you wouldn’t do it; you had to come out and here look for a way to save the humans first.”