Partials

She found a wide tunnel capped by a high metal door, and broke into a jog. “This is it—there’s a big ramp on the other side that leads up to the rear parking lot. We head north and we watch for patrols—the Defense Grid will be everywhere, but they’ll be distracted. As long as we don’t call any attention to ourselves, we should be able to slip through the gaps.” She turned to Jayden. “Thanks for your help—we would never have gotten out of there without you.”

“What do you mean, ‘thanks’? I’m going with you.”

Kira looked at him carefully, ghost white in the beam from the flashlight. “You sure?”

“You’re going to need all the help you can get,” he said. “Besides, I just freed a Partial and locked five pissed-off patriots in his cell. If I stay here, I’d be lucky to get arrested before they shot me.”

Kira nodded and saw the others doing the same. She put her hand on the doorknob and opened it slowly. The sky was dark, but still brighter than the pitch-black tunnels of the basement. Kira jogged slowly up the ramp, listening to the sounds of a city in chaos: shouts and screams; the scuffing and pounding of running feet; the intermittent cracks of sharp, staccato gunfire. She reached the top and saw a deep orange glow through the eastern trees—a fire. A group of three or four rioters ran past her in the dark.

Xochi whispered over Kira’s shoulder. “You think Isolde made it to the Senate building?”

“I hope so,” said Kira. “It’s going to be the only safe place in town for the next several hours.”

“You think we did the right thing?” Xochi’s voice was hesitant; uncertain. “You think we’ll have a home to come back to?”

“I think Mkele’s a lot better at his job than we give him credit for,” said Kira. “It might look different by the time we get back, but it’ll all still be here.” She looked behind her, saw that the group was all together, and looked forward into the darkness and chaos. “Move out.”

PART 3

FOUR HOURS LATER

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

I

t was nearly midnight before they got far enough from East Meadow to feel comfortable speaking freely; a wide forest beyond the highway, away from the press of ever-present houses.

“There’s a cluster of farms to the north,” said Jayden, hiking carefully through the underbrush, “near a pair of old country clubs. One of them has a harbor, and we’re sure to find a boat there.”

“On the North Shore?” asked Kira. “There’s not a lot of settlements up there.”

“It’s tucked down into a bay,” said Jayden, “and relatively close to the Grid base in Queens. Not that we should have any trouble with them,” he added quickly, “but the closer to Queens we get, the shorter our distance across the sound.”

“Do you know the name of the bay?” asked Samm.

Jayden shook his head. “Does it matter?”

“I want to get a sense of where we’ll land on the other side.”

Jayden looked at him oddly. “How well do you know our island?”

“We’ve sent scouts, of course,” Samm answered, “but never very far inland, and obviously the maps we have from before are all uselessly out of date.”

“‘Never very far,’” said Xochi. “I told you no one was infiltrating the island.”

“I said we haven’t been,” said Samm quickly. “That doesn’t mean nobody is.”

“Who else could there be?” asked Kira. “There’s you and there’s us, right? Everyone else is dead—you said so yourself. Unless—are there more humans alive on the mainland?” She felt her heart leap at the thought—it was stupid and impossible, but just for a second, before she could catch herself, she wished that it was true.

Samm shook his head. “There are no other humans.”

“Then who?”

Samm glanced over his shoulder again. “We can talk about this later, right now we have to keep moving.”

“No,” said Jayden, standing in front of him and halting the group. “We just betrayed our own species to bust you out of jail, so you can cut it with the secretive crap and tell us what you know, now.” He stared Samm firmly in the face, and Kira became acutely aware of the rifles each young man was holding at his side. Samm stared back, his dark eyes analyzing Jayden like an insect pinned to a wall. He sighed.

“There are no other humans,” he said again. “But there are other groups of Partials.”

“What?” cried Marcus. “I thought you couldn’t make new ones?”

“Not new Partials,” Samm clarified. “We’re just … we’re not exactly unified anymore.”

Kira couldn’t read his expression in the dark, but she could tell the admission made him profoundly uncomfortable.

“This would have been good to know before we broke our own island in half,” said Marcus.

“But the link,” said Kira. “You have a chemical communication system that normalizes emotion and behavior—how can anyone ever rebel from that?”

“They have a hive mind?” asked Jayden.

“It’s not like that,” said Samm, “it’s like a … we don’t think the same thoughts, we just share them.”

“Let’s walk while we talk,” said Marcus. “We’re still being chased, you know.”