Partials

Each hour that passed, Kira felt her stomach twist further into knots. What am I? Why am I here—and who put me here? Do I have the pheromone? Do I have something worse? A hundred thousand questions swirled madly through her head, and she was desperate for answers. She forced herself to forget them, to think about the task at hand, but that was even worse. When she thought about Madison and Arwen, it was all she could do not to run straight to the hospital. She patted the wrapped syringe on her waist, and forced herself to be patient.

When darkness finally fell, Farad pulled more planks from the fence and pushed a small hole through the kudzu. They shouldered their gear, strapped it on tightly, and poised on the brink in a thin line: Farad, Xochi, Jayden, Gianna, Kira, and Marcus. Kira gripped her rifle and took a deep, slow breath.

“Keep the radio on,” said Kira, “as quiet as you can make it. If the Grid sees us crossing, I want to know about it.”

Gianna smiled thinly. “Already done.”

“Then we go,” said Kira. “Stay down, stay silent, but if they spot us just run for it.”

Farad bounced loosely on the balls of his feet. “Ready … set-y … spaghetti.” He dropped to his stomach and slipped out, pushing silently through the weeds toward the makeshift wall of cars. The others followed, trying not to rustle as they went. There were a few long seconds of desperate silence, and suddenly the radio burst into cries and shouts and static.

“There! There! South of Twenty-Three!”

A bullet slammed into the asphalt barely ten inches from Kira’s hand.

“Stealth is over,” she said. “Just run.” They leaped to their feet and charged across the street, vaulting the wall of cars; Kira planted her right hand on a broad metal hood for leverage; it scalded her skin, still hot from a day in the sun, but she jumped up and tromped across it, two quick, clanging steps before leaping back down to the ground beyond. The radio was screaming alarms, and she heard warped, echoing gunfire—first over the radio, then in real life as the sharp reports finally reached her ears. Farad was across now, sprinting through the parking lot toward a gap in the strip mall buildings, when suddenly Gianna dropped like a stone, a puff of thick mist hanging in the air above her.

“No!” Kira screamed, following so close behind Gianna that she tripped over her body and crashed to the broken asphalt. She found her feet and tried to rise, turning to help Gianna, but Marcus grabbed her as he passed and pulled her to her feet, dragging her forward.

“Keep going!”

“We have to help her.”

“She’s dead, keep going!”

Kira wrenched her arm from his grip and turned back, hearing a bullet slam into the ground somewhere dangerously close. Gianna lay facedown in a puddle of blood. “Forgive me,” Kira whispered, and grabbed not the girl but her radio. This is too important to leave behind.

Kira felt her body twist with an impact, but she kept her feet and ran again toward Marcus and the others. Where was I hit? She catalogued every limb as she ran, trying to identify the pain, but felt none. Too much adrenaline, said the scientist in her head, strangely calm and analytical. You’re going to bleed out and die without ever feeling the bullet. She reached the shelter of the alley and ran on while Marcus cursed her wildly from behind.

“Are you trying to get killed?”

“Shut up and run,” said Xochi, pulling them through a broken gate that listed sadly on one rusty hinge. The space beyond was a backyard, dense with weeds, and they fought through them to the shattered back door of a sagging house, the paint peeling off in long, faded strips. This close to the edge of the city the houses were still uninhabited, and they dropped to the floor in a skeleton’s living room. Jayden turned back with his rifle to cover the door.

“I’ve been hit,” Kira said, dropping the radio to pat herself, looking for blood. Farad snatched up the radio, thumbed the switch, and barked into it, “Checkpoint Twenty-Three, this is Patrol Forty. We’re right here, but the Voice have not come through the houses. Repeat, they have not come through the houses. Do you have visual contact? Over.”

“Negative, Forty,” squawked the radio. “Still searching. Over.”

“Understood, we’ll keep searching as well. Over and out.” He clicked off the radio and threw it back to her. “You risked your idiot life for that thing, we may as well use it.”

“What’s Patrol Forty?” asked Xochi.

“They’re stationed on the north side,” said Farad, “which is a different radio channel. That gives us maybe ten minutes before they figure it out. Now we’ve got to get out of this house before a real patrol comes chasing us in here.”