Partials

“Would you like to explain that comment?” asked Senator Hobb coldly.

“You just punished Jayden for making a poor choice as a commanding officer, and yet you’re not going to call him an adult? Kira and Yoon are sixteen years old, an age you yourselves are currently debating as the new pregnancy age. You’re going to force them to have children, but you’re not going to call them adults?” He stared at each of the senators in turn, piercing them with his gaze. “I was eleven years old in the Break—I watched my father die in a Partial attack. I watched my mom and my brothers die two weeks later in a high school gym packed so full of refugees that RM went through it like a brush fire. I was the only person left alive in the entire city—I walked twenty miles, alone, until I found another group of survivors. I haven’t been a child since that day, Senators, and these three went through the same thing even younger than I was. They risk their lives for this society every day, they have jobs, and any day now you’re going to demand that they have children, too, and yet somehow you have the gall not to treat them like adults? This is not the paradise you lost in the Break, and it’s high time you accepted that.”

Kira listened with wide eyes. Way to go, Haru. You tell ’em. She leaned toward Isolde. “That ought to earn some respect.”

“For him, yes,” Isolde whispered. “It’s actually really bad for you. He’s trying to set you up as equals, to make sure this looks like a joint conspiracy of adults instead of one adult leading a group of minors. He could get a harsher sentence if they think he masterminded the whole thing. He doesn’t want to get slammed on your behalf like Jayden was for Yoon.”

“But that’s…” Kira frowned, looking back and forth between Haru and the senators. “But he sounded so noble.”

“It was brilliant,” said Isolde. “A conniving weasel like that is wasted in construction.”

“Very well,” said Senator Hobb. “Kira Walker, do you wish to be tried as an adult?”

Damn. Thanks a lot, Haru. She stood slowly and held her head high. “I made my own decisions, Senator. I knew the risks and I understood them.”

“You seem very certain of that,” said Dr. Skousen. “Tell me, Kira, what were you planning to do with this Partial once you caught it? How were you going to keep it contained? How were you going to address the threat of a new contamination?”

“I wasn’t planning to bring it back at all, sir. That was your idea.” She paused, watching Dr. Skousen’s brow grow dark with anger, wondering if she’d pushed him too hard. She forged ahead, glancing at the Partial; it looked back darkly, and she tried not to imagine how quickly it could break out of its restraints. “I was going to cut off its hand and test it in the field,” she said, “with a medicomp we brought to Brooklyn. There was never any threat to anyone until—”

“No threat to anyone?” asked Dr. Skousen. “What about the three men who died across the river? What about the two women of breeding age who almost died with them? Surely you of all people, with your job in maternity, understand the need to protect every possible pregnancy.”

“If you please, Doctor,” said Kira, feeling her face grow hot with anger. “We’ve asked to be treated like adults, not cattle.”

The doctor stopped short, and Kira gritted her teeth, forcing herself to keep her face as calm as possible. What am I doing?

“If you wish to be treated as an adult,” said Senator Delarosa, “I encourage you to keep a civil tongue.”

“Of course, Senator.”

“Can you tell us, for the record, what you expect to gain from your study of Partial tissue?”

Kira glanced at Dr. Skousen, wondering how much he’d already told them. “We’ve studied RM for years, but we still don’t know how it works. Everything that should be effective in abating it isn’t; everything that should inoculate us against it doesn’t. We’ve hit a dead end, and we need a new direction. I believe that if we study the immunity from a Partial perspective—not the chance mutation that keeps us from developing symptoms, but the engineered resistance that makes them wholly immune—we can find the cure we’ve been looking for.”

Senator Weist narrowed his eyes. “And you thought the best way to do this was to run screaming into the middle of enemy territory with no planning and no backup?”

“I asked Dr. Skousen for backup,” said Kira. “He made it clear I wouldn’t get any help from the Senate.”

“I made it clear that you should not attempt it under any circumstances!” roared Skousen, slamming his hand on the table.

“My friend is pregnant,” said Kira. “Haru’s wife; Jayden’s sister. If we’d done what you said, that baby would die, just like every other child you haven’t saved for eleven straight years. I didn’t study medicine to watch people die.”