Partials

She hadn’t allowed herself to think about Marcus yet; she hadn’t ever really had time. Less than twenty-four hours ago she was still in the back of a Defense Grid truck, pulling into East Meadow for her secret hearing with the Senate. Marcus hadn’t come to Xochi’s last night—and she hadn’t gone to look for him—and then in the morning she’d come straight here. Was he still mad at her? Was she even still mad at him? Yes, she was—of course she was—but at the same time she could see his side. She knew now that he had been … what? Trying to protect her? She didn’t need to be protected, not when she was the only one trying to do something here. But was he right about RM—that it couldn’t be cured, and they were ruining their lives by trying? She couldn’t believe that, couldn’t even allow herself to think it. She was going to cure the damned thing, and that was all there was to it. But then what did she think she understood about Marcus?

That he was scared, and thought he was going to lose her. She could understand that. She’d been half convinced she was going to die herself.

The medicomp chirped, and Kira looked back at the screen. It had higher-than-average electrolytes in its blood, a glucose level that looked borderline diabetic, and a white cell count so high she couldn’t help but take its temperature, fearing an infection. It was 98.6 degrees exactly, just as she was. Maybe its physiology had a slightly different baseline of normal? The results that would indicate illness in a normal human patient, but as far as she knew, they were normal for a Partial. She copied the details down in her notebook, marking the anomalies she wanted to go back and study later.

But the most important part of the scan was what was missing after she’d gone through it all. It had no trace of RM whatsoever.

No RM. She looked up, ecstatic; the Partial was still lying on the table, staring silently at the ceiling, and somehow still managing to look dangerous. Anyone else in that position would look like they’d given up, but there was something about it—the tension in its muscles, the alert flicker of its eyes—that told Kira its mind was racing.

In that moment it didn’t matter. Kira felt like laughing—the Partial had no trace of RM in its blood, just like she’d predicted. Its body could destroy or expel the virus completely. All she had to do was figure out how.

She tapped the screen quickly, fingers dancing across the surface as she pulled up the files on the virus. Now that she knew the Partials didn’t carry it, she had to figure out how, exactly, the humans did—what was the infection process? It wasn’t enough to just say, “They got sick”; she needed to know how the virus traveled from person to person, and what happened when it got there, in precise microbial detail. She needed to watch the process in a human and in a Partial, to see how they differed. She pulled up the image of the virus again, the yellow-tinged blob that lived in the blood. You look like a balloon, she thought, but you killed 99.996 percent of the human race.

She needed to focus. What information did the file already have? Size, for one thing: four hundred nanometers. That was huge for this scale—definitely big enough to be stopped by a good air filter. She glanced across the room to the plastic tunnel by the door, wondering what kind of filter it used. A system like that should be able to stop a four-hundred-nanometer virus, she thought. Four hundred nanometers should keep it away from a fetus, as well; nothing that big should be able to cross the placental barrier. That could explain why the babies don’t get sick until after they’re born.

Kira paused, caught by a sudden thought. If the virus is big enough to be contained, why can’t we deliver infants in a contained environment? They scrubbed the room, they sterilized their tools, they wore gas masks—they did everything they could think of, yet the virus still got through.