Partials

I’m not the first person to ask that question, she thought. Marcus and Dr. Skousen both said that people have been researching this since the Break. That means there’ll be records somewhere of their findings. She called up the database files in the microscope, searching for studies of all their clean-room births, and found several. None had been successful, obviously; the rate of sickness and the onset of RM was virtually identical to that of normal births, as if the clean room had shown no effect at all. Attached to the records was another set of studies, this time focusing on the existence of an RM variant found only in the air. Kira opened this with interest—she knew that RM was airborne, of course, but the actual structure of the airborne virus was not exactly entry-level medicine, and they hadn’t talked about it yet in any of her classes. The report contained more images, similar to those in her blood sample but much smaller: between twenty-three and thirty-one nanometers. Kira frowned. Something that small would be almost impossible to catch, even with a clean room. She looked at the Partial, feeling a surge of her old anger.

“You made pretty damn sure we couldn’t get away from this thing, didn’t you?”

The Partial turned its head to look at her, and Kira felt like she could almost see the thoughts whirring through its mind. When it spoke, its eyes seemed almost … curious. “You can’t reproduce.”

“What?”

“That’s why you’re trying to cure RM. We don’t have children, so their absence didn’t seem odd at first, but you don’t have any, do you? You’re trying to cure RM because your children don’t survive it.”

Kira wanted to scream at it, to force it to acknowledge its own hand in their extinction, to attack it for daring to speak so matter-of-factly about something so terrible, and yet she stopped, one thought catching in her mind.

Did it not know the virus was still killing them? She knew she shouldn’t trust it, but it seemed like something it was just now understanding. It really hadn’t known. But if it hadn’t known, that suggested two very important things: first, that the Partials weren’t spying on them. The theories cropped up now and then, that Partials were hiding among them, infiltrating the island with deep cover spies. But if that were true, this one would already have known that human infants were dying. Its surprise meant they weren’t being watched.

Or if they are watching, she thought, they aren’t telling each other what they see.

The second thing it suggested was that the Partials—or at least this Partial in particular—did not know how RM worked. It hadn’t expected the virus to stick around, and presumably most of the Partials it interacted with thought the same. Were the Partial leaders hiding the information from their own soldiers, or did they not know either? And how could they not know the function of a virus they’d created? It was possible the virus had mutated; Kira shuddered at the thought of it. If something as deadly as RM was mutating, acting beyond its original parameters, who knew what it was capable of?

She supposed there was one way to find out how much he knew. “You,” she said, “Partial. What do you know about RM?”

It didn’t answer.

“Oh, come on,” said Kira, rolling her head back in frustration. “Are we going to go through this again? Can’t you at least say something?”

“Well, human,” he said, “you’re going to kill me in five days. I don’t see much of an incentive to say anything.”

Kira stormed back to the medicomp and threw herself into the chair, so angry she could hardly think. It was going to be killed because it had killed Gabe, and Skinny, and six billion other people. After everything it had done, every atrocity it had been a part of, how dare it have the temerity to imply that it was a victim?

The images on the screen seemed to swirl and blur; how could she concentrate with that thing lying twenty feet away? It was times like this when she needed Marcus to make a joke, to defuse the situation and help her realize what mattered and what didn’t. She looked at the door, but of course he wasn’t there. He didn’t even know where she was.

The Partial was right about one thing: She only had five days. She needed to work. She pushed the Partials out of her mind and forced herself to focus on the task at hand: a screen full of viral images, a series of reports on the viral structure. It had two forms, one for blood and one for air; the Blob and the Spore, the yellow and the blue. Concentrate! The Spore was tiny, perfect for traveling through the air. That must be how the virus passed from host to host. But then what was the Blob for?