Partials

“It doesn’t matter if you’re human or not,” said Kira, probing the Partial’s shins through the fabric of his pants, searching for more wounds. “They’re human, and that means they need to act like it.” She pulled up his pant legs. “You’ve got a few new cuts on here, but they’re not bleeding, obviously, and you should be okay.” She rolled them back down. “None of these wounds has ever gotten infected.” She wondered if Samm’s body produced some kind of natural antiseptic or antibiotic, and made a mental note to check it out later—through some means other than just stabbing him with a dirty knife. “You should be fine,” she said, and walked to the computer.

Kira noticed immediately that the files had been read: her DORD images, her preliminary notes on the pheromones, even her handwritten notes in her notebook. Someone had moved them, sorted them, paged through them. Is Skousen checking my work? she wondered. Is he duplicating it? Some of the files were new; he’d done studies of his own while she was away. She didn’t know if she should be grateful someone was watching, or indignant that they didn’t trust her results. She was nearly too tired to care.

I only have three days left, she told herself. Stop whining and work. She struggled to concentrate on the DORD images, looking for any discrepancy between Samm’s physiology and that of a human, but she kept thinking about what he said yesterday. The sincerity in his voice. What if he was telling the truth—what then? If the Partials had never created the virus in the first place, then who did? The Lurker in his breath, whatever it was, proved that he had some relationship to RM, but that didn’t mean he made it. The Partials were soldiers, not geneticists; they had doctors, but they weren’t necessarily capable of this level of engineering. What if the similarity meant something else entirely?

What if it was a sign of common ancestry? What if RM and the Partials were both created by the same third party?

Kira closed her eyes, trying to remember what she’d learned in school. What was the name of the company? Para-something? It was so hard to remember the details of the old world—names and places and technologies that simply had no meaning in modern life. Food companies were easy, because the ruins were all around her: Starbucks and Panda Garcia and a dozen more like them. She could even remember eating at some of them as a child, before the Break. Genetics companies, on the other hand, were completely outside the realm of her experience. She’d learned the name in her history class, but they hadn’t made a big deal about it. It was the government who’d commissioned the Partials, Para-something was just the contractor.

Para-Genetics, she remembered. They were called ParaGen. Haru had mentioned them the other day. But what could they have to do with RM? Certainly they hadn’t created it—they were human too. It doesn’t make sense.

“Did you have a mother?” asked Samm. The question broke Kira’s train of thought in an instant, and she looked at him quizzically.

“What?”

“Did you have a mother?”

“I … of course I had a mother, everyone has a mother.”

“We don’t.”

Kira frowned. “You know you’re the second person in the last twelve hours to ask me about my mother?”

“I was only curious.”

“It’s okay,” said Kira. “I never really knew my mother. I guess that makes us more alike than we thought.”

“Your father, then,” said Samm.

“Why do you want to know about him? I was five when he died, I can barely remember him.”

“I’ve never had a father either.”

Kira scooted her chair closer, coming around the edge of the desk. “Why are you so curious?” she asked. “You never talk, for two solid days, and now this morning all of a sudden you’re obsessed with families. What’s going on?”

“I’ve been doing some thinking,” he said. “A lot of thinking. You’re aware that we can’t reproduce?”

She nodded warily. “You were built that way. You were … well, you were intended to be weapons, not people. They didn’t want self-replicating weapons.”

“Yes,” he said. “The Partials were never intended to exist outside the infrastructure that created us, but we do, and now all those old design parameters are—” He stopped suddenly, glancing at the cameras. “Listen, do you trust me?”

She hesitated, but not for long. “No.”

“I suppose not. Do you think you ever could?”

“Ever?”

“If we worked together—if we ever offered a truce. Peace. Could you learn to trust us?”

This is where he’d been angling since day one—since she’d asked him what he was doing in Manhattan. He was finally willing to discuss it, but could she trust him? What was he trying to get from her?