Ruins

“Damn bloody humans,” said the sergeant. “Nothing’s ever enough for them, is it? First the bioweapon, and now this.” She gestured violently at Delarosa. “If this witch got this far without us seeing her, how do we know there’s not more of them out there? What are we supposed to do?”

One of the newly appointed medics piped up from the side of the room; his name tag said Ether, and Vale couldn’t help but be amused by the juxtaposition. “I’ll tell you what we do,” said Ether. “We take that nuke straight back and turn East Meadow into a parking lot.”

Vale’s amusement vanished.

Delarosa, bound and bandaged and muzzled by an oxygen tube, made a move to attack Ether, but the other medic held her down.

“No one’s going to blow up anything,” said Vinci, and Audra’s fury burned across the link.

“We don’t need a human-lover in here telling us what to do,” she snapped. “After everything they’ve done to us, you’re taking their side in this?”

“I’m taking any side that’s not genocidal,” said Vinci. “Everything that has gone wrong since the moment we came back from China has been because of one species trying to get the upper hand on the other. We’re not going down that road again.”

“It’s going to give us some breathing room,” said Audra. “It’s going to give Dr. Morgan time to finish her work, maybe save some of us from expiration.”

“And what if the cure was coexistence?” asked Vale. He looked around the room, holding each Partial’s gaze before moving to the next one—the sergeant, the medics, the guards. “What if I told you that we could cure expiration right now, just by breathing the same air as that human in the corner.” Delarosa looked at him in disbelief, and the link told him that the Partials were just as incredulous.

“That’s impossible,” said Vinci.

“Humor me,” said Vale, but there was no humor in his voice. He looked at Vinci intently, pleading with him, and his sincerity was palpable on the link. “Pretend, for a moment, that she, and every human carrying the RM virus, is the cure for expiration. That they produce a chemical agent in their breath, the same as you do for them.”

Ether answered first, hesitantly. “We’d . . . have to find a way to synthesize it and . . . make a pill or something.”

Just like the humans tried to do, thought Vale. Just what I did. He shook his head. “You can’t synthesize it. It’s a two-part biological reaction: You breathe out a particle that renders RM inert in the humans, and then their body alters it and breathes it back out, curing you of expiration. You have to have both species in close proximity, and you have to have living bodies in which the reactions can take place.”

“They’d kill us first,” said Audra.

“Not all of them,” said Vinci.

“It only takes one,” said Audra. “This one smuggled a nuclear bomb right under our noses—one lone woman—and we stopped her with seconds to spare. How is the existence of one or two or even a thousand friendly humans supposed balance that out?”

“We might be able to harvest it,” said Ether. “We could keep them in a controlled environment—a prison camp, or a smaller island where we can watch them more closely—and then send a few people in every morning to collect the healing particles. Then we could distribute it through the army like an inoculation.”

Delarosa’s face was livid.

Now they’re re-creating my own failed plans, thought Vale. “Suppose that doesn’t work,” he said. “Suppose it takes”—he reversed the numbers from the Preserve—“ten humans for every two thousand Partials. One human for two hundred. If we implement this now, today, before losing any more soldiers to expiration, we’d need what, one thousand of them? Fifteen hundred? How do you support that many humans?”

“They could support themselves,” said Audra. “We’d make it a . . . like a labor camp.”

“And the Partials that live with them?” asked Vale. “As I said, they need to be in close proximity to Partials in order to produce the particle. Would those Partials live in the labor camp too?”

“They’d need guards anyway,” said Audra. “We could take shifts.”

“And what about the other thirty thousand humans?” asked Vale, feeling increasingly repelled by the entire conversation. “What do we do with the ones we don’t need? Do we put them in labor camps as well, or just kill them outright?”

“Fifteen hundred is already large for a sustainable prison population,” said Ether. “If we want to keep them from attacking us, or escaping and making the whole thing moot, we have to limit the population as much as we—”

“Listen to yourselves!” shouted Vale. His felt his heart pounding, his blood pressure rising even with a host of gene mods to keep it in check. “They’re not animals! They created you!”