Ruins

Ariel wanted to shoot her now, to raise her hand and fire, but she didn’t. She wanted to rage and scream and yell and make this woman pay for the hell she’d put her through—for the hand she’d had in this entire, world-ending calamity. She didn’t do that either. She watched the orange lights from the fire dancing weakly on the wall, just out of reach of the room’s dark shadow. “I saw what you did with the chemical trigger,” said Ariel at last. “The night you dumped it in the fire, after Erin Kessler said she wanted to use it.”

“I didn’t want her to try anything stupid,” said Nandita.

“Looks like we didn’t do enough to stop her,” said Ariel.

“Looks like.”

On. Off.

“Why did you do it?” asked Ariel.

“Create the Partials?” asked Nandita. “End the world? Destroy your childhood? My list of crimes is long, child. I’m afraid you’ll have to be more specific.”

“Why did you let them shoot us?” asked Ariel. She gripped her gun more tightly, though she still hadn’t pointed it anywhere but the floor. “You can control Partial soldiers with a thought—you could have stopped that gunfight before a single shot was fired. And yet you didn’t.”

“I . . .” Nandita stopped, a motionless form in the darkness. “I guess I decided that if I couldn’t stop Erin, I shouldn’t be able to stop the Partials.”

“You didn’t want to control them?”

“I did not.”

Ariel felt her voice rising. “You’d rather let them kill us all?”

“It was an inconvenient time for a moral revelation,” said Nandita. “You don’t have to tell me. But these things happen; I was ready to do it, and then I wasn’t. The moment happened, and then it was past.”

“So you think you made the right choice, then? That letting people get shot in the name of your moral revelation was worth it?”

“We didn’t get killed.”

“You had no way of knowing we wouldn’t.”

“I believe,” said Nandita, “that that is precisely the point.”

On. Off.

“I came down here to kill you,” said Ariel.

“I know.”

“I was always going to do it,” said Ariel. “That was the whole reason I came. You were the only one who could save Khan, and so I was going to wait until you had done that, and as soon as you did, blam.” She gestured with the gun. “No more lying, no more schemes, no more control. I figured the world would be better off.”

“I can hardly disagree with you.”

“Now here I am, and all I want to do is kill you, and . . .” She paused, waiting for Nandita to speak, but the woman said nothing. “You’re not the person I thought you were.”

“I can say the same about you,” said Nandita.

“Who did you think I was?”

“I thought you were a child,” said Nandita. She shook her head. “I was mistaken.”

Ariel stood up, pointed the gun at Nandita’s head . . .

. . . and stood there.

“Khan deserved to live,” said Ariel. “Maybe Hobb does, too. Or maybe he, and you, and all those Partials in that explosion, all deserved to die. I don’t know. Now here we are, and I’m the one with the control, with the power, with the ability to let you live or die with a thought. If I’m going to have any inconvenient moral revelations, now would be the time.”

She lowered the gun and turned away. “I’m going to go look for water.”

CHAPTER FORTY

Shon seethed, staring at the map until his vision turned red, and he slammed his fist into the table. It cracked under the force of the blow, and he collapsed to the floor of the middle-school gym he had made his base camp. Human rebels still swarmed through the forest, hiding and sniping and slipping away, killing his soldiers and attacking their supplies and leading them ever farther to the east: always north and east. Away from the mainland and away from East Meadow, and now White Plains was gone and East Meadow was emptying like a sieve. In hindsight it was obvious—the humans’ actions were a powerful deception precisely because they weren’t successful. Victory after victory, prisoner after prisoner, they had swept across the island and mopped up the guerrillas and played straight into their hands like fools. The ruse had worked, and the human civilians were getting away.

The sheer coldheartedness of it enraged him. War was war, but he had tried to conduct it honorably. He had stopped Morgan’s executions as soon as Morgan’s orders stopped coming. He had gathered the humans but he hadn’t hurt them; he’d tried to quell their uprisings peacefully when he could, and he’d worked to bring East Meadow food and water. They had repaid him with a vicious bioweapon, a campaign of terrorism, and now a nuclear explosion that had undoubtedly wiped most of the Partial species off the planet. His friends, his leaders . . . he had felt abandoned before, with no new orders for weeks, but now he was completely cut off. He would never receive new orders; he would never receive another message on the radio; he would never rejoin the rest of his army because it did not exist. He had twenty thousand Partials under his command, and there would never be reinforcements because they were the last living Partials in the world.