Ruins

“It’s apparently very painful,” said Haru. “They think the bioweapon was deployed in East Meadow, in the district by Nandita’s old house, and then whoever had it moved east along a path the Partials haven’t been able to decipher yet. The symptoms look like more or less the same thing your child has—scaly skin, yellow blisters, high fever, plus the two we talked to were obviously hallucinating. They kept talking about a giant monster, and snow—”

“No way,” said Ariel. She was staring at Isolde, who was staring right back with the same stunned expression. Ariel looked at the other women, her heart sinking as she saw that each of them had apparently come to the same conclusion.

“This is a very scary sudden silence,” said Haru. “What’s going on?”

“It can’t be him,” said Isolde.

“It absolutely can be,” said Kessler. “Everywhere we’ve gone—”

“I know,” growled Isolde. “I know that it’s probably Khan. I just don’t want it to be.”

“That’s what you named him?” asked Hobb. “Khan?”

“It doesn’t make sense that Khan would catch it, too,” said Haru. “It’s designed to target Partials—”

“He is a Partial,” Isolde snapped. “So am I.” She gestured to Ariel. “We both are—ask Nandita.”

Then men looked at Ariel, then at Nandita. “What?” asked Hobb.

“It’s a long story,” said Ariel, “and Nandita’s really bad at telling it. Here are the bullet points: Nandita was a geneticist at ParaGen. They made the Partials and loaded them up with a bunch of weird diseases, including RM and an alternate disease that kills Partials. When the Partials rebelled, the wrong one got released, because the Partial-killer was only inside a handful of certain late-model Partials designed to mimic a regular human life cycle. Me, Isolde, and Kira.”

Hobb stared at her blankly. “What?” he said again.

Haru shook his head. “I think you mean ‘What the bloody hell?’”

“Ariel left out the reasons behind our actions,” said Nandita, “but the basics are all there. Isolde’s DNA is coded with the blueprints for a Partial-killing plague, and when that DNA mixed with Hobb’s to conceive Khan, it looks like it may have . . . gotten loose.”

“Gotten loose?” asked Hobb. “My son is dying of a plague you built, and all you say is that it ‘got loose’?”

“I might be able to cure him,” said Nandita. “His human half seems to be keeping him alive, and if I can get to the lab on Plum Island, they have genetics equipment that could remove the disease altogether.”

Isolde was holding Khan tightly now, rocking him gently, her eyes filled with tears.

Hobb’s face was still aghast. “You’re a Partial?”

“You need to get past that part,” said Ariel. “None of us knew until a few weeks ago.”

“Let’s take a step back to think about this,” said Kessler. “We were headed to Plum Island—and we should still go there eventually—but if he’s a bioweapon . . .”

“No,” said Isolde.

“If he killed those two soldiers outside Plainview that fast,” Kessler continued, “think what he could do if we got him into the middle of the Partial army.”

“Not a chance,” Isolde hissed. “He’s a baby, not a bomb!”

“The Partials have ruined everything we ever loved,” said Kessler. “We could end it all right now—the war, the occupation, even the hunt to find us—”

Ariel scoffed. “You want to end their hunt by just turning ourselves over?”

“We’d be in custody for a couple of days at the most,” said Kessler, “then everyone hunting us would be dead, and everyone they worked with, and we could race to Plum Island without having to stop and hide every few hours. We might be able to cure him sooner.”

“You are not using my son as a weapon!” said Isolde.

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” said Haru. “That’s why we’ve been following your trail all over the island—we have to get off now. There’s no time to attack the Partials and definitely no time to visit some lab.”

“If we don’t get there, he’ll die,” said Nandita.

“If we don’t head south as fast as we possibly can, he’ll die anyway,” said Haru. “You heard about the rocket attack in Plainview?”

Ariel nodded. “The soldiers thought we did it.”

“Wrong place at the wrong time,” said Haru. “That was the first strike of a military campaign designed to distract the Partial army and lead them north, away from East Meadow and everything south of it. We’re evacuating every human we can: out of East Meadow, off the island, and then down the coast as far as we can get.”

“We can’t run away from the Partials,” said Xochi. “We need their pheromones to cure RM.”

“I’m sure some of them will follow us,” said Haru. “There’s not going to be anywhere else to go.”

“What are you talking about?” demanded Ariel. “What’s going to happen?”

“Former senator Marisol Delarosa is carrying a nuclear device to White Plains,” said Haru. “The radius of the fallout will include a lot of Long Island—we don’t know how much, or where, so it’s safer to just be gone. Traveling north and east toward your lab is just following the wind, and taking you farther into trouble.”

“How on earth did she get a nuke?” asked Kessler.