Ruins

Kira nodded. “Sure, but we were always looking for food and medicine. Sometimes you get lucky and find a survivalist who died halfway home with a trunk-load of canned food, but it was rarely ever worth our time.”

“Watch and learn.” Green walked to the passenger side and leaned in the window, pressing a button on the dashboard to pop open a small box. “This is called a glove compartment,” he said, rifling through it. “Aha.” He pulled himself back out and held up a folded Connecticut road map, in better condition than Kira had ever seen. “The compartment has a watertight seal, so the items were protected from the weather. Let’s figure out where we are.”

“Rita Drive,” said Kira, reading a weathered road sign. “A little horseshoe street off a larger road.”

Green spread the map on the hood of the car, and after some searching finally found it. Kira’s heart sank when she tapped the spot.

“We’re surrounded by lakes.”

“They’re all over this area,” said Green. He traced a winding path. “I think our best bet is to cut across this field, then follow this road, this road, and . . . this road. We might have to jump some fences, but we’ll be clear of the lakes without getting close to any of them.”

“One problem,” said Kira, and tapped her finger on a portion of his proposed route. “I came in through this gap here, trying to avoid the major roads, and that’s where I ran into the very first border marker.”

“That puts the border a lot farther from the lake than I expected,” said Green.

Now that they were out of combat, Kira’s link sense was dulling again, and she couldn’t tell how he felt about their situation—frustrated? Scared? His voice was impassive. “I wondered why we hadn’t run across any yet.”

“Be grateful that we haven’t.”

“Maybe this way,” said Green, “off the edge of the map. We can find a New York map when we cross the border.”

“That’s no good,” said Kira, thinking back to the map she’d had before. “West of here is just more lakes—there are hundreds of them. I don’t know if the Ivies patrol them, but I want to avoid them just in case. Our best bet is south.”

“South to where?” asked Green. “We may as well have this conversation now, if we’re planning our travel. I’m a deserter, so I can’t go near Morgan’s territory, and after the Ivies I’m a little leery of trying to meet up with any of the other factions.”

“I know how you feel,” said Kira. “My plan was to visit as many of the smaller factions as I could, but now . . .” She hoped the others weren’t as violent as the Ivies, and hoped even more that none of them had anything as creepy as a “Blood Man,” but how could she be sure? Should she risk it? If even one more faction captures me for some kind of . . . ritual sacrifice . . . is it worth it?

I’m trying to save the world, she thought. That’s worth anything.

She looked at Green. “I’ve never told you why I came here.”

“I was wondering about that.”

“Dr. Morgan is dangerous,” said Kira. “I assume I don’t have to tell you that, seeing as how you ran away from her.”

Green said nothing, and Kira continued. It was the first time she would propose her plan to anyone, and she was grateful it was just one person instead of a big group. She didn’t know how to present it. She already felt weird about starting with Morgan, and backtracked a bit.

“The humans are dying of RM,” she said, “and the Partials are dying of expiration. What I discovered while studying Morgan’s files is that the cure for one is the same as the cure for the other: Partials produce the cure for RM, and humans in turn are able to produce a particle that inhibits expiration in Partials. Both of the cures were engineered this way. So the only way to save both species is to live together. In peace, preferably.”

Green’s silence betrayed his skepticism. Kira went on.

“I mean we have to coexist, closely. Live in the same area, work together . . . basically just act like we’re one species instead of two.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“I’m trying to explain it,” said Kira. “The transmission of the particles would be almost impossible to replicate in a lab, not on the scale we’re talking about—tens of thousands of humans and hundreds of thousands of Partials. The two species can cure each other, but they’d have to be constantly breathing the same air. They’d have to live together without fighting.”

Green said nothing, thinking. After a moment he looked at her again. “And Dr. Morgan?”

“What about her?”

“You started this by saying she’s dangerous.”

“Right,” said Kira. “When I figured this out I left, because I didn’t trust her. She’s more likely to enslave humans than work with them.”

“So you didn’t trust Morgan, and you came out to try to find other groups of Partials who’d be more amenable to the idea of coexistence.”

“Exactly.”

Green paused for a long moment. “You’re sure that this process you’re describing works? That it’s really all this simple?”