Ruins

“No,” said the creature. It watched the coming storm with sad, wistful eyes. “My name was Jerry Ryssdal.”

Kira felt a rush of emotion—loss and sadness, that the man she’d found was not her father, and joy, that her father was not this thing dying slowly on the beach. Guilt, that she took joy in any aspect of another man’s death. She wondered if some of those emotions were his—his sadness at dying, his joy at fixing the weather. His guilt for destroying the world.

Jerry Ryssdal was the one she knew the least about; Vale had said he lived in the south, near the eternal fires of old Houston. He’d changed himself, Vale said. Kira had never known what to make of that, but it was obvious now. A brutal barrage of gene mods to help him survive in the toxic wasteland. He’d dedicated his life to restoring the world—not the people in it, but the world itself. Somehow, impossibly, he’d done it.

The first winter will be hard, she thought, repeating his words. She’d never known a real winter; very few people had. There hadn’t been one since the old war, before the Isolation War, when buttons were pushed and hell was unleashed and the world had been changed forever. Not forever, she thought. It’s changing back now. But any change this drastic will be painful to endure.

She looked up and saw the first snowflake fall.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

“It’s not enough to go after Delarosa,” said Marcus. “We have to warn the rest of the island as well.”

“Agreed,” said Vinci. “We need to do both.”

“You can’t do either one,” said the guard. “You’re still handcuffed and locked in the back of an old supermarket.”

“Um, you’re not really a part of this conversation,” said Marcus.

“I’m sitting ten feet away from you.”

“Then plug your ears,” said Marcus. “And sing to yourself for a few minutes, too. We’re about to discuss our plans for escape.”

“Shut up, Valencio.” Woolf sighed and turned to the guard. “Soldier, if you’re in a talkative mood, I’d love to hear your justification for going along with all this. I don’t care where Delarosa sets off that nuke, it’s going to kill what few of us are left.”

The guard glowered at them and returned to his former silence, leaning back in his chair and folding his arms with a frown.

“How about this,” said Marcus, still addressing the guard. “You’re stuck here guarding us, which isn’t helping our plans or yours. How about we find some common ground: Let’s all start traveling south, to warn everyone about the nuke, and we promise we won’t slow you down or cause any trouble. Even as a loyal fan of the nuclear solution, surely you agree that people need to be warned.”

“We’re not going to just warn the humans and ignore what Delarosa is going to do to the Partials,” said Vinci.

“Well—” Marcus stopped, trying to find the right words. “I was—that was kind of going to be the part of the scheme I didn’t tell him out loud. Like, he would come over to free us because he was swayed by my brilliant and well-considered plan, and then when he got close you could jump up and . . . knock him out or something.”

Woolf groaned.

“You’re a Partial,” said Marcus. “You could beat up a guy while still in handcuffs, right?”

“That was a terrible plan,” said Vinci. “I can say without exaggeration that that’s actually the worst plan I’ve ever heard.”

“That’s not entirely fair, though,” said Marcus. “All the other plans you’ve ever heard have been designed by Partial strategists, and I’m just like a regular . . . guy.”

“The worst part,” said Vinci, “was when you revealed the entire plan right in front of the guard. You were intending to trick him, and then I asked you one question and you said everything out loud, right in front of him.”

Marcus stuttered, trying to protest.

“Maybe that was actually the best part of the plan,” said Vinci, “since it meant that we never attempted to carry out the actual plan, which as I mentioned was terrible. This way you just look stupid instead of all of us getting killed.”

“None of us would get killed,” said Marcus. “It was a great plan.” He made vague karate-style movements with his hands, though no one could see them with his hands still cuffed behind his back, and the raw skin on his wrists burned from the effort. “Super Partial combat prowess, you could totally have—”

“Will you please shut up!” said the guard. “Holy hell, it’s like listening to my little sisters.”

“You have little sisters?” asked Marcus.

“Not anymore,” said the guard, “thanks to that mongrel sitting next to you.” He pointed at Vinci, his face growing tenser and angrier. The room fell silent for a moment, but then Marcus spoke softly.

“Technically, he’s less mongrel than anyone else in this room. He was grown in a lab from custom-engineered DNA; he’s like a perfect . . . specimen, and all the rest of us are the mo—”