Ruins

“So all the experiments,” said Ariel, “all the horrible things you did to us as kids, the herbs and the physical tests and the ‘alternative medicines’ you gave me to try to figure this all out, that was all for nothing? You treated me like a test subject when I lived with you, and a liar and a pariah when I tried to run away, and it was all for this? So I could just turn out to be completely normal, and everything you were looking for wasn’t even there?”

“Negative results are still results,” said Nandita. “You have more knowledge than you did before. More truth.”

“Yeah,” said Ariel. “The only true thing you’ve ever told me.”

The group mostly fell quiet after that, discussing Riverhead only briefly and deciding to follow Ariel’s plan of cutting north around it. There was no more mention of diseases, or of using Khan as a living weapon, and lots of murmured worry about the worsening storm. It was becoming increasingly likely that they might never make it to Plum Island at all, though no one dared to say it out loud, and Ariel wondered what would happen then. Khan would die, at the very least. Isolde would fall apart. Hobb might very well abandon them.

And I can shoot Nandita, Ariel thought. Helping Khan is the one decent thing she’s tried to do with her life, and if she can’t do that? The world will be better off without her.

Xochi took the first watch, and Ariel slept fitfully by the fire, one side too hot and the other still freezing. She dreamed of flowers, and the garden she used to keep as a child in Nandita’s house. She’d been so proud of them, and when she’d moved away she’d started a new garden: daylilies and salvia and geraniums; joe-pye weeds and black-eyed Susans. All dead now under three feet of snow.

She woke in the middle of the night to find the fire burning low; Nandita was awake, taking her watch. Ariel kept her eyes slitted, faking sleep while the old woman added more scraps of the old kitchen table to the fire. Nandita stood there a moment, warming her hands, and Ariel felt a crazy, almost overwhelming compulsion to shoot her now, right here; to rid the world of her manipulations, and save the group from their useless trek to Plum Island. They’d never make it. Killing Nandita would only hasten the inevitable and give them time to escape from the island before dying of cold or the nuclear explosion. It made so much sense. Ariel reached for her pistol, mere inches from her head, so slow and so quiet the old woman would never even notice.

Nandita pulled out the bag from around her neck, staring at it in the firelight. Ariel froze. Nandita didn’t move, simply looking at the bag, until at last she reached up with her other hand and opened it, tugging apart the strings that held it closed and pulling out the small glass vial. Inside was the plague trigger, dark brown and glistening in the firelight. Nandita unscrewed the rubber cap, dumped the liquid in the fire, and watched it disappear in a hiss of bubbles and steam. Ariel watched with her. Nandita re-stoppered the vial and tucked it back in the bag, and Ariel closed her eyes again before the old woman turned around and walked back to her window to keep watch.

Ariel watched the fire for the rest of the night.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Green heard it first, stopping in midstep and raising his head to listen. The other Partials stopped an instant later, warned by the link that something was happening. Kira tried to listen as well, but when the Partial soldiers all dropped to the ground in unison, taking cover and pulling up their rifles, she realized that her ears weren’t nearly as finely tuned. She pulled up her own rifle, crawling to the snow toward Green.

“What happened?”

“Gunshot,” said Green, and pointed down the road to a wide-open parking lot. “Two so far. Long gun, medium caliber by the sound of it. Sniper, but he missed what he was shooting at.”

“How can you tell all that?”

“If it was a real gunfight, they wouldn’t have been single shots, and we would have heard more than one gun.” He looked at her. “And if the sniper had hit what he was aiming for, he wouldn’t have had to shoot a second time.”

They crept down the road toward the sound, until the residential street gave way to a four-lane road with a massive shopping center on the other side. The closest building was a restaurant with a silhouette of a lobster on its sign; the parking lot was mostly empty. Looks like everyone in Hicksville decided to die at home, thought Kira. Beyond the restaurant was a strip mall, with a few of the storefronts blackened from a decades-old fire. Well, thought Kira, everyone but the looters.

“It came from over there,” said Falin, pointing past the strip mall to a multistory shopping mall two parking lots away.