Ruins

“Look, fellas,” said the voice, “we are trying to engage in a deadly game of cat and mouse with a psychotic murderess right now, so if you’d all just keep your noses out of other people’s business, we could get back to the nightmarish hellscape that our lives have become. Or you could just help us find her. Unless you’re working with her, in which case I really ought to stop talking, and we can all get back to shooting each other—”

“Marcus?” Kira shouted, standing up and edging carefully into the hallway. Green and Colin were both there, in cover positions of their own, linking their confusion. “Marcus Valencio! Is that you?”

There was a long moment of silence, and then she heard him again, his voice shocked and uncertain.

“Kira?”

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Kira looked up and saw Marcus on an upper balcony, leaning over with wide eyes and his jaw hanging open in abject surprise. He looked like he’d been living in the wilderness for weeks, his bronze skin flushed with sweat and adrenaline.

“Kira!”

“Marcus!”

He ran back toward the escalators, and she did the same, racing to meet him, and he clattered down them and dropped his rifle and flung his arms around her, kissing her joyously and lifting her in the air. She clung to him, laughing and weeping and kissing him back.

“I thought you were dead,” he said, over and over in her ear. “When the messages stopped and the Partials stopped looking, I thought they had you.” She felt his tears on her cheek. “What has it been, a year? A year and a half? How are you even alive?”

“What are you doing here?” she demanded, too happy to let go of him. Marcus, her best friend for years, her boyfriend for some of them. Last time she’d seen him he’d been skinny and pale, a medical intern so focused on his studies he barely left the hospital, and now he was toned and lean, quick and alert, as at home in his weathered combat fatigues as he’d ever been in his scrubs. She kissed him again. “What are you doing here?”

“Quiet down,” said Falin. “Didn’t you say something about an ambush and a murderer?”

“Crap, yes,” said Marcus, and pulled Kira down behind the escalator. “Also: murderess. Don’t be sexist, women can murder people too.”

Falin looked at Kira. “You want to tell us what’s going on here?”

“Marcus is one of my best friends in the entire world,” said Kira. “And he’s here apparently . . .” She looked at him and trailed off, waiting for him to fill in the rest.

“We were trying to find Senator Delarosa,” said Marcus. “I’ll get to that later. While passing through here, we got jumped by two Partials: They got three of us, we got one of them, and then we managed to set up what we thought was a pretty solid trap. A better one than we’d planned, it turns out, since we only hoped to catch one Partial, not . . .” He looked at Kira. “Six.”

Her heart tightened, twisting into a nervous ball. The count of six only worked if Marcus knew her secret: the murderess he’d been hunting, the four Partials Kira was traveling with, and Kira herself. She swallowed nervously. “So you know.”

“Yeah.” He closed his mouth tightly, looking at the floor. “I didn’t know for certain until just this moment, but we had kind of put all the pieces together last year.”

Kira let out a long breath and gave a dry, humorless chuckle. “I guess that saves me the trouble of finding a good way to tell you.”

“Actually I would love for you to find a good way to tell me,” said Marcus. “Knowing that it’s true and actually understanding anything about it are two completely different things, and this . . .”

“I wish I knew what to tell you.”

“How long have you known?”

“Since Morgan captured me,” said Kira. “The first time, when we broke Samm out of prison and crossed over to the mainland. When you rescued me from her, I . . . didn’t know how to tell you. You hated Partials—everyone did.”

“He seems fine enough working with Partials now,” said Falin.

“Meeting one you can work with makes all the difference,” said Marcus. “He’s a buddy of mine, and he’s chasing Delarosa right now, which is something else we need to talk about—”

“Movement!” shouted a gruff, older voice.

Marcus looked up sharply. “Is it the other Partial?”

“Don’t know who else it would be.”

“That’s Commander Woolf,” said Marcus. He grabbed his rifle from where he’d dropped it and shouted a question to the vast, empty mall. “Are we all pretty clear on the issue of friends and enemies? I don’t want anyone getting all excited and shooting the wrong person.”

“A friend of Kira’s is a friend of mine,” called Green.

“And a friend of Marcus has my sympathies,” called Woolf. “But no, I won’t shoot them.”

“She just went off the link,” said Green. “She probably put on a gas mask.”

“Damn,” said Kira. “That’s going to make this a lot harder.” She brought up her rifle and checked the barrel, making sure it was loaded and ready and safe. “You said you had an ambush planned?”