Partials series 1-3

“All what behind? Are you talking about us? Is that what this is about? I have to sit back and watch the whole world spiral down the drain because we might have to break up? You don’t own me, Marcus—”

“I’m not saying I own you, obviously I’m not saying that. I just don’t understand why you’re ready to throw everything away for this.”

“Because it’s the only way,” said Kira. “Doesn’t that even matter to you? Can’t you see what’s going on? We are tearing ourselves apart. If I go tomorrow I might die, yes, but if I stay, we will die, inevitably, and the whole human race with us, and I refuse to live with that.”

“I love you, Kira.”

“I love you too, but—”

“But nothing,” said Marcus. “You don’t have to save the world. You’re a medic—not even a full medic yet, you’re an intern. You have a gift for science, and you can do so much more here, in the hospital. Where it’s safe. Let them go if they have to, but you stay.” His voice faltered. “Stay with me.”

Kira squeezed her eyes shut, willing him to understand. “Stay with you and what, Marcus?” She opened her eyes again, looking deeply into his. “You want to get married? You want to have a family? We can’t do any of that until RM is cured. Whether or not they lower the required age, I will spend the rest of my life pregnant: Most of those women average one a year, and all the children die. Is that really what you want? We get married, we get pregnant, and twenty years from now we have twenty dead children? There is not enough room in my heart for that; there’s not enough strength.”

“Then we’ll leave,” said Marcus. “We’ll go to one of the farms, or to a fishing village, or we’ll join the Voice, I don’t even care—anything to make you happy.”

“The Voice and the Grid are going to tear the island apart if we don’t find a cure, Marcus, we’re not going to be safe anywhere.” She stared at him, trying to understand him. “Do you honestly think I could be happy in some tiny little village somewhere, ignoring everything while the world dies?” Her voice cracked. “Do you even know me at all?”

“It will never be cured, Kira.” Marcus’s voice was small and pained. He took a deep breath, setting his jaw firmly. “You’re an idealist, you solve puzzles, and you look at something unsolvable and all you can see are the things nobody’s done yet—the crazy, harebrained things that nobody has tried because they’re crazy and harebrained. We have to face the truth: We have tried everything, we have looked everywhere, we have used every reasonable resource, and RM is still not cured because it is incurable. Dying across the river is not going to change that.”

Kira shook her head, trying to find the words she wanted. How could he say something like that? How could he even dare to think it? “You don’t . . .” She paused, crying, starting over. “How can you live like that?”

“It’s the only way we have left, Kira.”

“But how can you live without a future?”

He swallowed. “By living in the present. The world is already over, Kira. Maybe one day a baby will live, maybe not. It’s not going to change anything. All we have left is each other, so let’s enjoy it. Let’s be together, like we’ve always said we’d be, and let’s forget all this death and fear and everything else and just live. You want to leave the island, let’s leave the island—let’s go somewher no one will find us, away from the Senate and the Voice and the Partials and everything else. But let’s do it together.”

Kira shook her head again, sobbing. “Do you really love me?”

“You know I love you.”

“Then give me this one thing.” She sniffed, wiping her face, and looked him squarely in the eyes. “Don’t stop us.” He started to protest, and she cut him off. “I can’t live in the world you’re talking about. I’m leaving tomorrow, and if I die, I die, but at least I’ll die doing something. And if you love me, you won’t tell anyone what we’re doing, or where we’re going, or how to stop us. Promise me.”

Marcus said nothing, and Kira gripped his arms fiercely. “Please, Marcus, promise me.”

His voice was slow and lifeless. “I promise you.” He stepped back, pulling away from her grip. “Good-bye, Kira.”

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The wagon rolled out of town at 12:02, a small group armed for battle. Jayden had found an old salvage report for a southwestern location—a high school on the South Shore that no one had ever followed up on. Schools tended to have well-stocked nurses’ stations, so requesting Kira had been easy; this particular school was also fairly old, which made it easy to request Haru: He’d test the place for stability, and Kira would look for meds. There was nothing out of the ordinary, and Jayden’s superiors had rubber-stamped it without a second glance. The border patrol didn’t even stop them, they just saw the uniforms and waved them through.

They reached the wilderness. Phase one was a success.

Kira and Marcus had fought again last night: his final attempt to talk her out of going. It drove Kira mad that he could be so obtuse—that he could misunderstand her so completely—and she was still fuming as she sat in the Grid wagon, trying to think of something else. She looked at the group they’d assembled. Driving the wagon was the same girl they’d had on the last run, a small-framed girl named Yoon-Ji Bak. Next to her at the front of the wagon was Gabriel Vasicek, a battle-scarred mountain of a man who made the phrase “riding shotgun” sound pathetic—he was riding “chain-fed minigun,” a giant metal monstrosity with at least eight barrels. Nobody who saw him wielding it was likely to give them trouble. In the back with Kira were Jayden, Haru, and two soldiers Jayden identified as Nick and Steve—Kira had no idea which was which, and chose to think of them as Skinny and Scruffy. They watched the empty houses roll past without comment.

Jayden laid out a map of the island. “We head south on Meadowbrook, west on Sunrise, and then south on Long Beach Boulevard to the edge of the island. We’ll actually get pretty close to the school in the salvage report, just a few blocks away, so anyone who sees us and happens to get asked about it will report that we went exactly where we’re supposed to.”

Kira pointed at the map’s south shore, a rough-edged maze of bays and inlets and narrow islands. “Your path takes us over a bridge—are we sure it’s still up?”

“You’re thinking of the wooden ones,” said Haru. “These that we’ll be using are steel, and even without maintenance, they can last a lot longer than eleven years.”

“But why so far south?” asked Kira. “If somebody sees us near the school, hooray, we have a witness, but is that really likely enough to warrant going a day or more out of our way?”

“We have to head south anyway,” said Jayden, tapping the western half of the map, “for two reasons. First is the airport, the block marked ‘JFK’—it’s big and solid and we don’t use it for anything, which makes it practically the Voice capital of the island. Everyone who doesn’t want to follow the rules ends up there sooner or later.”

“Everyone but us,” said Kira.

Jayden smirked. “It’s also perfectly situated between East Meadow and the military base in Queens, which is our other big obstacle. If we travel too far north, we hit the Defense Grid, which is obviously out of the question; if we travel through the middle, we risk Voice raids out of JFK. But if we go all the way south, we avoid them both—we get pretty close to the airport, but our scouts say the Voice don’t tend to patrol that far down.” He gestured to Skinny and Scruffy; one of them nodded once, the other did nothing. “The shore has less loot to steal, and fewer people to rob, and a pretty straight shot here, to Brooklyn.” He tapped the map again, then moved his finger south, to a place called Staten Island. “This is empty as far as we know, plus the Defense Grid collapsed this bridge, so there’s no good way across. Obviously there’s nothing south of us but ocean, which means ninety-nine percent of the military is up here, in Queens, where our land and their land are closest. All together, that means the route we’ve planned cuts deep to the south and far around everything we want to avoid.”

Kira nodded, seeing their plan. “So we follow the southern coast, hope all these bridges still work, and then cut up behind the Defense Grid through”—she peered at the map labels—“Brooklyn.”

“Exactly,” said Haru, “and we cross on the Brooklyn Bridge.”

Kira frowned, studying the map. “If this area is so undefended, why aren’t we worried the Partials will sweep across it and kill us? The bombs you were talking about?”

“We’ve filled that area with every explosive we could find,” said Jayden. “There are guard posts and watchtowers all through the area, and mines and traps all over both the city and the bridges. We can avoid them because we know where they are, but an army marching through would get blown up, bogged down, and sniped to death while our own forces march down to flank them.”

“Aren’t the Partials going to have the same defenses in . . . what is it called, the Bronx?”

“Possibly, if that’s where they are, but I honestly don’t think they even care. We’re gnats to them: a few thousand humans against a million-plus Partials. They likely don’t defend as well as we do, because they don’t expect us to be stupid enough to attack.”

Kira snorted. “I don’t know if ‘we’re stupider than they think we are’ is a really great attack strategy.”

“Just trust us,” said Jayden. “We know what we’re doing. We can avoid our own mines—Nick and Steve here set half of them themselves—and we can find theirs before they get us. This will work.”

Kira looked at Skinny and Scruffy again. One of them nodded, the same one as before. His companion again stayed silent. Kira pushed her hair from her face.

“We trust all these people? Nick, Steve, Gabe, Yoon?”

“Haru picked them,” said Jayden. “He trusts them, so I have no reason not to. They know what we’re doing and why, and they agree that it’s worth the risk. I’ve met them before; they won’t turn on us or rat us out, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Just curious,” said Kira. She turned to Skinny. “What do you say? Why are you here?”

“I want a piece of a Partial.”

“Great,” said Kira. “Real upstanding motives.” She looked at Scruffy. “How about you?”

Scruffy smiled, his eyes hidden behind jet-black glasses. “I just want to save the little babies.”

“Awesome,” said Kira. She looked at Jayden and opened her eyes wide. “Awesome.”

“It’s eleven miles to Long Beach,” said Haru, “then we’re going to push west as far as we can before dark. If you need some shut-eye, now’s the time to get it. Vasicek, you got front?”

“Sir,” said Gabe.

“I’ll watch back for now. The rest of you rest up, it’s going to be a long week.”