Fragments (20 page)

“But why?”

Heron glanced at Samm, almost imperceptibly, but didn’t answer.

“She’s helping me,” said Samm. “Dr. Morgan has put all her efforts into looking for
you.”

Kira nodded, phrasing her next question carefully. “How much does she know?”

“I know you’re a Partial,” said Heron, “if that’s what you’re asking. Some kind of
crazy Partial none of the doctors could identify.” She smiled slightly, raising her
eyebrow. “I take it you’re still keeping this a secret? You never told your human
friends before you left them?”

“It’s not that easy,” said Kira.

“It’s the easiest thing in the world,” said Heron, “unless . . . You’re still trying
to play both sides, aren’t you? Partial and human at the same time? Trying to save
both? Not gonna work.”

Kira felt herself growing angry. “You’re suddenly the expert on my life?”

Heron raised her hands in mock defensiveness. “Whoa, tiger, where’d all the hostility
come from?”

Kira nearly snarled. “The last time I saw you, you were strapping me down to an operating
table. You worked for Dr. Morgan then, and I don’t see why I should trust you now.”

“Because I haven’t killed you yet.”

“I don’t think you understand trust very well,” said Kira.

“You can trust her because I trust her,” said Samm. He paused. “That is, assuming
you still trust me.”

Kira studied him, remembering how he’d betrayed her—and how he’d saved her. Did she
trust him? A little, yes, but how much? She blew out a long breath of air and gestured
helplessly. “Give me a reason.”

“I defected from Dr. Morgan’s faction when I freed you from the lab,” said Samm. “Heron
followed us, waited for you to leave, and after we had discussed everything we’d seen,
she proposed a plan: finding our own cure for the expiration date. That’s why we had
joined Morgan’s faction in the first place, but her methods had become . . . distasteful.”

Kira raised an eyebrow. “That’s an understatement.”

“The expiration date is going to kill us in less than two years,” said Heron, and
Kira heard a flash of cold anger in her voice. “Every single Partial in the world,
dead. Faced with genocide, Morgan’s methods don’t seem quite so extreme.”

Kira glanced at Heron, then back at Samm. “And yet you still left her.”

“We left because of you,” said Samm. Kira felt a flush of warmth creep through her
body, but listened quietly as Samm continued. “Discovering that you were a Partial
changed everything, Kira—you are literally, right now, exactly what we’ve hoped to
be for almost twenty years.”

“Lost?”

“Human.” Samm tapped the photo of her as a little girl. “You age. You grow. You aren’t
enslaved to a chemical caste system. Dr. Morgan’s preliminary scans of your body suggest
that you’re not even sterile.”

Kira furrowed her brow. “How do you know this?”

“We’ve been spying on her ever since you left,” said Samm, “trying to stay one step
ahead. She’s looking for you everywhere—the entire Long Island invasion is a last-ditch
effort to find you and finish her experiments.”

“But how can she not know what I am?” asked Kira.

“Dr. Morgan is convinced that the secret behind our expiration date has something
to do with you,” said Samm. “She’s still experimenting on humans, but her main focus
is on two things: She wants to find you, and she wants to find the Trust.”

“You mean the rest of the Trust,” said Kira. Samm frowned, confused, and Kira explained.
“Dr. Morgan is part of the Trust,” she said. “McKenna Morgan, specialist in bionanotechnology
and human augmentation. She worked at ParaGen for years—I’ve got her whole résumé
upstairs.”

Samm frowned. “How could she work at ParaGen if she’s part of the Trust? They’re not
human scientists, they’re Partial generals and doctors who stepped up to lead us after
the Break.”

Kira pursed her lips. “We’d better go upstairs.”

Afa was gone, leaving nothing but a smoking hole in the wall of the eighth floor:
He’d used a small shaped charge to blow a hole between this building and the adjacent
one, and slipped out while Kira was fighting Heron and Samm. He’d taken his backpack,
but he hadn’t blown them up, and Kira knew he’d come back soon—he couldn’t stand to
leave his library for long. In the meantime she led Samm and Heron to one of the records
rooms, a former sound booth with a wide table and a ring of co-opted filing cabinets.
This was where Afa stored his most extensive, most valuable records about the inner
workings of ParaGen, and Kira had been going through them steadily during her breaks
from the radio. As the Partials grew more canny, and the human army retreated away
from effective radio range, those breaks were getting longer and more plentiful.

“This one first,” said Kira, hanging her oil lantern on a hook in the wall, and setting
out a printed sheet from an old company email. “It’s a meeting request from the financial
manager to the top staff of the ParaGen labs. This part at the top is a list of email
addresses—it’s like code names, kind of, that the computer system used to deliver
messages to people.”

“We’re familiar with email,” said Heron.

“Hey,” said Kira, “this technology is all new to me—I was five when you blew everything
up, remember?”

“Go on,” said Samm.

Kira looked at the two Partials, noting for the first time how different they were:
Samm, like before, was straightforward; he didn’t say half of what he felt, but what
he did say was simple and utilitarian. He’d explained his taciturn nature as a side
effect of the link: It carried most of their emotional information, so their speech
didn’t need to. Partials used their voices to convey ideas, and their pheromones to
convey the social context of those ideas: how they felt about it, how nervous or relaxed
or excited they were. For a human observer not connected to the link, it made the
Partials seem cold and robotic. Heron, in contrast, was a remarkably human communicator—she
used facial tics, voice modulation, slang, even body language in a way Kira hadn’t
seen from any other Partials.
Well
, thought Kira,
any other Partials but me. I can barely detect the link, though, and I grew up without
any access to it at all. I talk like a human because I’ve been communicating with
them my whole life.

What’s Heron’s explanation?

Samm was looking at her expectantly, and Kira turned back to the printout. “I’ve cross-referenced
this email list with some of the other records Afa’s got in here, and I think these
six people are the Trust—maybe not the whole Trust, but I’m pretty sure most of the
Trust ringleaders were in this group.” She pointed to each address as she named them
off. “Graeme Chamberlain, Kioni Trimble, Jerry Ryssdal, McKenna Morgan, Nandita Merchant,
and . . .” She paused. “Armin Dhurvasula. Some of those names probably look familiar.”

“General Trimble runs B Company,” said Samm. “We’ve known for a while she was part
of the Trust—but like I said, the Trust are all Partials, not humans. And this Dr.
Morgan—there’s probably more than one Dr. Morgan in the world, there’s no guarantee
this is the same one.”

“Take a look at her info page,” said Kira, handing him a stack of papers, “printed
from the company website. There’s a photo.”

Heron took the stack, Samm reading over her shoulder as she flipped through it. They
paused on the photo, studying it carefully; it wasn’t the best quality, but the image
was unmistakable. Kira had only been with the doctor for a few minutes, but her face
was scarred into her memory. It was the same woman.

Heron set down the papers. “Dr. Morgan is a Partial. She’s on the link—we’ve all felt
it. She’s been with us since before the Break. She’s immune to RM. Hell, she survived
a gunfight with Samm in close quarters back when you escaped—that’s a sure sign of
heightened Partial reflexes. There’s no way she’s a human.”

Kira nodded and dug into another filing cabinet. “One of these records is a report
from a corporate investigator; apparently some of the members of the Trust had been
giving themselves Partial gene mods. The company leaders flipped out when they found
out about it.”

“Partial gene mods?” asked Samm. “What does that even mean?”

“Before they got into the business of biosynthetic organisms,” said Kira, “ParaGen
got its start in biotech, making genetic modifications for humans—they’d fix congenital
defects, improve people’s strength and reflexes, even do cosmetic mods like breast
augmentation. By the Break, nearly every person born in a hospital in America had
some sort of genetic modification customs built by ParaGen or another biotech firm.
This report doesn’t go into detail, but it specifically says ‘Partial gene mods.’
I think some of the members of the Trust were using the same technology they made
for you—us—on themselves.”

“They gave themselves the link and then used it to control us,” said Heron. Her voice
dripped with venom.

“So they made themselves into . . . half-Partials,” said Samm. He didn’t show it as
obviously, but Kira could tell he was just as disturbed as Heron was, though maybe
not so angry. He paused, then looked at Kira. “Do you think maybe that’s what you
are?”

“I thought the same thing,” she answered, “but there’s no way to know for sure without
a closer look at the bioscan Morgan took of me. Every doctor in the room seemed pretty
certain I was a Partial, though, not just a hybrid. They spoke of Partial-specific
codes written on my DNA. But I’m not ruling anything out.”

Heron looked back at the list. “So Morgan’s part of the Trust. So is your friend Nandita.”
She looked up, staring at Kira, and Kira got the sudden sense that she was being analyzed—not
by a scientist, but by a predator. She half expected Heron to pounce forward and take
a bite from her neck.

Kira looked down, too uncomfortable to hold the girl’s gaze. “Nandita left me a message,”
she said. She fished the photo from her backpack pocket and handed it to Samm. “I
found this in my house three months ago; it’s the reason I left. That’s Nandita, that’s
my father, Armin Dhurvasula, and that’s me in the middle. Kira . . . Dhurvasula.”
It still felt strange to say it. For all she knew, it might not even be her name.
She’d never been officially adopted, as far as she could guess, because all the papers
she’d read from the time period implied that Partials weren’t legally defined as people.
She wouldn’t bear her father’s surname any more than a dog would, or a television.

Samm stared at the photo intently, his dark eyes flicking back and forth across the
image. Heron seemed more interested in the various Trust-related documents scattered
across the table. “So your father created you at ParaGen,” said Samm. “He knew you
were a Partial. And so did your guardian on Long Island.”

“But she never told me about it,” said Kira. “She raised me like a human—I think my
dad did, too. At least I don’t remember any reason to think that he didn’t. But why?”

“He wanted a daughter,” said Samm.

“You were part of their plan,” said Heron, shaking her head. “All of us are. We just
don’t know what it is, and what each member’s part was in creating it.” She held up
another email, one Kira had been looking at the night before. “This says Dr. Morgan
was assigned to ‘performance and specifications.’”

“I think that means she programmed your super-soldier attributes,” said Kira. “Each
member of the Trust had a part in the creation of the Partials, and her part was all
the extra gizmos that make you what you are—enhanced reflexes, enhanced vision, accelerated
healing, stronger muscles, and so on and so on. The rest of the team tried to make
you as human as possible; it was Dr. Morgan who made you . . . more.”

“And she’s still doing it,” said Samm. He set the photo down and looked at Kira somberly.
“I’ve overheard some reports about Morgan messing with the Partial genome, and Heron
says she’s seen it in person.”

Heron raised an eyebrow, still sifting through the pages on the table. “Apparently
she can’t stop tinkering.”

“Is she trying to just work around the expiration date?” asked Kira. “Maybe she can’t
find the genes that kill you after twenty years, so she’s adding in new mods to try
to dampen them.”

“Maybe,” said Samm, “if something like that is even possible. But she’s mostly doing
more . . . well, like you said: augmentation. Making certain Partials stronger or
faster. They say she has a whole squad that can breathe underwater. She’s drifting
further way from the human template.”

“Sounds like she’s turned her back on humanity across the board,” said Kira. “Or maybe
just given up on it.”

“She had help at ParaGen,” said Heron, picking up another sheet of paper. “Look. Jerry
Ryssdal was assigned to the same project, or another part of it.”

Kira nodded, marveling at Heron’s ability to sort through the information scattered
across the table. It had taken Kira days to find these connections, but Heron was
putting it all together in a matter of minutes. “I don’t know exactly what Ryssdal’s
contribution was,” Kira said, “but I think you’re right. Some of them worked in pairs.”

“But not all?” Samm prompted.

Kira shrugged. “I honestly have no idea. We’re talking about the biggest secrets of
an incredibly secretive company, and the even more secretive inner circle that was
apparently working both for and against them. Even the basic information is buried
in layers of security and coded emails, and I can’t even be sure if the clues I’ve
found are real or just disinformation designed to throw people off the trail. Afa’s
spent years on this, even before the Break, but it’s just . . . incomplete. We don’t
have the answers.

“He’s . . .” Kira paused, not certain how to articulate the big man’s condition. “He’s
been alone for a very long time, let’s put it that way. I think it kind of broke his
brain, but even broken he’s a genius. He was collecting information on the end of
the world before it even ended. He’s got stuff about the Isolation War, and the biotech
industry, and the Partials, and . . . everything. He worked for ParaGen, running part
of their computer system, which is where most of this stuff comes from.” She gestured
around the room, and Samm nodded appreciatively.