Fragments (30 page)

“That’s not good,” said Samm. “We’ll never get these running again.”

“Then we hope what we want’s on another floor,” said Afa, and splashed down a row
of servers to a large metal tank. “And we hope they have more of these up there with
it.”

“It’s a gas tank,” said Kira, and Afa nodded enthusiastically.

“And the generator’s right next to it. This is where we need the paint thinner.”

“I still don’t get that,” said Kira.

“Gas degrades over time,” said Samm, nodding as if he understood everything. “The
petroleum inside turns into resin, like a thick gum. That is why none of the cars
work anymore.”

“Everybody knows that,” said Kira.

“That is why he’s looking for paint thinner,” said Samm. “It breaks down resin and
turns it back into gasoline. The exhaust would be toxic, like he said before, but
the generator would run.”

“At least long enough for us to get our data,” said Afa. He clambered up on a metal
stair and started straining against the valve on the tank.

“I’ll open it,” said Samm, pushing him gently aside. “You two find some paint thinner.”

“Yes, sir,” said Kira primly, and managed to stifle a curtsy as she turned to leave.
Heron followed her out and spoke softly as they left the building.

“Glad to see you two getting along so well,” said Heron. “Anything you want to tell
me before you stab Samm in the face?”

Kira didn’t answer, scanning the storefronts for anything that looked like it might
sell hardware. She took a breath, trying to calm herself. “Do you think humans are
inferior?”

“I think everyone’s inferior.”

Kira stopped, looking back to glare at Heron, then turned again and kept walking.
“Do you think that’s the answer I’m looking for?”

“It’s a fact,” said Heron. “Facts are too busy being true to worry about how you feel
about them.”

“But you’re a person, not a fact—how do
you
feel about it?”

“Partials live in a caste system,” said Heron. “The soldiers are the best fighters,
the generals are the best leaders and problem solvers, the doctors have the most knowledge
and manual dexterity. It’s how we were built—there’s no shame in knowing that you’ve
been outsmarted by a general, because they are designed, from the genetic level, to
outsmart everyone.” She bowed slightly, an immodest smile creeping over her face.
“But I’m an espionage model, and we’re designed to beat everyone at everything. Independent
operatives who function outside the normal command structure, facing problems in every
category and overcoming them without outside assistance. How could I not feel superior
when I demonstrably am?” She paused, and her smile turned more serious. “When I suggested
that you might be an espionage model as well, that’s pretty much the best compliment
I can give.”

“You don’t get it,” said Kira. “You or Samm or any of the other Partials.” She stopped
walking again, throwing up her hands in frustration. “How do you think this is going
to end? You kill us and we kill you until nobody’s left?”

“I’m pretty sure we’ll win,” said Heron.

“And then what?” asked Kira. “In two more years you’ll all be past your twenty-year
limit, and you’ll be dead. And if any of us live through the war, we’ll die with you,
because we need your pheromone to live. And what if we avoid the war? What if we find
something in this data center and we cure RM and expiration and we go on with our
lives? We’ll both live and we’ll both hate each other and sooner or later we’ll have
another war, and we’re never going to escape it unless we change the way we think.
So no, Heron, I don’t like your facts or your attitude or your self-righteous explanation
of why it’s okay to be a racist, fascist jerk. Damn it, where is there a hardware
store?” They turned another corner, and Kira saw a sign that looked promising, storming
toward it in waterlogged boots. She didn’t bother looking to see if Heron was behind
her.

The store was odd, a kind of combination pet store/home repair store, but they did
have paint thinner, and Kira loaded up with two gallon cans per fist. When she turned
around, Heron was right behind her, and she grabbed four cans as well. They stomped
back through the water to the generators, being careful to follow the same exact route
in case there were any collapses or sinkholes they’d missed on the way out.

By the time they got back, Samm and Afa had managed to open the gas valve, and Afa
was probing the tank with a long piece of rebar.

“Glued almost solid,” he said. “This could take a while.”

“There are a few more cans in the store if we need them,” said Kira, setting the cans
heavily on the metal grating near the tank. “I brought a funnel.”

“First we need to make sure this is the right tank,” said Afa. “Samm looked around,
and there are several more on this floor, and from the looks of this wiring there
are more upstairs as well.”

“That means we can’t put it off any longer,” said Samm. “We have to figure out which
server ParaGen’s data is on.”

Afa nodded. “Records of which servers are ParaGen’s will be found in an administration
office; probably upstairs.”

They found the nearest staircase and trudged up; Kira exulted in the feeling as she
finally stepped up above the water level. The second story held nothing but servers,
as did the third, but the fourth had a number of small offices along one row of broken
windows. Afa set down his pack and zipped it open, pulling out a Tokamin—a phone-shaped
battery that provided nearly perpetual power, but only in small quantities, and the
device’s benefits had traditionally been negated by the ambient radiation it emitted.
The old world had never produced them beyond the proof of concept, and though the
survivors on Long Island had toyed with the idea, they’d deemed it too dangerous for
practical use. When you only have a handful of humans left, there’s no sense giving
them cancer. Afa, it seemed, had made his own; Kira stepped back from it, and noticed
that Samm and Heron did the same. Afa pressed the button to power it on, and Kira
cringed, half expecting a burst of gaseous green energy, but all it did was light
up a small doughnut-shaped icon in the center. He plugged it into the desk computer,
one of the black-framed glass ones Kira had seen in the Manhattan ParaGen office,
and turned it on.

The desk flickered, a five-foot panel of clear glass—on, off, on, on, off. With a
final burst of blue light the desk lit up, showing essentially a larger version of
Afa’s handheld screen. It was like a window had opened into another world, replacing
the sheet of glass with a view of a verdant green jungle, so sharp and clear Kira
reached out to touch it. It was the same glass, covered with drifts of dust and dirt,
and marred here and there by pixelated glitches in the image. Glowing softly in the
center was a small box requesting a password, and Afa tried a few simple words before
turning back to his pack and rooting around for something.

“Look for notes,” he said, gesturing haphazardly at the rest of the room. “Seventy-eight
percent of office workers leave their passwords written down near their computers.”
Kira and Samm scoured the ruined office for pieces of paper, though twelve years of
broken windows and full access to the elements had left the room so disheveled she
didn’t expect to find anything useful. Heron turned instead to the room’s few remaining
photos, turning them around to see if any had names on the back. While they searched,
Afa retrieved a memory stick from his backpack and inserted it into a port in the
frame of the desk. Before anyone could find a password, Afa barked a short laugh.
“Got it.”

Kira looked up. “The password?”

“No, but these desks had a maintenance mode, and I was able to trigger it. I can’t
see any of the data, and I can’t modify anything at all, but this will let me see
the settings and, more importantly, the file tree.” The image on the screen wasn’t
even an image anymore; the jungle and the icons had been replaced with scrolling text,
broken into branches and offshoots like a word-based root system. Afa’s fingers flew
across the image, expanding it here, compressing it there, flipping past row after
row of names and files. “This is perfect.”

“So you’re going to be able to find the ParaGen servers?” asked Samm. Afa nodded,
his eyes glued to the screen. Samm waited a moment, then asked, “How long?”

“Unless we get really lucky, most of the night,” said Afa. “Can you bring me some
more of that nacho sauce?”

S
amm stirred the gas tank, and Kira heard a satisfying slosh as the liquid inside slapped
against the metal walls. “Sounds like we’re ready.”

“This should give us enough juice to power the whole floor for most of the day,” said
Afa. Samm screwed the valve tight on the gas tank, they all stepped back, and Afa
flipped the switch to start it. On the fourth try it spluttered, stiff from disuse,
and on the seventh it roared angrily to life. Almost immediately the emergency lighting
came on, those few bulbs that hadn’t burned out or broken, and moments later the klaxons
on the ceiling began to sound, two of them blaring an urgent warning that the power
supply to the data center had been compromised, and the third merely hissing air and
dislodging a cloud of dust.

Heron looked at them through slitted eyes. “That’s going to get annoying.”

“Let’s go,” said Afa. “We don’t have long.”

“I thought you said we had power for most of the day?” asked Kira.

“Power yes, but cooling no. That entire facility next door is just to keep this one
cool, and there’s no way to get that running again—even if we could get it started,
it uses some rare chemicals we’re not going to find in the corner doggie hardware
store. Without a cooling system, these servers could melt their circuits and each
other pretty quickly.”

The ParaGen server was two rows over, and about halfway down; physically close to
the generator that served it and about eighty other machines. Even with the generator
running, the servers didn’t seem to have enough power to get going, so Afa sent Kira
and Samm around to every other computer on the same circuit with an order to cut the
power. It took Kira a while to figure out which of the many cables was for power,
but once she found the first one, the rest were simple. She’d done about twenty, still
not speaking to Samm, when Afa shouted triumphantly.

“It’s on!”

Samm stood to go back, but Kira kept working. If unplugging half of them helped, unplugging
the rest would help even more; besides, she was still mad at both Samm and Heron,
and didn’t want to be around them. How could they be so closed-minded? Racism had
all but disappeared since the Break, with humans of every shape and color working
together freely because there was literally no one else to work with. Kira remembered
one holdout in an outer fishing village, a man she’d met on a salvage run who’d called
her a towelhead for her obvious Indian ancestry, but he was such a bitter, solitary
man, and she had lived so long without any kind of ethnic hate, that the insult rolled
off her almost humorously. It was joke, a thing to laugh about with her friends:
Was this guy for real?
On Long Island, everyone worked together, everyone got along, and no matter what
you looked like, you were still human.

. . . unless you were a Partial.

She paused, a discarded power cable in her hand, suddenly seeing the situation from
the other side. Just as Samm and Heron saw themselves as innately superior, the humans
saw all Partials as innately evil—so different, and so lesser, that they didn’t even
qualify as people. Up until a few months ago she’d thought the same thing, but it
had all changed when she met Samm.

Samm.

He was the one who’d convinced her, through his words and actions, that Partials were
just as intelligent, just as empathic, just as angry and fractured, just as . . .
human, really. They had different biology, but their thoughts and feelings were almost
identical. She herself was the greatest proof of that: She had felt human for years—she
still felt human. What the hell was she? In a sudden rush she felt the full weight
of every mile she’d crossed from East Meadow to here, every river that separated her
from her friends, every mountain that rose up to keep them apart. She felt tears flood
her eyes, wondering what she was doing, why she was here, what she was trying to change.
Her friends, her sisters, Marcus, all together, it had all been so happy and simple.
Their lives weren’t perfect, but they were lives. They were happy. She sat on the
floor, sobbing and alone.

The generator stopped humming, and the room went suddenly dark.

She heard boots pounding on the floor, and Afa’s sudden cry of alarm: “I lost it!”
She looked up, saw the soft glow from his screen peeking through the gaps between
the computer towers, and opened her mouth to ask what had happened.

But before she could, a burst of gunfire tore through the air, putting out the light
with a tinkling shatter of glass. Kira dropped to the ground, crouching behind a computer
tower.

The computer rooms in the data center were sealed from all outside interference; there
were no windows, which meant that without the lights it had become nearly pitch-black.
Random snippets of link data assaulted Kira, always easier to detect in a high-stress
situation: the sudden shock of being ambushed, the confusion of not knowing where
the attack was coming from, the alarm of a wounded comrade. Kira tried to piece it
together: They’d been attacked somehow, by someone incredibly capable, but who? They
hadn’t seen any sign that Chicago was occupied. Was there some group hiding in there?
Or had they been followed? By humans or Partials?

She was still frightfully amateur when it came to processing link data, but she tried
to think hard about what it felt like when Samm and Heron had entered Afa’s compound,
trying to truly read the emotion behind it. All of it seemed to be coming from Samm
and Heron, not the attackers. That meant the ambushers were either human or Partials
wearing gas masks—a common tactic when Partials fought one another. Kira stayed still,
listening, trying to figure out where each person was. The generator had been turned
off, or outright destroyed, which meant that one of the attackers was there; Afa’s
screen had shattered, too, which meant one of the attackers had been somewhere with
a clean shot at it. That would likely be two rows to her right, though whether they
were in front of her or behind her, she didn’t know. Had Afa been shot as well? She
felt something in the link about a wounded comrade, but she didn’t know who or where.