Fragments (42 page)

“But who’s fighting?” asked Woolf. “All of Morgan’s forces are on Long Island.”

“There are other . . . issues,” said Vinci.

“Issues?” asked Marcus. “I thought you were going to say ‘other factions.’ What does
‘other issues’ mean?”

Vinci said nothing, and Marcus couldn’t tell whether he was thinking of a response
or just refusing to answer. They waited, trying to decipher his actions, when a voice
called out from the far side of the room.

“Trimble’s ready for you.”

They all looked up, surging to their feet. Diadem practically ran to the guard at
the big double doors, but he stopped her with a look and, presumably, a burst of link
data. “Not you, the humans.”

“I’ve been here longer.”

“Trimble wants to see them,” said the guard. He looked at Vinci. “Bring their commander
and their ‘Partials relations consultant’ and follow me.”

The hallway beyond the double doors was wide and clean, nearly empty because of what
Marcus was starting to recognize as the Partials’ typically pragmatic style—they didn’t
need
any plants or pictures or cute little tables in this hallway, so they didn’t have
any. At the end of the hall was another cluster of doors, one of which was surprisingly
loud; Marcus could hear shouted arguments and . . .
yes, and gunfire
.
Why is there gunfire?
The guard opened this door and a wave of cacophony rolled out to envelop them, shouts
and cries and whispers and battle, and Marcus recognized it as the chaotic blend of
multiple radios all blaring at once. The room itself, as they entered it, was lined
with wall screens and portable screens and speakers of every shape and size and even,
in one corner, another holovid depicting a giant glowing map of New York, including
Long Island, as well as parts of New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and even further
north. It wasn’t a multitude of radios, but of video feeds. Red dots blinked on the
map, faces and bodies ran back and forth on the screens, Jeeps and trucks and even
tanks rumbled through televised walls and cities and forests. In the center of it
all, bathed in the light and sound of a hundred different screens, was a single woman
sitting at a circular desk.

“That’s her,” said the guard, standing to the side and closing the door behind them.
“Wait for her to talk to you.”

Woolf and Vinci stepped forward; Marcus, more self-conscious, hung back by the door
guard. The woman was facing away, so Woolf cleared his throat loudly to get her attention.
She either didn’t hear him, or ignored him outright.

Marcus looked at the screens lining the walls. Many of them showed the same scene,
often from the same perspective, though he guessed that of the hundred or so screens
there were still several dozen separate feeds. Most showed battle scenes, and he assumed
that they were live; Trimble was watching the war unfold from a central location,
the way Kira had done with her radios. He wondered again where Kira had gone, and
if he would ever see her again. Most of East Meadow had given her up for dead, no
one having come forward to end D Company’s murderous occupation, but he still held
hope—probably vain hope, he knew—that she would survive.

One of the largest screens was repeating a single scene: a running soldier, an explosion
of mud and grass, and then it would all rewind in rapid motion. The flailing man would
fly forward, land lightly on the ground, and run backward while the earth knit itself
together again, and then suddenly the feed would reverse once more and the man would
run forward and the ground beneath him would explode. After the fourth such cycle,
Marcus realized that the speed and the stopping points were slightly different each
time—it wasn’t on a loop, someone was manipulating it, back and forth, searching for
. . . something. He stepped forward, circling slightly to the side, and saw that Trimble
was sitting at a faintly glowing desk-screen, her fingers sliding back and forth across
a series of digital dials and sliders. She zoomed in and out, she wound the video
backward and forward, and all the time the young man died in the explosion, over and
over and over again.

“Excuse me,” said Woolf.

“Wait for her to talk to you,” said the guard.

“I’ve been waiting all week,” said Woolf, and strode forward. The guard stepped up
to follow him, but Vinci waved him off. “General Trimble,” said Woolf, “my name is
Asher Woolf, I’m a commander with the Long Island Defense Grid and a senator in the
Long Island government. I’ve come to you as a duly appointed representative of the
last remaining human population on Earth, to broker a treaty of peace and a sharing
of resources.” Trimble didn’t respond, or even acknowledge him. He stepped forward
again. “Your people are dying,” he said, gesturing at the death and destruction that
plastered the walls. “My people are dying, too, and we both know it’s not just from
fighting. We’re sterile and diseased, both of us. In a few more years we will all
be dead no matter what we do—no matter how many wars we win or lose, no matter how
many times we shoot or shoot back or lay down our arms. Your people have two years
left, I understand; mine will live longer but still be just as dead in the end. We
have to work together to change this.” He stepped forward again. “Do you hear me?”

The guard moved in as Woolf’s voice rose, but Vinci ran forward to Woolf’s side. “Thank
you very much for seeing us, General,” said Vinci. “We realize that you’re very busy,
coordinating so many different wars at once—”

“She’s not coordinating anything,” said Woolf quickly, gesturing at the screens dismissively.
“She’s just watching.”

“Please check your tone or I will ask you to leave,” said the guard.

“You want me to wait quietly?” asked Woolf. “I can wait quietly. I’ve been waiting
for a day and a night out there, but we don’t have time—”

“Be quiet,” said Trimble softly, and Marcus stepped back in surprise as Vinci and
the guard both staggered under the weight of her will. The guard regained his footing
and stared silently at Woolf; Vinci opened his mouth, his face turning red with the
effort, but he couldn’t speak. Marcus had seen the same thing when Dr. Morgan had
ordered Samm to obey her—the leader commanded, and thanks to the link the Partials
had no choice but to obey.

“We’re not Partials,” said Woolf. “You can’t just force our minds with your ‘link.’”

“I’m not a Partial either,” said Trimble.

This stopped Woolf in his tracks, confused. Marcus saw him struggling for a response
and stepped forward with the first thing he could think of—anything to keep her talking.

“You’re human?” he asked.

“I used to be.”

“What are you now?”

“Guilty,” said Trimble.

Now it was Marcus’s turn to be shocked into silence. He cast about for something to
say, and finding nothing, he simply walked forward, putting himself between Trimble
and the view screen. Forcing her to look at him. She was an older woman, late sixties,
maybe, the same age as Nandita and with similar coloring.
Nandita is the other reason we’re here
, he thought.
We need to find her, too, just like Kira.
He seized on this thought, and when her eyes finally met his, he spoke softly.

“I’m looking for a friend of mine,” he said. “Another human. A woman named Nandita
Merchant. Do you know her?”

A spark of recognition lit up in Trimble’s eye, and Marcus considered again her statement
that she had once been human; no Partial he’d met was that visually expressive. Her
hands came up to her face, half covering her mouth, her eyes going wide. “Is Nandita
alive?”

“I don’t know,” said Marcus softly, still surprised that the woman seemed to know
who Nandita was. “We haven’t seen her in months. Do you know . . . anything about
her? Maybe you’ve seen something on your screens to help us find her?” He paused,
watching her face, watching her eyes grow moist with tears. He decided to push his
luck just one step further. “We haven’t seen Kira Walker, either.”

An odd look passed over her face, like she was peering into a long-forgotten memory.
“Nandita didn’t have anything to do with Kira,” she said, cocking her head to the
side. “Hers was called . . . Aura, I think. Aria. No, Ariel; it was Ariel.”

Marcus’s eyes went wide, a thousand questions crowding his mind so abruptly that none
of them managed to come out. Ariel? Trimble knew about Nandita and Ariel? That could
only mean that Nandita had communicated with her at some point; maybe she’d even come
here. And yet Trimble had asked if Nandita was alive, implying that even if she’d
come here before, she was gone now. As he searched for words an alarm sounded, and
Trimble swung her chair to the side, tapping a button on her console that sent a rippling
cascade across the wall of screens, calling up a score of new videos and images: roaring
artillery, crumbling buildings, long lists of names and numbers scrolling by so fast
Marcus couldn’t hope to read them.

“A new assault,” said the guard, apparently recovered from his forced silence. He
stepped forward to tap a small console of his own, glancing at the holovid map. “Inside
the city this time.”

“An assault here?” asked Woolf. He reached for his waist, grasping at something that
wasn’t there, and Marcus found himself doing the same—reflexively reaching for a weapon.
If an army of Partials attacked, their band of humans was trapped in the middle without
so much as a pointy stick.

And they still haven’t told us who is attacking,
thought Marcus. Knowing that they were covering something up scared him more than
anything else.

“This isn’t supposed to happen,” said Trimble, her eyes only half-focused on the charts
and videos that filled the wall before her. “None of this is supposed to happen.”

“You have to help us!” said Woolf. “We have to help each other!”

“Leave me,” said Trimble, and suddenly the Partials were walking for the door, grabbing
Woolf and Marcus as they went. Their grips were like iron, and they pulled the humans
outside as if they were children; Woolf and Marcus fought back, shouting all the way,
but it was useless. The guard closed the door solidly behind them, and Marcus saw
now that Vinci was panting for breath, flexing his empty hands and staring at the
floor; Marcus couldn’t tell if it was anger, exertion, or something else. Hatred?
Shame?

“I’m sorry,” said Vinci. “I’d hoped . . . I’m sorry. I warned you, but still. I’d
hoped for something more.”

“L
et us back in!” Woolf snarled.

“We’re in the middle of a war,” said Vinci. “There’s fighting in the city—if things
go poorly, there’ll be fighting here, in this building. She doesn’t have time to talk
to you.”

“But she’s not doing anything,” said Marcus. He looked around at the others, and the
Partials didn’t meet his eyes. “We all saw her, it was textbook traumatic stress.
She’s unfocused, she’s acting by rote, half the time she didn’t even seem aware of
her surroundings. That can’t be who you have leading your armies.”

The Partials were silent.

“She said she was human,” said Woolf. “Worse than that, she said she used to be human.
What does that mean? I thought she was a Partial general.”

“Except all the Partial generals are men,” said Marcus, remembering Samm’s explanation
of the caste system. “Each model was grown for its ideal job. The older Partial women
were all doctors.”

“This was not a Partial woman,” said Woolf. “She was human, or . . . she used to be.”
He had fire in his eyes. “Tell us what’s going on.”

“I’m sorry we pulled you out,” said Vinci. “There was nothing we could do.”

“You could disobey,” said Woolf.

“No, they couldn’t,” said Marcus, realization dawning. “She used the link. She told
them to leave and they were compelled to do it, whether they wanted to or not.”

Woolf frowned. “What kind of human woman becomes a Partial general and has access
to the pheromonal link?” He looked at the two Partials. “What is going on?”

When Vinci answered, the other soldier put a hand on his arm to stop him; Vinci ignored
him and spoke anyway. “She’s been like this for a while now. We’ve been fighting Morgan
for years, mostly just little skirmishes, all stemming from one fundamental disagreement:
what to do with you humans on Long Island. Whether or not your existence is a threat,
or a necessity. Whether we had the right to exterminate your race, or leave you alone
and let you live or die as best you could, or whether it would be in our best interest
to keep a population alive . . . But when the expiration date kicked in and people
started dying, it got worse. Morgan wanted to start using the humans as test subjects,
experimenting on them, and Trimble didn’t think it was right. Or, at least, didn’t
think it was the right time. But while Morgan’s been getting stronger, rallying more
Partials to her cause and becoming more violent in her methods, Trimble has been refusing
to act. When she says anything, she says she doesn’t want to condone a course of action
that could lead to the eradication of the human species. But she is offering no alternative,
no course of action whatsoever, and with more Partials expiring every day, Trimble’s
caution has begun to look more like fear and indecision. We’ve been losing soldiers
to Morgan’s faction in a massive flood, and still she does nothing to stem it.” He
looked at Marcus. “We want to help you—we’ve sent as many teams as we can to harry
Morgan’s rear flank, to disrupt her and avoid the elimination of the last of the human
population, but without any real leadership from Trimble . . .” His voice trailed
off, and Marcus heard an explosion in the distance.

“Who are you fighting here, though?” asked Marcus. “It can’t be Morgan’s company,
and you’ve already confirmed as much.”

“They’re fighting themselves,” said Woolf softly. Marcus looked at him, surprised,
then looked at Vinci and the other soldier. They didn’t answer, only looked at the
floor.