Fragments (44 page)

“Is there another way out of this room?” asked Woolf.

“Let’s hope so,” said Vinci.

“Great,” said Marcus. “The only guy we find to help us has the same ‘hope for a miracle
plan that we do.”

“General Trimble!” shouted Vinci, jogging to the center of the room. The old woman
sat in the same position as before, watching the citywide revolution play out on hundreds
of screens, from dozens of different angles and viewpoints. “We have to get you out
of here!”

“You must have a way out,” said Woolf, close behind him. Marcus hurried after them,
trying to stay close enough to hear.

“There’s a Rotor in the room above us,” said Trimble. Her voice was soft, and Marcus
almost didn’t catch it. She sounded even more disconnected than earlier, speaking
through a haze of confusion.

“You have to stop this,” said Marcus, pushing forward. He fumbled with a bandage from
the medkit as he walked, trying to wrap his arm wound and stanch the bleeding. “Don’t
run away, just do something. Send out orders, coordinate the war, do . . . something!”
He stopped in front of her, and her eyes half focused on his. She seemed dazed, or
maybe half-asleep. “These people have stuck with you for years, waiting for you to
lead them. That’s a kind of dedication I’ve never even imagined—if they were humans,
they’d have thrown you out on your ear years ago, but they’re Partials, and Partials
are loyal to the chain of command. To, apparently, stupidly ridiculous extremes, which
is where we are now. They will follow you anywhere, but only if you lead them.”

Her head shifted slightly, and Marcus realized he now had her full attention, intense
and vague at once.

“I’ve destroyed the world once already,” she said. “I won’t condone a course of action
that will destroy it again.”

“Failing to act is no less a crime than acting incorrectly,” said Woolf, but the second
half of his sentence was lost in a sudden boom as the locked door behind them exploded.
Partials poured through the opening, taking positions with trained precision. Vinci
raised his rifle to fire, and a dozen rifles zeroed in to fire back. Marcus dropped
to the ground, his entire life literally flashing before his eyes: his job at the
hospital. Kira. The school. The Break. His parents, more clear in his mind now than
in all the years before.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” he said. “I guess I’m going to see you soon.”

The rebel Partials screamed a death sentence on Trimble. Vinci moved to block her
with his body. Woolf and Galen raised their handguns.

Trimble rose to her feet, turned to the Partial invaders, and spoke a single word:

“Stop.”

It looked to Marcus as if an invisible wave had struck them, rippling across the crowd
and freezing them in their tracks. Where before they’d been still, now they were rigid,
so motionless they looked like statues. Even Vinci was rooted to his spot, as if her
word had turned him to stone.

The link,
thought Marcus.
I’ve never seen it this powerful.

“I have a Rotor in the room upstairs,” said Trimble, turning to Marcus. “Can you fly
it?”

“I can,” said Woolf.

“Then go,” said Trimble. “It’s short range, but it should get you to Manhattan at
least.” She tapped a code onto the glowing screen closest to her hand. “No one will
follow you.”

“What will happen to you?” asked Marcus.

Trimble nodded to the frozen Partials. “They will kill me.”

“They can’t even move.”

“I had hoped to guide them,” said Trimble, “but all I’ve done is hold them back. Now
holding them back is all I can do. Go now.”

“And Vinci?” asked Marcus. “Are they going to kill him, too?”

“I won’t be able to stop them.”

Marcus looked at Woolf, who nodded and spoke. “We’ll take him with us.”

“Hurry,” said Trimble.

Marcus grabbed his medkit and headed for the stairs at the side of the room. Woolf
and Galen lifted Vinci—his body was stiff as a board—and carried him up after. Marcus
stopped at the top of the stairs. “Thank you.”

“If you find Nandita,” said Trimble softly, “tell her . . . that I tried.”

“I will.” He slipped through the door into a small hangar beyond, and when Woolf and
Galen passed through with Vinci, he sealed the door behind them. The Rotor was small,
but looked like it would hold four people if they squeezed in tightly. As they maneuvered
Vinci into position, he went abruptly limp, gasping for air and croaking out a plea.

“We have to go back.” A chorus of voices rose up behind them, a sign that the other
Partials were also free. “We have to help her, they’re going to—” Gunshots echoed
up from beyond the door, and Vinci hung his head. “Never mind,” he murmured. “Open
the windows and spread the data. Let everyone know that a general has fallen.”

K
ira kept one eye on the sky as they traveled, watching for rain, and one eye on the
fields around them. They could never afford to be far from shelter in the toxic wasteland,
but in the great plains of the Midwest, they were often far from everything.

They lost another horse in the first acid rainstorm—
But no, Kira reminded herself, we didn’t lose Buddy in the rainstorm, we lost him
in the house—the house that I brought him into.
The mad kicking of the horses, thrashing wildly with their hooves as the acid burned
their flesh, had destroyed the room and everything in it, and by the time they’d washed
them clean and calmed them down, Buddy had been kicked too hard, and in too many places;
he had a broken foreleg, two broken ribs, and a shattered jaw. Kira herself put him
out of his misery.
There was nothing else I could have done,
she told herself, probably for the hundredth time.
It was either bring him inside or let him die in the acid, and I couldn’t do that
to him.
It didn’t soothe her conscience, but she pushed it aside anyway. The worst part of
all was that it wasn’t even the biggest problem on her mind.

Kira and Heron were both burned by the acid, though the blisters had healed into angry
welts after a few days. Samm was much worse off, and spent three days near blind before
his Partial accelerated regeneration was able to fight off the poisons and rebuild
the damage to his corneas. Afa, the only human in the group, had it worst of all:
He’d survived the harrowing fifteen minutes tied to the back of the kicking, thrashing
horses, but in the process his back and arms and legs had been horribly burned by
the acid, and his eyes, burned even worse than Samm’s, showed no sign of having healed.
Kira stopped in every city they passed to scrounge for ointments and painkillers,
but most of the time they kept him doped and tied to the back of Oddjob, trying to
make the travel as easy as possible for all of them. They didn’t know what they’d
find at the ParaGen complex in Denver, but Kira hoped it would have, at the very least,
adequate shelter and a clinic they could scavenge for supplies. Afa deserved better
than they could give him on the move.

Highway 34 took them through the state of Iowa, a vast, flat checkerboard of farmland
that was now marked only by bleached-white fences and sickly yellow trees. The poison
wind blew steadily from the south, broken by the occasional acid rainstorm or, even
more terrifying, vast black dust storms that swept across the land like swarms of
locusts, blotting out the sun and scouring the last desperate leaves from those few
bushes strong enough to draw strength from the toxic earth. Kira had tried at first
to use their water purifier on the oily yellow streams that flowed here and there
across the land, but they gave up when the purifier itself started to break down under
the caustic onslaught. Instead they searched every grocery store and shopping center
they passed for bottled water, loading as much as they could on their own backs and
using Bobo, the last remaining horse aside from Oddjob, as a pack animal to carry
their few remaining supplies. Clean feed for the horses was even harder to come by,
and as the journey wore on Kira was forced to spend more and more of their rest stops
swatting their mouths away from the poisoned grasses sticking up through the dust.
Their good traveling clothes were left in a smoking heap on that first farmhouse’s
floor, and they were dressed now in the farmers’ family’s clothes. They were too big,
but Kira joked that at least now they were properly dressed for the Midwest country
they traveled through. It was the kind of joke she thought Marcus would have made.

When the Missouri River appeared before them, cutting a deep, treacherous border between
Iowa and Nebraska, Heron growled, “If I never see another river again, it will be
too soon.”

“That doesn’t make linguistic sense,” Samm started, but Kira cut him off.

“It’s an expression,” she said, staring at the river. She sighed. “And one I agree
with in this case.” The Missouri was thick and putrid, a gray-green river laced with
streaks of yellow and pink. It smelled like burned detergent, and the air around it
tasted strangely metallic. Kira shook her head. “It’s not as big as the last one,
but it’s not one I exactly want to take any chances with, either. Where’s the nearest
bridge?”

“I’m looking,” said Samm. He had found a new map in a bookstore, replacing the one
they’d lost in the Mississippi crossing, and he stood now carefully unfolding it.
Kira patted Bobo on the neck, soothing him gently, then moved to Oddjob and Afa. The
big man was asleep, lolling precariously in the harness they’d rigged to keep him
strapped to the saddle. He hadn’t fallen yet, but Kira checked the straps anyway,
talking softly to Afa as she did. “You want to go north or south?” asked Samm, peering
at the road map. “There’s a crossing north in Omaha and another south in Nebraska
City, and we’re about halfway between them both.”

“Omaha will be bigger,” said Heron. “Better chance the bridges are still up.”

“It’s also out of our way,” said Kira, checking the bandage on Afa’s still-broken
leg. “We need to get off the plains soon or Afa is going to die. We’re going to eventually
have to turn south anyway, so I say we do it now.”

“If we don’t have time for a detour,” said Heron, “we don’t have time to head back
north again when the bridge in Nebraska City turns out to be at the bottom of the
river. We should go for the sure thing.”

“Heading north takes us across a second river,” said Samm, still looking at the map.
“The Platte merges with the Missouri just a few miles north of here, and if we go
to Omaha, we’ll have to cross them both.”

“All right, then we go south,” said Heron. “The second river can bite me.”

“I agree,” said Samm, refolding the map and looking up. “Nebraska City still looks
pretty big, and if the bridges are gone, we can just head farther south to Kansas
City. The bridges there were huge—they’re bound to be up.”

“Unless someone destroyed them in the Partial War,” said Kira. She ran her hands through
her hair—far too greasy, after weeks of travel with no clean water to wash it in.
She shrugged, too exhausted to think. “I just hope this wasteland doesn’t get any
worse the farther south we go.”

The bridge to Nebraska City was indeed still standing, and Kira made a silent prayer
of thanks as they trudged toward it. A sort of levee to the south had become clogged
with debris, and the river below the bridge had swelled to create a small lake, stinking
of chemicals and topped with a layer of stagnant foam, like an ice cream float. It
hurt just to breathe the air above it, and Kira tied a spare shirt across her mouth—and
another across Afa’s—to try to filter the worst of it. Halfway across they found themselves
trapped by a cluster of cars, crashed into a snarl that completely blocked the road.
Kira and Samm strained to shift them out of the way while Heron scouted ahead, and
by the time they cleared a hole wide enough for the horses to pass through, Heron
was back, reporting that portions of the bridge were unstable, corroded by the river
or the rain until pieces had started to slough off. They proceeded carefully, controlling
their breathing; at one point Kira could look down through the cracks by her feet
and see the multicolored water drifting lazily below them, iridescent in the pale
sunlight. She kept a firm hand on Oddjob’s reins, hoping no more cracks appeared until
they were safely across. They reached the far side after nearly half an hour, and
if the ground hadn’t been poisonous, Kira would have kissed it.

The land west of the river was, if possible, even more featureless than the land east
of it. They followed the map to rejoin I-80 in a town called Lincoln, and made good
time on a stretch of highway so remarkably straight it didn’t deviate more than an
inch for days. They hit the Platte, but they didn’t have to cross it, and when the
road curved north to follow the river, they plunged south instead, eventually rejoining
Highway 34 on the banks of the Republican. They kept between these two rivers, traveling
in a wide corridor through bleached fields and corroded cities. During the day the
sun baked the toxic chemicals on the ground, and acrid smoke and steam rose up in
wisps like ghosts in the fields. At night the land was eerily silent, stripped of
crickets and birds and howling wolves until nothing remained but the wind, rippling
through the pallid grasses and sighing through the shattered windows of the houses
they camped in. Kira kept her eye on the rain, thinking of Buddy and Afa’s blistered
face.

Afa was asleep most of the day now, with or without the sedatives they gave him, and
Kira grew more worried than ever. His broken leg was refusing to heal, as if all his
body’s strength was routed to some other purpose. In a town called Benkelman she used
most of their water to wash him, head to toe, cleaning his hair and his leg wound
and the sores from the acid and shooting him full of antibiotics; she didn’t know
if it would do any good, for the surface wounds, at least, seemed uninfected, but
she didn’t know what else to do. In the East Meadow hospital she would have had more
options, but in a crumbling farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, there was nothing
to do but hope. She wrapped him tightly and covered him with blankets, and the next
day they tied him back in his saddle and headed west again, leaving the road—it tried
to cross the river, but the bridge was gone—and striking out across the fields themselves.
They passed a town called Parks, and a bigger town called Wray, and soon the river
petered out to nothing and the fields stretched out to nothing on every side, as if
the world had run out of terrain altogether and there was nothing left but land and
sky, a lost limbo of never-changing nothing.