Fragments (53 page)

“Not here,” said Samm. “We need to get inside.”

The tall brush extended nearly to the edge of the building, where they could enter
through any number of floor-to-ceiling openings—giant windows destroyed in the Partial
attack. Almost the entire ground floor was open around the perimeter, supported by
a series of central pillars. There was nothing but reception desks and waiting areas;
any records they could find would likely be in the offices above, and Kira spied a
stairwell door standing partly open. She pointed it out to Samm, and he nodded, his
chest rising and falling in slow, deliberate rhythm. She counted softly under her
breath: “One, two, three,” and then they leapt up and ran, bolting across the rubble-strewn
floor to the door beyond. Kira reached it first, several steps ahead of Samm, and
when he staggered through, she slammed it shut behind him. He leaned heavily against
the wall, gasping for breath, his eyes closed.

“I don’t think anyone saw us,” she said. “We can rest here for a minute before moving
up.”

“If I rest, I’ll fall asleep,” said Samm. He struggled to open his eyes, but his lids
seemed heavy and unresponsive. “Keep moving.”

“Are you going to be okay?”

“We have to keep moving either way,” said Samm, “so it doesn’t matter.”

Kira tried to protest, to tell him that they could come back later, but he wouldn’t
listen. “We won’t get another chance at this. I can make it.” He gripped the railings
with his hands, one on either side, and raised a leg that looked as heavy as lead.
Kira inserted herself under one of his arms, wrapping his hand around her shoulders,
and put her own arm around his waist, helping him along. His breathing was deeper
now, almost as if he were already asleep. His steps were arrhythmic, and sometimes
it took him three or four tries to find the right height for a stair.

“You’re doing fine,” said Kira, though she knew something wasn’t right.
What the hell is going on?
“Just a few more.” She held him tightly, supporting almost his full weight as they
climbed. “That’s right, just a few more.” At the top of the first flight of stairs
she opened the door, and he collapsed through it onto the floor. The smell of earth
and plants filled the air, and she saw footprints of cats and birds in the dust that
covered the carpet. “Samm, are you okay?” It didn’t look like anyone outside could
see them in this spot; it was as good a hiding place as any. “Samm, talk to me.”

“Not . . .” His voice was slow and weak, as if he had to force each word through a
heavy screen, and they had no force left when they emerged. He rolled his head back
and forth, opening his eyes as wide as he could, struggling to stay conscious. She
waited for him to finish the sentence, but when he finally spoke again, it was something
different. “Heron . . . here.” Another pause. “Asleep.” He turned his head toward
her, but his eyes were dazed and unfocused. “Find . . . it.”

“Find ‘it’?” she asked. “Find what?” She shook him, whispering urgently in his ear,
but nothing roused him.
He’s asleep—he told me he was asleep. And apparently Heron’s here somewhere.
Kira willed herself to use the link, to detect some sign of Heron’s data anywhere
in the air around her. She’d never been able to use it at will; only in combat could
she actually rely on it, when her adrenaline seemed to amplify its effect.
But my adrenaline’s high now,
she thought.
This thing with Samm has me scared to death, and I’m not detecting anything. Are the
combat pheromones simply stronger—or am I just designed to detect the combat pheromones
and nothing else?

She checked Samm again, his pulse and his breathing. They were normal. Now that he’d
stopped fighting and settled into sleep, his body functions seemed to have normalized.
She stood up, trying to figure out what she should do next—should she stay until he
woke? Should she leave him here and keep going? The latter seemed like the only viable
option, but she didn’t like it—what if something happened to him while she was gone?
She dragged him over to the wall and propped him up on his side, his back to the wall
and his front held up by a pair of desktop computer towers she pulled from nearby
cubicles. He was sleeping so soundly she worried that if he threw up or drooled he’d
be too inert to react, and would choke to death. This would at least keep him safe
from that.

It’s almost like he’s been sedated,
thought Kira.
But why would someone do that to him—and how could they have done it? Did Calix slip
him a drug? Why drug him and leave?
She shook her head.
I can ask him more when he wakes up. Right now I’m here, at the end of our search,
and I don’t know how long we have before they come looking for us. And if we leave
now, Samm is right, there’s no guarantee we’ll have another chance to find what we
came for. I have to find the records.

She silently apologized to him, and then rifled through the desks on the floor, searching
for a directory or a map—some hint of where to start looking. Obviously the Trust
wouldn’t be mentioned by that name anywhere, at least she didn’t think so, but she
knew most of their names from the records they’d found in Chicago. She repeated them
again in her mind: Graeme Chamberlain, Kioni Trimble, Jerry Ryssdal, McKenna Morgan,
Nandita Merchant, and Armin Dhurvasula. My father. She found a small directory and
scanned it for their names, but found nothing.

She decided to try another tack, approaching the problem from another angle: What
clues had she already gathered, and what pieces did she already know? It took her
a moment to align her thoughts; she had been so busy getting here the last few weeks
and had thought of little aside from survival. She had to remind herself of the mysteries
she was trying to solve. Dr. Morgan had been assigned to create the Partials’ incredible
physical attributes: their strength, their reflexes, their resistance to disease,
and their incredible ability to heal. Jerry Ryssdal had worked on their senses. Kira’s
father had created the link, and the entire system of pheromonal communication. She
still didn’t know about Trimble. Last of all came Graeme Chamberlain and Nandita,
who had been assigned to the Failsafe project. The world-ending plague they had come
to know as RM. They’d learned in Chicago that the Failsafe was designed to kill the
Partials if they ever got out of hand—it had been requested by the American government,
and mandated by the ParaGen executives, and that mandate seemed to be the defining
incident that sparked the lead scientists to form the Trust in the first place. And
somehow, when the virus finally appeared, it killed humans instead. That couldn’t
possibly be what the Trust decided to do—she couldn’t allow herself to think that
anyone, let alone her father and the only mother figure she had ever known, would
willingly, knowingly, unconscionably destroy so many people. And Graeme had killed
himself, which didn’t tell her anything but still left her deeply unsettled.

Still,
she thought,
the Trust had been fractured, even as they tried to make their plans
. Dr. Morgan knew nothing about the expiration date, for example, but somebody must
have programmed it into their DNA, someone with a plan. There were others, too, the
names Morgan had screamed when she thought Kira was a spy: Cronus and Prometheus.
Were they code names for some of the people on this list? Or new people altogether?
And where did Dr. Vale fit into this?

Kira turned back to the directory, searching for anything that might relate to the
Trust’s plan: expiration. Failsafe. Virus, virology, pathology, epidemiology—she searched
for every synonym she knew. She searched for “laboratory,” for “research,” for “genetics,”
she even searched for RM. . . .
Wait.
She stared at the directory. There was no RM, but there was an RD.
Is that a reference to the virus? Maybe an earlier version of it? But there is no
way something so secret would be here on a directory so general it doesn’t even have
the lead scientists’ names.
She remembered her confusion with the term IT, and how it had turned out to be an
acronym: information technology.
RD must be the same thing, maybe . . . reference database? Research database?

Research and development.

If the Trust were anywhere, they were there. But where is Floor C? The floors here
are all numbered.
She looked for a map, scrounging through every desk she could find, but on her third
pass through the main hallway she stopped at the top of the stairs, staring not at
them but at the doors beside them. Three sets of double doors, all in a row.

Elevators.

The Preserve had an ongoing, self-sustaining power grid. The elevators in the other
buildings still worked. If they still worked here, finding Floor C would be as easy
as looking at the buttons. Getting there would be as easy as pressing one. She stepped
forward, her finger hovering over the call button. She pushed it.

Deep in the bowels of the building a motor hummed to life, and Kira felt the floor
vibrate as the gears and pulleys turned. Clanks and groans echoed through the elevator
shaft, and Kira stepped back as the door before her wrenched halfway open with a loud
screech. The elevator beyond was only partly lined up with the door, leaving a wide
gap at the bottom that plunged deep into darkness.
Having power to run them doesn’t mean anyone’s been maintaining them for the last
twelve years,
Kira thought. It’s amazing the elevators still work at all. The doors tried to close,
but had damaged themselves so much in opening that they couldn’t shut again. Kira
hesitated in the doorway, trying to decide if she trusted the stability enough to
climb in and look at the buttons. She peered into the pit below, seeing dark red lights
at the bottom of a shaft that looked to go down at least seven stories.
That’s five levels below ground,
she thought.
There must be one for maintenance, maybe two. And three full subterranean stories.

A, B, and C.

She decided to avoid the elevator, and instead peeked into the shaft and around the
corners, searching for a maintenance ladder. She found one she could reach relatively
easily, but she still had a moment of terrifying vertigo as she stretched out over
the deep black pit. With her hands firmly on the metal rungs, she swung the rest of
her body out into space, found the ladder with her feet, and began climbing down.
Each floor was marked, and she breathed a sigh of relief when she climbed down past
1 and found A waiting below it. She kept going, stopping on Floor C, and searched
for an exit. Next to the ladder was a maintenance door; she twisted the handle, and
it opened smoothly.

The hallway beyond was brightly lit. The air was fresh and well circulated. Far away,
a faint echo in the emptiness, she heard footsteps.

Kira’s heart caught in her throat, and she found herself suddenly paralyzed with fear.
Was that Heron—was she already here? Or was it somebody else? Had they heard all the
noise she’d made with the elevator? Was there one set of footsteps, or more? Were
they coming or going? She didn’t know, and not knowing made her too afraid to move.
After a moment she paused, forcing herself to think.
No matter what it is, I should go through the door. I can’t just leave, and this could
be my only chance to find out what I am.
She hesitated, trying to psych herself up, wondering if there was a security system
inside that would attack her. She hadn’t set off any alarms by opening the door. She
took a deep breath and drew her handgun from where she’d hidden it in the back of
her pants. She stepped through.

The hallway was bright, not just because of the lights, but because the walls and
floors and ceiling were white, like a hospital. She could feel the faint hum of something
through the floor, like the motor of the elevators but constant, like a background
buzz.
The power generator?
she thought.
Or an air circulator.
There was definitely a faint breeze, neither hot nor cold but simply air in motion.
She heard another cluster of footsteps, so small she thought it had to be just one
person. She strained at the link, trying to see if it was Heron, but felt nothing.
Kira fumbled in her waistband for her handgun, pulling it out and checking the chamber
and magazine, making sure it was loaded and ready to go. She held it before her carefully,
walking softly on the balls of her feet. She could hear somebody walking, but she
was determined they wouldn’t hear her.

Floor C was a lab, far more intact than the upper stories. Whatever the Partials had
done to this place, the destruction hadn’t penetrated this deep. Kira walked past
offices and conference rooms, past laboratories and showers, past clean white rooms
full of equipment she didn’t even recognize. Was this where Vale was making his cure?
That would make sense; ParaGen would undoubtedly have the best genetic engineering
equipment in the Preserve. Was this equipment the reason he said it wasn’t “portable”?
Maybe it was Vale she could hear down here. Kira quickened her pace.

She heard the footsteps again, and as she drew closer she heard a voice, murmuring
and indistinct, someone talking softly. Kira walked as quietly as she could, still
wary of who she might find, or what he or she might be doing. Would they attack an
intruder? Would they take her presence as a threat? What equipment were they using,
and how were they using it? Would they kill her to protect their secret?

It doesn’t matter. I’ve come this far. I need to know.

She rounded the final corner, stepping into a vast room, and gasped. Before her in
two long lines were ten metal tables, each bearing an emaciated, almost skeletal man.
Snaking up from each was a cluster of tubes and cords and cables, some dripping nutrients
into the bodies while others bore away what looked like waste or recirculated blood.
Their faces were uncovered, but a small tube sprouted up from the neck of each figure,
punching straight through the skin and curling up into the tangle of tubes that hung
above them. In any other situation she would think they were dead, but she could see
a frail rise and fall of their chests, see their hearts thumping slowly inside their
fragile ribs. They were living corpses, unconscious and lost to the world. They looked
like they’d been there for years.