Partials (23 page)

“You talk too much.”

Kira stopped, eyes wide. His voice was dry and hoarse from days of disuse—as far as she knew, it hadn’t said a word since they’d captured it, now more than fifty hours ago. She almost wasn’t sure she’d heard him right.
The first human to communicate with another species in eleven years
, she thought,
and he tells me to shut up
. When the initial shock wore off, she almost started laughing.

“Point taken,” she said, nodding. “But first let me explain what I’m going to do. Most of our tests here are going to be sensor-based, noninvasive stuff, looking at your organs, that sort of…” It closed its eyes, pointedly ignoring her, and she trailed off. “All right then, no medical explanations.” Kira walked to a side counter, rooted through the drawers, and came back with a sterilized glass tube and a handful of little instruments. “Let me at least warn you, though, this finger poker is going to hurt a bit—it’s nothing horrible, just a spring-loaded pin about two millimeters long. Are you going to let me use your finger, or are we going to fight again?”

He opened his eyes, saw the finger poker, and looked up at Kira’s face. After a long moment, he unrolled his fist and laid out his fingers.

“Thank you.” She shook a few drops of ethanol onto a ball of cotton and swabbed his index finger. His hands were firm and warm. The poker was about the size and shape of a dental floss container, and she pressed it against his fingertip. “Brace yourself.”

He barely flinched. The pin jabbed into its fingertip, and she pulled it away quickly, pressing a skinny glass tube against the wound. It slowly filled with blood, more slowly than usual, and she squeezed its finger, pressing out more. The flow stopped before she could even fill the tube.

“Your blood pressure might be low,” she commented, sealing up the tube with a frown. “Usually I can fill two vials on one finger. Unless…” She peered in closer, watching the blood in the tube as it started to congeal. She looked at its finger, prodding the hole gently. It had already sealed itself closed. “That’s amazing,” she whispered. She held the glass tube up to her eye; the blood was turning a rusty brown, firming up until it was capped on both ends by a small, solid scab.

She looked back at the Partial. It said nothing.

Kira’s first impulse was to poke it again, deeper this time, but she recoiled from the idea almost as quickly as she had it. She wasn’t here to torture it, and fast healing or not, it could still feel pain. Its flinch at the finger poker had been proof enough of that. She didn’t have the stomach to wound it just to watch how it reacted.

And yet … wasn’t that what the Senate wanted? Wasn’t that what she was here to do? She wouldn’t just go cutting him with knives, but they had told her to study him, and if the Partial resistance to RM was based on a powerful self-regenerative system, then she would have to test the limits of his healing power and determine how, if at all, they could use it for themselves. If she couldn’t find the answer elsewhere, she would have to look there.

Could it take a gunshot? What would happen to the bullet? Her gut warred with her scientific curiosity. She shook her head and set down the scabbed-over tube.

“I’m not going to torture you,” she said, going back to the drawers and retrieving a small plastic syringe and a short, sharp needle. “But I do have to get another blood sample. The medicomp needs liquid blood to give me a good picture of what’s going on in there, so if you scab over on instant contact with air, we’ll have to keep air out of the equation for as long as possible.” She fitted the syringe with the needle, found a tube of saline solution, and drew it in and out of the needle until she was fairly certain all the internal space had been filled with liquid. She swabbed the vein on the Partial’s inner elbow and held the needle above it. “Get ready for another poke.”

This time it didn’t flinch at all. She drew a cubic centimeter of blood and started to tape a cotton ball to the hole in its arm, but quickly realized that it was, of course, already healing over. She felt a little foolish and turned away, putting the entire syringe, needle and all, into the medicomp. The blood was still liquid. She stripped off her gloves and started tapping the screen, calling up blood tests and liver screens and everything else she could think of, triggering the “comprehensive scan” message that had identified the virus last time. With Marcus. She tapped yes and waited, practically holding her breath, while the medicomp catalogued the blood.

She hadn’t allowed herself to think about Marcus yet; she hadn’t ever really had time. Less than twenty-four hours ago she was still in the back of a Defense Grid truck, pulling into East Meadow for her secret hearing with the Senate. Marcus hadn’t come to Xochi’s last night—and she hadn’t gone to look for him—and then in the morning she’d come straight here. Was he still mad at her? Was she even still mad at him? Yes, she was—of course she was—but at the same time she could see his side. She knew now that he had been … what? Trying to protect her? She didn’t need to be protected, not when she was the only one trying to do something here. But was he right about RM—that it couldn’t be cured, and they were ruining their lives by trying? She couldn’t believe that, couldn’t even allow herself to think it. She was going to cure the damned thing, and that was all there was to it. But then what did she think she understood about Marcus?

That he was scared, and thought he was going to lose her. She could understand that. She’d been half convinced she was going to die herself.

The medicomp chirped, and Kira looked back at the screen. It had higher-than-average electrolytes in its blood, a glucose level that looked borderline diabetic, and a white cell count so high she couldn’t help but take its temperature, fearing an infection. It was 98.6 degrees exactly, just as she was. Maybe its physiology had a slightly different baseline of normal? The results that would indicate illness in a normal human patient, but as far as she knew, they were normal for a Partial. She copied the details down in her notebook, marking the anomalies she wanted to go back and study later.

But the most important part of the scan was what was missing after she’d gone through it all. It had no trace of RM whatsoever.

No RM. She looked up, ecstatic; the Partial was still lying on the table, staring silently at the ceiling, and somehow still managing to look dangerous. Anyone else in that position would look like they’d given up, but there was something about it—the tension in its muscles, the alert flicker of its eyes—that told Kira its mind was racing.

In that moment it didn’t matter. Kira felt like laughing—the Partial had no trace of RM in its blood, just like she’d predicted. Its body could destroy or expel the virus completely. All she had to do was figure out how.

She tapped the screen quickly, fingers dancing across the surface as she pulled up the files on the virus. Now that she knew the Partials didn’t carry it, she had to figure out how, exactly, the humans did—what was the infection process? It wasn’t enough to just say, “They got sick”; she needed to know how the virus traveled from person to person, and what happened when it got there, in precise microbial detail. She needed to watch the process in a human and in a Partial, to see how they differed. She pulled up the image of the virus again, the yellow-tinged blob that lived in the blood.
You look like a balloon
, she thought,
but you killed 99.996 percent of the human race
.

She needed to focus. What information did the file already have? Size, for one thing: four hundred nanometers. That was huge for this scale—definitely big enough to be stopped by a good air filter. She glanced across the room to the plastic tunnel by the door, wondering what kind of filter it used.
A system like that should be able to stop a four-hundred-nanometer virus
, she thought.
Four hundred nanometers should keep it away from a fetus, as well; nothing that big should be able to cross the placental barrier. That could explain why the babies don’t get sick until after they’re born
.

Kira paused, caught by a sudden thought.
If the virus is big enough to be contained, why can’t we deliver infants in a contained environment?
They scrubbed the room, they sterilized their tools, they wore gas masks—they did everything they could think of, yet the virus still got through.

I’m not the first person to ask that question
, she thought.
Marcus and Dr. Skousen both said that people have been researching this since the Break. That means there’ll be records somewhere of their findings
. She called up the database files in the microscope, searching for studies of all their clean-room births, and found several. None had been successful, obviously; the rate of sickness and the onset of RM was virtually identical to that of normal births, as if the clean room had shown no effect at all. Attached to the records was another set of studies, this time focusing on the existence of an RM variant found only in the air. Kira opened this with interest—she knew that RM was airborne, of course, but the actual structure of the airborne virus was not exactly entry-level medicine, and they hadn’t talked about it yet in any of her classes. The report contained more images, similar to those in her blood sample but much smaller: between twenty-three and thirty-one nanometers. Kira frowned. Something that small would be almost impossible to catch, even with a clean room. She looked at the Partial, feeling a surge of her old anger.

“You made pretty damn sure we couldn’t get away from this thing, didn’t you?”

The Partial turned its head to look at her, and Kira felt like she could almost see the thoughts whirring through its mind. When it spoke, its eyes seemed almost … curious. “You can’t reproduce.”

“What?”

“That’s why you’re trying to cure RM. We don’t have children, so their absence didn’t seem odd at first, but you don’t have any, do you? You’re trying to cure RM because your children don’t survive it.”

Kira wanted to scream at it, to force it to acknowledge its own hand in their extinction, to attack it for daring to speak so matter-of-factly about something so terrible, and yet she stopped, one thought catching in her mind.

Did it not know the virus was still killing them? She knew she shouldn’t trust it, but it seemed like something it was just now understanding. It really hadn’t known. But if it hadn’t known, that suggested two very important things: first, that the Partials weren’t spying on them. The theories cropped up now and then, that Partials were hiding among them, infiltrating the island with deep cover spies. But if that were true, this one would already have known that human infants were dying. Its surprise meant they weren’t being watched.

Or if they are watching
, she thought,
they aren’t telling each other what they see
.

The second thing it suggested was that the Partials—or at least this Partial in particular—did not know how RM worked. It hadn’t expected the virus to stick around, and presumably most of the Partials it interacted with thought the same. Were the Partial leaders hiding the information from their own soldiers, or did they not know either? And how could they not know the function of a virus they’d created? It was possible the virus had mutated; Kira shuddered at the thought of it. If something as deadly as RM was mutating, acting beyond its original parameters, who knew what it was capable of?

She supposed there was one way to find out how much he knew. “You,” she said, “Partial. What do you know about RM?”

It didn’t answer.

“Oh, come on,” said Kira, rolling her head back in frustration. “Are we going to go through this again? Can’t you at least say something?”

“Well, human,” he said, “you’re going to kill me in five days. I don’t see much of an incentive to say anything.”

Kira stormed back to the medicomp and threw herself into the chair, so angry she could hardly think. It was going to be killed because it had killed Gabe, and Skinny, and six billion other people. After everything it had done, every atrocity it had been a part of, how dare it have the temerity to imply that it was a victim?

The images on the screen seemed to swirl and blur; how could she concentrate with that thing lying twenty feet away? It was times like this when she needed Marcus to make a joke, to defuse the situation and help her realize what mattered and what didn’t. She looked at the door, but of course he wasn’t there. He didn’t even know where she was.

The Partial was right about one thing: She only had five days. She needed to work. She pushed the Partials out of her mind and forced herself to focus on the task at hand: a screen full of viral images, a series of reports on the viral structure. It had two forms, one for blood and one for air; the Blob and the Spore, the yellow and the blue.
Concentrate!
The Spore was tiny, perfect for traveling through the air. That must be how the virus passed from host to host. But then what was the Blob for?

None of the studies had the answer; they knew both forms of the virus existed, but not how they worked together. Kira turned back to the sample report from Marcus’s blood, combing through the results for any sign of the Spore. If it
could
get into the body, it
would
; there should be some sign of it in Marcus’s sample, but there was nothing. That meant that whatever happened to the Spore when it got into the body was happening very quickly, and leaving no trace.

That is, the Blob
was
the trace. Kira ran through the possibilities in her head: The virus obviously reacted to human blood and tissue—that was how it worked, using the host body’s own material to replicate itself—so maybe there was an extra layer of interaction. Maybe the Spore wasn’t designed to replicate itself at all, just to convert itself into the Blob and let that one replicate. It was weird, but it was possible.
Whatever it does
, thought Kira,
it has to do it quickly: By the time we get a chance to test the blood, any samples of the Spore have all been converted
. Kira ran her fingers through her hair, trying to figure out how to see the transformation in action. If she could get a sample of uninfected blood, and get it into the medicomp fast enough, she’d be able to study the actual process of infection. But where could she find uninfected human blood?