Partials (37 page)

She found a wide tunnel capped by a high metal door, and broke into a jog. “This is it—there’s a big ramp on the other side that leads up to the rear parking lot. We head north and we watch for patrols—the Defense Grid will be everywhere, but they’ll be distracted. As long as we don’t call any attention to ourselves, we should be able to slip through the gaps.” She turned to Jayden. “Thanks for your help—we would never have gotten out of there without you.”

“What do you mean, ‘thanks’? I’m going with you.”

Kira looked at him carefully, ghost white in the beam from the flashlight. “You sure?”

“You’re going to need all the help you can get,” he said. “Besides, I just freed a Partial and locked five pissed-off patriots in his cell. If I stay here, I’d be lucky to get arrested before they shot me.”

Kira nodded and saw the others doing the same. She put her hand on the doorknob and opened it slowly. The sky was dark, but still brighter than the pitch-black tunnels of the basement. Kira jogged slowly up the ramp, listening to the sounds of a city in chaos: shouts and screams; the scuffing and pounding of running feet; the intermittent cracks of sharp, staccato gunfire. She reached the top and saw a deep orange glow through the eastern trees—a fire. A group of three or four rioters ran past her in the dark.

Xochi whispered over Kira’s shoulder. “You think Isolde made it to the Senate building?”

“I hope so,” said Kira. “It’s going to be the only safe place in town for the next several hours.”

“You think we did the right thing?” Xochi’s voice was hesitant; uncertain. “You think we’ll have a home to come back to?”

“I think Mkele’s a lot better at his job than we give him credit for,” said Kira. “It might look different by the time we get back, but it’ll all still be here.” She looked behind her, saw that the group was all together, and looked forward into the darkness and chaos. “Move out.”

PART 3

FOUR HOURS LATER

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

I
t was nearly midnight before they got far enough from East Meadow to feel comfortable speaking freely; a wide forest beyond the highway, away from the press of ever-present houses.

“There’s a cluster of farms to the north,” said Jayden, hiking carefully through the underbrush, “near a pair of old country clubs. One of them has a harbor, and we’re sure to find a boat there.”

“On the North Shore?” asked Kira. “There’s not a lot of settlements up there.”

“It’s tucked down into a bay,” said Jayden, “and relatively close to the Grid base in Queens. Not that we should have any trouble with them,” he added quickly, “but the closer to Queens we get, the shorter our distance across the sound.”

“Do you know the name of the bay?” asked Samm.

Jayden shook his head. “Does it matter?”

“I want to get a sense of where we’ll land on the other side.”

Jayden looked at him oddly. “How well do you know our island?”

“We’ve sent scouts, of course,” Samm answered, “but never very far inland, and obviously the maps we have from before are all uselessly out of date.”

“‘Never very far,’” said Xochi. “I told you no one was infiltrating the island.”

“I said
we
haven’t been,” said Samm quickly. “That doesn’t mean nobody is.”

“Who else could there be?” asked Kira. “There’s you and there’s us, right? Everyone else is dead—you said so yourself. Unless—are there more humans alive on the mainland?” She felt her heart leap at the thought—it was stupid and impossible, but just for a second, before she could catch herself, she wished that it was true.

Samm shook his head. “There are no other humans.”

“Then who?”

Samm glanced over his shoulder again. “We can talk about this later, right now we have to keep moving.”

“No,” said Jayden, standing in front of him and halting the group. “We just betrayed our own species to bust you out of jail, so you can cut it with the secretive crap and tell us what you know,
now
.” He stared Samm firmly in the face, and Kira became acutely aware of the rifles each young man was holding at his side. Samm stared back, his dark eyes analyzing Jayden like an insect pinned to a wall. He sighed.

“There are no other humans,” he said again. “But there are other groups of Partials.”

“What?” cried Marcus. “I thought you couldn’t make new ones?”

“Not new Partials,” Samm clarified. “We’re just … we’re not exactly unified anymore.”

Kira couldn’t read his expression in the dark, but she could tell the admission made him profoundly uncomfortable.

“This would have been good to know before we broke our own island in half,” said Marcus.

“But the link,” said Kira. “You have a chemical communication system that normalizes emotion and behavior—how can anyone ever rebel from that?”

“They have a hive mind?” asked Jayden.

“It’s not like that,” said Samm, “it’s like a … we don’t think the same thoughts, we just share them.”

“Let’s walk while we talk,” said Marcus. “We’re still being chased, you know.”

Samm nodded and started walking, and the others fell into step beside him. “The link is… I still don’t know how to describe it to you. It’s a sense. It’s like describing sight to someone who was born blind.”

“Is it a network device?” asked Jayden. “An implant? I thought we took everything when we bagged you in Manhattan.”

“Not a device,” said Samm, holding out his hands. “It’s just a … link. We’re all linked together.” He nodded slightly at the houses around them. “If we were a team of Partials, walking through these ruins at night, we’d all know, intuitively, how all the others were feeling. If Kira saw something that made her wary, she’d register that chemically, and we’d all sense it, and within seconds we’d all be wary: Our adrenaline would increase, our fight-or-flight response would prime, and the entire group would be ready for something only one of us saw. If someone in our group got hurt, or captured, we’d all be able to sense what was wrong and follow that sensation to wherever that soldier was.”

“Probably don’t get lost very often, then,” said Marcus. “If I could tell where the rest of you were, I wouldn’t ever wander off.”

“No,” said Samm firmly, “you wouldn’t.”

“Sounds like it could also tell you friend from foe,” said Jayden, nodding. “That would come in pretty handy.”

“It doesn’t work on humans,” said Samm, “because you don’t carry any data. But yes, it does help us identify other Partials who aren’t in our unit, which makes telling my faction from the others pretty simple. It also makes it easy for other factions to find me, which might be a problem.”

“But that’s the part I don’t get,” said Kira. “The link tells you friend from foe, it tells you one unit from another—it stands to reason it would carry authority as well, right? You were created as an army, with generals and lieutenants and privates and all that: Does the link tie into that command structure?”

Samm’s answer was stiff. “It does.”

“Then how could you split into factions? It doesn’t make sense.”

Samm said nothing, stomping irately through the underbrush. After a long pause he said, “After the—” and then stopped again almost immediately, standing in the middle of the road. “This isn’t easy to talk about.”

“You have disagreements,” said Kira simply. “Everyone has those, all the time—”

“We don’t,” said Samm. His voice was even, but Kira could sense an undercurrent of … frustration? “Is disobedience really so common among humans that you can’t understand why we’d want to obey? We’re an army; we obey our leaders. We follow our orders.” He set off down the road again. “Anyone who doesn’t is a traitor.”

“We’re coming up on a bridge,” said Xochi.

The group slowed, studying the terrain in the moonlight, then stopped to confer.

“A river?” asked Samm.

“Only in a really bad rainstorm,” said Kira. “That bridge goes over the expressway; most of these roads pass over it.”

“We want to follow it west,” said Jayden, “but probably not directly. Too easy for anyone following to find us.”

Kira wondered how long it would take Mkele to figure out what their plan was; as soon as he did, he’d be right on their tail. Sneaking off the island wouldn’t be the first thing he’d suspect, which might buy them some time. She set down her bags and stretched her back, twisting from side to side to pop out the kinks. “Do we want to cut west now, or after we cross?”

“Definitely after,” said Jayden. “It’ll be the least cover we pass through until we reach the water, so let’s get it out of the way.”

Kira pulled on her pack and shouldered her shotgun. “No sense waiting around then.”

They crept forward through the trees, eyes scanning the bridge ahead, ears alert for anything that stood out from the ambient sounds. This was beyond the reach of the old urban areas, just thick forests and old-growth trees. Lighter foliage on the right probably led to an old mansion, the grounds now overgrown with kudzu and hundreds of tiny saplings. The bridge was wide ahead, easily double the width of the back road they’d been following. They crossed another narrow road and ran through the trees to the thick cement barrier at the edge of the bridge.

“Nothing to do but do it,” said Marcus. They gripped their packs and guns, took a deep breath, and ran.

The bridge was shorter than the waterways they’d crossed on their trip to Manhattan, but her fear and tension gave Kira the same feeling of dangerous exposure. The expressway stretched out for miles in either direction—anyone looking would be able to see them.
We just have to hope we made it here first
. They plunged back into the trees on the far side, panting from exertion, taking quick stock of the area.

“Clear,” said Samm, lowering his rifle.

“I didn’t see anyone out there,” said Xochi.

“Doesn’t mean they didn’t see us,” said Jayden. “We can’t stop until we cross the sound.”

The road continued just a short way before hitting a T, and here they turned west to follow the curve of the expressway.

Marcus jogged forward to walk by Kira’s side. “How’s your leg?”

“Hardly worth mentioning, all things considered.” In truth it itched like mad, the aftereffects of the regen box, and it was all she could do not to roll up her pants and start gouging it with a stick. She couldn’t help but worry whether she’d overdone the treatments and ruined the tissue, but she forced herself not to think about it; there was nothing she could do out here anyway. “How are you?”

“Out on a moonlight stroll with the girl of my dreams,” he said, then added, “and Xochi, and Jayden, and an armed Partial. So pretty much my secret fantasy come true.”

“Tell us more about the—” Xochi started, but then a horse whinnied, and the group stopped abruptly.

“Now I’ve made the horses jealous,” said Marcus, but Jayden shushed him with a gesture.

“It came from over there,” he whispered, pointing to the north side of the road. “One of the farms I told you about.”

“So we’re close?”

“Not nearly, but we’re on the right track. We follow this road west until … until we smell seawater, I guess. If you’d told me we were coming out here tonight, I’d have brought a map.”

“West, then,” said Kira, “and quietly.”

They followed the winding road until it reached a new stretch of buildings, though even here the road was still heavily forested, and the buildings removed from the road. They rose empty and ominous from the trees, too far from arable land to be useful as farms, yet too close to the North Shore to be useful as anything else. Even bandits stayed away from here.

They continued in silence. A mile or so later the road crossed a major street, and the old world had commemorated the occasion with a strip mall, now cracked and crumbling. They debated heading north, but Jayden insisted they stay west for another mile at least.

“If we go north too soon we could get trapped in the middle of the farms, away from the water,” he said. “What was your plan, just go north until you ran out of land?”

“Pretty much,” said Kira. “There are boats everywhere.”

They heard a low rumble from behind them; an engine.

“They’re closer than I thought,” said Jayden, “and that engine sound means they’re using the jeeps. They must really be serious.” He paused, sucking in a breath. “They have maps and we don’t, they have the advantage. I admit that. But I promise you: If we go north now, we’ll get trapped between the soldiers and the farms. Someone is bound to find us.”

“This looks like it used to be a housing development behind the strip mall,” said Marcus. “We can weave through there and avoid most of their patrols.”

“Are you sure they’re not tracking us?” asked Samm. “They should be going slower than this if they’re stopping to search.”

“They don’t have to search for us, they know where we’re going,” said Xochi, echoing Kira’s thoughts from earlier. “They’re trying to reach the water first.”

“Then we go north,” said Samm. “We need to stay ahead of them.”

“You’re the boss,” said Jayden, but she could tell he didn’t like it. They stuck to the main road now, practically jogging to keep the right pace. The wide street was relatively clear, and they could move quickly even in the dim light. Xochi and Marcus were breathing heavily, struggling to keep up, and Kira was wincing with every other step, feeling lances of pain through her burned leg every time it hit the ground. Soon they heard more engines behind them, getting closer each minute, and the next time Kira turned, she saw lights behind them like glowing eyes.

“Get off the road,” she grunted, and the group dove into the greenery, burying themselves behind tree trunks and kudzu. Three small jeeps roared past, engines snarling like wild animals. Kira counted four or five soldiers in each one.

“They’re not even looking for us,” said Kira.

Marcus leaned out to peer back down the road. “Nothing behind them. You think it’s a coincidence?”

“They’re trying to cut us off,” said Samm. “The only good news is that them being here means we’re probably on the right path.”

“Doesn’t do us any good now,” said Jayden. “We have to go west.”