Ruins

  “Until they realize what’s going on, and the whole lake rises up to get us.”

  “Do you want to escape or not?”

  A gun clicked, a slide racking back. They sound close enough to be on the second floor now, and almost to the final set of stairs. Green’s link was boiling over with terror. “What do we do?”

  Kira didn’t have time to plan; she had to wing this as best she could. She put her face against his ear, whispering softly so the Ivies couldn’t hear. “They can’t link me. Lead them out the window.” She pushed away from him and slipped away on all fours, her toes and fingertips barely touching the floor as she stole around the corner to the hallway. Green hesitated, but seemed to understand her plan; he jumped up suddenly and ran to the window, tearing down the blanket and climbing out onto the slanted roof beyond. He disappeared past the edge of the window frame just as the first Partial came into view up the stairs.

  “They’ve gone out the window,” said one.

  “Check it.”

  Kira pressed herself back against the wall, out of sight around the corner, trying to tell how many Ivies there were. She’d heard only two speak, but without looking there was no way to tell for sure. She had to act fast. This part of the hallway contained more broken furniture, neatly stacked like firewood, and the room beyond held the disassembled metal shell of a dryer, which the prisoners had folded out into a flat platform to contain their fires. A table leg in the pile of wood looked like it might make a good weapon, but Kira knew she had no chance in a club-versus-assault-rifle fight. She needed something better, something that used the only advantage she had right now: surprise. There was a large, ornate mirror leaning against the wall, which would be deadly but far too unwieldy to fight with, and an old 3D projector, which would be too lightweight to do any damage. She swore silently and reached for the table leg, knowing she was running out of time.

  “They’ve jumped down to the balcony,” said a voice from near the window. They were talking softly, rather than coordinating over the link, but that made sense: They were chasing Partials, so the link would give them away. They didn’t know Kira was listening in. “I’ll follow—you go back down and cut them off.”

  Kira saw the scene clearly in her head—one Partial gone out the window, the other walking back down that deep well of a staircase. She made her decision in a flash, grabbing the giant mirror with both hands and heaving it up, holding her breath to keep from puffing with the effort, padding across the floor as fast as she could without making any noise. The frame weighed at least forty pounds. She reached the wall around the staircase and hefted the mirror up and over, pausing only half a second to aim before letting go. The Partial heard her, or saw the motion, but it was too late; he looked up and the mirror crashed into his face, the full forty pounds focused in on a single edge right on the bridge of his nose. His faced caved in, his body crumpling to the stairs below, and Kira raced down after him.

  DEATH

  Already the link was broadcasting his death; even outside the building, his partner would know. Kira grabbed his gun and turned to look back up the stairs, bringing the rifle in tight to her shoulder. The starlight through the open window made a small trapezoid of light, and she watched it intently, her finger hovering over the trigger, waiting for the other Partial to come into view.

  WHAT HAPPENED?

  She didn’t know if that was Green or the gilled Partial; the cold blast of FEAR that followed could have been either as well. She thought about Green, trapped outside with a scared, angry warrior, and moved slowly backward. After a few steps away from the stairs the window disappeared from view, and she spun around to confront any other horrors lurking in the darkness. No one had approached her from behind, so she assumed there were only two Partials—or that any others were waiting in the boat. The hallway was dark, with few openings to the light outside, and after the starlight upstairs, her eyes had to readjust. She held still, listening for footsteps or breathing, trying to sense on the link who might be lying in wait beyond the next shadow. All she could feel was the lingering DEATH, bitter as old metal on her tongue.

  She looked into the first room she passed; a bedroom, she guessed, the furniture gone and the clothes piled up in the corner. A little girl’s clothes, pink and frilly and eaten through by worms. The next room was an office; the next another bedroom. The house was empty and silent and choked out the light.

  A tendril of link data tickled her nose: SOMETHING’S HERE. She moved swiftly to the next room in the hallway, a master bedroom leading out to the balcony. The wide glass doors were all broken, but the curtains still hung across them, thin and frail as ghosts. They billowed gently in the night air, and Kira almost fired her rifle when the shadow of a figure passed across one. The silhouette of a man outside on the balcony, too ill-defined to distinguish.

  “Don’t move.”

  Another shadow, facing the first. Neither seemed to be holding a gun; either could be wearing a helmet. She moved her rifle back and forth, locked in indecision. Which one is Green?

  “Don’t shoot me.”

  “Where is the other?”

  “I don’t know, she ran ahead.”

  “She is in the house.”

  “I said I don’t know.”

  Kira brought the rifle to her cheek, holding it tightly, focusing her aim. She only had one shot—she had to pick the right target, and she had to hit it. The curtains billowed again, and she realized with shock that she didn’t even know where the men were standing; depending on where the moon was, those shadows could be cast from anywhere. She stepped backward quietly, retreating to the hall. She had to find another vantage point. She stood a moment at the top of the stairs leading down to the first floor, but backed away from those as well; she didn’t want to give up the high ground. But she didn’t want to give the last soldier an open path to the boat, either, so she crept back up the hall toward the third-floor stairs. Stepping around the dead Partial, linking once again to the powerful DEATH particles, she remembered the link data she’d felt on the border marker two days before. It had completely overpowered her, the liquid pheromone so concentrated she’d barely been able to function until the smell of it cleared from her nose. A real Partial, with a more sensitive link mechanism, would be even more affected. She glanced behind her, set aside the rifle, and pulled the dead soldier into the little girl’s bedroom.

  “I’m very sorry about this,” she whispered. She pulled off her shirt and wrapped it tightly around her face, already gagging from the body odor and mildew, but hoping desperately that they’d be enough to protect her. The face is too mangled, she thought. I’ll have to go in another way if I want to find the right spot. She pulled the soldier’s combat knife from the sheath on his belt and thought back to her medical training, picturing the diagram of the nasal cavity and calculating the approximate location of the pheromonal glands. She placed the knife gently in the corpse’s mouth, lined up the tip against the center of the soft palate, and shoved.

  FEARBETRAYALDEATHBLOODRUNHIDEDEATHSCREAMFEARBLOOD

  The link data overwhelmed her, a rush of thoughts and feelings and even memories that threatened to drown her in a dead man’s mind. She held her breath, trying to control her own brain, focusing on her own thoughts, her own movements. She pulled the knife out of the soldier and found it covered with liquid—blood and lymph and dark brown data, the liquid form of a dozen different pheromones jumbled chaotically together. The air seemed to vibrate, shapes and colors and smells and voices flickering madly across through the darkened room. She staggered to her feet and back down the hall.

  “What’s that?”

  The voices were closer now, but they weren’t the only one in the house, not anymore—

  The bombs were falling now, she was back on the beaches of the Isolation War—she was sleeping in the water, looking up at the moon melting shapelessly on the surface of the lake.

  DEATH

  RUN

  HELP ME

  She
heard a gun clatter to the floor. The hallway laughed at her, shadows twisting into faces telling her to RUN HELP STOP GO KILL. Voices screamed, but she couldn’t tell if they were from the present or the past; real or hallucinations. She stumbled into the master bedroom and saw them, the gilled Partial and Green, clutching their heads and sobbing and shouting and there was her father between them, his hands dripping blood, and she blinked and he was gone.

  “Garrett,” sobbed the Partial. Link data slid from her dagger in dark drops of liquid thought, so thick in the air she could hardly see. She walked forward, pushing aside the haze of nerve gas from a Shanghai bunker, the artillery smoke from an assault on Atlanta, the bloody mist from the White Plains coup. She wanted to cower behind the trees, to hide behind the wall, to dive back into the cold, dark lake where she could be safe.

  I am Kira Walker, she told herself. Identities ran through her mind like streams, rushing and blending and thundering together. She looked at the two men, now writhing on the floor, and couldn’t tell which was the enemy. I am Kira Walker, she thought again. I will not lose myself. Green is my friend. She found the other Partial, gills flapping wildly on his pale, wet neck, and drove the knife home through the gap in his body armor right beneath his arm. The linked declaration of DEATH barely registered in the haze of super-concentrated madness. Kira fell to the floor, crawling toward Green, and dragged him out the door to the balcony. Fresh air rushed in like a healing angel, and she felt her mind begin to clear. Wooden stairs led down from the balcony; they wouldn’t have to go back inside.

  “I don’t want to,” Green mumbled. “I don’t want to.”

  “It’s okay,” said Kira, her voice still muffled by her makeshift mask. She looked across the yard to the low stone dock on the island’s edge, where a boat, half-obscured by shadows and trees, rocked gently in the water. Her theory had been right. There really was a boat. And it was empty.

  “It’s going to be okay,” she said. “We’re leaving.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Dark shapes moved in the water. Kira helped Green into the boat, pulling it as close to the little stone dock as possible before easing him down into the center. The night air was slowly clearing her head of the concentrated pheromones, but Green was still lost in chemical memories, curling into a fetal position down in the aluminum belly of the boat. Kira stepped over the slim black line of the water, but stopped with her foot in midair before turning, gritting her teeth, and walking back to the house. She needed a weapon.

  She clambered back up the wooden stairs to the balcony, took a deep breath, and ran into the bedroom, feeling her way through the sudden darkness. The dead Partial lay on the floor, his rifle beside him, and she grabbed it and ran back out. She didn’t dare to breathe until she was back down the stairs, and sucked air greedily in the cool darkness of the wooded yard. When she reached the boat Green was still lying on the floor and panting, but his eyes were open. She stepped in carefully, trying not to think about what might be lurking in the water beneath.

  “Where am I?” asked Green.

  “Outside, on the boat,” said Kira. “Stay quiet.” She picked up an oar and dipped it gently in the water, all the time expecting a gilled Partial to grab it and yank, pulling her over the side. She untied the boat and it drifted away from the dock—ten inches, twenty inches, five feet, ten. The shore fell away sharply, the inky lake deep and impenetrable. Who was down there, watching? How many of them? What did they see or think? All it would take was one Partial, one pale and clammy hand, to reach up and tip the boat, and then both she and Green would be in the water, sinking and helpless, dragged down by dead-eyed monsters. She rowed carefully, evenly, not daring to rush. If the enemy Partials got suspicious enough to come up and check, they’d link their dead companions immediately, and Kira and Green would be exposed. The interrogators had rowed out to the island, and she had to make the others think that now they were rowing back, returning their weapons to dry storage before diving back down to their home.

  Why would they live under the water at all? she wondered. They can obviously survive on dry land, at least for a while. Morgan and Vale had both told her that heavy gene mods can degrade a person’s sanity. Was that what had happened here—Partials living underwater, killing other Partials and nailing their hands to pikes like savages? How much of their minds is man, and how much is . . . something else?

  Two hundred feet to the closest island. One hundred. Fifty. Twenty. A small wooden dock sat low in the water ahead of them, and beyond it another house lost among the trees. Her map was gone, and all her equipment, but she remembered the bay’s basic geography; if this was the large central island she thought it was, there would be a causeway about two miles down connecting it back to the western shore of the lake. They could cross there . . . if the causeway was still up.

  Ten feet left. Five.

  The boat bumped up against the dock and Kira leaped out, looping the rope around a short pole and reaching out a hand for Green. The wooden planks under her feet and the dark black water all around her brought back sharp, terrifying memories of the dock where she’d been captured, and she imagined another pale Partial bursting up from the lake to seize her outstretched arm, but nothing did. Green grabbed her hand and stood up, steadier now than before. She checked the rifle slung over her back, nervously reassuring herself that it was still there, and led Green up toward the house. The path here was well-worn, further proof that the Partials stored their water-sensitive gear on dry land nearby.

  Which means there might be more of them waiting here, she thought. Kira tried to feel them on the link, but without the heightened awareness that came with combat or terror, the data—if any existed—was too weak for her limited abilities to detect. She whispered to Green. “Can you link anyone up here?”

  “Not right now,” he said softly, “but they come here often.”

  “Tell me if it gets stronger,” said Kira, and pressed forward. The path led up from the dock through a wooded backyard, a former lawn now thickly overgrown with weeds and vines and saplings. The home there was large, old and once luxurious, now sagging and decrepit but obviously used by the Ivies; the windows were boarded over, and the footpath through the underbrush led straight to the door. Green didn’t alert her to any Partials hiding inside, and she could sense none herself but chose not to enter, just in case. They were clear now; their best plan was to put as much distance between them and the lake as they could before the Ivies realized they were gone.

  They left the trail to give the house a wide berth and broke through the trees onto a cracked asphalt road that wound north through a parade of faded lakeside homes. By silent agreement they broke into a run, the only sound their shoes slapping wetly against the road. They ran half a mile before Green risked speaking.

  “Do you know where we’re going?”

  “Sort of.”

  “That’s good enough?”

  “I had a map before I was captured,” said Kira. “There’s a causeway up here—if we’re on the right island.”

  “And if we’re not?”

  “Then we have to cross the water again,” said Kira. “So let’s hope we’re on the right island.”

  They ran in silence for a moment, and then Green asked another question. His voice was dark and worried. “What happened back there?”

  “In the house?”

  “I thought I was back in China again. Like, I literally thought I was there, in the middle of the Isolation War, in one of the subway tunnels we used to take their larger cities, except . . . I never had to fight in those tunnels. Other units did, but not mine.”

  “I got the drop on the first guard because they didn’t know I was there,” said Kira. “The only way to get the second was to use the link against him.”

  “I thought you weren’t on the link.”

  “It wasn’t my data,” said Kira. She hesitated. “I borrowed it from the other dead Partial.”

  He shot her a probing look. “Borrowe
d?”

  “Extracted via combat knife,” said Kira. He looked horrified, and she felt queasy at the memory. “Look, I wish I didn’t have to do it, but it was the only way. Normally you don’t link the data until it’s out in the air, diffused, but inside the pheromonal glands it’s still liquid, and intensely concentrated.” She shrugged helplessly. “Apparently his unit did fight in the subway tunnels, and we remembered it through his link data.”

  “Who—” said Green, stopping abruptly. Kira checked her steps, almost tripping, and looked back at him. He peered at her in confusion. “Did you just say ‘we’ remembered it?”

  Crap, thought Kira. It wasn’t that she desperately needed to keep her nature secret, it was just that she hadn’t told him before, and she didn’t want it to look like she’d been withholding something from him. She cleared her throat.

  “You’re not on the link,” Green insisted. He walked toward her, furrowing his brow. “Maybe it’s the concentrated data, like you said—when it’s that strong, maybe humans can sense it too?”

  This could be a way into recruiting Green to my cause, she thought. If he thinks humans can sense link data, even only in a case like this, he could see a stronger connection between the species. He might be more open to helping me, helping the humans.

  Except it’s not true. If we’re going to work together—the two of us, or the two species—we have to trust each other. We can’t start that relationship with a lie.

  She shook her head. “I’m not a human.”

  “You said you were.”

  “I thought I was,” said Kira, “for my whole life. I grew up with them. I still feel human. But I’m a Partial.”

  “Partials link,” he said simply. “Partials don’t age. You don’t look like any Partial model I’ve ever seen.”

  “I was a new model,” said Kira. “A prototype for a new line, after the war. That’s why Dr. Morgan wanted to study me, because she thought my DNA would help her cure expiration. But it didn’t work. I don’t have any of your heightened abilities—none of the strength, none of the reflexes, maybe some slightly accelerated healing. And I can link, sort of, but only one way.”