The fires were easier to build, obviously, in homes with fireplaces, but thirteen years of neglect had left the chimneys clogged and useless, and even with the windows open, the rooms would fill with smoke. They lay on the floor, where it was easier to breathe, and hoped that no one was close enough to see the smoke and come looking—Partials were the main worry, but Ariel was just as concerned about desperate humans, starving and freezing, who would see a group of women and get all kinds of thoughts. Even with the dangers, though, it was simply too cold to forgo a fire completely. They kept their guns close and ready, and always had at least one person on watch. In spite of the fact that they disliked him—or perhaps because of it—Senator Hobb always took a double watch.
The conditions, though, did nothing to deter them from their mission to find the lab Nandita spoke of, and the first week of winter brought them as far as Middle Island, a small community that was exactly what the name implied: halfway between the west end of the island and the east.
“This is good,” said Isolde. Her eyes were bloodshot, rimmed with black circles, and she stroked Khan’s blistered cheek as he screamed feebly. “We’re halfway there, baby. You’re going to be just fine.”
“Halfway from Brooklyn,” said Ariel. “We started in East Meadow, so we really haven’t come that far.”
“Thanks for the pep talk,” said Isolde, too exhausted to manage much of a glare.
“We only made it two miles today,” said Xochi. The baby was slowing them down. “The farther east we go, the worse the snow is going to be; the rain was always worse farther out on the island, at least, and I imagine the snow’s going to be the same.”
“We won’t give up,” said Hobb firmly. “This is my son we’re talking about.”
Ariel and Xochi gave each other a look, but said nothing.
“We’re almost to Riverhead,” said Kessler. “Another fifteen miles or so; a week at the most.”
“We’ve made worse time every day,” said Xochi. “Who knows how long fifteen miles could take us?”
“Riverhead is the largest community outside of East Meadow,” said Kessler. “The Partials relocated everyone during the occupation, but their supplies might still be available—clean water, stored grain, smokehouses full of fish. At the very least we’ll find houses with good windows, working chimneys, and clean clothes.”
“We’re not planning to stay there,” said Xochi.
“I’m just saying we’d have the option,” said Kessler. “A few days to recuperate and get our feet back under us, or a few weeks to sit out this storm.”
“We don’t have a few weeks,” said Hobb. “There is a nuclear bomb—”
“This storm will hinder Delarosa’s progress just as much as ours,” said Ariel. “There’s no way she’s going to make it to White Plains and set that thing off.”
“That only makes it more likely that she’ll set it off early,” said Hobb. “That she’ll set it off closer.”
“But if the storm ever breaks—” said Kessler, but Nandita cut her off, speaking up for the first time that evening.
“This storm isn’t going to break,” she said. “You heard the giant as clearly as I did—this isn’t a freak storm, it’s the return of winter; the first great backswing of Earth’s pendulum, struggling to rebalance itself. And as far as that pendulum swung in one direction, it’s going to have to swing just as far in the other. This winter could last a year or more, and this storm? I shudder to think of it.”
“All the more reason to push through to Riverhead,” said Xochi. “Kessler’s right about their supplies, and we’ll need all the help we can get if we’re going to make it to Plum Island.”
“You could at least call me ‘Erin,’” said Kessler, “since apparently ‘Mother’ is too much to ask for.”
“If Riverhead’s such a strong community, the Partials will be holding it,” said Ariel. “It’s the best place to set up an outpost on the eastern half of the island, especially since we did all the work for them. Our best course is to avoid it altogether.”
“We’ll starve,” said Kessler. “We can barely feed ourselves as it is. This house didn’t have a damn thing we could eat, and unless you’re volunteering to go fishing—”
“We can scrounge in stores along the way,” said Ariel. “We can send out pairs to forage while the others build the fire. Anything to avoid walking into a base full of Partial soldiers.”
“It would be easy enough to deal with them,” said Kessler. Her voice was different, and she stole a glance at Khan.
“No,” said Isolde, “I do not want to have this conversation again.”
“He wouldn’t be at any more risk than he already is,” said Kessler. “What, you think they’re going to take him somewhere in this weather? We’ll show up, they’ll ‘take us prisoner,’ which will essentially just mean they feed us and lock us somewhere warm, and then a few days later they’ve died of whatever Partial plague they catch from him, and we have the place to ourselves.”
“And killing an entire group of people, just like that, doesn’t bother you?” asked Ariel.
“They’re Partials,” said Kessler, “and no, you’re not the same thing, so don’t look at me like you’re offended. No matter where you came from, you grew up human, with human morals, and you didn’t lay siege to an entire species. They attacked us in the old world and they attacked us again in this one, and now they’re sitting in houses we rescued, eating food we grew and caught and stored, and I’m supposed to feel sorry for them? The hell I am.”
“I don’t care how good your reasons are,” said Isolde, “my baby is not a bomb.”
“Then we use you instead,” said Kessler, “or Ariel, if she’s so keen to get up close and personal with them.”
Ariel spread her arms wide, waving her fingertips to beckon Kessler closer. “You wanna go, bitch? Let’s do this.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” said Hobb, positioning himself between them. “How are we supposed to use Ariel or Isolde in the same way? They’re Partials—you keep saying that—but they’re not sick. Are they carriers?” He scooted away from Ariel almost imperceptibly.
“They’re the source of the disease,” said Kessler, “which is how Isolde’s baby got it. It’s latent inside their bodies, but Nandita has a chemical that can trigger it.”
Nandita’s hand went to her chest, clutching the small bag that she wore on a chain around her neck. When she saw that all eyes were on her, she looked calmly at Senator Hobb.
“The reason I gathered the three Partial girls was because I knew they might have something inside them, waiting to be unlocked. I thought it was the cure for RM, and I spent their entire childhood trying to find a way to trigger its release. That’s where I went last year—I found the facilities on Plum Island and used the equipment there to finish my research.” She held up the bag, staring at the small outline of a vial faintly visible in the folds of the fabric. “But the cure was never part of the genetic code for the new models, as Kira proved, and the trigger I found is for the disease.” She looked up. “If we give this to Isolde, she’ll start producing the pathogen in her lungs, and spread it to kill every Partial she comes in contact with.”
“Does she just drink it?” asked Kessler. “Does it have to be injected?”
“Injection only,” said Nandita. “The formula’s too fragile to survive the digestive system.”
“Why Isolde?” asked Ariel. She remembered all the lies and deceit and experimentation, an entire childhood as a secret lab rat in this woman’s hands. “Why didn’t you say me?”
“I thought you didn’t want to do it,” said Xochi.
Ariel roared at her without looking away from Nandita’s face. “Of course I don’t want to do it! But I want to know why she thinks I can’t.” She pointed at Nandita. “That wasn’t an accidental omission—you know something about me.”
“Your child died,” said Nandita. “Khan isn’t the first Partial-human hybrid, he’s the first one who lived;
the plague processors in Isolde’s DNA made him immune to one disease, but cursed him with another. Your baby . . . simply died.”
“So you don’t think I have the Partial disease in my genes.”
“I don’t,” said Nandita. “I don’t know about Kira. Isolde, as far as I know, might be the only one.”
“So all the experiments,” said Ariel, “all the horrible things you did to us as kids, the herbs and the physical tests and the ‘alternative medicines’ you gave me to try to figure this all out, that was all for nothing? You treated me like a test subject when I lived with you, and a liar and a pariah when I tried to run away, and it was all for this? So I could just turn out to be completely normal, and everything you were looking for wasn’t even there?”
“Negative results are still results,” said Nandita. “You have more knowledge than you did before. More truth.”
“Yeah,” said Ariel. “The only true thing you’ve ever told me.”
The group mostly fell quiet after that, discussing Riverhead only briefly and deciding to follow Ariel’s plan of cutting north around it. There was no more mention of diseases, or of using Khan as a living weapon, and lots of murmured worry about the worsening storm. It was becoming increasingly likely that they might never make it to Plum Island at all, though no one dared to say it out loud, and Ariel wondered what would happen then. Khan would die, at the very least. Isolde would fall apart. Hobb might very well abandon them.
And I can shoot Nandita, Ariel thought. Helping Khan is the one decent thing she’s tried to do with her life, and if she can’t do that? The world will be better off without her.
Xochi took the first watch, and Ariel slept fitfully by the fire, one side too hot and the other still freezing. She dreamed of flowers, and the garden she used to keep as a child in Nandita’s house. She’d been so proud of them, and when she’d moved away she’d started a new garden: daylilies and salvia and geraniums; joe-pye weeds and black-eyed Susans. All dead now under three feet of snow.
She woke in the middle of the night to find the fire burning low; Nandita was awake, taking her watch. Ariel kept her eyes slitted, faking sleep while the old woman added more scraps of the old kitchen table to the fire. Nandita stood there a moment, warming her hands, and Ariel felt a crazy, almost overwhelming compulsion to shoot her now, right here; to rid the world of her manipulations, and save the group from their useless trek to Plum Island. They’d never make it. Killing Nandita would only hasten the inevitable and give them time to escape from the island before dying of cold or the nuclear explosion. It made so much sense. Ariel reached for her pistol, mere inches from her head, so slow and so quiet the old woman would never even notice.
Nandita pulled out the bag from around her neck, staring at it in the firelight. Ariel froze. Nandita didn’t move, simply looking at the bag, until at last she reached up with her other hand and opened it, tugging apart the strings that held it closed and pulling out the small glass vial. Inside was the plague trigger, dark brown and glistening in the firelight. Nandita unscrewed the rubber cap, dumped the liquid in the fire, and watched it disappear in a hiss of bubbles and steam. Ariel watched with her. Nandita re-stoppered the vial and tucked it back in the bag, and Ariel closed her eyes again before the old woman turned around and walked back to her window to keep watch.
Ariel watched the fire for the rest of the night.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Green heard it first, stopping in midstep and raising his head to listen. The other Partials stopped an instant later, warned by the link that something was happening. Kira tried to listen as well, but when the Partial soldiers all dropped to the ground in unison, taking cover and pulling up their rifles, she realized that her ears weren’t nearly as finely tuned. She pulled up her own rifle, crawling to the snow toward Green.
“What happened?”
“Gunshot,” said Green, and pointed down the road to a wide-open parking lot. “Two so far. Long gun, medium caliber by the sound of it. Sniper, but he missed what he was shooting at.”
“How can you tell all that?”
“If it was a real gunfight, they wouldn’t have been single shots, and we would have heard more than one gun.” He looked at her. “And if the sniper had hit what he was aiming for, he wouldn’t have had to shoot a second time.”
They crept down the road toward the sound, until the residential street gave way to a four-lane road with a massive shopping center on the other side. The closest building was a restaurant with a silhouette of a lobster on its sign; the parking lot was mostly empty. Looks like everyone in Hicksville decided to die at home, thought Kira. Beyond the restaurant was a strip mall, with a few of the storefronts blackened from a decades-old fire. Well, thought Kira, everyone but the looters.
“It came from over there,” said Falin, pointing past the strip mall to a multistory shopping mall two parking lots away.
“That’s good open ground,” said Kira, “easy to defend. Someone in a top window could shoot anyone who gets too close.”
“The shot came from inside,” said Green. “Which means I don’t know what this means.”
“It means it’s easier to avoid,” said Falin. “Back up a block, and we go south with cover and forget it ever happened.”
“I’d like to know what it is,” said Green, watching the mall with sharp eyes. “But I don’t need to. On the very small chance whatever it is comes after us, we’re better off out there than approaching a sniper’s nest.”
“What if it’s someone who needs our help?” asked Kira.
“If I die before expiration,” said Green, “it’s going to be because you said somebody needed our help.”
“I know,” said Kira. She scanned the parking lot, looking for anything out of the ordinary. “If you both say it’s safer to turn back, we turn—” She stopped suddenly. “Wait.”
“I see it too,” said Green. “A body, in the snow by that stand of trees.”
“We have to check it out,” said Kira.
Green sat silently, deep in thought. “It should be safe,” he said at last. “We can advance under cover of that restaurant without anyone in the mall seeing a thing. Jansson can cover us from here in case of an ambush.” They conveyed their plan quickly and efficiently between them, the link doing most of the work, and then Green and Kira ran forward, feet kicking up thick tufts of snow. The trees and the body beside them were just beyond the cover of the restaurant—a small strip of dirt and grass that had once separated the parking lot into traffic lanes now served as home to a full line of young trees. They glanced back, got the okay from Falin, and ran forward again to sink down in the shadows of the miniature grove.
The body lay on its stomach, barely covered with snow; he had fallen recently. Kira reached for his neck to feel for a pulse and recoiled with a disgusted curse when her hand touched a cold, wet hole.
“What is it?” asked Green.
“Gills,” said Kira, recovering from the shock. She rubbed her fingers compulsively, as if she was trying to physically wipe away the memory of accidentally sticking her fingers inside them.
“Interesting,” said Green. “Apparently the Blood Man brought some of his toadies with him and one of them got snagged by that sniper.”
“So the sniper might be inside that mall,” said Kira. “Now we have to go in.”
“I know,” said Green, though the slight pause before he spoke showed how reluctant he was. “I told you you were going to get me killed.”
“I have three more weeks,” said Kira. “Give me a chance.”
Green signaled to the others, and they regrouped by the back wall of the restaurant, well out of sight of the mall. Green explained the situation and mapped out a plan to approach the mall safely. They ran slightly to the right, around a bank and through the strip mall to another residential street beyond; this gave them cars and fences and houses to hide behind, and when they reached the larger mall they were already behind it, running across a narrow loading zone to
a windowless blue wall. One of the loading bays was open, and they climbed through to the darkened warehouse.
At this point their communication became entirely nonverbal, and even with her adrenaline pumping Kira had to concentrate as hard as she could not only to detect all the link data but to interpret it. Emotional cues as simple as SEE and SUPPORT seemed to have much deeper meanings, sending one Partial ahead and another to a flanking position. The team moved seamlessly through the aisles and shelves, and eventually to the mall and the storefronts beyond, and Kira simply followed Green, stopping when he stopped, hiding when he hid. The link data sounded an alarm in her nervous system, and Kira found herself raising her rifle before she even understood why, firing down a hallway as a figure she hadn’t even seen dove smoothly into cover. Falin took up a firing position by the base of an escalator, and Jansson did the same in some kind of café across the hall. Green and Kira and the final soldier, a man named Colin, raced down the hall toward the fleeing shape, only to dive to the floor and scramble for cover when the entire mall seemed to explode into gunfire, bullets flying in all directions at once. Kira crawled into a clothing store, past the racks of snarky T-shirts to the sturdier wood of the counter, and covered her head with her hands. The soldiers started firing back, and Kira was deafened by the noise, until suddenly the shooting stopped and she heard a voice echoing through the halls.
“Whoa! Whoa! Everybody stop shooting . . . everybody else. This was a carefully calibrated ambush that was not intended to catch what looks like . . . an entire squad of Partial soldiers? What? What are you even doing here?”
Kira raised her head. She recognized the voice.
“Look, fellas,” said the voice, “we are trying to engage in a deadly game of cat and mouse with a psychotic murderess right now, so if you’d all just keep your noses out of other people’s business, we could get back to the nightmarish hellscape that our lives have become. Or you could just help us find her. Unless you’re working with her, in which case I really ought to stop talking, and we can all get back to shooting each other—”