Ruins

Ariel felt her voice rising. “You’d rather let them kill us all?”

  “It was an inconvenient time for a moral revelation,” said Nandita. “You don’t have to tell me. But these things happen; I was ready to do it, and then I wasn’t. The moment happened, and then it was past.”

  “So you think you made the right choice, then? That letting people get shot in the name of your moral revelation was worth it?”

  “We didn’t get killed.”

  “You had no way of knowing we wouldn’t.”

  “I believe,” said Nandita, “that that is precisely the point.”

  On. Off.

  “I came down here to kill you,” said Ariel.

  “I know.”

  “I was always going to do it,” said Ariel. “That was the whole reason I came. You were the only one who could save Khan, and so I was going to wait until you had done that, and as soon as you did, blam.” She gestured with the gun. “No more lying, no more schemes, no more control. I figured the world would be better off.”

  “I can hardly disagree with you.”

  “Now here I am, and all I want to do is kill you, and . . .” She paused, waiting for Nandita to speak, but the woman said nothing. “You’re not the person I thought you were.”

  “I can say the same about you,” said Nandita.

  “Who did you think I was?”

  “I thought you were a child,” said Nandita. She shook her head. “I was mistaken.”

  Ariel stood up, pointed the gun at Nandita’s head . . .

  . . . and stood there.

  “Khan deserved to live,” said Ariel. “Maybe Hobb does, too. Or maybe he, and you, and all those Partials in that explosion, all deserved to die. I don’t know. Now here we are, and I’m the one with the control, with the power, with the ability to let you live or die with a thought. If I’m going to have any inconvenient moral revelations, now would be the time.”

  She lowered the gun and turned away. “I’m going to go look for water.”

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Shon seethed, staring at the map until his vision turned red, and he slammed his fist into the table. It cracked under the force of the blow, and he collapsed to the floor of the middle-school gym he had made his base camp. Human rebels still swarmed through the forest, hiding and sniping and slipping away, killing his soldiers and attacking their supplies and leading them ever farther to the east: always north and east. Away from the mainland and away from East Meadow, and now White Plains was gone and East Meadow was emptying like a sieve. In hindsight it was obvious—the humans’ actions were a powerful deception precisely because they weren’t successful. Victory after victory, prisoner after prisoner, they had swept across the island and mopped up the guerrillas and played straight into their hands like fools. The ruse had worked, and the human civilians were getting away.

  The sheer coldheartedness of it enraged him. War was war, but he had tried to conduct it honorably. He had stopped Morgan’s executions as soon as Morgan’s orders stopped coming. He had gathered the humans but he hadn’t hurt them; he’d tried to quell their uprisings peacefully when he could, and he’d worked to bring East Meadow food and water. They had repaid him with a vicious bioweapon, a campaign of terrorism, and now a nuclear explosion that had undoubtedly wiped most of the Partial species off the planet. His friends, his leaders . . . he had felt abandoned before, with no new orders for weeks, but now he was completely cut off. He would never receive new orders; he would never receive another message on the radio; he would never rejoin the rest of his army because it did not exist. He had twenty thousand Partials under his command, and there would never be reinforcements because they were the last living Partials in the world.

  In ten more days the next batch would expire, and they would be down to seventeen thousand. A month later they’d lose six thousand more.

  He was done being honorable.

  A messenger walked toward him but kept his distance, probably because of the shattered table and the angry link data still boiling through the air around his head. He took a breath to calm himself before speaking.

  “Report.”

  “One of the prisoners is talking,” said the messenger. “Apparently the rebels have been spreading word of the nuke, telling people to flee south before it went off.”

  “And we never discovered this?”

  “You had given explicit orders not to torture anyone,” said the messenger. “Now that we are, they’re . . . We’re learning a lot.”

  “Who was behind it?”

  “A resistance group called the White Rhinos,” said the messenger. “They’ve been in operation since just after the occupation of East Meadow began.”

  “I know who they are,” said Shon. “They’ve been notoriously hard to catch—do we have any in custody?”

  “Just one, sir.”

  “Lead the way.” He left his aides to pick up the broken table, pausing only to grab his sidearm from the rack by the door. The prisoners were kept in a pair of basement restrooms, chained to the pipes of molding sinks and dank, broken toilets. Shon nodded to the guards standing alert in the hall outside and marveled at the fierce, almost desperate anger that seemed to permeate the entire camp. As soon as they had a target for their vengeance, they would fall like a thunderbolt.

  They opened the door, and Shon reeled back slightly at the smell. The messenger led him to a short, skinny girl in the back corner, who showed signs of having been interrogated.

  “This is the White Rhino?”

  The messenger nodded. Shon crouched down in front of the battered girl, showing her the gun. “What’s your name?”

  “Yoon-Ji Bak.”

  “And you worked with the rebel Marisol Delarosa?”

  The girl’s face was hard, steely and determined even through the blood and grime. “Proudly.”

  “Where are the rest of the humans you have been attempting to evacuate?”

  The girl said nothing.

  “Tell me where they’re gathering, and I’ll make your death quick.”

  The girl said nothing.

  Shon raised his voice, trying to emulate as much of the sound of human anger as he could. “Where are they?”

  “Shoot me,” said Yoon.

  Shon looked at her a moment, then handed the gun to the messenger behind him. He clamped Yoon’s left wrist tightly in one hand and grabbed her little finger with his other. “You are a terrorist, a murderer, and a war criminal,” he said. “That broken nose is the nicest treatment you’ll get here, unless you start telling me what I want to know. I’m going to find all of you bastards, and I’m going to do what I should have done months ago—years ago. What is the rendezvous point for the human evacuation?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Shon snapped her finger backward, breaking it with an audible crack. The girl screamed, and he grabbed the next finger in line. “Let’s try again. Where are the humans going?”

  She screamed again, gritting her teeth against the pain. “We’re getting everyone off the island.”

  “Be more specific, please. Where and how?”

  “You’ll have to kill me,” she gasped.

  He snapped another finger, and moved his hand to the third. “Eight more chances before I start to get creative. Where exactly can I find them?”

  She was grunting now, tears streaming down her face, clenching her other fist into a tight white ball against the pain. “I don’t know!”

  Snap.

  “Seven,” said Shon. “Where?”

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  The snow started again soon after the explosion, and Kira could only hope that the weather would diminish the spread of the fallout. Green said the windstorm was a side effect of the bomb, brought on as the fires in White Plains sucked in air like the eye of a tornado. They waited in the hospital for Falin and the others, and Kira led them all to Nandita’s house, hoping to find some trace of her sisters. The wind slashed the falling snow into their faces, stinging their cheeks a
nd eyes as they hiked through the city. When they arrived at the home it was empty.

  “Sandy said that Haru was here in East Meadow,” said Marcus. “If he knew about the nuke, he would have gone straight to Madison, and she wouldn’t have left without Ariel and Isolde. They’re probably . . . south, I guess. That’s where everyone’s going. They wouldn’t dare try to evacuate through Manhattan, with all the bridges all booby-trapped, so I’m guessing boats.”

  “Do you have that many boats?” asked Green. “Thirty-five thousand people is a lot to move over water.”

  “We have fishing villages all along the southern beaches,” said Kira. She closed her eyes as she spoke, collapsing on the old living room couch, battered and broken. She tried to remember the last time she hadn’t been running, either from or to something. Even the effort of searching through her memory made her tired.

  “The fishermen have some boats, but not many,” said Marcus. “Still, they’re better than nothing. I think Nandita has an old atlas in here somewhere. . . .” He searched the bookshelves and pulled out a thick hardback, thumping it down on the coffee table and flipping through it to find a map of Long Island. “Most of the island’s protein comes from fish, caught either here, by Riverhead, or here, in the Great South Bay. There are a few smaller communities out here as well, on Jones Beach. The Riverhead boats are out of reach, but there’s a pretty sizable fleet of sailboats in the bay, and while it would probably take several trips, they could start ferrying people to the mainland . . . here, I guess.” He pointed to the Jersey shore. “If they follow the coast past Long Beach and Rockaway, they can cut across to New Jersey pretty easily, without ever getting out into the high seas and deep water.”

  “So if we want to meet up,” asked Falin, “do we go to Jones Beach or look for the boats in the bay?”

  “If I was trying to coordinate this I’d send everybody due south,” said Marcus, looking at the map, “to get as far from the blast as possible, then west as far as they can go. If the boats are just shuttling back and forth here, between Breezy Point and Sandy Hook, they can evacuate the island a lot more quickly.” He looked at Green. “Which is a long way of saying that we have a better chance of finding them if we stick to the beaches.”

  “Unless the fishermen haven’t been able to get their boats out of the bay,” said Falin. “What if the Partials are holding them? They might need our help.”

  Marcus leaned back on the couch, shaking his head. “Obviously you have never had the pleasure of meeting a post-Break fisherman. Where do you go if you’re so traumatized by the end of the world that you can never trust civilization again? Some of them live in the woods, hunting deer and wild cats and whatever else, but most of them became fishermen: They’re independent, they’re mobile, and if they don’t want to trade with our farms, they can ignore the rest of the world completely. That’s where Kira’s sister Ariel went when she left this place—straight out to Islip on the fringe of a fishing commune. I’d bet you no more than a handful of those fishing communities were ever rounded up by the Partials during the occupation at all. They could sail out to Fire Island or hide in Oyster Bay, and pretty much avoid the invasion the same way they avoided our society for the last decade.”

  “Then who’s to say they’re going to help at all?” asked Green. “Even if the other humans found the fishing communities, how do we know they agreed to let those humans use the fishing boats?”

  “Oh, they definitely found each other,” said Marcus. “Some of these causeways are miles long—we used to travel on them a lot when we did salvage runs—and when a fisherman sees a few thousand people crossing over he’s going to get curious, and when he finds out what’s going on, word will spread fast. I suppose it’s possible some of them won’t help, but I’d bet you dollars to doughnuts most of them will. They won’t want to stay on an irradiated island any more than the rest of us, and when they leave, they’re more likely to take us with them than not. They’re not evil, just . . . antisocial.”

  Green nodded. “So what do we do?”

  “We follow the other refugees,” said Marcus. “South on the causeways, then west on the beaches. We take as many of the final refugees as we can—we empty East Meadow completely—and then we follow the route the others took until we manage to catch up to them.”

  Green asked another question, but Kira wasn’t listening anymore. Marcus’s analysis of the island was solid, and his plans were sound, but . . . how much of it really mattered anymore? Even if they could flee, what were they fleeing to? What hope did humans alone have for survival? They had Green and Falin and a few others, but four Partials, or even forty, couldn’t save thirty thousand humans. Who even knew how many Partials were left? And surely any chance at reconciliation was consumed in the nuclear blast.

  Kira stood up and walked into the kitchen, smelling the herbs that reminded her so much of home. Nandita had gone missing two years ago, and after all that had happened Kira knew she’d never see the old woman again, but this kitchen, and these herbs, brought back a flood of fond memories. Xochi had kept up the garden after Nandita left, and the ceiling was hung with sprigs of dried rosemary, sheaves of brittle brown basil and bay leaves, fragrant bunches of chamomile. Kira stared at the mess—they had obviously left in a hurry when they fled the city—and after a long moment she opened a cupboard, pulled down the blackened metal teapot, and went to the sink to fill it up. The faucet dribbled for a second and went dry; apparently the cold had been too much for their aging water system, and the pipes had finally frozen and burst. She thought about using the pump in the backyard, but eventually just opened the side door and scooped a hefty chunk of snow into the teapot. Xochi had left a pile of split logs stacked neatly by the wood-burning stove, and Kira built her fire carefully inside the cast-iron monster. Her hands moved almost by themselves, remembering the years past, night after night, doing the same thing under Nandita’s watchful eye. Sometimes Madison’s. The specks of snow that had landed on the outside of the teapot melted quickly as the stove warmed up, and then hissed into steam as it grew even hotter.

  “Thirsty?” asked Marcus. He was standing in the doorway from the living room, watching her with tired eyes.

  “No,” said Kira blankly. “I just needed something to do.”

  Marcus nodded and walked to the counter, staring at the array of herbs. “Let’s see. Mint, chamomile, lemongrass, rose hips, ginger—what sounds good?”

  “Whatever.” Kira put another stick in the fire, keeping the heat even. It didn’t really matter, since she was only boiling water, but it was something she was good at. The fire was something she could control. She felt the heat with her hand and watched the pot.

  Marcus fiddled with the herbs a bit, pulling out three of the chipped porcelain mugs and a metal mesh ball for each. He sniffed them, making sure they were clean, and dropped a few leaves into each ball as he spoke. “So that was your father.”

  “Yep.” Kira didn’t know how to feel about Armin, and so refused to feel anything. She tested the heat again, trying to gauge the perfect temperature for the tea.

  “I saw a picture of him once,” said Marcus. “Heron showed it to me.”

  Kira looked up at this. “Heron?”

  “You remember that Partial assassin who captured you when we went north with Samm? She showed up here one night last year, out of the blue. Showed me a picture of you as a little girl, standing between Nandita and that guy from the hospital. Armin . . . Walker, I guess?”

  “Dhurvasula,” said Kira, looking back at the stove. “I couldn’t remember my last name when the soldiers found me after the Break, so they gave me one. I might be Kira Dhurvasula, I don’t know. I don’t know if he legally adopted me or what.”

  “If you were an experiment, you might not legally ex—” He stopped. “Never mind.” Marcus finished with the last mesh ball and dropped one into each mug. “Is the water close?”

  “Yeah,” said Kira. The teapot had already started to give short, f
eeble whistles, gearing up for a full boil. They watched in silence, and when it piped loudly she took it off the stove and poured a steaming stream into each thin mug. The aroma of the tea rose up in a cloud, calming her, and she breathed deep. Chamomile.

  “Is he going to come after you?” asked Marcus.

  It was a question Kira hadn’t allowed herself to think about yet, but now that it was out in the air there was no avoiding it. “Probably.”

  “He said you were a new model,” said Marcus. “Some kind of ultimate refinement of the Partial design. If he’s collecting . . . artisanal DNA, or whatever, he’s going to want yours.”

  “I used to wonder what I was for,” said Kira. She looked up at him, meeting his eyes for the first time that evening. His face was a warm bronze, almost glowing in the firelight, and his eyes were as black as the clouded, starless sky. “When I found out I was a Partial, I thought that they must have built me for some grand purpose. Something evil, maybe, like I was a bomb carrying a new strain of RM, or a spy just waiting to be activated. I hoped, though, that just maybe I was the key to saving us all, the cure for everything or a hybrid model, or something that could bring the two species together.” She smiled, but it felt sour and forced, the kind of smile that led almost instantly to tears. “Turns out I’m useless, at least as far as saving the world goes.” She wiped her eye. “I don’t carry the cure for RM, and while I don’t think I expire, I can’t do much to keep other Partials from doing so. Now Armin wants me for my DNA, and I can’t help but wonder if that’s all I’m good for. I used to wonder if I was really going to live through this, but now I can’t help but think that maybe . . . I shouldn’t.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “I thought I was made for something terrible,” said Kira, “and then I thought I was made for something great, and now it turns out I wasn’t made for anything. I’m just . . . here.”

  “You mean like everybody else?” asked Marcus. His eyes were kind, almost smiling, but Kira looked away.