Fragments

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Another pack of Watchdogs trailed them from Camelback Mountain to the Susquehanna River but never moved in to attack. Samm tied their food and equipment high in the trees every night, and Heron and Kira did their best to protect the horses. Afa stopped talking to Samm completely, and only barely to Heron; the few times he did, both girls began to suspect he was confusing her for Kira. He was better in the mornings, when his mind was rested, but as each day wore on he became more suspicious, more furtive; Kira began to see a third personality emerge, a dangerous cross between the confused child and the paranoid genius. It was this version of Afa that stole a knife from Kira’s gear, and tried to stab Samm with it the next time he got too close to his backpack. They got the knife away from him, but Kira worried that the struggle was even more damaging in the long run, feeding his distrust and paranoia.

As they traveled, Kira thought about her experience with the link—about the times she could sense something, and the times she couldn’t. She couldn’t quite puzzle it out, but that didn’t mean it didn’t make sense, just that she didn’t yet have all the tools she needed to make sense of it. She tried to concentrate, willing herself to feel Samm’s emotions, or to transmit something to him, but it didn’t seem to work—unless they were in a high-stress situation, like combat. After a few days of trying and failing, she approached Samm about it directly.

“I want you to teach me how to use the link.”

Samm looked at her passively, though she knew he must be sending some kind of link data to reflect his emotional state. Was he confused? Skeptical? She clenched her teeth and tried to sense it, but she couldn’t. Or she couldn’t tell the difference between that and what she thought she was picking up intuitively.

“You can’t learn how to link,” said Samm. “That’s like . . . learning how to see. Either your eyes work or they don’t.”

“Then maybe I’m already doing it and I just can’t recognize it,” said Kira. “Teach me how it works, so I know when it happens.”

Samm rode in silence for a moment, then shook his head—a surprisingly human gesture he must have picked up from her or Heron. “I don’t know how to describe it because I can’t imagine not having it,” he said. “It’s like not having eyes. You use your eyes for everything—vision is so important to human and Partial function that it colors every other aspect of our lives. Even that—the word ‘colors’ as a synonym for ‘affects.’ It’s a visual metaphor being used to describe something nonvisual. When you imagine someone trying to function without sight, that’s how I imagine someone trying to function without the link.”

“But vision fails all the time,” said Kira. “Blind people can still function in society, and I bet all of them understand metaphors like ‘colors.’”

“But blindness is still considered a handicap,” said Samm, “at least among Partials.”

“Humans, too.”

“Okay then,” said Samm. “And no one would argue that blindness is a stylistic difference, it’s literally a lessening of ability.”

“Take a look at this,” said Kira. She widened her eyes, making an exaggerated “surprised” face, and Samm didn’t respond. “Did you see it?”

“See what?”

“I just opened my eyes really wide.”

“You do that all the time,” said Samm. “Different parts of your face and body move constantly while you talk; Heron does it, too. I used to think she had a facial tremor.”

Kira laughed. “It’s called body language. Most of the social cues that you communicate with pheromones, we communicate with little facial movements and hand gestures. This means I’m surprised.” She widened her eyes again. “This means I’m skeptical.” She raised her eyebrow. “This means I don’t know something.” She shrugged, holding her hands to the sides, palms up.

“How do you . . .” Samm paused, in the space where a human would furrow his brow or wrinkle his lips—something to signify confusion—and Kira assumed that he was sending out “I’m confused” data through the pheromone link. “How do you teach that to each other? A new member of your culture, or a new child—how long does it take them to learn all these weird little hand signals?” He tried to emulate the shrug, looking stiff and mechanical.

“That’s like asking a Spanish speaker why they bother with all those weird words when it would be so much easier to just speak English,” said Kira. “Do you have to teach the link data to new Partials?”

“We haven’t had new Partials in years,” said Samm, “but no, of course not, and I think I see where you’re going with this. Do you really mean to say that this ‘body language’ is as inherent to human beings as the link is to Partials?”

“That’s exactly it.”

“But then how—” He stopped, and Kira could only guess what link data he was expressing now. “I was about to say, ‘How can you understand each other over the radio when half your communication is visual?’ but I suppose the link doesn’t transmit over the radio either, so we’re even there. But on the other hand, Partials can still understand each other in the dark.”

“I’ll grant you that,” said Kira, “but we also have a lot of verbal cues you don’t. Listen to these two sentences: ‘Are you going to eat that?’ Now: ‘Are you going to eat that?’”

Samm stared back, and Kira almost laughed at what she assumed was his confusion. “I suppose you’re going to tell me that the difference in volume changes the meaning of the sentence? We use the link for most forms of emphasis like that.”

“I suppose that gives us a leg up on radio communication,” said Kira, and waggled her eyebrows. “This may be the key to winning the war.”

Samm laughed, and Kira realized that laughter, at least, seemed to be fairly common among the Partials. They probably didn’t need it, since they could express enjoyment or humor through the link, but they still laughed anyway. Maybe it was built into some human segment of their custom genome? A vestigial response? “Enough about body language,” said Kira. “I want to practice the link, so hit me.”

“Hitting you won’t make the link easier to detect.”

“It’s an expression,” said Kira. “Send me some link data—start throwing it out there. I need to practice trying to pick it up.”

They spent the next few days practicing, with Samm sending her simple pheromonal messages and Kira trying everything she could to feel them, and to recognize which emotions they represented. A couple of times she thought she could sense it, but most of the time she was completely lost.

They passed through the Appalachians on a wide highway marked with a number 80, run-down and crumbling in places, but mostly unbroken. They made better time across the river, leaving the dog pack and, they hoped, any other potential observers far behind them. With less fear of attack they could travel more openly, but the open stretches of farmland only accentuated what Kira understood was a growing agoraphobia in Afa, and he tried to stop at almost every town they passed through, holing up in a bookstore or library and obsessively sorting the titles. Much of the area was covered with long, low hills, and he did better when they could travel between them, comfortably hemmed in by reassuring masses that, while not buildings, at least limited his sight line. Kira hoped that this kind of terrain would continue all the way to Chicago, but as they moved west, the land got flatter and flatter. When they crossed the Allegheny River and the midwestern plains stretched out before them, Afa’s mutterings grew more sporadic and disorganized. By the time they crossed the border from Pennsylvania to Ohio, Kira realized he wasn’t just talking but arguing, mumbling furiously at a choir of voices in his head.

Afa’s lone saving grace in the Midwest were the cities, which were bigger here and more frequent; Heron, on the other hand, grew more cautious in each, always wary of an attack by some unseen force. They stayed on Interstate 80 as much as possible, passing through Youngstown and following it north to a place called Cleveland. Both were eerie, empty cities, lacking the kudzu that gave such a junglelike quality to Kira’s home on the East Coast. New York was still and silent, but the vegetation at least gave it a feeling of life. Here the cities were dead, bare and crumbling, eroded by wind and weather, fading monuments in a vast and featureless plain. It made Kira lonely just to look at them, and she was as happy as Heron to leave them behind. Their road took them along the southern edge of a rolling gray sea, which Samm insisted was just a lake; even seeing it on the map, Kira found it hard to believe that it wasn’t another part of the ocean she’d left behind. She’d never liked that ocean before, feeling small and exposed on its shores, but now she ached for it. She ached for her friends—for Marcus. Bobo nickered and shook his mane, and she patted him gratefully on the neck. How the old world ever got by without horses, she couldn’t understand. You couldn’t pet a car.

In a city called Toledo the lake met a wide river snaking up from the south, and they reined in their horses on the edge of it, a ledge off which there was a fifty-foot drop down to the raging river. There was no longer any road before them; the rubble of the I-80 bridge lay in the river far below.

“What happened here?” asked Kira. The precipice was dizzying, the wind whipping through her hair. “The bridge looks too new to just fall apart like this.”

“Look at the beams,” said Samm, pointing below to the metal infrastructure twisting out of the concrete on their side of the chasm. “This was blown up.”

“That should make you happy,” said Heron to Afa. Afa was turning in circles on his horse Oddjob, ignoring them and muttering threats that Kira guessed were only half directed at the horse.

“We’ll have to go around,” said Samm, pulling Buddy’s head to the left to head back. Kira stayed near the edge, peering across to the far side. The fallen bridge had made a sort of barrier in the river, not big or tall enough to block its flow, but intrusive enough to send the placid river roiling and bubbling over the rubble before smoothing again on the other side.

“Who would have blown it up?” she asked.

“There was a war,” said Heron. “You probably don’t remember it, you were pretty young.”

Kira did her best not to glare at her. “I know there was a war,” she said. “I just don’t understand which side had a good reason to blow up a bridge. You told me the Partials focused on military targets, so they wouldn’t have done it, and the humans wouldn’t have destroyed their own structures.”

“That’s the attitude that started the war,” said Heron, and Kira was surprised by the angry undercurrent in her voice.

“I don’t understand,” said Kira.

Heron looked at her, a mixture of calculation and disdain, then turned and looked out over the river. “Your tacit assumption of sovereignty. This bridge belonged as much to the Partials as it did to the humans.”

“Partials were given property rights in 2064,” said Afa, staring at the road as Oddjob turned him around and around. “These rights were never recognized by state courts, and Partials were still unable to get loans to buy anything anyway. New York Times, Sunday edition, September 24.”

“There’s your answer,” said Samm, pointing down at the line of broken water as the river rolled over the fallen bridge. “There, sticking out of the water about twenty yards out.” Kira looked, following the line of his finger and shading her eyes against the spots of glare off the water.

Where Samm was pointing, Kira saw a metal prong sticking out of the water, lodged somehow in the pieces of the bridge. She pulled out her binoculars and looked again, focusing them in on the metal, and saw that it was the cannon of a tank. The body bulged up, just under the flow of water, wedged between two pieces of concrete and steel. The markings on the side read 328. “There was a tank on the bridge when it went down.”

“Probably dozens of them,” said Samm. “328 was a Partial armored platoon. I’m guessing the local militia rigged the bridge and blew it when the Partials were crossing, killing as many as they could.”

“They wouldn’t have done that,” said Kira.

“They did that and worse,” snapped Heron.

Samm’s voice was more gentle. “By the end of the war they were desperate enough to do anything,” he said. “The Partial victory was already decisive, and the release of RM made everything worse. Humans were dying by the millions. Some of them were ready to blow up anything they could—their bridges, their cities, even themselves—if it meant killing even one of us.”

“Really great ethics,” said Heron.

“What about the fleet off New York Bay?” Kira snapped back, whirling to face her. “I saw it in Afa’s documents—twenty human ships brought down, all hands lost, the most devastating attack of the war.”

“Twenty-three,” said Afa.

“Self-defense,” said Heron.

“Are you kidding me?” asked Kira. “What could the Partials possibly be defending themselves from?”

Heron raised her eyebrow. “Why do you keep saying that?”

“What?”

“Saying ‘them’ instead of ‘us.’ You’re a Partial—you’re different, but you’re one of us. And you’re most definitely not one of them. You keep forgetting it, but your human buddies aren’t going to. And they will find out.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” asked Kira.

“You tell me,” said Heron. “What’s your little boyfriend Marcus likely to do to you when he finds out what you are?”

“Easy,” said Samm. “Everybody just calm down. This argument is not going to get us anywhere.”

“Neither is this bridge,” Kira growled, and turned Bobo’s head to lead him back down to the highway. She wanted to yell, to scream at them both, even at Afa—that this was their fault, that they had fought this war and destroyed the world before she was even old enough to defend it. But this one part of it, this massive act of destruction, she couldn’t even blame on them. That was the worst part of all. “Let’s find another way around.”

Chicago was flooded.

It had taken them nearly a month to get there, anticipation rising with each new day. All their solar panels were gone, powering a string of radio repeaters behind them—if the records they found included a way to extend the expiration date or synthesize the cure for RM, they could radio it home in seconds instead of traveling another month back through dangerous country. Afa grew more eager as the city appeared before them, a giant metropolis that seemed even bigger, if possible, than New York City. It sat on the shores of another giant lake, curving around the eastern and southern sides, and spread out into the plains as far as Kira could see—towering skyscrapers, elevated trains and monorails, vast factories and warehouses and endless rows of houses and offices and apartments.

All crumbling. All mired in oily, swampy water.

“Is it supposed to look like that?” asked Kira.

“Not a chance,” said Samm. They stood on the top of an office complex on the edge of the city, surveying the scene with his binoculars. “It’s not all flooded, just most of it; looks like there are rises and falls in the terrain, though nothing huge. I’d bet most of the water’s just a few inches deep, maybe a few feet in the worst places. Looks like the lake overflowed its boundaries.”

“Chicago had dozens of canals running through the city,” said Heron. “Some of your shallow streets are going to be deep rivers, but they should at least be easy to spot.”

“Those canals were the most heavily engineered waterways in the world,” said Afa proudly, as if he had engineered them himself. “The old-world engineers actually reversed the flow of one of the rivers—those are the glories we used to have, when mankind kept nature under tight control.” His eyes glowed, and Kira could only imagine what the thought did to him; after four weeks in a wilderness run wild, a city so fiercely technological must have felt like an answer to a prayer.

“Nature has fought back,” said Heron. “Let’s hope it hasn’t flooded your data center.”

“Here’s the address,” said Afa eagerly, pulling a folded piece of paper from his backpack; another email printout, with a street address circled in red near the bottom. “I’ve never been here, so I don’t know where it is.”

Samm looked at the paper, then at the gargantuan city ahead of them. “Cermak Road. I don’t even know where to start looking.” He glanced back down at his paper, then down at the streets below. “We’re going to need a map.”

“That tower is probably an airport,” said Kira, pointing to a tall concrete pillar near the shores of the lake. “They’ll have an old car rental place, and that’s bound to have some kind of local road map.” The others agreed, and they climbed back down to their horses. The roads to the airport were mostly dry, but the few patches of flooding still proved problematic. Some of the streets were full of shallow standing water, others were merely muddy, but here and there a street had become a moving stream or a rushing river. Manhole covers bubbled with encroaching lake water, pavement buckled from leaking water mains, and sometimes entire streets had caved in and washed away, thanks to overloaded sewer pipes far below. The smell was overpowering, but it smelled like lake, not sewer. Humanity had been gone so long it didn’t even smell bad anymore. It took them all day to reach the airport, and they camped for the night in a ground-floor office. The horses they tethered to a rusting X-ray machine. As Kira had suspected, the rental car center had a number of local maps, and they pored over them by the light of Heron’s flashlight, planning their route for the following day.

“The data center is here,” said Samm, pointing to a spot near the coast, smack in the middle of the thickest part of downtown. “With the lake right there, and canals on every side, I think we’ll be lucky if we don’t end up swimming there. And we’ll have to hope the water’s not poisonous this close to the toxic wasteland.”

“The horses will never make it,” said Kira.

Heron looked at the scale in the corner of the page, trying to calculate distance. “That’s a long walk without them. It looks like we can take Highway 90 almost the whole way there; if it’s elevated, like some of these have been, we shouldn’t have any problems with the flooding until the last few blocks.”

“And then what?” asked Kira. “Leave the horses tied up to the freeway? If Chicago’s anything like Manhattan, they’ll be eaten by lions in the first few hours. Or those freaky talking dogs.”

Samm almost smiled. “You’re still hung up on those, aren’t you?”

“I don’t understand how the rest of you aren’t,” said Kira.

“If we leave them free enough to escape from predators, they won’t be there when we get back,” said Heron. “If you want horses at all, we have to take the risk.”

“How far is it?” asked Kira, looking closer at the map. “We could leave them here, or upstairs maybe—if they’re penned in, they’re not in as much danger, and we know we could find them again.”

“I don’t want to walk,” said Afa from the other side of the room, fiddling with his portable screen. Kira didn’t even know he’d been listening.

“You’ll do fine,” she said, but Samm shook his head.

“I don’t know if he will. I think he’s weaker now than when we started the trip.”

“If he can’t handle the walk there, he won’t be able to handle the walk back home,” said Kira. “We leave the horses somewhere safe, and pick them up on the way back.”

Heron examined the map, tracing the route with her finger. “We go out here and get straight on 90; it’s a toll road, but I’ve got a few quarters. That links up here, to 94, and goes right into the heart of downtown. We get off on this big interchange here, and it’s a straight shot across to ParaGen, maybe only a mile of surface streets.” It was hard to tell on the map what kinds of buildings lay along the route, since it was intended for tourists and business travelers; a few key hotels and convention centers were called out, and a handful of famous local restaurants, but nothing that looked convenient to their path. Finally Heron zeroed in on a building shaped like a lopsided circle, just off the highway. “This says ‘Wrigley Field.’ That’s a baseball stadium. There’ll be an off-ramp from the highway, and plenty of places to pen the horses in—they’ll have food, and they’ll be contained and protected.”

Kira studied it, then nodded. “I suppose it’s our best bet, and if things don’t go as planned, we can adapt on the road. Let’s get some sleep, and head out at first light.”

The airport had several restaurants, and in the back kitchens they were able to scrounge together several cans of sealed food—mostly bulk-size cans of fruit, but one place had a rack of canned chicken, and a sagging Mexican restaurant had some gallon cans of refried beans and cheese sauce. Most of the fruit had turned, and the beans smelled just suspicious enough that they decided not to risk it, but the chicken and cheese made for a tasty if slightly messy meal. They started a fire in a metal garbage can and warmed it up as best they could, serving it on foam trays—so well-preserved they looked like new—and eating with plastic forks from a bag in the back of an old sandwich shop. Afa ignored them, eyes glued to his screen, eating only when Kira placed the food directly in front of his face. He was mumbling about security codes, and they left him to his work.

Kira took the first watch, talking softly to Bobo as he nibbled on an overgrown planter box. Afa was still working when Heron took over at two in the morning, but when Kira woke up at seven he was asleep in his chair, slumped down over the darkened screen. Kira couldn’t help but wonder if he’d fallen asleep naturally, or if Heron had somehow knocked him unconscious.

They packed up and rode out, following the map and discovering that Heron was right, and the highway was elevated. They passed through mile after mile of Chicago as if on a bridge through a swamp, looking down at houses and parks and schoolyards all flooded and soggy, the oily surface of the water glinting brightly in the morning sun. Here and there a river moved through the city, evidence of an extremely high water table, and Kira marveled that the city had ever been dry at all. It must have taken an immense effort for the old world to keep the lake and the rivers and even the groundwater in check. Part of her felt proud, as Afa had been the day before, smiling to think that she was a part of such an amazing legacy—a species so intelligent, so capable and determined, that they could hold back the sea and turn rivers around in their paths. To have taken this marshy coastline and turned it into a megacity was a feat to be proud of.

Another part of her thought only of the towering pride. How easy would it be for a civilization so amazing to reach just a little too far? To do something it shouldn’t? To make one sacrifice or one compromise or one rationalization too many? If you can build a city so great, what’s to stop you from building a person? If you can control a lake, what’s to stop you from controlling a population? If you can subjugate nature itself, why should a sickness ever get out of hand?

Kira thought about the Trust: about all their secret plans and hidden intentions. About the Failsafe. What was it? Were they trying to save the world, or destroy it? The answers were in the data center, and the data center was in their grasp.

They followed Interstate 90 on a straight course northwest, until at last it arced farther west to join 94. To their dismay it began to dip down here, not just losing its elevation but literally running below the level of the rest of the city—not under the ground, but sunken into it. What had once been a highway was now a lazy river, with only the tops of the tallest trucks poking out above the water.

“We’ll need to double back,” said Samm.

“And what,” asked Heron, “travel through the surface streets? You saw the sinkholes we passed trying to get to the airport—with this much water covering everything, we’ll never know whether we’re stepping into solid ground or an underwater pit.”

Kira looked behind them, scanning the cityscape, then back at the river. “It’s too long for the horses to swim.”

“It’s miles,” said Heron.

“Let’s find a boat,” said Afa.

Kira looked at him. “Are you serious?”

“You said this road goes straight up to the data center, right? We know it’s deep enough for a boat, so let’s leave the horses and take one.”

Samm nodded. “I have to admit that’s a pretty good idea. Let’s find something that can float and carry us.”

Kira angled Bobo toward the side of the highway and looked off, scanning the city around them. Here at the point of junction the highway was ridiculously wide, dozens of lanes across, and nearly at ground level. The north side was some kind of a rail station, but the south looked like a residential neighborhood, and probably the best bet for finding a small boat. She slid off Bobo’s back, stretched her legs, and grabbed her rifle. “One of you come with me. Let’s see what we can find over there.”

“I’ll go,” said Samm. He jumped off Buddy and followed Kira, catching up to her quickly with long, easy strides. They clambered over a cement barrier, then another and another, countless different roads and lanes and directions all running into and past and around one another. “It’s a good plan,” he said.

Kira hoisted herself over another barrier. “The boat? Afa’s not an idiot.”

“I think I’ve been unfair to him.”

Kira grinned. “Don’t get all mushy over one good idea.”

“It’s not just that,” he said, “it’s everything. He’s been stronger than I expected. Or more resilient, at least.” He followed her over the barrier.

Kira nodded absently, scanning the trees at the edge of the road. “He’s been through a lot.”

“Eleven years alone,” said Samm, “running and hiding without anyone to help or share it with. It’s no wonder his mind broke.” He shrugged. “He’s only human.”

Kira froze. “Wait,” she said, turning to face him. “You’re saying he’s . . . that it’s okay that he’s crazy because he’s human?”

“I’m saying that he’s done much better for himself than a lot of humans would have,” said Samm.

“But you think being human is a liability,” said Kira. “That being human somehow excuses his deficiencies because hey, at least he’s not crapping in his pants all the time.”

“That’s not what I said.”

“But it’s what you meant,” said Kira. Is that what you thought about me? ‘She’s pretty smart, for a human’?”

“You’re a Partial.”

“You didn’t know that.”

“We are engineered to be perfect,” said Samm. “We’re stronger and smarter and more capable because we were built that way—I don’t see why it’s so bad to recognize it out loud.”

Kira turned away and vaulted the last barrier, splashing down in the thin mud beyond. “And you wonder why all the humans hate you.”

“Wait,” said Samm, following closely behind her. “What’s this really about? You don’t normally get this angry.”

“And you don’t normally make sweeping racist statements about how stupid humans are.”

“Heron does,” said Samm. “You never bite her head off.”

She spun to face him. “So you should be allowed to hate us, too? Is that the problem—I’m being unfair to you?”

“That’s not—” He stopped in midsentence. “Ah.”

“‘Ah’? What ‘ah’?”

“I see what this is about, and I apologize for bringing it up.”

“I told you what this is about. Don’t try to shift the blame anywhere but your own perfectly engineered shoulders.”

“You keep calling the humans ‘us,’” he said softly. “You’re still identifying with them.”

“Of course I’m identifying with them,” she said. “It’s called human empathy. That’s what humans do, we identify with each other—we care about each other. Obviously Heron has no heart whatsoever, but you, I thought, were different. You . . .” Her voice trailed off. How could she explain the betrayal she felt when he talked like that about people she loved? When he continued to not understand how horrible that kind of attitude was? She turned away and started walking.

“I’m sorry,” he said behind her. “But Heron is right. You’re going to have to figure out who you are.”

Kira threw her hands in the air, yelling back without turning around. “So I can ‘choose a side’?” She was crying now, and the tears were hot on her cheeks.

“So you can be happy,” said Samm. “You’re tearing yourself in half.”