side of the bed where Partial Number Five was slowly stirring. The Partials from Vale’s lab had been free of the sedative for weeks now, but the effects had lingered, and their bodies, unconscious for nearly thirteen years, seemed reluctant to wake up. Many in the Preserve had given up hope that they would wake up at all, but Samm had refused to abandon them. Now Number Five—they did not know their names—was moving, not just shifting in his bed, but fidgeting, coughing, and even groaning around his breathing tube. Samm had watched with growing excitement all morning, but when Five finally started to flutter his eyelids, as if struggling to open them, Samm called for the others. They came flooding into the room: Phan and Laura and Calix, who was now on crutches as Heron’s bullet wound slowly healed in her leg. The girl pointedly avoided even looking in Heron’s direction.
Avoiding Heron was all too easy these days, as she seemed to have withdrawn herself from the community—not completely, but almost. Instead of disappearing from sight, she simply hovered along the edges, lurking in shadows and hallways, detached from the others. She stood now against the back wall of the hospital room, practically in reach of the humans but somehow miles apart from them. Samm knew without looking that she was as curious about the humans’ behavior—and Samm’s—as she was about the slowly waking Partial. Her link data was typically analytical, but with a tint of the growing confusion that Samm had started to sense from her more and more frequently.
WHY?
Samm did his best not to respond, focusing his thoughts—and through them, his link data—on the stirring Partial. He had approached Heron about her apparent confusion before, but every time he did, she left immediately. He didn’t know what she was trying to figure out, but she wasn’t interested in talking about it—but neither did she seem interested in leaving the Preserve entirely. The one thing he knew for sure about Heron was that if you saw her lurking in the shadows, it was only because she wanted you to. What did she want now? He would have to think about it later, when the link wouldn’t give him away.
Partial Number Five had been sending out link data of his own, and Samm returned his focus to that. It was both fascinating and tragic. The link was designed to carry tactical information in the field of battle, informing your squad mates of both danger and safety and syncing everyone to the same informed, efficient emotional state. One of the side effects of this system was that it was triggered from an imaginary stimulus as easily as it was from real life, making Partial soldiers vaguely aware of their sleeping companions’ dreams. The effects were more muted—a simple dream about pizza or a flashback to basic training wouldn’t usually register for anyone else—but an intense emotional experience would often spread through the squad like subtle magic, until they were all sharing the same, or a similar, dream. Like a contagious vision. If one soldier had a nightmare, soon everyone had one; if one soldier dreamed of a girl, the entire squad might wake up with an awkward mix of high fives and embarrassed chuckles. Samm’s sergeant had once dreamed of falling, and the entire group had woken up in the same terrifying moment, gasping with one loud, unified breath as the half-remembered terror subsided. A Partial soldier with a history of good dreams—or simply a very strong memory of a woman—was welcome in any squad, while a soldier haunted by darkness and nightmares was sometimes looked upon as a curse.
The comatose Partials from Dr. Vale’s lab were a pit of darkness Samm could barely stand to be next to. It wasn’t that Number Five’s dreams were dark, for there were many bursts of active, tense, and even happy data that Samm had come to identify as the sleeping Partial’s dreams. What broke his heart was the rest of the time—all the long, troubled, hopeless hours where Five wasn’t dreaming at all. The soldier seemed to exist in a state of constant pain and despair, sensing on some unconscious level that something was deeply and horribly wrong, but lacking the observation and the rational thought to decipher what it was. The other sleeping Partials were the same, with only small variations in the length and magnitude of their brief dreaming respites. Samm could feel their dark pall hanging over the entire floor of the hospital, and he worried about the turmoil they might bring with them when they finally woke up. You couldn’t spend thirteen years in that kind of a pit without being horribly, perhaps irrevocably, scarred by the experience. What would they do when they awoke? Would they be cheered by their recovery, or marked for life by their trauma? Samm had no way of knowing.
As he watched the waking Partial, thinking these thoughts, Samm couldn’t help but feel again inadequate to the unsought task that seemed ready to crush him: the leadership of the Preserve. He was not a leader, not by design and not by nature; he was an underling at best, the perfect soldier, ready to follow his commander through the gates of hell but choked by doubts when it came time to lead the charge himself. And yet here he was, stronger and better informed than almost anybody else in the Preserve, and they had started to look to him for leadership. Laura was technically in charge, but Samm was the one who knew about the sleeping Partials; Samm was the one who knew where Kira and Vale had been taken, and why; Samm was the one who gave his own breath and body to produce the RM cure and save their newborn infants. He had all the power, and they knew it—he could probably beat any ten of them in a fight, too, and he supposed they knew that as well. Even Heron followed him, often wordlessly, though he supposed that was less out of subservience than a simple distaste for taking any leadership herself.
Samm watched the Partial twitching back to life, sensing the horror in its soul, and wondered again if it was a good idea to bring them back at all. Nine Partials could destroy a community like this; nine angry, possibly unhinged Partials would cut through it like a rain of blades. It should be Kira deciding this, he thought, not me—she was the leader, the thinker, the visionary. I’m just some guy.
Like it or not, though, it was his decision, and he wasn’t going to make one against his own people. Thus the Partials were nursed back to health, risks and all, and when they woke up, they’d find some guy named Samm waiting to say hello. He would do his best. He brought children into their rooms sometimes, and tried to send happy thoughts over the link and hoped those actions could counteract their thirteen years of darkness. It was a simple plan, but he was a simple man, and sometimes simple was good. He hoped this was one of those times.
“Here he comes,” said Heron. Samm glanced at her, surprised that she would be the first to announce the final step of Number Five’s awakening, but a sudden cry from Calix made him look back. Heron was right. The gaunt soldier was struggling actively now, not just waking up naturally but striving, practically clawing at the universe to force himself awake by choice. He coughed and sputtered, and Samm jumped up, reaching for the breathing tube and pulling it from Five’s throat. The soldier’s eyes flew open, and his hand shot up to grab Samm’s arm, clamping down with surprising strength for someone so atrophied.
“Help.” His voice was ragged from disuse, thin and raw, but the link data slammed into Samm like a moving truck. The newly opened eyes were wild with terror, and Samm felt the same terror welling up in his own gut—a numbing, crippling, overwhelming sense of wrongness, of helplessness, of boundless fear. Samm raced to sort through his thoughts, trying desperately to separate his own mind from this irrational fright before the link overwhelmed him; he closed his eyes and repeated every comforting detail he could think of, one after the other like a mantra.
You’re safe. We’re your friends. We’re protecting you. We’re healing you. You’re safe. He realized the soldier probably thought he’d been captured, waking up abruptly with none of his companions nearby and no officer to reassure him; any of his squad mates he could sense on the link would be broadcasting the same catastrophic confusion that he was. We’re your friends. We’re protecting you. We’re healing you. You’re safe.
“Help.” The soldier’s voice was painful to hear, as if the words themselves were bleeding. “Arm.”
“What does that mean?” asked Calix. “Does his arm hurt? Why did he say ‘arm’?”
“He knows he’s unarmed,” said Phan. “He’s afraid.”
