a raging hurricane with air temperatures hot enough to boil water. Every living thing within … ten miles of ground zero would be dead in minutes, and five or ten miles farther out you’d still kill enough of everything not to know the difference. Here on the island we won’t have any of those primary effects—we might feel a thump, and anyone looking right at the detonation will be blinded, but that should be the worst of it. Should be. Until the radioactive ash cloud gives us all leukemia and we die in slow, crippling agony.”
“And how big is the ash cloud?” asked Haru.
“A nuclear ash cloud doesn’t radiate out like a shock wave,” said Mkele. “It’s a distribution of physical material, so the exact pattern will depend on the weather. The major winds in this region tend to blow northeast, so most of the ash cloud will drift that way, but we’re still going to get some peripheral fallout—flurries around the edges, and castoffs from the winds in the firestorm.”
“Anyone less than ninety miles downwind will be dead within two weeks,” said Tovar. “We just have to hope the winds don’t change.”
“So the Partials would be effectively destroyed,” said Hobb.
“Everyone on the mainland, yes,” said Mkele, “but this close to the blast zone we’re going to lose a lot of humans as well, even under ideal conditions.”
“Yes, but the Partials will be gone,” Hobb repeated. “Delarosa’s plan will work.”
“I don’t think you’re grasping the ramifications here—” said Haru, but Hobb cut him off.
“I don’t think you are either,” Hobb snapped. “What are our options, honestly? Do you think we can stop her? The entire Partial army has been trying to find Delarosa for weeks, and they can’t; we can barely leave this basement without getting shot at, so I’m pretty sure we’re not going to find her either. We could find her strike force, maybe, because we have protocols in place for that, but the team delivering the warhead is likely beyond recall. This bomb is going off, whether we like it or not, and we need to be ready.”
“The Partials will catch her,” said Mkele. “A warhead’s not an easy thing to transport—it’s going to compromise her ability to stay hidden.”
“And if that happens, she might just blow it on sight,” said Hobb. “As long as she’s twenty miles from East Meadow, our major population center is safe, and then the winds will blow the fallout north to White Plains.”
“If she makes it twenty miles,” said Haru.
Tovar raised his eyebrow. “Are we prepared to risk the human race on a bunch of ifs?”
“What are we risking?” asked Hobb. “We send someone to stop her, and everyone else to evacuate the island—we’re not risking anything unless we don’t act.”
“Hobb wasn’t exaggerating about how hard it is to move around,” said Mkele. “Haru can do it because he’s been trained, and he knows the island, but how do you intend to carry out a mass evacuation without drawing attention?”
“We do it after the blast,” said Hobb. “Spread the word, get everything ready, and when the bomb goes off and the occupation force is distracted, we rise up, kill as many Partials as we can, and run south.”
“So your plan is to murder a superior enemy army,” said Tovar, “and then outrun the wind. I’m glad it’s so simple.”
“We have to evacuate first,” said Haru, “now, to avoid even the periphery of the nuclear fallout.”
“We already talked about how that’s not going to work,” said Hobb. “There’s no way to move that many people without the Partials seeing us and stopping us.” He looked at the others. “Remind me why the kid is even here?”
“He’s proven himself valuable,” said Mkele. “We’re not exactly in a position to turn away help.”
“Which is also why you’re still here,” said Tovar.
“My wife and child are in East Meadow,” said Haru, “and you know who they are—every human being alive knows who they are. And that means you know why we don’t have time to waste. Arwen is the only human child in the world, and she’s going to attract some attention—for all we know, they’re already in Partial custody somewhere, ready to be cut open and studied.”
“We can’t lose that child,” said Tovar, and Haru could see that the fear in his face was real. “Arwen represents the future. If she dies in that explosion, or in the fallout after …”
“That’s why we have to evacuate now,” said Haru, “before Delarosa detonates that nuke. There’s got to be a way.”
“Hobb’s plan uses the explosion as a distraction,” said Mkele. “But what if we distracted them another way?”
“If we could create a distraction big enough to overthrow the Partials, we’d have done it already,” said Hobb. “The nuke is all we have.”
Mkele shook his head. “We don’t need to overthrow them, just pull their attention. Delarosa’s guerrillas have been doing that already, more or less, but if we went all out—”
“We’d die,” said Tovar. “It’s like Hobb said, if we could do it safely, we’d have done it already.”
“So we don’t do it safely,” said Mkele.
The other men went quiet.
“This is as final and as deadly as any situation can be,” said Mkele. “We’re talking about a nuclear explosion forty miles from the last group of human beings on the planet. Even our best-case scenario, where somebody finds Delarosa and stops her in time, leaves us trapped in the hands of an occupying species that treats us like lab rats. An all-out attack on the Partials is going to kill every human soldier who tries it—none of us hold any illusions about that—but if there’s a chance that the rest of the humans could escape, then how can we possibly argue that it’s not worth it?”
Haru thought about his family: his wife, Madison, and his baby girl. He couldn’t bear to think of leaving Arwen without a father, but Mkele was right—when the only alternative is extinction, an awful lot of horrors become acceptable. “We’re going to die anyway,” he said. “At least this way our deaths will mean something.”
“Don’t go volunteering just yet,” said Tovar. “This is a two-part plan: One group provides the distraction, and the other gets everyone as far south as humanly possible. No pun intended.”
“Then we run,” said Mkele. His voice was somber. “Away from our only source of the cure. Or did we all forget?”
The room fell quiet again. Haru felt a numbness creeping up his legs and back—no matter how far they ran, they still had RM. Arwen was alive because Kira had found a cure in the Partials’ pheromonal system, but so far the humans had been unable to replicate it in a lab. They’d have to start over in a new medical facility, and it could take years just to find one and get it working again—and there was no guarantee that they’d ever be successful. If the Partials died, the cure would almost certainly die with them.
Haru could tell from their faces that the others were thinking of the same insurmountable problem. His throat was dry, and
