FOUR
“Disengage that last hose,” said Heron. Her voice sounded tinny and distant through the radio, and Samm bristled again at the oddness of trying to communicate without the link. Partials used pheromonal communication because it was efficient, folding words and emotions and tactical information into a single, silent package. Working side by side, yet communicating solely through the radios in their helmets, felt like being deaf and mute. He still didn’t understand how humans did it.
As difficult as dealing with the repurposed diving gear was, though, it was necessary. If either of them breathed a whiff of the air in the laboratory, they’d be unconscious in seconds.
Samm slowly disengaged the final hose from the unconscious Partial’s odd metal face mask. There were ten comatose Partials here in Dr. Vale’s old laboratory, fast asleep in a secret subbasement of the Preserve. Vale had kept them here, unconscious, for thirteen years, tending them like plants and harvesting the Lurker pheromone from their bodies—an engineered chemical, naturally produced by all Partials, which served as the only known cure for RM. These Partials had kept the humans of the Preserve alive for over a decade, allowing them to raise healthy children—something the humans on Long Island had been completely unable to do. These ten Partials—But no, Samm corrected himself, these nine Partials. These nine Partials had given the Preserve a life and hope no other human had felt since the end of the world. Maybe even before that. They were saviors. But they were unwitting, unwilling, unconscious saviors, and Samm could not allow that to continue. The tenth Partial, this last one with the odd-looking face mask, had been modified by Dr. Vale to produce a different pheromone: one that would instantly render any Partial comatose. His mere proximity was a weapon.
Samm and Heron were disconnecting him, but they still had no idea what to do with him.
“That hose was pumping his sedative throughout the building,” said Heron. “Now that we’ve cut off his access, the effect should be limited to his immediate presence.”
“He’s got a tag,” said Samm, leaning in closer. “Williams.” He flipped the dog tag over, reading the numbers on the back; he couldn’t interpret them perfectly, but he knew the coding system well enough to know that Williams had been assigned to the third regiment. The group we left behind, back in the rebellion, to guard Denver and NORAD after we’d taken them. He guessed that the other Partials in the room had come from the same group. He flipped the tag over again, hoping to find something he’d missed, but there was nothing. It wasn’t surprising, exactly—most Partials only had a first name—but it was odd to find one who only had a last name. He wondered what the man’s story was, where his name had come from, what he’d done and what he’d thought and how he’d lived, but that information was lost forever now. His own genes would keep him sedated for the rest of his life.
It was the cruelest thing Samm had ever witnessed, and Samm had watched the world end.
“This mask is grafted on,” said Heron, probing Williams’s face mask with gloved fingers. Samm looked closer and saw that she was right—it wasn’t really a mask at all, more of a cybernetic implant that covered, or perhaps replaced, the man’s nose, mouth, jaw, and neck. Vents stood out on the side like gills, and the surface was covered with nozzles and valves. His entire body was rebuilt for a single purpose, thought Samm, to spread this sedative, but then he paused and considered his own body. I was built for a single purpose too. All of us were. We’re weapons, just like him.
I’m even designed to destroy myself, when I reach my expiration date.
In eight months.
“We still haven’t decided what to do with him,” said Samm.
“We can leave him here for now,” said Heron. “Vale kept him healthy for years, and he’s still hooked up to life support. Now that the hoses are disconnected, we can access the rest of the building without these stupid helmets, and we can move the rest of the Partials up and out of range so they can wake up.”
“And then what?” asked Samm. “We just keep him here forever?”
“Until his expiration, yeah,” said Heron.
“He’s like a living corpse,” said Samm. “That’s cruel.”
“So is killing him.”
“Is it?” Samm sighed and shook his head, looking around at the room full of atrophied, corpselike Partials. “Every single one of us is going to be dead in eight months—I was part of the last purchase order, and when we go, there’s nobody left. The humans will live longer, but without the cure for RM their species won’t propagate, and they’ll be just as dead as we are. The entire world is on life support, and—”
“Samm,” said Heron. Her voice sounded cold and clinical, and Samm wondered if she was really being terse or if all the consoling, sympathetic feelings were being cut off with the rest of the link. With Heron it was hard to tell, even under the best of circumstances. “Survival is all we have. If we end we end, but if we live a second day there’s always a chance, no matter how slim, that we can find a way to live a third, and a fourth, and a hundredth and a thousandth. Maybe the world kills us and maybe it doesn’t, but if we give up, it’s the same as killing ourselves. We’re not going to do that.”
Samm looked at her, confused by the care she seemed to be taking for his welfare. It wasn’t like her, and without the link to clue him in, he had no idea why she was behaving so strangely. He tried to read her face, the way Kira said that humans did—Heron was an espionage model, the most human of the Partial designs, and showed a lot of her emotions on her face. Even without the curved diving helmet distorting her visage, though, Samm was just too unpracticed to read anything.
The best thing he could do, then, was answer. “I’m not really considering it,” said Samm. “I would never give up.” He stared at Williams. “But he can’t give up, even if he wants to. For all we know he’s miserable—maybe he’s in pain, or he’s aware enough to feel trapped, or something even worse. We don’t know. There’s always a chance for us to find something new, like you said, but what about him? Vale said he lost the technology to make another Partial like him, and that includes the technology to turn him back. He will never be conscious or … alive, ever again. I just don’t know if that existence, specifically, is worth preserving. Maybe euthanasia is the most merciful thing to do.”
Heron paused a moment, looking at him, before answering softly. “Do you really want to kill him?”
“No.”
“Then why are we even talking about it?”
“Because maybe what I want doesn’t matter here. Maybe the best decision is the hardest one to make.”
Heron turned away and started fiddling with one of the other Partials, the one next to Williams, checking his vital signs before carefully disconnecting him, tube by tube, from the life support system. She wasn’t killing him, Samm knew, she was freeing him; this was the next step in their plan. He checked his own oxygen level in the diving helmet—a needless precaution, since there were several hours left—and read Williams’s sensor readout one last time. He was alive, technically, and his body was as healthy as any long-term coma patient’s would be. He turned to the other nine Partials and helped Heron unplug them from the machines.
They wheeled the first two gurneys to the elevator and took them upstairs. The humans who lived in the Preserve were waiting outside, led by the only two humans Samm was certain he could trust: Phan,
