they actually reached her the coldness was gone, and she was all business.
“I didn’t want to believe you,” she said, staring at the comatose Partials.
“There are eight more down there,” said Samm, taking off his diving helmet. The air was fresh, with no lingering trace of the sedative. “All as emaciated as these two.”
“And this is where Dr. Vale got the cure,” said Phan. He touched one of the unconscious Partials lightly on the arm. “We didn’t know. We never would have …” He looked up at Samm. “I’m sorry. If we’d known he was enslaving Partials, we would have … I don’t know. But we would have done something.”
“We’ve had more than one thousand children born since the Break,” said Laura, an older woman, and the acting leader of the Preserve now that Vale was gone. “Are you really saying you would have let them all die?”
Phan went pale, an impressive feat on his dark features. “I didn’t mean that, I just mean—”
“Are you saying you want them back down there?” asked Heron, watching Laura like a snake about to strike. She still wore her helmet, and the radio gave her voice a menacing, mechanical sound. Samm interjected before the situation could get out of hand.
“I’ve already told you I’ll fill in for them myself,” said Samm. “You need the cure, and I understand that, so you can get it from me—willingly. The slaves go free, and everybody’s happy.”
“Until Samm dies,” said Heron. He assumed she was being flippant and sent her a scalding blast of WATCH IT before realizing that with her helmet on she was still cut off from the link data. He glanced at her instead, trying to convey the same sharpness he’d seen so often when Kira was mad at her. She smirked back, silently amused, and he assumed he’d done it wrong. At least she knows what I meant, even if she doesn’t care.
Calix craned her neck over her shoulder, calling to the gathered humans behind her. “Take these two back to the hospital, and make sure they’re ready for more.” The crowd hesitated, and Calix barked another command that even Samm could tell was intended as a harsh verbal slap. “Now!”
An older man spoke. “These are Partials, Calix.” His suspicious glance encompassed Samm and Heron as well.
“And they’ve saved one thousand of your children from RM,” said Calix. “They’ve done more for this community than any of us, and they’ve done it all from the verge of death. Anyone who’s got a problem with helping them will answer to me.”
The man stared at Calix, a slim sixteen-year-old girl in a wheelchair. Her eyes hardened.
“You don’t think I can back that up?” she whispered.
“Just take them to the hospital,” said Laura, grabbing the first gurney. “I’ll come with you. The rest of you go down with them, now that we know it’s safe.”
Samm let Laura pull the gurney away and slowly buckled his diving helmet back on for the next trip down. He knew this wasn’t easy for the humans to do, but they were doing it, and that impressed him. In the back of his mind, though, he knew that Heron’s quick, snarky comment was the truest statement any of them had made: Sooner or later, no matter what anyone did or sacrificed, the Partials were going to die. And then the humans would die, and it would all be over.
Kira had left to help try to find a cure. Would she and Dr. Morgan find it in time? And if they did find it, would they bring it back here?
Kira …
Would Samm ever see her again?
Dr. Morgan took biopsies of Kira’s uterus, ovaries, lungs, sinuses, heart, spinal fluid, and brain tissue. She built elaborate models of Kira’s DNA, manipulating them on the molecular level through a massive holographic display, running so many simulations she actually slagged one of the hospital’s central computer processors. Every Partial technician who might have known how to replace it had already expired, so they soldiered on with the two remaining processor banks and hoped for the best.
Hope, Kira realized, was quickly becoming their sole remaining asset.
Dr. Vale, for his part, spent his time poring over Morgan’s copious records of Partial genetics, trying to reconstruct as much of his work on the expiration date as possible. When Kira wasn’t on the operating table or in the recovery room, she sat with him, usually attached to a rolling IV, and tried to learn as much as she could.
“This is part of the aging sequence,” said Vale, pointing to a segment of a DNA strand glowing faintly on the screen. He highlighted a series of amino acids with his fingers, and it glowed a different color. “A normal Partial grows to physical maturity in about ten months, all inside of a big glass tube; we called them vats, but they really looked more like those clear capsules you’d use at an express diner.”
Kira shook her head. “I have no idea what that means.”
“Sorry. How about a … skinny glass elevator?”
“I was five years old at the Break,” said Kira. “I grew up after the world already ended. You’re going to have to explain this without old-world metaphors.”
“Okay,” said Vale, pressing his fingers to his lips as he thought. “Okay. Imagine a clear cylinder, about seven feet long and two feet in diameter, with a metal cap on each end full of tubes and hoses and such. We had a few of them in the ParaGen building in the Preserve, I should have shown you; the rest were all at the growth and training facilities in Montana and Wyoming, but those were pretty heavily bombed during the Partial War. Anyway: The techs would create the zygotes in a lab and plant them in a nutritive gel Dr. Morgan invented, and by the time they were done growing, they more or less filled the tube; them and all the liquid we pumped in with them. I designed the entire life cycle,” he said, pointing back at the glowing DNA strand on his screen. “They required a remarkable amount of energy to grow at such a rate, most of which they drew from Morgan’s gel, though we had to keep them warm as well—the infant Partials were designed to be so energy-efficient that they lost virtually none of their energy as heat, which helped them grow quickly but kept them unnaturally cold. Once the accelerated aging was finished, the heightened metabolism slowed down, and they live relatively normal lives, but when the twenty years are up, the age accelerator kicks into overdrive—it looks like they’re decomposing, but really they’re aging a hundred years in a matter of weeks.”
“And freezing to death at the same time,” said Kira.
“Well, yes,” said Vale. “The energy has to come from somewhere.” He sighed. “I know you don’t approve, and I assure you that I don’t either. I didn’t like it then and I don’t like it now. But there was no other way.”
“You could have refused.”
“To create the Partials? ParaGen stood to make trillions of dollars—if we hadn’t helped them, they would have found someone else. This way we could control the process.”
“You could have refused to set an expiration date.”
“It was supposed to be a temporary measure to buy us time: The government wanted
