are—” He stopped suddenly, glancing at the cameras. “Listen, do you trust me?”
She hesitated, but not for long. “No.”
“I suppose not. Do you think you ever could?”
“Ever?”
“If we worked together—if we ever offered a truce. Peace. Could you learn to trust us?”
This is where he’d been angling since day one—since she’d asked him what he was doing in Manhattan. He was finally willing to discuss it, but could she trust him? What was he trying to get from her?
“I could trust you if you proved yourselves trustworthy,” said Kira. “I don’t . . . I don’t know that I distrust you on principle, if that’s what you’re asking. Not anymore. But a lot of people do.”
“And what would it take to earn their trust?”
“Not having destroyed our world eleven years ago,” said Kira. “Short of that . . . I don’t know. Putting it back together.”
He paused, thinking, and she watched him carefully—the way his eyes twitched, as if examining two different objects in front of him. Every now and then they flicked toward one of the cameras, just a fleeting glance. What is he planning?
She looked him in the eyes. When in doubt, don’t hold back. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because the only hope, for either of us, is to help each other. To work together.”
“You’ve said that before.”
“You’ve asked about our mission. That was it, Kira—we were coming here to try to make peace. To see if we could work together. You need our help to cure RM, but we need you just as much.”
“Why?”
He glanced at the camera again. “I can’t tell you yet.”
“But you have to tell me—isn’t that why you’re here? If you came on a mission of peace, what were you going to say? ‘We need your help, but we can’t say why’?”
“We didn’t know how much you still hated us,” said Samm. “We thought perhaps we could persuade you with an offer to work together. When I was captured and brought here, when I saw what’s going on here . . . there was no way. But you, Kira, you listen. More than that, you understand what’s at stake. That no price is too high to pay when it means the survival of your species.”
“So just tell me,” she pleaded. “Forget the cameras, forget whoever’s listening on the other side, and tell me what’s going on.”
Samm shook his head. “It’s not just a matter of them not believing me,” he said. “If they find out why I’m here—the instant they know the reason—I’m a dead man.”
It was Kira who glanced at the camera this time, suddenly filled with unease, but Samm shook his head and glanced at his wounds. “It’s okay, they know I have a secret.”
She folded her arms and sat back in her chair. What could be so dangerous he’d be killed just for saying it? Something they didn’t want to hear—or something they did? She racked her brain, searching for a theory that made sense. Was he really a bomb, like they’d initially feared, and Samm thought the Senate would kill him to get rid of him? But what did that have to do with peace?
Peace. It was exactly what she had hoped for when she was talking with Marcus the day before. She wanted to reach out and touch it, to taste it, to know what it felt like not to live in constant fear. They hadn’t known true peace since the Hope Act was established, and the Voice rebelled and the island started its slow spiral into chaos. They hadn’t even known it in the years before that—the desperate rebuilding after the Break, the Break itself and the Partial rebellion, even the Isolation War that sparked the creation of the Partials in the first place. She had lived in a world of discord since the moment she was born, and the world before had been no better. They were on the brink of destruction, and everyone had their own solution, but Kira had been the only one to suggest that they might need the Partials. That they might need to work together.
That is, she’d been the only one until now. Now a Partial was suggesting the same thing.
“No,” she said slowly, suspicion creeping through her like a spider. “It’s too perfect. It’s like you’re saying exactly what I want to hear.” She shook her head. “I don’t believe you.”
“Why would we want anything else?” asked Samm. “It’s the most basic instinct of life—to outlive yourself. To build another generation that’s going to see tomorrow.”
“But you’ve never even known family,” said Kira. “You didn’t have families, you didn’t grow up, you have no idea what it’s even like. What if creation is just a phantom instinct, held over from some lost shred of DNA?”
Like a flash, Kira remembered a dog—it was giant in her memory, a growling mass of muscle and teeth. It chased her through a park or a garden, something green with grass and flowers, and she was terrified, and the dog was almost on her, and suddenly her father was there. He was not a strong man, he wasn’t big or powerful, but he put himself between her and the dog. He was bitten, and she thought it was very bad. He did it to save her. That’s what fathers did.
“What do you think it says about us that we don’t have any parents?” She looked up and caught Samm’s eye. “I don’t mean us, I don’t mean kids, I mean no fathers at all—a whole society, two whole societies, with no parents at all. What do you think that’s done to us?”
Samm said nothing, but he held her gaze. There was a tear in his eye—the first time she’d ever seen him cry. The scientist in her wanted to study it, to take a sample, to find out how and why and what he was crying. The girl in her simply thought of the Hope Act and wondered if a law like that could ever pass if a voter knew it would be forced upon his own daughter.
Kira looked at the screen, seeing not the image but her memory of Manhattan: of the Partial attack; of Gabe’s body lying slumped in the hall where the Partials had shot him. If they were on a mission of peace, why did they shoot him? She frowned, trying to reconcile that event with Samm’s protestation of innocence. They didn’t even try to talk to us first. It doesn’t make sense.
She racked her brain for more memories, trying to call up anything that would support what she desperately wanted to be true. What was it the Partials said right before we blew up the apartment? She struggled to remember. “Which group is this?” She’d heard it clearly—at least she thought she had. Which group of what? Had they been expecting someone else, maybe a group of bandits or the Voice? Was it pure luck that they’d found Kira instead, the one human who seemed willing to listen?
Or was Samm simply telling her exactly what she wanted to hear?
The doors opened with a sudden buzz, and the decontamination blowers roared to life. Shaylon came through the tunnel, clutching a plastic syringe full of blood, and ran to her in a rush.
“The nurse said to give you this,” he said quickly, holding out the syringe. “She said you’d know what to do with it.”
“You’re not allowed in here,” said Kira.
“She said it was an emergency,” said
