Ruins (17 page)

“Better to be safe,” she decided at last, and plotted a course that curved west, around the edge of the city, and approached the lake through the smaller, suburban area called New Fairfield. She would be staying off the roads almost the whole way, and she worked out enough of the details to guide herself by compass instead, landmark to landmark, starting with the western edge of a place called Bennett’s Pond. The forest was thicker there, with steeper hills than she’d passed through before, and she found herself tiring more quickly in the rougher terrain. She crossed I-84 around ten in the morning, a wooded stretch of road well west of the city, and then tramped across a narrow stream and through another thick, old-growth forest. By noon she had reached another wide pond, ringed by a series of golf courses long ago gone to seed. The western edge of the water was a low marsh filled with empty nests. Cold or not, the need to migrate south was too ingrained in the birds’ tiny minds, and the wetland was still and quiet. She saw a cluster of small, gleaming curves, surprised to find a clutch of eggs, but when she drew closer they were simply golf balls, yellowed and cracking in the sun.

She kept heading north through the forest, skirting the invisible line between the states, until a cluster of homes signaled it was time to curve eastward again. More and more houses appeared as she drew closer to New Fairfield, the buildings fading and forlorn in the midst of the trees. Kira imagined them not as houses but as spirits of the houses that used to be here, persisting stubbornly, ethereally, long after the structures themselves had disappeared. She skirted the edge of Corner Pond, crossed a narrow road, and turned almost straight east. Her undeveloped forest was running out quickly.

And then she saw a bright white mark in the trunk of a tree; a recent carving, maybe three days old at the most. The roman numeral four. IV.

The Ivies.

It made so much sense, and so abruptly, that she marveled she hadn’t thought of it before: the Ivies hadn’t named themselves for the plant, but for their old military designation. IV. The fourth division or regiment or some such segment of the Partial army. They were real, and they were here; this was either a border sign or a trail marker, and she couldn’t help but wonder if they used this same forested corridor to avoid the developed areas on either side. It was possible, maybe even likely, but why? What did a defensive army have to fear from the homes and open streets of a long-abandoned suburb?

A sudden thought consumed her, and she crept closer to the mark to examine it. Dogs and other animals used smells to mark their territory, and the Partials’ link system was similar in a lot of ways. Could their data pheromones persist in the same way? It was possible that this sign was more than visual, that the mark merely pointed out where the real data could be found. She’d practiced with Samm to develop her own small connection to the link; if there was something there, she might be able to sense it. She walked up cautiously to the mark on the tree, breathing deeply as she went. She sensed nothing. When she reached it she touched the bark gently, feeling the edges of the three white lines: IV. They looked like they’d been hacked in with a hatchet, two quick chops per line to break through the bark and expose the white wood underneath. White except for an odd discoloration at the bottom of each letter, like something had dripped there, or been smeared on purpose.

It was blood.

Kira hesitated, glancing nervously at the forest around her. Nothing moved, not even wind in the leaves. She looked back at the bloody letters, wondering why the blood was there at all. Was it an accident? A warning? Was that the best way to make the link data persist long-term? She leaned in, steeling herself, taking a deep breath.

DEATH PAIN BLOOD BETRAYAL—

She staggered back, gasping for breath, rubbing her nose to get the smell out.

DEATH BETRAYAL PAIN THEY’RE KILLING US—

She tripped over a tree root, yelping as she fell, rolling to her feet and grabbing handfuls of dirt and leaves and grass as she came up. She ran through the forest, irrationally, helplessly terrified, clutching the ground cover to her face and sucking in the smell, trying desperately to drown the signal out.

DEATH PAIN—

DEATH

And then it was gone. Kira collapsed to the ground, her heart still racing, her blood pounding in her ears. The link was designed as a combat tool, a fast, wordless way for the Partials to warn one another of danger and coordinate their movements on the battlefield. When one soldier died, he released a burst of death pheromones, warning his companions that something was wrong; Kira had sensed it before, but it was nothing like this. That had been data, in its truest form: an announcement of what had happened, and where. This was a frantic, overwhelming warning, a pheromonal scream. A normal death would produce nothing like it, and she didn’t even want to think about what could. Partials had been murdered here, probably tortured, perhaps solely for the purpose of creating that data. She’d had to walk right up to smell it, but her link connection was weak.

Did the whole forest smell like that? Was this warning spread around the entire lake?

In her mad race to escape, Kira had gotten disoriented, and she pulled out her compass with trembling hands. North was behind her, which meant she’d been running south; obviously not too far, as she hadn’t run into any houses. She looked up, trying to get her bearings.
Do I keep running, or stay on track?
She was too scared to speak out loud.
The Ivies are “opposed to medical experimentation,” and if this is how they tell people to stay away, it looks like they’re a lot more opposed than I realized. And maybe that’s not all they oppose. Morgan’s record focused on experimentation because that’s all she cares about—they don’t want to help with her work, and they’re too far away to interfere with it, so she forgets them and moves on. Never mind the details.

She slowed her breathing, calming herself, forcing herself to think clearly. It was harder than it should have been, and she wondered how much of the warning pheromones were still in her nose, still filling her bloodstream with adrenaline. She closed her eyes, trying to focus.
They still might be my allies,
she told herself.
They post these as warnings to Partials, to Morgan’s forces. Their community might be sympathetic to the humans, and almost certainly amenable to a plan that opposes Dr. Morgan. And if nothing else, they’re expiring. I can offer a possible solution to that.
She thought again about the pain and fear it must have taken to produce that warning on the link, and shuddered.
Is that really who I want to align myself with? All the things I was worried about Morgan doing—would they do the same?

She shook her head.
I might be misinterpreting everything, not just how they created the border marker but the fact that it’s a border marker at all. For all I know, one of the Ivies was ambushed by Morgan’s soldiers and carved that mark as a warning to his friends. I can’t judge them without more information
.

She checked her compass, set her jaw, and hiked east toward the lake.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

M
arcus sat as still as he could, trying not to pull against the handcuffs tied around his wrists to a metal bar behind him—he’d struggled a lot the first night, hoping to get out of them, and rubbed his skin raw in the process. Now any movement at all brought lances of pain so sharp they made him bite the inside of his cheek. Woolf, Galen, and Vinci were tied up next to him, sitting silently against a wall in the back room of an old supermarket, but none of them seemed to be in quite as much pain. Marcus wondered if they were better at masking it, or if they’d just been smarter about their wrists in the first place. Either way he felt stupid.

Which was to be expected, he decided, when you found yourself tied up by a terrorist you went looking for in the first place.

“This is what we get for trusting her,” said Marcus.

“She was our only option,” said Galen.

“She is also a convicted criminal,” said Marcus. He looked at the others with as bemused a grin as he could muster. “I kind of feel like we should have given that point more weight when we made our plan to find her.”

“She was working with the Senate and Defense Grid,” said Woolf. “Since the start of the invasion she hadn’t done anything suspicious or illegal—that we knew about,” he added.

Marcus closed his mouth, swallowing his snarky comment.

Woolf shook his head. “Obviously if we’d known she’d managed to round up a nuclear warhead, we would have thought twice about it.”

“If we’d known she had a nuclear bomb, we would have done exactly the same thing,” said Vinci. “We just would have handled the meeting a little differently. Infiltrating her army would have been the best bet.”

“I suppose it’s too late for that now?” asked Marcus, looking at the guard on the other side of the room.

The guard nodded. “Yes, it is.”

“Bummer,” said Marcus. “Thought we had something there.”

“Why is she doing this?” asked Vinci. “A bomb big enough to destroy the invading Partial army would kill almost every human on the island in the same instant. Ninety percent of both groups are in East Meadow—she can’t possibly consider that an acceptable loss.”

“She won’t set it off on Long Island,” said Woolf. “She’ll take it north to White Plains, or as close as she can get it, and detonate it there. Even out the numbers, like she said.”

“It’s genocide,” said Vinci.

“You mean like RM?” asked the guard. “You mean like exactly what you did to us thirteen years ago?”

“The Partials had nothing to do with RM,” said Vinci, his voice calm and matter-of-fact. He wasn’t arguing, Marcus realized, simply explaining. A quick glance at the seething guard showed just how unlikely he was to listen to reason.

“You’re talking to a man ready to set off a nuclear device fifty miles from the last human survivors,” said Marcus. “Let’s just assume he doesn’t believe you and move on.”

“The Partials need to be destroyed,” said the guard, lifting his rifle. “Every one of them. I can’t believe she hasn’t let us execute
you
yet.” He stood up, his face hard as stone, and Marcus pressed as far back against the wall as he could.

“See?” said Marcus, trying to keep his voice from cracking with fear. “I told you this would be more fun.” The guard’s eyes were red with fury, and Marcus half expected him to shoot all four of them in one long burst of bullets.

The door to their back room opened, revealing Delarosa flanked by Yoon and another guerrilla. Marcus breathed an audible sigh of relief. “You have awesome timing.”

“Unless she wants us dead as well,” said Vinci.

“Still good timing,” said Marcus. “It’d be a bummer if this guy shot us and she didn’t get to see it.”

“No one’s going to shoot you,” said Delarosa. She stepped forward into the room and looked down at them, not arrogant or angry, but businesslike. “We’re not monsters.”

“And we’re more valuable to you alive,” said Marcus.

Delarosa cocked her head to the side. “How?”

“Because, um . . .” Marcus grimaced. “I don’t actually know, I just assumed because that’s what people typically say at this point.”

“You’ve seen too many movies,” said Delarosa.

“I’ve never seen any,” said Marcus, shrugging. “Plague baby. But I’ve read a lot of spy novels: They don’t need batteries.”

“Either way,” said Delarosa. “We have no reason to keep you alive but our own human decency, and nothing to gain from killing you but convenience.”

“Is that a phrase?” asked Vinci. “‘Human decency’?”

“You find it insulting?” asked Delarosa.

“I find it confusing,” said Vinci. “Especially considering your plan.”

“I’m not happy about it,” said Delarosa. “I’ve lost a lot of sleep trying to think of an alternative. The Partials are all dying—can I just wait a year and let them die, and free ourselves without lifting a finger?”

“I vote we try it,” said Marcus. “Are we voting? Hands up, everybody, don’t leave me hanging here.” He moved his hands to raise them, and winced at the sudden stab of pain in his wrists.

“That plan won’t work,” said Delarosa. “The occupying army in East Meadow is killing too many humans, and now they might not die at all because they’ve found Kira—”

“Holy crap,” said Marcus, “they found Kira?”

“They stopped the broadcasts,” said Delarosa. “The hostage scenario is over. The most likely explanation is that they got what they wanted.”

“We need to go get her,” said Marcus.

“The Partials think they can use Kira to cure their expiration date,” said Delarosa. “I don’t know how she’ll help them do that, but there it is. The longer we wait, the less likely it becomes that this situation will ever end—if we want to get rid of the Partials, we have to strike now, and with overwhelming force. We don’t have the army for it, so a nuclear weapon is our only choice; it can be delivered by a single person, under their radar, and finish them off in a single blow.”

“The invading army will still be here,” said Galen. “A bomb on the mainland won’t end the occupation here.”

“Vinci,” said Delarosa, “what will the Partial army do when White Plains goes up in a fireball?”

“They’ll go back there,” said Vinci calmly. “They’ll try to find as many survivors on the mainland as possible.”

“Even if they don’t leave, they’ll die a few months later,” said Marcus. “Any research they’ve done on a cure for expiration will be destroyed in the explosion, along with anyone skilled enough to continue it.”

“It has to happen,” said Delarosa, “and it has to happen now. We upset the balance of nature when we created the Partials, and now we have to put it right.”

“You can’t trigger that warhead remotely,” said Woolf. “Which of these brainwashed saps have you tricked into setting it off for you?”

“I’m not a monster,” Delarosa said again. “This is my plan, and my responsibility.”