Partials

“I’m going to save her,” she said again, grabbing the wall and pulling herself, inch by agonizing inch, to her feet. She rested her weight on her good leg and tried to ignore the other, willing herself to stand through sheer mental force. “I have sacrificed everything I had, and everything I am, to save your daughter. Are you really going to be the one to stop me?”

“You’re a Partial agent,” said Haru. “You’re in league with them—God only knows what you’re trying to do to my daughter, but I will die before I let you do it.”

“I’m fine with that plan,” said Xochi.

“He’s dead,” announced Marcus, falling back from Jayden’s body. He looked up at Haru, gasping for breath and reeling from exhaustion. “He died for this, Haru. Don’t do this.”

Madison wailed in despair, and the child in the crib wailed with her, an incoherent cry against a world that brought nothing but pain. Kira stared at Haru fiercely. “You have to let me try.”

“Try?” asked Haru. “You mean you’re not even sure?”

Kira paled, thinking of all the ways she could be wrong, all the ways the injection could fail. What if I’ve done all this for nothing? What if I’ve killed my friends and destroyed my world for nothing more than a sloppy experiment and some bad guesses and my own stubborn pride? The Senate warned me about this: They said I was risking thousands of lives and the future of the human race for one overriding obsession. Is it because I’m a Partial, driven to destroy everything just because that’s how I’m made? Thanks to me, the entire nation is in chaos, thousands are dead, and without a cure, we may never recover. Without a cure, it won’t even matter.

But with a cure…

“I don’t have any data for you,” she said. “I don’t have any facts, my studies were all lost when the lab exploded, and the cure itself has never been tested. I don’t have anything that can prove to you that what I’m doing is right. But Madison,” she said, looking her adopted sister straight in the eye, “if there is one thing you know about me, one thing at all, it’s that I always try to do the right thing. And no matter how painful this has been, no matter how much hell we’ve been through and how many of us have died, this is the right thing to do.”

“Shut up!” screamed Haru, shoving the pistol forward. Kira ignored him, keeping her eyes on Madison’s.

“Madison,” she said again, “do you trust me?”

Slowly, tearfully, Madison nodded. Kira held up the cure, still wrapped on the belt, and Madison stepped forward.

“Madison, stay back,” growled Haru. “I am not letting you give our baby to that traitor.”

“Then shoot me,” said Madison fiercely. She planted herself squarely between Haru and the incubator; his hand quivered, faltered, and dropped to his side.

Kira collapsed to the floor, and Marcus ran to the cupboards on the wall to find a needle for the syringe. The soldiers in the doorway didn’t move, watching the whole thing with their guns pointed at the floor. Xochi helped Kira to her feet and took her to the incubator; Kira could feel the heat from the tiny body’s fever like a pit of dying coals. Marcus handed her a needle and swabbed the child’s arm with disinfectant.

Kira prepped the injection, hesitating over the red, screaming body. Right now the Blob virus was roaring through her like a pack of wild dogs, ripping and tearing, eating her from the inside. This syringe, this pheromone, would save her.

Kira leaned forward. “Hold her still.”

Madison held the baby close, Marcus and Xochi stopped moving, even Haru fell silent in the background. The entire world seemed focused on this single moment. Arwen’s thin, hoarse crying filled the room like smoke, the final, desperate sparking of an engine about to fail. Kira breathed, steadied her arm, and gave the baby the shot.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

“We have discovered a cure for RM.”

Cheers rang through the coliseum, applause and shouts and cries of joy. It wasn’t news—something so world-shaking could hardly be contained, and the news of Arwen’s recovery had spread like wildfire—but still the people cheered. Senator Hobb smiled at the crowd, his giant holographic head mimicking the expression in the air above him. Kira sat neatly on the stand behind him, crying again and wondering, as she had a thousand times in the last week, if it was all really true. If it was all really happening. She caught Marcus’s smile from the audience, and smiled back. It was real.