Partials

She sat and waited, planning out her conversation, scripting both sides and sounding effortlessly brilliant, but the wait grew longer, and her subtle barbs about being held unfairly for questioning turned to angry rants about unlawful imprisonment. Eventually she got bored and stopped altogether.

There was a clock on the wall, the old circular kind with little black sticks, and she wondered for the umpteenth time in her life how they worked. She had a similar clock in her house, prettier than this one—whoever had lived there before her, before the Break, had had a thing for glass. Apparently the hands would move if you powered them, but digital clocks used less energy, so they were all she’d ever seen.

Well, all she could remember. Had her father ever had a round clock with sticks? It was stupid that she didn’t even know what this type of clock was called—there was no good reason for something so ubiquitous to just disappear from human vocabulary. And yet try as she might, she couldn’t remember ever seeing one that worked, or learning how to read them, or hearing what they were called. They were a relic of a dead culture.

The big stick was pointing at the ten, and the little stick was halfway between the two and the three. Ten oh two and … a half? She shrugged. This clock ran out of juice at exactly ten oh two and half. Or whatever it said. She stood up to examine it. It must be bolted to the wall, or it would have fallen off by now.

The door opened and a man walked in—Kira recognized him as the mysterious man from the town hall meeting. He was perhaps forty years old. His skin was even darker than her own—mostly African descent, she guessed, as opposed to her mostly Indian.

“Good evening, Ms. Walker.” He shut the door behind him and extended his hand; Kira stood and shook it.

“It’s about time.”

“I am deeply sorry for the wait. My name is Mr. Mkele.” He gestured to Kira’s chair, pulled the other a few feet away, and sat down. “Please, sit.”

“You have no right to hold me in here—”

“I apologize if you got that impression,” said Mkele. “We are not holding you here, it was simply my desire to keep you safe while you waited. Did they bring you food?”

“They haven’t brought me anything.”

“They were supposed to bring you food. Again, I apologize.”

Kira eyed him carefully, her anger at being locked in the room for so long turning slowly into suspicion. “Why ‘Mr.’?” she asked. “Don’t you have a rank?”

“I’m not in the military, Ms. Walker.”

“You’re in a military installation.”

“So are you.”

Kira kept her face rigid, trying not to frown. Something about this man irked her. He’d done nothing but speak to her calmly, a model of manners and courtesy, and yet … she couldn’t put her finger on it. She glanced at the chair he had offered, but stayed standing and folded her arms. “You say you locked me in here to keep me safe. What from?”

The man raised his eyebrow. “That’s an interesting question from someone who just got back from no-man’s-land. My understanding is that someone tried to blow you up not two days ago.”

“Not me personally, but yeah.”

“My official title, Ms. Walker, is head of intelligence—not for the military but for the entire island, which in practice means I’m the head of intelligence for the entire human race. My job today is to ensure that there is still a human race tomorrow, and I do that by knowing things. Consider, if you will, the things we know now.” He held up his hand, counting on his fingers. “One: Someone, potentially the Voice or, heaven help us, the Partials, has enacted another successful assault on East Meadow forces. Two: That someone is highly proficient with explosives and perhaps radio technology. Three: That person has killed a minimum of three people. Now. Given the ominous nature of these few, small things we do know, I think you’ll agree that the massive number of things we don’t know is, to put it mildly, incredibly troubling.”

“Well, yeah,” said Kira, nodding, “of course. But I’m not in no-man’s-land anymore—I’m in a military base. That’s got to be, like, the safest place on the island.”

Mkele watched her calmly. “Have you ever seen a Partial, Miss Walker?”

“In person? No. I was only five during the war, and no one’s seen any since then.”

“How can you be sure?”

Kira frowned. “What do you mean? No one’s seen one in years, they’re … well, I’m alive, for one thing, so apparently none of them have seen me either.”

“Let us assume,” said Mr. Mkele, “just for the moment, that whatever the Partials are planning is larger in scope than the murder of one teenage girl.”

“You don’t have to be insulting about it.”

“Again, I apologize.”

“So is that really what this is about?” Kira asked, with more than a hint of exasperation. “Partials? Really? Don’t we have more important threats to deal with?”