“I told you I didn’t like it. And I’m only talking about taking blood samples, not inducing a comatose state in our subject for years on end—”
“Is this also the same young woman,” Vale continued, “who was herself kidnapped and studied? In this same facility?”
Kira gritted her teeth, frustrated both with him for resisting, and with herself for suggesting it in the first place. It tore her apart even to consider it, but what other options were there? “What do you want me to say?”
“I don’t know,” said Vale. His voice sounded lost and weary. “I’m not fishing for a specific response, I’m just … surprised. And saddened, I suppose.”
“Sad because this is our only option left?”
“Sad because I may have just witnessed the death of the world’s last living idealist.”
Kira clenched her fists, trying to calm herself as tears threatened. “If we can find the interaction between the species, with RM as a catalyst for both cures, we can save the world. We can save everybody. Isn’t that worth every sacrifice we can make?”
“When you gave yourself to this research, it was a sacrifice,” said Vale. “I didn’t like it, but I admired you for it, but now—”
“Now we have even less time to debate the ethics of it—”
“Now you’re talking about someone else,” said Vale, raising his voice to talk over her. “Now I see I was wrong about you, because you weren’t giving yourself for a cause, you were just obsessed, as obsessed as Morgan is, and you only gave yourself because you didn’t have anyone else to give.”
Kira’s tears were real now, streaming hotly down her face as she screamed back at him. “Why are you fighting me so much?”
“Because I know what it feels like!” he roared. He stared at her, his chest heaving with the force of his emotion, and she looked back in stunned silence. He took a few more ragged breaths, then spoke more softly. “I know what it’s like to betray your ethics, your humanity, everything that makes you who you are, and I don’t want you to go through that. I destroyed ten lives in the Preserve—ten Partials that I didn’t just enslave, I tortured. I loved them so much I betrayed the entire world to give them the life they deserved, and when that plan went as wrong as it could possibly go, I betrayed them in return, all to save what, a thousand humans? Two thousand? Two thousand humans who are just going to die alone once the only source of the cure expires anyway.”
“Not if this experiment works.”
“And if it does?” asked Vale. “What then? Say the humans can’t live without the Partials, and the Partials can’t live without the humans—how will that possibly end well? Are you expecting some kind of glorious cultural marriage between the two? Because that’s not what happened before, and it’s never going to. The group with the power has always oppressed the group without—first the humans, by making Partials in the first place, and forcing them to fight and die and come home to a life of second-class subservience. Then the Partial War. Then my work in the Preserve. Dr. Morgan’s experimentation with live subjects. Even you captured a Partial for study and were captured in return. Now Morgan’s invaded East Meadow and the humans are fighting tooth and nail, and Kira the Partial wants to capture a human. Don’t you see the futility of it all? You know both sides better than anyone. If you can’t live in peace, how can anyone else hope to do it?”
Kira tried to protest, knowing that he was wrong—that he had to be wrong—but completely failing to find any reasons why. She wanted him to be wrong, but that wasn’t enough to make it so.
“There will be no cultural marriage,” said Vale. “No meeting of equals. The future, if we have one at all, will be a mass cultural rape. Tell me with a straight face that that’s good enough, that that’s acceptable on any conceivable level.”
“I …” Kira’s voice trailed off.
There was nothing to say.
Samm shouted into the hallway, “I think this one’s waking up!” He heard a flurry of activity and raced back to the side of the bed where Partial Number Five was slowly stirring. The Partials from Vale’s lab had been free of the sedative for weeks now, but the effects had lingered, and their bodies, unconscious for nearly thirteen years, seemed reluctant to wake up. Many in the Preserve had given up hope that they would wake up at all, but Samm had refused to abandon them. Now Number Five—they did not know their names—was moving, not just shifting in his bed, but fidgeting, coughing, and even groaning around his breathing tube. Samm had watched with growing excitement all morning, but when Five finally started to flutter his eyelids, as if struggling to open them, Samm called for the others. They came flooding into the room: Phan and Laura and Calix, who was now on crutches as Heron’s bullet wound slowly healed in her leg. The girl pointedly avoided even looking in Heron’s direction.
Avoiding Heron was all too easy these days, as she seemed to have withdrawn herself from the community—not completely, but almost. Instead of disappearing from sight, she simply hovered along the edges, lurking in shadows and hallways, detached from the others. She stood now against the back wall of the hospital room, practically in reach of the humans but somehow miles apart from them. Samm knew without looking that she was as curious about the humans’ behavior—and Samm’s—as she was about the slowly waking Partial. Her link data was typically analytical, but with a tint of the growing confusion that Samm had started to sense from her more and more frequently.
WHY?
Samm did his best not to respond, focusing his thoughts—and through them, his link data—on the stirring Partial. He had approached Heron about her apparent confusion before, but every time he did, she left immediately. He didn’t know what she was trying to figure out, but she wasn’t interested in talking about it—but neither did she seem interested in leaving the Preserve entirely. The one thing he knew for sure about Heron was that if you saw her lurking in the shadows, it was only because she wanted you to. What did she want now? He would have to think about it later, when the link wouldn’t give him away.
Partial Number Five had been sending out link data of his own, and Samm returned his focus to that. It was both fascinating and tragic. The link was designed to carry tactical information in the field of battle, informing your squad mates of both danger and safety and syncing everyone to the same informed, efficient emotional state. One of the side effects of this system was that it was triggered from an imaginary stimulus as easily as it was from real life, making Partial soldiers vaguely aware of their sleeping companions’ dreams. The effects were more muted—a simple dream about pizza or a flashback to basic training wouldn’t usually register for anyone else—but an intense emotional experience would often spread through the squad like subtle magic, until they were all sharing the same, or a similar, dream. Like a contagious vision. If one soldier had a nightmare, soon everyone had one; if one soldier dreamed of a girl, the entire squad might wake up with an awkward mix of high fives and embarrassed chuckles. Samm’s sergeant had once dreamed of falling, and the entire group had woken up in the same terrifying moment, gasping with one loud, unified breath as the half-remembered terror subsided. A Partial soldier with a history of good dreams—or simply a very strong memory of a woman—was welcome in any squad, while a soldier haunted by darkness and nightmares was sometimes looked upon as a curse.
The comatose Partials from Dr. Vale’s lab were a pit of darkness Samm could barely stand to be next to. It wasn’t that Number Five’s dreams were dark, for there were many bursts of active, tense, and even happy data that Samm had come to identify as the sleeping Partial’s dreams. What broke his heart was the rest of the time—all the long, troubled, hopeless hours where Five wasn’t dreaming at all. The soldier