“But I should have been with you,” he said, his voice hard. “I should have been there to protect you. I love you, Kira.”
“I love you too,” she said softly, but a voice in the back of her head said, You didn’t need to be protected.
She ignored the voice, shoving it away. Right now, all she wanted in the entire world was to be in his arms.
“You got one, didn’t you?”
Kira paused, not wanting to talk or even think about the Partial, then nodded. “Yeah.”
“The rumors are going around. Everybody knows the Grid brought something back from the west end of the island, but nobody knows what. It wasn’t hard for me to put two and two together.”
Kira felt a wave of tension creep back through her body, remembering how tense the city had been before she’d left it. How close the people were to civil war. “You think anyone else has figured it out?”
“I doubt it,” said Marcus. “Bringing a Partial into the middle of East Meadow is not exactly the first thing that’s going to leap into anyone’s mind.”
“Maybe not the first,” said Kira, “but the second, or the fifth, or the twentieth. Someone might figure it out.” She felt suddenly cold, pulling away from Marcus to rub her arms. He put a hand on her back and led her gently inside.
“We have plenty of other things to worry about,” he said, uncharacteristically somber. “There was another Voice attack while you were gone, a big one. They raided the kennels and killed or kidnapped almost every trained dog the Grid had. Now we can’t—”
Kira stopped and grabbed him by the arm, her heart pounding. “The kennels? Isn’t that where Saladin worked?”
“The boy wonder,” Marcus nodded, “the youngest human on the planet. They took him when they took the dogs, and half the people working with him. It was a pretty big blow, psychologically. Without the dogs we can’t track the Voice through the wilderness anymore, but without Saladin . . . it’s like they came in, kicked a puppy, and stole a baby. A lot of people are calling for an all-out war.”
“Why would they do that?” asked Kira. “Obviously it was going to make people mad—it’s almost like they went out of their way to piss us off. It’s certainly not going to win them any new supporters. Maybe they’re trying to start a war?”
“They might be holding him for ransom,” said Marcus. “He’s a pretty big bargaining chip, and they left a note.”
“A note?”
“Well, technically they tagged the kennel with twenty feet of graffiti, but still. The message was clear, the same as it’s always been: ‘Repeal the Hope Act.’”
Kira pushed her way through the plastic tunnel. “Good morning.” She said it without thinking, then paused, wondering why. When had she started to think of it as a person?
The Partial, of course, said nothing. It didn’t even seem to react when it heard her, and Kira wondered if it was asleep. She crept closer, trying to stay as quiet as she could, but the Partial groaned and coughed, rolling his head to the side and spitting.
“What are you—” She froze.
The spit was red with blood.
Kira dropped her files and rushed to his side, gently lifting his head. His face was black with bruises and crusted blood.
“Holy crap, what happened to you?”
He groaned again, slowly blinking his eyes open. “Blood.”
“Yeah,” said Kira, running to the cupboards to look for towels, “I can see you’re bleeding, but why? What happened?”
He didn’t say anything. He tilted his head, popping the joints in his neck, then held up his right arm; it moved about three inches before the restraint jerked it to a stop. He had been given a change of clothes, and Kira pulled back his sleeve to reveal an arm covered with thin lacerations, tender and pink. “They cut me.”
Kira’s mouth dropped open in horror. “Who?” The horror turned to anger almost instantly. “Who was it? The guards? Doctors?”
He nodded slightly, and probed his mouth with his tongue, making sure all the teeth were still in place.
“That’s ridiculous,” said Kira, fuming. She stomped to the microscope, snarled, and stomped back. Everything she’d thought about doing, and rejected for being inhumane, someone else had come in and done. She shot a long, cold glance at one of the cameras, an unblinking eye that stared back without emotion. She wanted to smash it, but took a breath and forced herself to calm down. Getting angry wasn’t going to solve anything. I’m trying to be the good guy here, but . . . is coddling the Partial really “good”? Would I be serving humanity better by testing his limits? She walked to her desk and sat down, still staring straight ahead. I don’t even know what to do.
She hung her head, and while looking down she saw the crumpled rubber glove in the garbage can. The breath test—she still needed to find a way to isolate the Partial’s breath so she could search it for samples of the airborne RM. The Spore. She still hadn’t found a good way to do it. The rubber gloves would work, she was pretty sure, but only if the subject was willing. She glanced at the Partial, grim and silent on the table.
She stood, pulled out another rubber glove, and walked slowly to the table.
“Do you have a name?”
The Partial eyed her carefully, that slow, studying look that made her feel like he was calculating everything about her.
“Why do you want to know?”
“Because I’m tired of calling you ‘Partial.’”
He studied her a moment longer, then smiled, slowly and warily. “Samm.”
“Samm,” said Kira. “I have to admit, I was expecting something more unusual.”
“It has two Ms.”
“Why two Ms?”
“Because that’s what it said on my rucksack,” said Samm. “‘Sam M.’ I didn’t realize the M was for a last name: I was two days old; I’d never met anyone with a last name. I was just . . . Samm. I spelled it that way on a report, and it stuck.”
Kira nodded and crouched down next to him. “Samm,” she said, “I know you have no reason to help me, no reason to do anything I say, but I want you to understand that this is very important. You guessed yesterday that RM is still a big concern for us, and you were right. Everything I’m doing here—everything we’re all doing—is to find a way to cure it. That’s why we were in Manhattan, because nothing we have left here on the island was giving us any answers. I don’t know if that’s important to you in any way, but it’s incredibly important to me. I’d give up my life to find a cure. Now I know this sounds weird, but I’m going to ask you a favor.” She paused, almost talking herself out of it, then held up the rubber glove. “Will you breathe into this?”
His eyebrow went up.
“I need you to inflate it,” she explained. “That will allow me to isolate your breath sample and study it in the medicomp.”
He hesitated. “Tell me your name.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m tired of calling you ‘human.’”
She cocked her head, looking at him. Was that a joke? His voice was still as flat and unemotional as ever but there was something almost playful behind it. Was he reaching out to her? Testing her? Behind it all, that calm, calculating look never left his eyes. Whatever he was doing, he must have more than one reason for doing it. She pursed her lips, thinking, and decided to go along with it. “My name is Kira.”
“Then