CHAPTER THREE
Kira stared up at the surgery robot, a massive metal spider looming down from the ceiling. Twelve sleek, multijointed arms swiveled into place, each tipped with a different medical instrument: scalpels and clamps in half a dozen different sizes, syringes with interchangeable barrels of brightly colored liquid, and spanners and spikes and other devices with functions Kira could only guess at. She’d been in medical training since she was ten—almost eight years ago now—but there were things in here she’d never even dreamed of.
They showed up all the time in her nightmares, though. This was the same facility in Greenwich, Connecticut, where Dr. Morgan had captured her and tortured her before Marcus and Samm had saved her. Now she’d abandoned them both and come back of her own free will.
The spider rotated silently, reaching toward her with sleek steel pincers. Kira suppressed a scream and tried to think calm thoughts.
“Local anesthetic to points four, six, and seven,” said Morgan, tapping the locations on a massive wall screen, where a diagram of Kira’s body hung motionless in the air. “Engage.” The spider reached down without pause or ceremony and plunged its needles into Kira’s hip and abdomen. Kira stifled another scream, gritting her teeth and compressing her fears into a low grunt.
“Such a glowing bedside manner,” said Dr. Vale, standing by another wall. “It warms my heart, McKenna—you’re like a mother hen.”
“I started a war to find this girl,” said Morgan. “You want me to ask permission every time I touch her?”
“A quick ‘This will only hurt a little’ might be nice,” said Vale. “Maybe even an ‘Are you ready, Kira?’ before we start the surgery?”
“As if my answer would change anything?” asked Kira.
Morgan shot her a glance. “You made the choice to be here.”
Vale snorted. “Another answer that didn’t technically change anything.”
“It changed a great deal,” said Morgan, looking back at the wall screen. She plotted out lines for incisions. “It impressed me.”
“Well, then,” said Vale. “By all means, treat her like a lab rat.”
“I was a lab rat last time,” said Kira. “This time is better, believe me.”
“That’s the kind of answer that only makes this worse,” said Vale, shaking his head. “You were always cold, McKenna, but this is the most coldhearted, dehumanizing—”
“I’m not a human,” said Kira, and realized with a start that Morgan had said almost the same thing—“She’s not a human”—simultaneously. They looked at each other for a moment, then Morgan turned back to her wall screen.
“In the interest of”—Morgan paused, as if searching for the right way to say it—“a peaceful working relationship, I will be more communicative.” She tapped a few icons on the wall screen, which split into three sections—the line diagram of Kira’s body on one side, and two half-size boxes on the other showing two sets of data: one labeled “Expiration” and one labeled “Kira Walker.” “Dr. Vale and I were part of the Trust—the group of ParaGen scientists who created the Partials and the RM plague. We didn’t intend for the plague to bring the human race to the brink of extinction, obviously, but the damage is done, and once I realized the humans were a lost cause, I turned my attention to the Partials instead. I’ve spent the last twelve years helping them build a new civilization, trying to find ways to overcome the sterility and other handicaps hardwired into their DNA. Imagine my surprise when they began dying, for no discernible reason, precisely twenty years after they were created.”
Vale spoke up again. “The expiration date was—”
“The expiration date was the surest sign that ‘the Trust’ was a horrible misnomer,” said Morgan. “Living, thinking beings that I helped create were preprogrammed to wither to dust in a matter of hours the moment they hit their biological deadline, and I knew nothing about it. I’ve been doing everything in my power to fix it, which brings us here.”
“You think I can cure it,” said Kira.
“I think something in your body holds the secret that will help me cure it,” said Morgan. “The last time I had you in a lab, when we discovered you were a Partial—another secret the ‘Trust’ kept from me—my initial scans determined that despite being a Partial, you had none of the genetic handicaps the others have: no sterility, no fixed age, no inhibition of growth or any other human function. If it turns out that you have no expiration date either, there might be a way to reverse engineer certain fragments of your genetic code to help save the rest of the Partials.”
“I’ve already told you that this is impossible,” said Vale. “I’m the one who programmed the expiration date—I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you at the time, but there it is. You were unstable, and no, we didn’t trust you. It wasn’t just you, though—Armin didn’t trust me with some of the pieces, either.”
Armin, thought Kira. My father—or the man I used to think was my father. He took me home to raise as his own, he never even told me what I was. Maybe he would have, one day. Now nobody even knows where he is. She wondered if he was dead. Everyone else in the Trust had survived the Break—Trimble and Morgan here with the Partials, Vale in the Preserve with a group of hidden humans, Ryssdal in Houston working on “environmental issues,” whatever that meant, and Nandita on Long Island with the humans.
Nandita. The woman who raised me, who also didn’t tell me I was a Partial.
Dr. Morgan tried to kill me, but at least she hasn’t pretended to be something she isn’t.
“Even if you can find something in there,” Vale continued, “how are you going to incorporate it into the Partials’ genetic sequence? Gene mods? You’re talking about hundreds of thousands of people—even if we had the facilities and the personnel to mount that kind of a mass modification effort, we don’t have the time to pull it off. How many Partials are left, half a million?”
“Two hundred thousand,” said Morgan, and Kira couldn’t help but gasp at the low number. Morgan’s voice was grim and exhausted. “They were created in batches, so they die in them as well. The next wave is due in just a few weeks.”
“And they’re all soldiers,” said Vale. “Infantry and pilots and maybe a few commandos, but the leaders are all dead—more to the point, the doctors are all dead. It’ll be up to you and me, and we wouldn’t be able to process even a tenth of what’s left before their time runs out—even if we already knew how.”
“That’s why we have to do something,” said Kira. She thought of Samm, and everything they’d shared, and their final, terrifying, passionate moment together. She loved him, and if her sacrifice here could keep him alive . . . “Everyone in the world is dying, humans and Partials, and I gave myself up because this is our best shot at saving anyone. So let’s get on with it.”
Vale’s expression darkened. “I’m trying to help you, Kira, don’t get snotty with me.”
“You don’t know her very well,” said Morgan, and her voice softened.
Vale stared at her a moment, then snarled and turned away.
Morgan looked at Kira. “Last time, we scanned your reproductive system only peripherally—back when we thought you were human, it wasn’t a priority. Today we’re going to do several biopsies.”
Kira’s hips and abdomen already felt numb and lifeless from the anesthetic. She looked back at Morgan, steeling her resolve, and nodded silently.
“Engage,” said Morgan, and the spider unfurled its knives.