blew strongly into the glove. It took a couple of tries to get the seal right, but soon she had a small breath sample and pinched the glove off tightly. “Thank you.” She put the glove in the medicomp sample bay, feeling only slightly ridiculous, then closed the chamber and started flicking through the screens. The scope began the long process of finding as many structures as it could, saving them for Kira to look at.
Almost immediately, a small message popped up in the corner of the screen—the scope had found a “partial match” to something in its database. Kira shook her head. No pun intended, right, microscope? A moment later another one popped up, then two more, then four more, partial match after partial match. Kira pulled up the image and found a bizarre protein construct, completely new and yet, like the scope said, very familiar. She peered closer. There were dozens of matches now, climbing swiftly toward the hundreds. Something in Samm’s breath looked very similar to—but not exactly like—the RM Blob. Kira’s fingers flew across the screen, magnifying the image, rotating it, pulling it apart. It was remarkably close to the blood-borne version of RM—a similar size, a similar shape, even some of the same nodes and receptors on the surface. It wasn’t exactly RM, but it was close enough to make Kira shiver. The few small differences were the most terrifying part, because they meant it was new. A new strain of the virus, perhaps.
And Samm was breathing it out.
Kira looked up at the ceiling, moving her eyes from corner to corner. She thought about calling out, or just running out of the room, but she paused. I need to think this through. First of all, she wasn’t sick; she had no symptoms, no discomfort, no signs of any pathogenic attack. She peered closer at the screen, studying the object: It looked like RM, but it didn’t look like a virus. A virus would have a core particle in its center, a little packet of genetic information that entered a host cell and corrupted it, but the thing in Samm’s breath didn’t have one. She searched it carefully, using her fingers to peel back the layers of the image, examining the structure in detail. As nearly as she could tell, this new particle didn’t have any way of reproducing itself. It was like a nonvirus version of the virus.
Whatever it was, the thing had given Kira something to concentrate on. She cross-referenced the image with the others in the database, searching for any sign of its purpose or function. Two possibilities immediately suggested themselves, and she jotted them down on her notepad: first, that Samm’s body could, at one time, produce the Blob, and that somehow that ability had been removed or reduced, leaving only this inert, nonviral structure. It was a vestigial particle, like the human appendix: the evidence of a previous function. Kira thought about that, staring at her notepad. Is this how the Partials spread RM? Did they just breathe it out and kill everyone? But then how did that function go away—what flipped the switch and made the deadly virus turn inert? The Partials are engineered, she thought. A switch like that, and the power to flip it on and off, could have been built right into them. But who holds the key to flipping it?
Kira shuddered, the ramifications twisting her stomach into queasy knots. And yet her second guess about the particle seemed even worse: that the particle in Samm’s breath was a precursor to the active virus, designed to transform on contact with human blood and become the deadly Blob. Was that the secret of Partial immunity? A virus that couldn’t even arm itself until it found a human target? That was the worst possible situation for Kira, because it meant there might be nothing she could use—no defensive mechanism she could copy from the Partials to help fight off the virus. If RM targeted humans, specifically and directly, then the only defense against it was to not be human anymore.
Maybe the only way to survive was to be a Partial.
Kira shook her head, throwing down her notepad and shoving the thought from her mind. She couldn’t think like this—she wouldn’t think like this. There had to be something in the Partial genetic code that rendered RM inert, and there had to be a way to copy it and apply it to the human genetic code. And she was going to find it. The only thing this proved for certain was that what Samm had said yesterday was true: The Partials did have a connection to RM, at a very basic level. But what was it?
She tapped on the screen, opening the particle’s profile information to give it a name. The blood-borne form was the Blob, because it was fat; the airborne was the Spore, because it was, presumably, how the virus spread. This new one she labeled the Lurker, because it didn’t have any obvious function at all. It simply sat and waited, presumably, for the right time to strike.
“You’re not going to find what you’re looking for.”
Kira started again; Samm had a funny sense of timing. But she was curious. “And how do you know what I’m looking for?”
“You’re looking for a solution.”
“I’m looking for a cure.”
“The cure is only part of it,” said Samm. “You’re looking for a solution to your problems: rebels, plagues, political unrest, civil war. You’re scared of everything, and to be fair, everything in your lives is pretty scary. You’re looking for a way to move past it, to bring your lives back together. But you’re not going to find the answers simply by curing RM. And you know it.”
He’s been listening to us, thought Kira. A lot of that he could have picked up from the hearing, but not all of it. Not the Voice, certainly. But he’s been paying attention, and he’s figured it out. Her first thought was to stop talking, to make sure the Partial couldn’t glean any more info. And yet, he was tied up and had four days to live. How could deducing an impending civil war possibly help him to escape?
She felt trapped in the room and marched past Samm to open the window for air. It wouldn’t budge. She strained against it as hard as she could, muttering curses at the Senate for locking her in, then remembered that this was ostensibly a sealed room, and felt stupid for even trying to open the window, which only made her curse more harshly.
“We don’t want you to die,” said Samm.
“Then why did you kill us?” Kira whirled to face him, feeling her face grow hot and red.
“I told you, we didn’t create RM.”
“What I found in your breath suggests otherwise.”
If that was news to Samm, he didn’t show it. “If we wanted you dead, you would be dead,” said Samm. “That’s not a threat, it’s a fact.”
“Then what do you want from us?” Kira demanded. “Why did you keep us alive? What are you planning? Is this why you were in Manhattan?”
He hesitated for a moment. “You seem like you’d do anything to ensure humanity’s survival. How far are you willing to go?”
“What are you talking about?” she asked. “What are you suggesting?”
He glanced at the corner, to a camera she knew was watching and listening to everything they said. He closed his mouth and looked at the ceiling.
“No,” said Kira, leaning over him, “you can’t just say something like that and then clam up again. Why did you even start talking if you’re not going to finish?”
He didn’t answer; he didn’t even look at her.
“Is this what you were talking about yesterday? That you can’t tell us because you don’t want to die? I’ve got news for you, Samm: You’re going to die anyway. If you’ve got something to say, say it. You were in Manhattan for a reason; are you saying it had something to do with RM?”
She waited there for a full minute, but he stayed silent, and she turned angrily back to the window, slamming the pane with her hand. The sound of the slam echoed back, but distantly. That was weird. She frowned, peering at the window, and hit it again, wondering what had caused the sound. Nothing happened. She leaned in closer, and suddenly a loud string of rapid pops drifted in from the city beyond. She looked out, trying to see what the noise could possibly be, and saw a plume of smoke rise up from somewhere beyond the trees. It couldn’t have been more than a few blocks away. The popping continued, short bursts of rapid, rhythmic noise, but it wasn’t until she saw people running that she realized what it was.