Six-four, maybe six-six.” Her voice softened, and Kira could tell she was drifting into memory: Her eyes were wet and unfocused, staring blindly into space. She grabbed a lock of her coal-black hair. “She had black hair, like mine, and she was always wearing jewelry. Silver, I think. She had a big fat ring on her hand like a flower, and I used to play with it. We lived in Philadelphia—I used to think that was the name of the state, but it’s a city. Philadelphia. Someday I want to go back and find that ring.” She rolled her eyes. “You know. Someday.”
“My mom sold airplanes,” said Isolde. “I don’t know how, or to who, but I remember that’s what she told me, and I thought it was so amazing, and now I look back and I think: We don’t even have airplanes anymore. We don’t have gas to put in them, I don’t know if we even have anyone left who could fly them if we did, but my mom used to sell them like they were nothing, like they were fish rolls in the market.”
“I don’t think I had a mother,” said Kira. “I mean, obviously I had one at some point, but I don’t remember her, just my dad. I don’t even remember him talking about her, but I’m sure he did. I guess they were divorced, or she was dead. Probably divorced: We didn’t have any pictures of her.”
“So imagine something awesome,” said Xochi. “If you don’t remember your mom, that means she can be anyone you want—she can be an actress, or a model, or the president of some giant company, or . . . anything you want.”
“If you can’t know the truth,” said Isolde, “live the most awesome lie you can think of.”
“All right then,” said Kira. “She was a doctor, like me—a brilliant scientist renowned for her work with children. She invented . . . gene sequencing. And nanosurgery.” Kira smiled. “And normal surgery, and penicillin, and she cured cancer.”
“That is a pretty awesome dream,” said Xochi.
“Yeah,” said Kira. “I guess awesome dreams are all we have left.”
“Stay alert today,” said Shaylon.
Kira eyed the young soldier warily, her eyes still red from tears and fatigue. “More so than normal? What’s going on?”
“Mr. Mkele thinks someone’s planning an attack,” he said, gripping his rifle more tightly. “The Voice hiding in town, still looking for whatever they didn’t find at the town hall. The new amendment to the Hope Act probably didn’t help matters, either. He’s sending more patrols outside, but he told us to be careful here anyway, just in case.”
Kira nodded. “I’ll keep my eyes open.” She pushed her way through the door into the decontamination tunnel, rubbing her face with her palms as the air blasted around her. I should be using Shaylon a lot more than I am. If I can find a way to talk to him alone, maybe after hours, I can probably learn a lot more about what the Grid is doing.
Kira sighed. Like I have time for another project.
She set down her stack of notebooks and crouched by Samm’s table, checking his face and arm—a ritual that had become standard now.
“They beat you again.”
Samm, of course, said nothing.
Kira watched him a moment, then glanced nervously into the corners. “They shouldn’t be doing this to you. It’s inhumane.”
“I’m not sure that statement has any bearing on me.”
“It doesn’t matter if you’re human or not,” said Kira, probing the Partial’s shins through the fabric of his pants, searching for more wounds. “They’re human, and that means they need to act like it.” She pulled up his pant legs. “You’ve got a few new cuts on here, but they’re not bleeding, obviously, and you should be okay.” She rolled them back down. “None of these wounds has ever gotten infected.” She wondered if Samm’s body produced some kind of natural antiseptic or antibiotic, and made a mental note to check it out later—through some means other than just stabbing him with a dirty knife. “You should be fine,” she said, and walked to the computer.
Kira noticed immediately that the files had been read: her DORD images, her preliminary notes on the pheromones, even her handwritten notes in her notebook. Someone had moved them, sorted them, paged through them. Is Skousen checking my work? she wondered. Is he duplicating it? Some of the files were new; he’d done studies of his own while she was away. She didn’t know if she should be grateful someone was watching, or indignant that they didn’t trust her results. She was nearly too tired to care.
I only have three days left, she told herself. Stop whining and work. She struggled to concentrate on the DORD images, looking for any discrepancy between Samm’s physiology and that of a human, but she kept thinking about what he said yesterday. The sincerity in his voice. What if he was telling the truth—what then? If the Partials had never created the virus in the first place, then who did? The Lurker in his breath, whatever it was, proved that he had some relationship to RM, but that didn’t mean he made it. The Partials were soldiers, not geneticists; they had doctors, but they weren’t necessarily capable of this level of engineering. What if the similarity meant something else entirely?
What if it was a sign of common ancestry? What if RM and the Partials were both created by the same third party?
Kira closed her eyes, trying to remember what she’d learned in school. What was the name of the company? Para-something? It was so hard to remember the details of the old world—names and places and technologies that simply had no meaning in modern life. Food companies were easy, because the ruins were all around her: Starbucks and Panda Garcia and a dozen more like them. She could even remember eating at some of them as a child, before the Break. Genetics companies, on the other hand, were completely outside the realm of her experience. She’d learned the name in her history class, but they hadn’t made a big deal about it. It was the government who’d commissioned the Partials, Para-something was just the contractor.
Para-Genetics, she remembered. They were called ParaGen. Haru had mentioned them the other day. But what could they have to do with RM? Certainly they hadn’t created it—they were human too. It doesn’t make sense.
“Did you have a mother?” asked Samm. The question broke Kira’s train of thought in an instant, and she looked at him quizzically.
“What?”
“Did you have a mother?”
“I . . . of course I had a mother, everyone has a mother.”
“We don’t.”
Kira frowned. “You know you’re the second person in the last twelve hours to ask me about my mother?”
“I was only curious.”
“It’s okay,” said Kira. “I never really knew my mother. I guess that makes us more alike than we thought.”
“Your father, then,” said Samm.
“Why do you want to know about him? I was five when he died, I can barely remember him.”
“I’ve never had a father either.”
Kira scooted her chair closer, coming around the edge of the desk. “Why are you so curious?” she asked. “You never talk, for two solid days, and now this morning all of a sudden you’re obsessed with families. What’s going on?”
“I’ve been doing some thinking,” he said. “A lot of thinking. You’re aware that we can’t reproduce?”
She nodded warily. “You were built that way. You were . . . well, you were intended to be weapons, not people. They didn’t want self-replicating weapons.”
“Yes,” he said. “The Partials were never intended to exist outside the infrastructure