Fragments. Dan Wells

quietly in the corner—the Miracle Child was too precious to risk without fulltime medical attention, so Sandy followed mother and daughter everywhere, but she had never really fit into their group socially. There were more in their retinue as well: To help protect the child, the Senate had assigned them a pair of bodyguards. When a crazed woman—the mother of ten dead children—had tried to kidnap Arwen the day Madison first brought her to the outdoor market, they had doubled the guards and reinstated Haru to the Defense Grid. There were two guards here tonight, one in the front yard and one in the back. The radio on Haru’s belt chirped softly every time one of them checked in.

      “Any luck with that?” asked Madison, and Marcus snapped back to attention.

      “What?”

      “The cure,” said Madison. “Have you had any luck with it?”

      He grimaced, glancing at Isolde, and shook his head. “Nothing. We thought we had a breakthrough a couple of days ago, but it turned out to be something the D team had already tried. Dead end.” He grimaced again at his own word choice, though this time he managed to avoid glancing at Isolde; better to let that reference disappear in shame than call any more attention to it.

      Isolde looked down, rubbing her belly the way Madison always used to. Marcus worked as hard as he could—everyone on the cure teams did—but they were still no closer to synthesizing the cure for RM. Kira had figured out what the cure was and was able to obtain a sample from the Partials on the mainland, but Marcus and the other doctors were still a far cry from being able to manufacture it on their own.

      “Another died this weekend,” said Isolde softly. She looked up at Sandy for confirmation, and the nurse nodded sadly. Isolde paused, her hand on her belly, then turned to Marcus. “There’s more, you know—the Hope Act is gone, none of our pregnancies are mandatory anymore, and yet there are more now than ever before. Everyone wants to have a child, trusting that you’ll have figured out how to manufacture the cure reliably by the time they come to term.” She looked back down. “It’s funny— we always called them ‘infants’ in the Senate, back before the cure, like we were trying to hide from the word ‘child.’ When all it was was death reports, we never wanted to think of them as babies, as children, as anything but subjects in a failed experiment. Now that I’m . . . here, though, now that I’m . . . making one of my own, growing another human being right inside of me, it’s different. I can’t think of it as anything besides my baby.”

      Sandy nodded. “We did the same thing in the hospital. We still do. The deaths are still too close, so we try to keep death distant.”

      “I don’t know how you can do it,” said Isolde softly. Marcus thought he heard her voice crack, but he couldn’t see her face to tell if she was crying.

      “You have to have some kind of progress, though,” Madison told Marcus. “You have four teams—”

      “Five,” said Marcus.

      “Five teams now,” said Madison, “all trying to synthesize the Partial pheromone. You have all the equipment, the samples to work from, you have everything. It . . .” She paused. “It can’t be a dead end.”

      “We’re doing everything we can,” said Marcus, “but you have to understand how complex this thing is. It doesn’t just interact with RM, it’s part of the RM life cycle somehow—we’re still trying to understand how it works. I mean . . . we still don’t even understand why it works. Why would the Partials have the cure for RM? Why would it be part of their breath, in their blood? As near as we could gather from Kira before she left, the Partials don’t even know they have it, it’s just part of their genetic makeup.”

      “It doesn’t make sense,” said Sandy.

      “Not unless there’s some larger plan,” said Marcus.

      “It doesn’t matter if there’s some huge hypothetical plan,” said Madison. “It doesn’t matter where the pheromone came from, or how it got there, or why the sky is blue—all you have to do is copy it.”

      “We have to know how it works first—” said Marcus, but Isolde cut him off.

      “We’re going to go take it,” said Isolde. There was an edge in her voice Marcus hadn’t heard before. He raised his eyebrows in surprise.

      “You mean from the Partials?”

      “The Senate talks about it every day,” said Isolde. “There’s a cure, but we can’t make it on our own, and babies are dying every week, and the people are getting restless. Meanwhile right across the sound there are a million Partials who make our cure every day, without even trying. It’s not ‘will we attack the Partials,’ it’s ‘how much longer will we wait.’”

      “I’ve been across the sound,” said Marcus. “I’ve seen what Partials are capable of in a fight—we wouldn’t stand a chance against them.”

      “It doesn’t have to be an all-out war,” said Isolde, “just a raid—in and out, grab one guy, done. Just like Kira and Haru did with Samm.”

      That got Haru’s attention, and he looked up from his argument with Xochi. “What about me and Samm?”

      “They’re talking about whether the Grid’s going to kidnap another Partial,” said Madison.

      “Of course they’re going to,” said Haru. “It’s inevitable. They’ve been stupid to wait this long.”

      Great, thought Marcus. Now I’m stuck in a conversation with Haru whether I like it or not.

      “We don’t have to kidnap one,” said Xochi. “We could just talk to them.”

      “You were attacked last time,” said Haru. “I’ve read the reports—you barely made it out alive, and that was with a Partial you trusted. I’d hate to see what happens with a Partial faction you don’t know anything about.”

      “We can’t trust all of them,” said Xochi, “but the other thing you must have seen in the reports is that Samm disobeyed his commander to help us. Maybe there are more Partials who share his perspective.”

      “If we could really trust them,” said Haru, “we wouldn’t have to rely on the one disobedient outlier to help us. I’ll believe in peace with the Partials as soon as I see them raise a finger to help us.”

      “He talks big,” said Madison, “but he wouldn’t trust a Partial even then.”

      “If you remembered the Partial War,” said Haru, “you wouldn’t either.”

      “So we’re back to the beginning,” said Isolde. “Nobody in charge wants to make peace with them, and nobody in the hospital can make the cure without them, so our only option is war.”

      “A small attack,” said Haru. “Just slip in and grab one and they won’t even notice.”

      “Which will mean war,” said Marcus, sighing as they dragged him into the argument. “They’re already in a war with each other, and that’s probably the only reason they haven’t attacked us yet. The group we ran into across the sound was studying Kira to try to solve their own plague, their built-in expiration date, and there is clearly a faction of them that believes humans are the key and will stop at nothing to turn us all into experiments. The instant they win their civil war, they’ll come down here with guns blazing and kill or enslave us all.”

      “So then war is inevitable,” said Haru.

      “Almost as inevitable as you using the word ‘inevitable,’” said Marcus.

      Haru ignored the jab. “Then there’s no reason for us to not raid them. In fact, it’s better to do it now, while they’re distracted; we’ll grab a few, extract enough of the cure to last us as long as we’ll need, kill them, and get out of Long Island before they ever have a chance to come after us.”

      Sandy frowned. “You mean leave Long Island completely?”

      “If the