Fragments. Dan Wells

laughing out loud.”

      “I’m pregnant,” said Isolde, “my senses are like superpowers. I can smell your thoughts.”

      “Smell?”

      “It’s a very limited superpower,” she said. “Now seriously, get me some fresh air or I’m going to make this room a lot grosser than it already is.”

      “You want to go back out?”

      Isolde shook her head, closing her eyes and breathing slowly. She wasn’t showing yet, but her morning sickness had been terrible—she’d actually lost weight instead of gained it, because she couldn’t keep any food down, and Nurse Hardy had threatened her with inpatient care at the hospital if she didn’t improve soon. She’d been taking the week off work to relax, and it had helped a bit, but she was too much of a political junkie to stay away from a hearing like this. Marcus looked around the back of the auditorium, saw a seat near an open door, and pulled her toward it.

      “Excuse me, sir,” he said softly, “can my friend have this chair?”

      The man wasn’t even using it, just standing in front of it, but he glowered at Marcus in annoyance. “It’s first come, first served,” he said lowly. “Now stay quiet so I can hear this.”

      “She’s pregnant,” said Marcus, and nodded smugly as the man’s entire demeanor changed in seconds.

      “Why didn’t you say so?” He stepped aside immediately, offering Isolde the seat, and walked off in search of somewhere else to stand. Works every time, thought Marcus. Even after the repeal of the Hope Act, which had made pregnancy mandatory, pregnant women were still treated as sacred. Now that Kira had discovered a cure for RM, and there was a real hope that infants would actually survive more than a few days, the attitude was even more prevalent. Isolde sat down, fanning her face, and Marcus positioned himself behind her seat, where he could discourage people from blocking her airflow. He looked back up at the front of the room.

      “. . . which is just the kind of thing we’re trying to stop in the first place,” Senator Tovar was saying.

      “You can’t be serious,” said the new senator, and Marcus focused his concentration to hear him better. “You were the leader of the Voice,” he told Tovar. “You threatened to start, and by some interpretations actually started, a civil war.”

      “Violence being occasionally necessary isn’t the same thing as violence being good,” said Tovar. “We were fighting to prevent atrocity, not to punish it after the fact—”

      “Capital punishment is, at its heart, a preventative measure,” said the senator. Marcus blinked—he’d had no idea that execution was even being considered for Weist and Delarosa. When you have only 36,000 humans left, you don’t jump right to executing them, criminal or not. The new senator gestured toward the prisoners. “When these two die for their crimes, in a community so small everyone will be intimately aware of it, those crimes are unlikely to be repeated.”

      “Their crimes were conducted through the direct application of senatorial power,” said Tovar. “Who exactly are you trying to send a message to?”

      “To anyone who treats a human life like a chip in a poker game,” said the man, and Marcus felt the room grow tense. The new senator was staring at Tovar coldly, and even in the back of the room Marcus could read the threatening subtext: If he could do it, this man would execute Tovar right along with Delarosa and Weist.

      “They did what they thought was best,” said Senator Kessler, one of the former senators who’d managed to weather the scandal and maintain her position. From everything Marcus had seen, and the inside details he’d learned from Kira, Kessler and the others had been just as guilty as Delarosa and Weist— they had seized power and declared martial law, turning Long Island’s tiny democracy into a totalitarian state. They had done it to protect the people, or so they claimed, and in the beginning Marcus had agreed with them: Humanity was facing extinction, after all, and with those kinds of stakes it’s hard to argue that freedom is more important than survival. But Tovar and the rest of the Voice had rebelled, and the Senate had reacted, and the Voice had reacted to that, and on and on until suddenly they were lying to their own people, blowing up their own hospital, and secretly killing their own soldier in a bid to ignite fear of a fictional Partial invasion and unite the island again. The official ruling had been that Delarosa and Weist were the masterminds, and everyone else had simply been following orders—you couldn’t punish Kessler for following her leader any more than you could punish a Grid soldier for following Kessler. Marcus still wasn’t sure how he felt about the ruling, but it seemed pretty obvious that this new guy didn’t like it at all.

      Marcus crouched down and put a hand on Isolde’s shoulder. “Remind me who the new guy is.”

      “Asher Woolf,” Isolde whispered. “He replaced Weist as the representative from the Defense Grid.”

      “That explains that,” said Marcus, standing back up. You don’t kill a soldier without making every other soldier in the army an enemy for life.

      “‘What they thought was best,’” Woolf repeated. He looked at the crowd, then back at Kessler. “What they thought was best, in this case, was the murder of a soldier who had already sacrificed his own health and safety trying to protect their secrets. If we make them pay the same price that boy did, maybe the next pack of senators won’t think that kind of decision is ‘best.’”

      Marcus looked at Senator Hobb, wondering why he hadn’t spoken yet. He was the best debater on the Senate, but Marcus had learned to think of him as the most shallow, manipulative, and opportunistic. He was also the one who’d gotten Isolde pregnant, and Marcus didn’t think he could ever respect the man again. He certainly hadn’t shown any interest in his unborn child. Now he was showing the same hands-off approach with the sentence. Why hadn’t he picked a side yet?

      “I think the point’s been made,” said Kessler. “Weist and Delarosa have been tried and convicted; they’re in handcuffs, they’re on their way to a prison camp, they’re paying for—”

      “They’re being sent to an idyllic country estate to eat steaks and stud for a bunch of lonely farm girls,” said Woolf.

      “You watch your tongue!” said Kessler, and Marcus winced at the fury in her voice. He was friends with Kessler’s adopted daughter, Xochi; he’d heard that fury more times than he cared to count, and he didn’t envy Woolf’s position. “Whatever your misogynist opinion of our farming communities,” said Kessler, “the accused are not going to a resort. They are prisoners, and they will be sent to a prison camp, and they will work harder than you have ever worked in your life.”

      “And you’re not going to feed them?” asked Woolf.

      Kessler seethed. “Of course we’re going to feed them.”

      Woolf creased his brow in mock confusion. “Then you’re not going to allow them any fresh air or sunshine?”

      “Where else are they going to work at a prison farm but outside in a field?”

      “Then I’m confused,” said Woolf. “So far this doesn’t sound like much of a punishment. Senator Weist ordered the coldhearted killing of one of his own soldiers, a teenage boy under his own command, and his punishment is a soft bed, three square meals, fresher food than we get here in East Meadow, and all the girls he could ever ask for—”

      “You keep saying ‘girls,’” said Tovar. “What exactly are you envisioning here?”

      Woolf paused, staring at Tovar, then picked up a piece of paper and scanned it with his eyes as he talked. “Perhaps I misunderstood the nature of our ban on capital punishment. We can’t kill anyone because, in your words, ‘there are only thirty-five thousand people left on the planet, and we can’t afford to lose any more.’” He looked up. “Is that correct?”

      “We have a cure for RM now,” said Kessler. “That means we have a future. We can’t afford to lose a single person.”

      “Because