Partials. Dan Wells

a finger on her lips. “You know, the best way to prevent an overdose is to vary the active ingredient. That blond nurse at the south clinic is great at drawing blood; I could get two from you, two from her.”

      Kira snarled playfully, grabbing his collar. “Oh no, you don’t.”

      “Medically speaking, it would be perfectly safe,” said Marcus. “I could even get two from you and two from her at the same time. I might get a little dizzy, but—ow!”

      “I still have the finger poker,” said Kira, pressing the sharp pin against his side just hard enough to let him know it was there. “You are a one-phlebotomist man, Marcus Valencio. You got that?”

      “I got it,” said Marcus. “Speaking of which, I think my meds are wearing off.”

      “No more today,” she said, pushing him back to his chair and picking up the tubes of blood. “It’s time to find out what kind of man you really are.” She took his blood to a medicomp in the corner, switched it on, and started preparing a sample while it booted up. Marcus followed, handing her glass slides and plastic pipettes and other little tools exactly when she needed them. She liked working with Marcus; it reminded her of the easy, unspoken rhythm they had sorting medicine on salvage runs.

      She finished the slide, popped it into the medicomp bay, and slid her fingers across the screen; the computer detected the blood and offered the basic information.

      “Type O positive,” said Marcus, reading over her shoulder, “good cholesterol, good glucose; hmm, a very high hotness count, that’s interesting.”

      “Yes,” Kira murmured, fingers flying across the screen, “but look at all those arrogance particles.” Marcus started to protest, and she laughed, tapping out instructions for a deeper scan. An option popped up for a “Full Blood Analysis,” and she tapped yes; she’d never asked for this much information before, and apparently there was a simple “everything on the menu” option. It made her wonder how life had been different in the old world, when computers were used for every aspect of life, and not just in the hospitals where they could generate enough electricity to use them.

      Mere seconds later the computer offered a list of various electrolytes and glucose molecules and other little bits in the blood; it would take longer for a full analysis, calculating what, for example, the glucose density suggested about his liver health, but the computer would update those details as it went. The next set of notes to appear were genetic modifications; they had been so common before the Break that almost everyone on the island had at least a few. Marcus had the genetic markers for in vitro gene correction, meaning his parents had scrubbed his DNA for congenital diseases before he was even born. He had another marker in his red blood cells, signifying some sort of bone marrow modification, but neither Kira nor the computer could tell exactly what it was without a full bone sample. It didn’t matter either way; Skousen and the other researchers had already examined the gene mods as a possible source of RM immunity, but it was a dead end—if anything, it seemed to make the subjects more vulnerable to the virus, not less. Kira moved on and started taking 3-D photos of the blood, examining individual portions of it for anomalies, when the computer chirped a small alert, and a glowing blue rhombus appeared in the corner of the screen. She frowned, glancing at Marcus, but he only shrugged and shook his head. She looked back at the screen and tapped the alert.

      A new section expanded across the screen, one brief sentence with a handful of pictures attached: 27 Instances of RM Virus.

      “What?” Kira whispered. The number blinked, updating to twenty-eight. She tapped one of the pictures, and it flew up into a corner of the screen, enlarging to a 3-D representation of RM. It was a rough, fat sphere, highlighted in yellow to stand out from the background image. It looked putrid and menacing.