Ruins. Dan Wells

“Neither of them are you.”

      “Only two of us figured out the cure for RM,” Kira countered, studying the monitors. “Go ahead and remind yourself which two.”

      Morgan sneered, but after a moment she stalked to the door. “Have your little pity party,” she said to Vale. “I have work to do.” She stormed into the hall and slammed the door behind her.

      “I delight in anyone who stands up to that harridan,” said Vale, “but she’s arguably the most powerful person in the world right now. You need to keep a civil tongue.”

      “People have been telling me that my whole life,” said Kira, only barely paying attention to him. She stared at the vast screen, cataloguing the data in her mind, searching for some kind of order in the chaos—some final, perfect key that would pull it all together and make sense of it. “What do you see here?”

      “Your entire life, reduced to numbers,” said Vale. “Cellular decay rates, gene sequences, pH levels, white cell counts and bone marrow samples—”

      “The answer’s not here,” said Kira.

      “Of course it’s not here.”

      She felt a tiny spark of excitement, the familiar thrill of solving a riddle slowly coming back to her. “But this is the most exhaustive biological study I’ve ever seen. It’s not just my data, it’s years’ worth of studies about expiring Partials and healthy Partials and human test subjects and everything else. Whatever else you want to accuse her of, Dr. Morgan is spectacularly thorough.”

      “You’re acting like that’s good news,” said Vale, “but everything you’re saying only makes our situation worse. Morgan’s a brilliant scientist, and she’s been collecting this data for over a decade, and the answer’s still not here. If you’ve already looked everywhere and you can’t find your answer, your answer doesn’t exist. There is no cure for expiration.”

      Kira spun around, her eyes alive with eagerness. “Do you know how I found the cure for RM?”

      “By capturing a Partial and experimenting on him,” said Vale. “Kind of puts your current situation into an interesting karmic light.”

      Kira ignored the jibe. “We did everything for RM that Morgan’s done for expiration, and we ran into this same wall—we’d tried everything, we’d failed at everything, and we thought we had nothing left. We found the cure because we looked in a Partial, and we looked in a Partial because he was literally the only thing we hadn’t looked in yet. It didn’t make sense, it didn’t follow from any data we’d previously collected, it was just a hunch—an absolute Hail Mary—but it worked, by pure process of elimination. If you’ve already looked everywhere and you can’t find your answer, you haven’t looked everywhere yet.”

      Vale walked toward the screen, studying the glowing words and numbers as he did. “I know the Trust kept a lot of secrets from one another,” he said, engaging more actively in her brainstorm. “But I can assure you there are no more mysterious species out there we can gather up and poke around in.”

      “Not strictly true,” said Kira. “On our trip to the Preserve we were attacked by talking dogs.”

      “The Watchdogs aren’t a cure for expiration,” said Vale, tapping the screen to call up a file on the semi-intelligent animals. “Believe it or not, Morgan’s already studied them, trying to see if they had the same expiration date the Partials did. They don’t carry any more potential cures than you do.”

      “Which is exactly why this giant, useless data dump is such a godsend,” said Kira. “It’s like a road map that only shows ninety-nine percent of a country—all we have to do is figure out what isn’t on the map, and that’s where the answer is. The one percent of the territory that we haven’t studied yet.”

      “Okay,” said Vale halfheartedly, flicking through a list of digital folders, “what’s not in here?” He stopped, watching as his simple touch created a cascade of innumerable folders flying past him on the screen. “How are we even supposed to know where to start?”

      “We start by thinking about the people, not the numbers,” said Kira. “This isn’t just data, it’s Morgan’s data, collected by her based on her own suppositions. And she wasn’t looking for a natural, random phenomenon, she was looking for something created by another person—by Armin Dhurvasula. He had a plan for everything, you said he did, so all we have to do is figure out what it was.”

      “If your plan relies on us reading the mind of a dead mad scientist who might have come up with a plan to save the world, maybe, I’m going to suggest that we’d be better off looking for another plan.”

      “It’s not mind reading,” said Kira, “just … think about it. What were the resources Armin had to work with?”

      “The entire industry of genetic engineering.”

      “Divided into a specific subset of tools,” said Kira. “Each of you in the Trust had a specific job, right? What was his?”

      Vale narrowed his eyes, as if suddenly caught by the viability of Kira’s line of thought. “He did the pheromones—the link system.”

      Kira grimaced, pulling up the folders about Morgan’s pheromonal research. It was one of the biggest subsections in the databank. “Morgan has researched every aspect of the pheromones she could think of,” she said, shaking her head as she flicked through the list of subjects: Communication; Tactics; Vulnerabilities. Dozens of folders, each with dozens of subfolders, sitting on top of a mountain of notes and experiments and images and videos. “There’s no way she missed something in all of this.”

      “She missed the cure for RM,” said Vale.

      Kira almost laughed. “Yeah, okay, I’ll give you that one. That still doesn’t make this any easier to figure out.”

      “So now we need to think like McKenna Morgan,” said Vale. “Why did she miss the cure under all this data?”

      “Because she wasn’t looking for it,” said Kira. “She was trying to solve Partial expiration, not the human RM susceptibility, so she never thought to look in the other species.”

      “So maybe we should be looking in the other species, too.” Vale put his hands over his mouth, breathing through his fingers—a nervous tic Kira had noticed several times over the last few weeks of research. He stared at the data. “Let’s approach it from this angle: Morgan missed the connection because she didn’t expect Armin to make one species the cure for the other. But this can’t be as simple as reversing that same situation, because that’s impossible—he could hide the cure for humans inside the Partials because he built the Partials. He built the pheromone system that carries the human cure. But he obviously didn’t build the human genome, and unless he ran some kind of massive gene mod program we don’t know about—”

      “Holy shit,” said Kira.

      “I told you to keep a civil tongue,” said Vale.

      “He did run one,” said Kira. Her body was practically shaking with excitement as the revelation rushed over her. “A massive program, worldwide, that reached out to every human and altered them, right under our noses—he seeded them with active biological agents, each carrying his own, custom-built DNA. If he wanted to hide the Partial cure inside humans, he had a perfect opportunity to do so.”

      Vale stared at her, his face twisted in confusion, until suddenly his jaw dropped open and his eyes went wide. He struggled to speak, but he was completely dumbfounded. “Holy shit.”

      “No kidding.”

      “RM,” said Vale, turning back to the wall screen and clutching his head, as if expecting his brain to burst right out of his skull. “Every human being in the world is a carrier for RM. He used the world’s most contagious virus to plant the cure in the last place anyone would ever look.”

      Kira nodded. “Maybe.