Ruins. Dan Wells

of the aging sequence,” said Vale, pointing to a segment of a DNA strand glowing faintly on the screen. He highlighted a series of amino acids with his fingers, and it glowed a different color. “A normal Partial grows to physical maturity in about ten months, all inside of a big glass tube; we called them vats, but they really looked more like those clear capsules you’d use at an express diner.”

      Kira shook her head. “I have no idea what that means.”

      “Sorry. How about a … skinny glass elevator?”

      “I was five years old at the Break,” said Kira. “I grew up after the world already ended. You’re going to have to explain this without old-world metaphors.”

      “Okay,” said Vale, pressing his fingers to his lips as he thought. “Okay. Imagine a clear cylinder, about seven feet long and two feet in diameter, with a metal cap on each end full of tubes and hoses and such. We had a few of them in the ParaGen building in the Preserve, I should have shown you; the rest were all at the growth and training facilities in Montana and Wyoming, but those were pretty heavily bombed during the Partial War. Anyway: The techs would create the zygotes in a lab and plant them in a nutritive gel Dr. Morgan invented, and by the time they were done growing, they more or less filled the tube; them and all the liquid we pumped in with them. I designed the entire life cycle,” he said, pointing back at the glowing DNA strand on his screen. “They required a remarkable amount of energy to grow at such a rate, most of which they drew from Morgan’s gel, though we had to keep them warm as well—the infant Partials were designed to be so energy-efficient that they lost virtually none of their energy as heat, which helped them grow quickly but kept them unnaturally cold. Once the accelerated aging was finished, the heightened metabolism slowed down, and they live relatively normal lives, but when the twenty years are up, the age accelerator kicks into overdrive—it looks like they’re decomposing, but really they’re aging a hundred years in a matter of weeks.”

      “And freezing to death at the same time,” said Kira.

      “Well, yes,” said Vale. “The energy has to come from somewhere.” He sighed. “I know you don’t approve, and I assure you that I don’t either. I didn’t like it then and I don’t like it now. But there was no other way.”

      “You could have refused.”

      “To create the Partials? ParaGen stood to make trillions of dollars—if we hadn’t helped them, they would have found someone else. This way we could control the process.”

      “You could have refused to set an expiration date.”

      “It was supposed to be a temporary measure to buy us time: The government wanted a kill switch, the Failsafe I thought had been implanted in you, and if we’d gone with that plan, the Partials would all be dead by now, and the humans would have no hope at all. This way we had twenty years to find another solution, but the end of the world precluded that.”

      The Failsafe. Kira had crossed the continent looking for information on the Failsafe, only to discover that it was a twisted mess: The government had demanded a plague that could kill Partials if they ever got out of hand, and the Trust had built two versions. The first—the plague the government wanted, the one that would only affect Partials—was never implemented, intended solely as a decoy to make ParaGen think the Trust was following orders. The second, which would only target humans, was what eventually came to be known as RM, though for reasons even the Trust didn’t understand, it had proven to be far more deadly than planned. They had tried to make the humans’ well-being dependent on the Partials, giving them a disease only the Partials could cure. They’d thought it was the only way to keep the Partials safe from genocide. Instead, they’d committed genocide themselves.

      Kira watched Vale in silence as he pored over the DNA images, reading them the way an archaeologist would read an ancient language—organic hieroglyphics that he studied with a low, intense mutter. After a moment Kira spoke again.

      “What was your plan for those twenty years?”

      “Excuse me?”

      “You said you had twenty years to deal with the expiration date before it kicked in, and that you were going to try to deal with it before it became an issue. What was your plan?”

      “It was Armin’s plan,” he said softly, still staring intently at the DNA. “We all had our jobs, and we worked in secret. That’s why Morgan didn’t know about the expiration date.”

      At the mention of his name, Kira was lost in another dark reverie. It was Armin who had formed the Trust, he who had suggested the rash plan to save their million Partial “children” from death. If he had a plan to overcome expiration, what was it? Was he just relying on the same genetic equipment Morgan was? Before the Break, with access to the full resources of ParaGen, gene-modding a million people might have been a feasible plan, diving into their DNA and carving out the expiration code like a patch of rot in an apple. What Armin would have done, she could only guess. She’d lived with the man for five years, give or take—she had no idea how long she’d gestated in a growth vat before popping out to be taken care of. Armin had raised her as his own, so fully she’d never even suspected she wasn’t human, that she wasn’t really his daughter. She didn’t even know what her purpose was. Would she ever meet him? Would she ever get the chance to ask him?

      Did knowing the truth about who he was, and what she was, make him less of a father? She remembered him with love—was that relationship any less meaningful now? She hadn’t decided yet. She wasn’t sure if she could. You didn’t need a biological connection to be a family; all of the family relationships post-Break were ones of adoption, and the love they felt was real. But none of those adoptive parents had lied to their children about the fundamental aspects of those children’s existence and species. None of those adoptive parents had synthetically engineered their children and grown them in a clear glass cylinder.

      None of those adoptive parents had ended the world.

       Well, except Nandita. I have all the luck with parents.

      “Do you know where Armin is?” she asked softly.

      “You asked about him before,” said Vale, pausing to turn and look at her. “What’s your interest in him?”

      Kira wasn’t sure she wanted to share that part of her life with Vale or Morgan—at least not yet. “He’s the only one we can’t account for.”

      “We don’t know much about Jerry Ryssdal, either.”

      “But Jerry Ryssdal wasn’t the one who created the Trust.”

      Vale shook his head helplessly. “Well, given the circumstances, I would assume Armin is dead.”

      Kira swallowed, trying not to let her feelings show, even as she was unsure of what those feelings were. “But the Trust are all immune to RM. You gene-modded yourselves for protection.”

      “There are plenty of ways to die that aren’t related to RM,” said Vale. “When things fell apart … he could have died in a looting scuffle, during a Partial bombing—”

      “I thought the Partials didn’t attack civilians.”

      “ParaGen was hardly a civilian target in that particular war,” said Vale. “Many of our facilities were attacked, and he may have been in or near one at the wrong time.”

      “But you survived.”

      “Why are you interrogating me?”

      Kira took a deep breath, shaking her head tiredly. “You’re trying to work, and I’m … preoccupied. I’m sorry. You’re in here practically twenty hours a day trying to cure this thing, and I should be helping you, not—”

      Now it was Vale’s turn to shake his head, refusing to meet Kira’s eyes. “You’re helping more than anyone.” There was more anger in his voice than Kira had expected. “You’re a sixteen-year-old girl and I’m letting Morgan treat you like a cell culture.”

      “I volunteered.”