Partials series 1-3 (Partials; Fragments; Ruins). Dan Wells

to the row of houses, and Kira recognized her street.

      “Yeah, the blue one’s mine.”

      Brown nodded. “Is Romeo getting off with you?”

      “I would,” said Marcus, “but Nandita wouldn’t let me in anyway. I’m just two streets over, if you can do it.”

      “Not a problem.” The young soldier slowed the wagon and pulled the horse to a stop. Kira gave Marcus a final peck on the cheek and hopped off.

      “There’s Nandita,” said Marcus, straightening up and pointing. Kira turned and saw her working busily in her garden. Marcus lowered his voice. “See if she’s got some herbs for the chicken.”

      “Rosemary, I assume,” said Kira, and Marcus nodded with a grin. “Anything else?”

      “Whatever she can spare,” said Marcus. “Everything in your garden is awesome.”

      “You got it,” said Kira. “Thanks, Brown.”

      The soldier smiled. “Call me Shaylon.”

      “Easy, tiger,” said Marcus. “She’s spoken for.”

      The wagon pulled away, and Kira shouldered her pack and walked toward her house. Kira shared her home with several other girls and their “nanny,” Nandita, though after eleven years she seemed more like a grandmother than anything else. Between the Partial War and RM, no family had survived intact: Every surviving wife became a widow; every child an orphan. Those few humans who’d been immune to the virus had banded together for protection, gathering here on Long Island because it was a developed, defensible position with good access to fish and arable land. The children had been divided among the adults, and Nandita had happily laid claim to four of them: Kira, Madison, Ariel, and Isolde. Ariel had moved nearly three years ago, on her sixteenth birthday, and Madison had moved in with Haru when they got married. Ariel had hardly spoken to any of them again, but Kira loved them all like sisters.

      Nandita was working in the garden, and Kira could smell the exotic mix of aromatic herbs: rosemary, nutmeg, anise, cilantro, basil, marjoram. . . . Kira helped in the garden every summer, and she still couldn’t keep track.

      “Does Marcus want rosemary on the chicken this Friday?” asked Nandita. The old woman straightened up from the garden, brushing soil from her hands. She spoke quickly, almost impassively, but Kira could tell from her eyes that she had been worried sick the entire time Kira had been gone.

      Kira smiled.

      “Did you hear him?”

      “I didn’t need to hear him,” said Nandita. “That boy has a one-track mind.” She grunted and stood up, picking up a basket of fresh leaves and sprigs and berries. Even while gardening, she was wearing a sari. “The market was good today. Help me inside.”

      Kira shouldered her pack and her medkit, following the old woman up the porch steps and in through the doors; Xochi’s music was blaring upstairs, and Kira smiled. She’d have to go talk to her when she was done helping Nandita.

      Nandita loved all her girls, but she’d always had a soft spot for Kira. Maybe because she was the youngest, or maybe because she was so precocious; Kira remembered helping Nandita in the market as a child, calling out fearlessly to passing adults and ordering them sternly to buy a sprig of mint. Nandita called her the Little Explosion.

      Sometimes Kira felt guilty that she had so many memories of Nandita, and none of her real mother. Her father she knew, but her mother . . . It was okay. She had Nandita.

      “Did anything exciting happen while I was gone?”

      “My Little Explosion almost died in a big one,” said Nandita, pushing the door open. The previous owners—the Martels, according to the papers and photos and scrapbooks they had found inside—had died with the doors locked, and the early survivors had been forced to break them open to get inside and clean up the bodies. Nandita had replaced the door four times over the years, as one or the other of the girls had forgotten their keys after a long night out. Replacing the door, she said, was preferable to leaving it unlocked. It wasn’t like the island was short on unused doors. Kira dropped her pack inside and followed Nandita into the kitchen.

      “You have grown up well,” said Nandita, turning in the kitchen doorway and regarding Kira with a smile. “You will make a good wife.”

      “Um, yay?”

      The woman walked to the counter and set down the basket, opening the cupboards to look for bowls. “You do not want to be a wife? You are not going to marry Marcus?”

      Kira opened a cupboard and handed Nandita a ceramic bowl. “I . . . haven’t really thought about it.”

      Nandita stopped moving, turned, and stared at Kira. Kira squirmed uncomfortably, waiting for her to look away, then finally sighed and threw up her hands. “Okay, so I’ve thought about it, but I haven’t decided anything. I don’t know what I want.”

      “You want to be happy,” said Nandita, reaching past Kira to the open cupboard and pulling out the entire stack of dishes. “That’s what everybody wants. You just don’t know what will make you happy.”

      Kira grimaced. “Is that weird?”

      Nandita shook her head kindly. “Happiness is the most natural thing in the world when you have it, and the slowest, strangest, most impossible thing when you don’t.” She set out the dishes and started sorting through the herbs, separating them into groups and tearing off leaves and branches for the bowls. The scent of crushed mint filled the kitchen. “It’s like learning a foreign language: You can think about the words all you want, but you’ll never be able to speak it until you suck up your courage and say them out loud.”

      “What if you say them and they’re wrong?”

      “Then you’ve probably just asked the waiter for a bowl of library elephants,” said Nandita, “or whatever the metaphorical equivalent of that would be. I can’t carry these analogies very far, I get mixed up.”

      “Too bad,” said Kira, picking up a handful of rosemary and breaking off pale green twigs for the bowl. “I was hoping you’d just keep going: happiness, love, the whole . . . purpose of life, I guess.”

      “Whose life?”

      “What do you mean?”

      “Each life has a different purpose, and some people can find their purpose more easily than others. The key,” she said, turning to Kira and gesturing firmly with a sprig of cilantro, “the most important thing you can ever know, is that whatever your purpose is, that’s not your only choice.”

      “Huh?”

      “No matter why you’re here, no matter why any of us are here, you’re never tied down to fate. You’re never locked in. You make your own choices, Kira, and you can’t let anyone ever take that away from you.”

      “Okay,” said Kira. “That’s not really where I was expecting this conversation to go.”

      “That’s because I make my own choices, too,” said Nandita, picking up her basket. She still had nearly half the herbs unsorted. “I’m taking these to the neighbors; Armand is sick. You go and get cleaned up—I want my house to smell like basil, not teenage armpits.”

      “Done,” said Kira, and ran upstairs. The music was louder up here, the usual assortment of screeching, booming, yelling music that Xochi always chose when she was alone. Kira smiled, then smelled herself, grimaced, and went straight to the shower.

      On the very small list of benefits to the end of the world, at or very near the top, was clothes. Long Island had once held nearly eight million people, with the shopping malls and department stores and fashion meccas necessary to clothe them all. The Break had reduced that population to a tiny fraction, and obliterated the economic system in the process, leaving all those clothes pretty much free for the taking. It was horrible, Kira knew, and the survivors lived their lives in a brutal