shiiki
in
shiikifics
FIC: Five Days, Chapter 2
Title: Five Days
Author: shiiki
Rating: PG-13
Characters/Pairings: Samm, Kira Walker, various others, Gen
Fandom: Partials
Summary: Alone in enemy territory with only five days to live, Samm makes an unexpected ally and reaches some stunning conclusions about the fate of their two species. Alternate PoV of Part II of Partials.
In this chapter
Chapter Title: Study
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Samm, Kira Walker, Duna Mkele, Dr Skousen
Word Count: 6,071
Chapter Summary: The first day of study begins, and Samm tries to understand the circumstances of his capture ... and the enigmatic girl who is at the centre of it all.
Day 1
The humans rolled Samm’s metal prison down long, dark hallways, finally coming to a stop in a room that smelled of rot and mildew. The light was dim, but Samm’s eyesight adjusted quickly. His throbbing headache had started to fade away, but the return of clarity was no boon, as his mind quickly envisioned for him the human’s next step.
They were going to interrogate him.
Fear flared through him. He’d been interrogated once before, when he’d first arrived at D Company, but that hardly counted, because they’d linked his friendly intentions easily enough and accepted him into the community. That wasn’t about to happen now.
A bright beam shone straight into his eyes, momentarily blinding him. When his pupils re-adjusted to the intensity, he found himself staring at a stocky black man who stood, arms crossed, surveying Samm.
Samm held his breath, not wanting to communicate his fear.
‘What was your purpose in Manhattan, Partial?’ barked the man. When Samm didn’t answer, he stepped closer, leaning aggressively towards Samm. ‘You see these soldiers, Partial? The Senate may have voted to prolong your execution, but your five days’ grace will be a long, torturous one if you don’t comply.’
Samm wasn’t actually certain if the answers to these questions were actually military secrets, but he was reluctant to give anything to the humans. At best, it would only incense them enough to kill him sooner. At worse … There was a fragile stalemate between their species now. Much as he felt like killing them all in this moment, the Partials couldn’t afford to-not until they extracted the secret behind expiration from the humans.
He registered the movement a split second before the blow caught him in the side of his head. It made him expel his breath and all his data-PAIN FEAR RAGE-along with the bare bones of his thoughts-MISSION SECRET HOLD BACK.
Another furious blow, along with the question, ‘What was your mission?’
Alarmed by the references that had slipped out on the link, Samm tried again to pull back his data, though he knew it would be futile. Even under ideal circumstances, his capacity for holding his breath was at best ten minutes. Against the barrage that rained down upon him now, Samm couldn’t help gasping in pain. His body strained against the chains with each blow, instinctively searching for an escape.
PAIN-CAN’T DEFEND-FAILURE-
A pause, punctuated by another question: ‘What are the Partials planning?’
He tried to focus on the physical pain-emotional data that wouldn’t convey any intelligent information-but his mind worked against him, wanting escape from the aversive experience. The information that did leak out in jumbled pieces-SECRET DYING HUMANS-seemed to infuriate the humans, either from the content or their disbelief. Again and again, they repeated their questions in different variations, accompanied by blows to his head and lashes to his body. It seemed to reach a level where they no longer expected answers, where the violence exacted on him seemed to sate something more than a simple need for answers. Samm’s ears rang and his eyes watered from the relentless attack. He was breathing hard now, and he registered dimly that he still wasn’t reading any data.
This fragment of thought snagged in his mind, a piece of a puzzle that struggled to fit with other aspects of the whole situation. But Samm’s thoughts danced away on waves of pain when he tried to focus them.
At last, it ceased. Samm’s every muscle ached from the pummelling. His face felt puffy. His cheeks were wet. A metallic tang hung distastefully in his mouth. Through slitted eyes, he noticed a newcomer to the room, a white-haired man he recognised from the earlier hearing.
‘Doctor,’ said the black man in acknowledgement.
‘Is it sedated?’
‘No-we wanted it lucid for the interrogation. Not that it’s done any good. Not a peep out of it.’ The discrepancy of this comment with the data he had linked under torture confused Samm. Something almost clicked into place in his mind, a connection just beyond his reach.
The black man glanced darkly at Samm. ‘May you and Walker have better luck. I still can’t comprehend why you think this arrangement is worth the compromise in security.’
The doctor didn’t reply. He came forward and stared at Samm for a long moment, taking in his battered state.
Nothing on the link, thought Samm. Still nothing. Where is their data? Are they even on the link?
It came to him then, a forgotten nugget from his tactical training before the Isolation War. Partials linked to give them an advantage over the soldiers they faced. Over the human soldiers.
Humans simply didn’t link.
Which meant that all of his linked emotions, all of his thoughts … they weren’t receiving them at all. They hadn’t beaten him because of their fury at his answers or repeated their questions because they thought he was lying. He hadn’t answered any of their questions at all!
‘I’ll need to sedate it,’ said the doctor finally. ‘You’ll need to clean and weigh it before we move it to the old quarantine room. I’ve had the custodians preparing it, and Weist is having his people working on reinforcements.’
He produced a syringe and jabbed it expertly into the crook of Samm’s arm. The sedatives flowed into Samm’s bloodstream, taking quick effect. Before Samm could elaborate on his mental realisation, consciousness descended like a fog. The last thing he was aware of was the rusty scent of his own blood.
The stench of blood and bodily fluids hung in the air.
The ward was a cesspool of death. It was the last one remaining in the hospital with live patients, although Samm knew it was only a matter of time before this one, too, went silent.
He wasn’t sure why he had returned. The rest of his regiment had given up days ago, when it became clear that nothing they did was helping-not even their efforts to make the dying humans more comfortable.
RM ate the humans alive, inflaming their immune systems until they boiled in their own fevers. Within three days of infection, they were dead.
The other Partials had retreated to base camp in the heart of the city, unable to bear the helplessness and guilt that only intensified when they were all linking their response to the horror. By all accounts, Atlanta had been healthy before they’d taken it. Days after their invasion, the human resistance had crumbled as RM swept the city, and now, a week later, it was a ghost town. The last of its human population lay in this hospital ward, burning themselves away.
The plague was so perfectly timed, so coincidental that even knowing that they had not released a biological weapon, the whole regiment couldn’t shake the sense that they were nevertheless culpable.
A wail caught Samm’s attention. In the corner of the room, a woman lay dead. The baby cradled in her stiff arms was crying lustily however, a piteous scream of agony that cut straight to Samm’s heart. Its face was red with both effort and disease.
Samm wondered again why he’d come. This was almost too much to bear. Still he stayed, a silent witness to the final passing of the last humans in Atlanta, until the cries subsided and the last breaths expired, leaving a hollow, empty quiet.
*
Samm awoke in the quiet, the remnants of sorrow from his dream floating in his senses. For the first time since his capture, his mind felt sharp and clear. The sedatives they’d pumped into him must finally have worn off.
He was still strapped down, this time to what appeared to be an operating table. The humans had stripped him to his underwear; he lay in this undignified position, facing the ceiling. Cameras winked at him from the corners of the room. Clearly he was being watched, even if no guards had been left with him. He tested the restraints: strong, leaving him no more than a few inches of movement against them.
Somebody had left food next to his cheek. It was an awkward angle, but his mouth could just manage to reach it if he craned his head. Samm bit into the stale bread, not bothering to worry if it was safe. The humans had already plenty of other opportunities to kill him. The chances that they’d resort to poison were minute.
Besides, he was hungry. His last meal had been before the mission … how long ago now?
The faint light filtering through the window on the far side of the room told him it was early morning, but he didn’t know how many days it had been since the ambush in Manhattan. He guessed it was the first of his five remaining days. If the humans had meant to sedate him throughout their study, they would have simply killed him at the end of it and not left him to awaken to food.
Samm polished off the bread and then took in the rest of his surroundings. Tables lined the walls, stacked with equipment: computers, screens, others he couldn’t name but appeared to be medical. The room was more brightly lit than any he’d seen here so far, but it still didn’t come close to the lighting they had in Greenwich.
This is it, then, he thought. Their ‘lab’. He felt like an insect, mounted on a drawing board ripe for study. A shiver came over him that had nothing to do with the cold metal beneath his bare skin.
There was a soft hum, followed by a whoosh of air, and the door clicked open. Samm recognised the dark-skinned girl who entered slowly: she’d been at the hearing. The one who had fought so hard to study him.
The one who had intended to cut off his hand.
The memory of it, tinged with linked fear and anger, made his heart pound. Was she about to do it now? What else had she said? He wished now that he had paid better attention, to give himself an idea of what was in store for him now. He probably would have, if they hadn’t drugged him up to high heaven.
He pulled forth bits and pieces-a cavalier attitude towards his person, an obsession with RM, an insistence that he be studied. She’d been the one pushing hardest to keep him alive for that purpose. Well, she’d got her way: she was here, now.
And yet, surprisingly, she didn’t start. She walked first to one of the tables. Samm could hear her moving things around on it. She turned, and still her attention was drawn to the room around them. Her gaze travelled towards the cameras in the corners, her breath came out in a loud puff, then she approached his table at last, only to pass right by him. He watched her stop at the window and stare out of it.
None of it made any sense. She was here to study him, so why didn’t she … study? Why move around the room so randomly, making all these awkward actions: rubbing her hands together, touching her hair, her face, her ears … the continuous action reminded him a little of Heron, whose manner was unlike any other Partial. Were they naturally like the spy models, theses humans? Or more likely, it was the spy models that more closely resembled the humans. Heron was the only espionage rank Partial he knew, and he’d been out of contact with humans for so long that he couldn’t be sure.
At last, the girl came closer to look at him. Her eyes were the exact same colour as his, except their almond shape, nestled in a soft, winsome face, gave them a much more attractive quality. Her face changed as she examined him: contours and shades shifting so subtly he wouldn’t have detected it if he hadn’t been this close. He couldn’t tell what it meant, if it even meant anything. Samm breathed in deeply before recalling sharply that it was useless. Humans had no link, no data he could read to anticipate their next move. Nothing but frustrating, indecipherable actions.
And yet, he imagined he sensed something there, a whiff of almost-connection. Samm blinked and it disappeared, a trick of his mind. He’d been bereft of link data for at least a day now. His senses, hollow from the lack, must be over-actively searching for any possible connection.
The movement of a hand caught his eye; the girl was reaching towards his face. As she did so, her teeth flashed and caught her bottom lip between them, an action that sent a fresh wave of fear flooding through him. Was it a predatory sign? He braced himself, but her hand stopped en route and fell back to her side.
‘I take it they beat you,’ she said.
It was a cold, cavalier statement, reducing his long night of torture to a stated fact. She knew how he’d spent his night, and under her hands, his day was likely about to get worse. And this teasing, her interminable slowness at carrying out her purpose, was unnerving. She reached out again, and with his nerves keyed to the highest pitch, Samm couldn’t stay still. He jerked away reflexively to avoid her touch, but his restraints held tight.
Surprisingly, she leapt back. Her hands flew to a holster at her side, but it was a few seconds before they retrieved the gun. A lesser soldier would have drawn it in a split second. Was she incompetent with firearms?
‘I was part of the group that captured you.’ So not untrained, clearly, he thought. Unless she was lying. ‘I’m not trying to threaten you, I’m just telling you how serious I am. We’ve got five days together, and if you want to spend them fighting, I’m more than ready.’
He studied her, trying to work out what she meant. Her stance was aggressive; her words contradictory. She didn’t wish to threaten, but she’d drawn a weapon on a bound prisoner. She implied that he’d fought her, which was ludicrous. He was strapped down and at her mercy. Even without the gun, she had all the power.
The girl stepped back again, then lowered and stowed her gun. ‘In case you couldn’t tell, everyone here is pretty much terrified of you. We don’t know what you can do or how you work. For all we know, you’re a biological weapon on legs.’
She was trying to communicate not just facts, he realised, but information that was usually passed along the link. Without it, everything had to be verbal. It was nevertheless an annoying method of interaction, a deluge of words devoid of the typical emotion that accompanied them.
Another hand gesture redirected his attention back to the girl. This time, it was a half wave in his direction, following by a loud release of breath before she continued speaking.
‘Fine then, if you don’t want to talk, that’s fine. I don’t think I would be in your situation either, frankly, but then again, I don’t know if I could help myself. Humans are very social creatures …’
It seemed like she would continue unless he responded-which would have to be verbally, too, since she couldn’t receive his link. Though the first thing that came to mind now was irritation at the incessant flow of chatter. Samm opened his mouth and rasped, ‘You talk too much.’ The air felt like fire pushing through his lungs; he was in worse shape than he thought.
The girl stopped midsentence, her mouth gaping open at him. There was silence for half a minute, then she started up again.
‘Point taken.’ Her voice had a different timbre to it suddenly, a lighter quality. ‘But first, let me explain …’
He closed his eyes wearily as her words turned ominously towards medical terminology. It must mean that she was warming up to begin at last.
‘Let me at least warn you,’ she said, ‘this finger poker is going to hurt a bit-it’s nothing horrible, just a spring-loaded pin about two millimetres long. Are you going to let me use your finger, or are we going to fight again?’
His finger? Surely that couldn’t be what she wanted. He opened her eyes to see that she wasn’t lying: the finger poker was exactly as she had described, grasped firmly and innocently in her hand. He wasn’t sure what she’d meant by a fight, and the fact that she was practically asking him, and politely, as though he had a right to refuse, was perplexing in itself. It was a level of decency he had not been expecting, not after everything … He wasn’t even sure he wanted it, from this human he hated, who was partly responsible for the death of his unit and his capture, who had spoken so cavalierly before about chopping his hand off.
But he stretched his hand open to give her access to his finger.
‘Thank you,’ she said, surprising him yet again. There was something soothing to the sensation that accompanied it. A balm over the wounds from her callous words the previous day. You matter, her thanks said. You deserve respect. His breath caught painfully in his throat as the unexpected emotion threatened to undo him.
True to her word, the pinprick hurt, but almost imperceptibly. It was embarrassing that he even flinched at such a tiny jab. She pressed a tiny vial to the wound and they watched his blood trickle slowly into the tube. It managed to fill half of it before his platelets took over, knitting the prick site closed.
‘Your blood pressure must be low,’ the girl commented as she removed the vial. ‘Usually I can fill two vials with one finger. Unless …’ She looked from tube to finger, evidently just making the connection. She voiced her amazement as she studied the tube more closely, and then fell silent, looking at him and back to his blood again. It fit with what she’d said before-she really didn’t know much, if anything, about Partial physiology at all. Why she didn’t was the mystery, as it seemed unlikely that she would have embarked on this study without collating existing information from the other humans. Though she’d implied that humans as a whole didn’t actually know much about them any more.
Humans as a whole meaning the tiny fraction of the once-burgeoning population. It occurred to Samm then that their human creators could well have died without passing on their knowledge. With that came the chilling thought: Is our mission futile, then? If the humans don’t have the answers …
There was an ironic caveat to that conclusion. There was another way to get answers. A direct flip of his current situation, with humans on the receiving end. A part of him wondered, with no small amount of horror, if that had been in the D Company leaders’ plans all along.
The girl was studying him intensely again, some deep thought clearly running through her head, but without the link, Samm couldn’t even being to fathom what it was. She’d just expressed astonishment at how quickly he’d healed over. That she was surprised by how quickly he healed, he was certain. Was she planning to follow up on this discovery? Would she hurt him now, given an opportunity to test his defences? It was the logical move to perform on a test subject, but he felt his stomach twist at the thought. If she were to do exactly what he’d imagined she meant to now, after she’d spoken to him as an equal, it was going to hurt ten times as much as if she’d simply walked in at the beginning and stabbed him without a word.
‘I’m not going to torture you,’ she said finally, ‘but I do have to get another blood sample.’ She worked on another tube as she continued to explain the intricacies of his blood-she knew something about that at least-and drew out the finger poker again. ‘Get ready for another poke.’
Knowing what to expect this time, he could remain still as she drew the sample. Once she removed it, she expertly taped a cotton ball to his finger-a useless move, but one that mollified Samm. She’d treated him like a human, even having just witnessed his inhuman healing capabilities. Her eyes met his again, then looked away quickly, but he sensed it was different from the previous times she had averted her gaze. There was some kind of emotion involved, but he could only guess at it. Regret? Embarrassment?
She retreated with her vials of his blood, without a comment this time, and proceeded to the tables. The computers and screens were too far away and at too awkward an angle for Samm to see what she was up to there - not that he would have understood the analysis - so he stared up at the ceiling as she worked, the beeps and chirps of the equipment and the faint murmurs of her voice as she muttered to herself, forming a backdrop to his thoughts.
She was studying RM, he recalled, as he caught some of her faint exclamations and connected it with his vague memories from the trial. The humans were trying to understand it, to find a cure. They-no, she-had been shouting about saving their children, not that any of the others had disputed it.
The answer swooped down upon him in a staggering revelation: RM killed all the human babies. Every child in the past eleven years had died.
It disconfirmed eleven years of Partial intelligence reports about the Long Island human population. None of their scouts had ever reported any anomalies-the humans were settling down, scavenging supplies, organising military defence, growing food; their numbers were small but varied, the disease having left a sizeable gene pool intact. Now that he thought about it, there had never been any mention of human children about, though that wasn’t something any of them would have flagged as extraordinary-the concept of children was alien to Partials. Even before the revolution, Samm’s exposure to them had been minimal. An image from his dream, with the dying infant, resurfaced. Yes, humans reproduced and their young grew. How could he have forgotten?
It appeared now that RM immunity was not hereditary, that the humans had all along been facing an expiration date of their own, though in their case it was more species- rather than individual-focused. Of course, the individual problem of expiration is equivalent to a species-wide one. We can’t make any new Partials. Especially not if it’s true that the humans who made us are really dead. All the same, it was an issue that gave the dynamics of the whole situation a greater complexity than he could wrap his head around.
‘You made pretty damn sure we couldn’t get away from this thing, didn’t you?’ Samm turned to see the girl glaring at him. Her words had been forceful, delivered at a higher amplitude. It reflected … anger?
More pieces of the puzzle fell into place. It was perhaps no wonder eleven years hadn’t tempered the humans’ animosity towards Partials-they believed the disease had come from Partials, and the disease was killing them yet.
‘You can’t reproduce,’ he said, verbalising his theory. ‘That’s why you’re trying to cure RM. We don’t have children, so their absence didn’t seem odd at first, but you don’t have any, do you? You’re trying to cure RM because your children don’t survive it.’
She didn’t answer immediately. Her face went through a dizzying array of changes again. When she finally spoke, her words were cutting.
‘You, Partial. What do you know about RM?’
He recoiled at the contemptuous way she addressed him, so different from the previous courtesy she had afforded him. Samm felt a mixture of petulance and caution. She’d had him for at least an hour and it was the first time she’d thought to ask directly for his input. The condescension chafed at him, while her reversion to hostility gave him pause. If he admitted what he did know-that years of Partial study had turned up no profitable line of inquiry-would she in accept this and concede failure? He suspected she wouldn’t.
But there were others listening in, too, Samm remembered suddenly. They were more likely to take Samm’s answer as an indication that the study was useless and he, the Partial, should be killed immediately.
No, I need more time to figure this out. There were things he had to work out, which hinted at the solution he’d set out to find.
‘Oh, come on, are we going to go through this again?’ The girl reverted back to a conversational sentence structure, dropping her imperative tone so quickly it could give him whiplash. ‘Can’t you at least say something?’
‘Well,’ Samm considered his words carefully. ‘Human,’ he addressed her directly. ‘You’re going to kill me in five days. I don’t see much of an incentive to say anything.’
She responded with more drama than he had expected: flinging herself across the room into a chair, wiping her hands across her face, moving about … all accompanied by rapid facial movements. Samm felt certain he had discomfited her, and it gave him some small satisfaction, however petty. At last, she settled back at her table with the computers and screens and the room returned to its previous electronic hum.
With the bigger picture now in view, Samm started to feel his hatred ebb away on waves of empathy. The similarity of their situations-Partials and humans-presented itself clearly. Both species faced impending extinction and the accompanying desperation to cure it. Put in that light, even his capture, torture and examination was understandable.
He wasn’t blind to the hypocrisy of his feelings in the matter. For all his resentment at the way the humans regarded him, Samm couldn’t deny that the Partials’ motives with respect to the humans were all that different.
If we didn’t manage to get answers from a human under questioning, we’d resort to studying them like this, too.
And he had to admit, despite her talk of mutilation at the hearing, the girl hadn’t attempted anything of the sort. She’d even treated him with consideration. Humanely. He watched her for a moment, now engrossed in one of the screens on the table. She was young, no more than seventeen. It struck him that she must possess an enormous amount of courage. She’d ventured into no-man’s land without the backing of her leaders, with the express intent of capturing a highly dangerous enemy, who in all likelihood would kill her first. With this in mind, he allowed that her manner during the trial might have been a show of bravado.
He’d believed, too, that the girl had turned to secure experimentation as a first line of inquiry because she didn’t see him as an equal being, capable of reasonable exchange. This new perspective suggested fear as a motivation: a view of him as a dangerous enemy who hated them in return.
This fit with the ferocity of his interrogators, how they had attacked him as though seeking vengeance. When the Partials had revolted, their resentment had been fuelled by several years of suffering. The humans had faced their extinction via RM for eleven years, and if they believed that the Partials had been responsible for the plague …
But we didn’t create it. There had been no reason to, not when they had overthrown most of the government within months, not when it was all practically under their control. We were winning the war.
‘What?’ The girl, roused from her work, turned to him, and he realised he must have spoken aloud. ‘Why the hell are you bringing that up?’
‘Because you think we created the virus.’ This one mistaken belief explained more than just the human’s on-going hatred of Partials, he realised. It underscored their conviction that he held the answers they were desperate for. ‘That’s why you’re studying me as part of your mission to cure it. You think we engineered it; we didn’t.’
‘Obviously I expect you to lie to me, but I was hoping you’d be a little more creative.’
He supposed it wouldn’t be that easy to convince her. Unlike them, the humans weren’t motivated to relieve the Partials of their culpability. ‘It’s the truth.’
Her voice rose in amplitude again, a change he decided must be associated with anger. ‘It is not true!’ Her arms swung up away from her sides. ‘You attacked us, you killed us, and you released that virus to finish the job.’
She needs to believe we did, he realised. Probably because … if she accepted his words as truth, she would realise the answers she was searching for, that the risks she had taken were all in vain.
‘We were winning the war,’ Samm repeated, wondering if the logic would be enough to convince her when she was so invested in believing he held the answers. He laid out the military reasoning for her: the dominance of their rebellion, the pure waste of losing the humans who had created and maintained their whole society.
‘Was that your plan?’ she interrupted. ‘To use us as slaves? As labour to maintain your infrastructure?’
Irritation surged through his link. ‘You mean the same thing you had done to us?’
He was beginning to place her reactions better. This time, when she moved away stiffly and threw something into the corner of the room, he identified her petulance without difficulty.
‘We didn’t want to enslave you,’ he told her. The rebellion had never been about turning the tables on the humans, but freeing themselves from oppression. But maybe she wasn’t in any state to accept that yet. He tried a different tack. ‘Even if we did, we didn’t want or need to kill you to do it. There was no purpose, tactical or political or otherwise, in releasing a killer virus.’
‘You expect me to believe that a perfect supervirus, which destroyed humans and left you unscathed, was coincidentally released in the middle of your attack-and that you had nothing at all to do with it?’
She’d hit him back with the one fact that had haunted the Partials for years. The timing and the effects of RM, so perfectly aligned to favour Partials over humans had left them with a profound, unsettled guilt that somehow, despite never having planned it, they’d been responsible. Could he blame the humans for not believing their innocence?
‘I admit that it seems far-fetched.’
‘Far-fetched is an understatement.’
‘We’ve been searching for an explanation ever since, but we still don’t know where it came from.’
She shook her head, still unconvinced. ‘I don’t know why I am even talking to you.’
Just when he thought he had her figured out, she threw him for a loop. He hadn’t initiated the conversation, yet she was acting as though he’d drawn her into it. Her mental twists and turns were too erratic for him to follow. She was back to pacing the room, turning her head back and forth from him to the computers. She settled back into her chair, but even then couldn’t stop swivelling it in half circles. At last she seemed to reach a conclusion and settled on facing him.
‘All right, since you’re in such a talkative mood.’ Her eyes locked on him. ‘Why were you in Manhattan?’
She’d managed to go from their discussion of RM and the revolution to the part of the problem he hadn’t managed to analyse properly yet. Intuition told him they were treading into dangerous waters-this was the answer they’d tried to beat out of him last night. He became acutely aware of the cameras again, certain that if ever the other humans, the ones in charge, were listening in, it would be now. Had they tasked the girl to question him?
‘What was your mission? Why were you so close to our border?’
Samm met her clear, searching gaze. For some reason, he felt compelled to respond, even if he couldn’t reveal anything.
‘I can’t tell you.’
Her innocence revealed itself in her next, guileless question: ‘Why not?’
It conveyed an expectation of harmlessness, an assumption that if he revealed his secrets, the humans’ angry retribution would not fall swiftly and irreversibly. Samm looked away from her, wondering if she truly believed that.
‘Because,’ he said slowly, wondering how best to convey to her that whatever he said was bound to have immediate consequences, ‘I don’t want them to kill me.’
‘Why would they …’ She fell silent, the implications of what he’d said evidently sinking in. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said at last, speaking as much to herself as to him. ‘They gave us-they gave me five days.’
Samm held his tongue, avoiding looking back at her, though he could sense her still staring at him. Eventually she gave up and returned to her work. For the rest of the day, she busied herself at the computers, either avoiding him due to their last exchange or simply not needing to examine him further. The latter seemed unusual, since her task was ostensibly to study him for answers. Taking a blood sample and then periodically ignoring him didn’t seem to tally with his idea of ‘study’ … surely there wasn’t that much in his blood that could sustain her interest for so long?
On the bright side, it really didn’t seem as though her study was meant to be invasive or torturous.
Just like she said.
She was interrupted around midday by the white-haired doctor, who arrived bearing a plate of food.
‘It’s not for you,’ he said. ‘You can go to the cafeteria. I’ll feed the Partial and review your notes while you’re gone.’
The girl stood, blinking bemusedly at the plate … as though she had forgotten food existed, thought Samm. Amusement crept up on him, along with some satisfaction that he was starting to make some sense of the girls’ nonverbal expressions. She looked up and stammered, ‘I hadn’t written out a report yet.’
The doctor surveyed her with what must be disapproval, and she quickly added, ‘I meant to do a comprehensive report at the end of the day, you know, when I’d analysed everything. But I’ll type something out now, just give me half an hour, and I’ll come get you when I’m done. And I’ll, um-’ she grabbed the plate and glanced at Samm, ‘feed it.’
‘No need.’ The doctor’s tone sounded sour. He looked up at the cameras, then turned and left without clarifying which part of her sentence he was referring to.
The girl stared down at the plate she was holding and then back at Samm again. ‘Um …’ She approached him slowly, with a rosy tint to her brown cheeks. Samm didn’t need the link to recognise her embarrassment. It was mirrored in him as she awkwardly held the small roll of bread for him to bite into. He devoured it quickly, not wanting to prolong the experience.
‘Sorry about that,’ she muttered quickly, turning away.
She typed rapidly for the next fifteen minutes, finishing off the report she had promised in half the time. The doctor reappeared soon, taking over her spot and settling in to read her work without bothering to look at Samm. When the girl returned half an hour later, Samm listened intently, curious to know what she had written, but the doctor only said, ‘Leave the full report when you leave tonight.’
The girl worked late into the night. She ate her dinner out of a container she’d brought with her from the cafeteria before, clearly too engrossed to leave again, although she remembered his presence and they went through the same silent, awkward feeding procedure. She’d brought him something that tasted nutty and good this time, which was at least a nice change from the stale bread.
When she finally got up, long after the natural light outside the window faded, her movements were slow and fatigued. She nodded in his direction, and then she left.
The first day of study was over. He had only four more.
Author: shiiki
Rating: PG-13
Characters/Pairings: Samm, Kira Walker, various others, Gen
Fandom: Partials
Summary: Alone in enemy territory with only five days to live, Samm makes an unexpected ally and reaches some stunning conclusions about the fate of their two species. Alternate PoV of Part II of Partials.
In this chapter
Chapter Title: Study
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Samm, Kira Walker, Duna Mkele, Dr Skousen
Word Count: 6,071
Chapter Summary: The first day of study begins, and Samm tries to understand the circumstances of his capture ... and the enigmatic girl who is at the centre of it all.
Day 1
The humans rolled Samm’s metal prison down long, dark hallways, finally coming to a stop in a room that smelled of rot and mildew. The light was dim, but Samm’s eyesight adjusted quickly. His throbbing headache had started to fade away, but the return of clarity was no boon, as his mind quickly envisioned for him the human’s next step.
They were going to interrogate him.
Fear flared through him. He’d been interrogated once before, when he’d first arrived at D Company, but that hardly counted, because they’d linked his friendly intentions easily enough and accepted him into the community. That wasn’t about to happen now.
A bright beam shone straight into his eyes, momentarily blinding him. When his pupils re-adjusted to the intensity, he found himself staring at a stocky black man who stood, arms crossed, surveying Samm.
Samm held his breath, not wanting to communicate his fear.
‘What was your purpose in Manhattan, Partial?’ barked the man. When Samm didn’t answer, he stepped closer, leaning aggressively towards Samm. ‘You see these soldiers, Partial? The Senate may have voted to prolong your execution, but your five days’ grace will be a long, torturous one if you don’t comply.’
Samm wasn’t actually certain if the answers to these questions were actually military secrets, but he was reluctant to give anything to the humans. At best, it would only incense them enough to kill him sooner. At worse … There was a fragile stalemate between their species now. Much as he felt like killing them all in this moment, the Partials couldn’t afford to-not until they extracted the secret behind expiration from the humans.
He registered the movement a split second before the blow caught him in the side of his head. It made him expel his breath and all his data-PAIN FEAR RAGE-along with the bare bones of his thoughts-MISSION SECRET HOLD BACK.
Another furious blow, along with the question, ‘What was your mission?’
Alarmed by the references that had slipped out on the link, Samm tried again to pull back his data, though he knew it would be futile. Even under ideal circumstances, his capacity for holding his breath was at best ten minutes. Against the barrage that rained down upon him now, Samm couldn’t help gasping in pain. His body strained against the chains with each blow, instinctively searching for an escape.
PAIN-CAN’T DEFEND-FAILURE-
A pause, punctuated by another question: ‘What are the Partials planning?’
He tried to focus on the physical pain-emotional data that wouldn’t convey any intelligent information-but his mind worked against him, wanting escape from the aversive experience. The information that did leak out in jumbled pieces-SECRET DYING HUMANS-seemed to infuriate the humans, either from the content or their disbelief. Again and again, they repeated their questions in different variations, accompanied by blows to his head and lashes to his body. It seemed to reach a level where they no longer expected answers, where the violence exacted on him seemed to sate something more than a simple need for answers. Samm’s ears rang and his eyes watered from the relentless attack. He was breathing hard now, and he registered dimly that he still wasn’t reading any data.
This fragment of thought snagged in his mind, a piece of a puzzle that struggled to fit with other aspects of the whole situation. But Samm’s thoughts danced away on waves of pain when he tried to focus them.
At last, it ceased. Samm’s every muscle ached from the pummelling. His face felt puffy. His cheeks were wet. A metallic tang hung distastefully in his mouth. Through slitted eyes, he noticed a newcomer to the room, a white-haired man he recognised from the earlier hearing.
‘Doctor,’ said the black man in acknowledgement.
‘Is it sedated?’
‘No-we wanted it lucid for the interrogation. Not that it’s done any good. Not a peep out of it.’ The discrepancy of this comment with the data he had linked under torture confused Samm. Something almost clicked into place in his mind, a connection just beyond his reach.
The black man glanced darkly at Samm. ‘May you and Walker have better luck. I still can’t comprehend why you think this arrangement is worth the compromise in security.’
The doctor didn’t reply. He came forward and stared at Samm for a long moment, taking in his battered state.
Nothing on the link, thought Samm. Still nothing. Where is their data? Are they even on the link?
It came to him then, a forgotten nugget from his tactical training before the Isolation War. Partials linked to give them an advantage over the soldiers they faced. Over the human soldiers.
Humans simply didn’t link.
Which meant that all of his linked emotions, all of his thoughts … they weren’t receiving them at all. They hadn’t beaten him because of their fury at his answers or repeated their questions because they thought he was lying. He hadn’t answered any of their questions at all!
‘I’ll need to sedate it,’ said the doctor finally. ‘You’ll need to clean and weigh it before we move it to the old quarantine room. I’ve had the custodians preparing it, and Weist is having his people working on reinforcements.’
He produced a syringe and jabbed it expertly into the crook of Samm’s arm. The sedatives flowed into Samm’s bloodstream, taking quick effect. Before Samm could elaborate on his mental realisation, consciousness descended like a fog. The last thing he was aware of was the rusty scent of his own blood.
The stench of blood and bodily fluids hung in the air.
The ward was a cesspool of death. It was the last one remaining in the hospital with live patients, although Samm knew it was only a matter of time before this one, too, went silent.
He wasn’t sure why he had returned. The rest of his regiment had given up days ago, when it became clear that nothing they did was helping-not even their efforts to make the dying humans more comfortable.
RM ate the humans alive, inflaming their immune systems until they boiled in their own fevers. Within three days of infection, they were dead.
The other Partials had retreated to base camp in the heart of the city, unable to bear the helplessness and guilt that only intensified when they were all linking their response to the horror. By all accounts, Atlanta had been healthy before they’d taken it. Days after their invasion, the human resistance had crumbled as RM swept the city, and now, a week later, it was a ghost town. The last of its human population lay in this hospital ward, burning themselves away.
The plague was so perfectly timed, so coincidental that even knowing that they had not released a biological weapon, the whole regiment couldn’t shake the sense that they were nevertheless culpable.
A wail caught Samm’s attention. In the corner of the room, a woman lay dead. The baby cradled in her stiff arms was crying lustily however, a piteous scream of agony that cut straight to Samm’s heart. Its face was red with both effort and disease.
Samm wondered again why he’d come. This was almost too much to bear. Still he stayed, a silent witness to the final passing of the last humans in Atlanta, until the cries subsided and the last breaths expired, leaving a hollow, empty quiet.
*
Samm awoke in the quiet, the remnants of sorrow from his dream floating in his senses. For the first time since his capture, his mind felt sharp and clear. The sedatives they’d pumped into him must finally have worn off.
He was still strapped down, this time to what appeared to be an operating table. The humans had stripped him to his underwear; he lay in this undignified position, facing the ceiling. Cameras winked at him from the corners of the room. Clearly he was being watched, even if no guards had been left with him. He tested the restraints: strong, leaving him no more than a few inches of movement against them.
Somebody had left food next to his cheek. It was an awkward angle, but his mouth could just manage to reach it if he craned his head. Samm bit into the stale bread, not bothering to worry if it was safe. The humans had already plenty of other opportunities to kill him. The chances that they’d resort to poison were minute.
Besides, he was hungry. His last meal had been before the mission … how long ago now?
The faint light filtering through the window on the far side of the room told him it was early morning, but he didn’t know how many days it had been since the ambush in Manhattan. He guessed it was the first of his five remaining days. If the humans had meant to sedate him throughout their study, they would have simply killed him at the end of it and not left him to awaken to food.
Samm polished off the bread and then took in the rest of his surroundings. Tables lined the walls, stacked with equipment: computers, screens, others he couldn’t name but appeared to be medical. The room was more brightly lit than any he’d seen here so far, but it still didn’t come close to the lighting they had in Greenwich.
This is it, then, he thought. Their ‘lab’. He felt like an insect, mounted on a drawing board ripe for study. A shiver came over him that had nothing to do with the cold metal beneath his bare skin.
There was a soft hum, followed by a whoosh of air, and the door clicked open. Samm recognised the dark-skinned girl who entered slowly: she’d been at the hearing. The one who had fought so hard to study him.
The one who had intended to cut off his hand.
The memory of it, tinged with linked fear and anger, made his heart pound. Was she about to do it now? What else had she said? He wished now that he had paid better attention, to give himself an idea of what was in store for him now. He probably would have, if they hadn’t drugged him up to high heaven.
He pulled forth bits and pieces-a cavalier attitude towards his person, an obsession with RM, an insistence that he be studied. She’d been the one pushing hardest to keep him alive for that purpose. Well, she’d got her way: she was here, now.
And yet, surprisingly, she didn’t start. She walked first to one of the tables. Samm could hear her moving things around on it. She turned, and still her attention was drawn to the room around them. Her gaze travelled towards the cameras in the corners, her breath came out in a loud puff, then she approached his table at last, only to pass right by him. He watched her stop at the window and stare out of it.
None of it made any sense. She was here to study him, so why didn’t she … study? Why move around the room so randomly, making all these awkward actions: rubbing her hands together, touching her hair, her face, her ears … the continuous action reminded him a little of Heron, whose manner was unlike any other Partial. Were they naturally like the spy models, theses humans? Or more likely, it was the spy models that more closely resembled the humans. Heron was the only espionage rank Partial he knew, and he’d been out of contact with humans for so long that he couldn’t be sure.
At last, the girl came closer to look at him. Her eyes were the exact same colour as his, except their almond shape, nestled in a soft, winsome face, gave them a much more attractive quality. Her face changed as she examined him: contours and shades shifting so subtly he wouldn’t have detected it if he hadn’t been this close. He couldn’t tell what it meant, if it even meant anything. Samm breathed in deeply before recalling sharply that it was useless. Humans had no link, no data he could read to anticipate their next move. Nothing but frustrating, indecipherable actions.
And yet, he imagined he sensed something there, a whiff of almost-connection. Samm blinked and it disappeared, a trick of his mind. He’d been bereft of link data for at least a day now. His senses, hollow from the lack, must be over-actively searching for any possible connection.
The movement of a hand caught his eye; the girl was reaching towards his face. As she did so, her teeth flashed and caught her bottom lip between them, an action that sent a fresh wave of fear flooding through him. Was it a predatory sign? He braced himself, but her hand stopped en route and fell back to her side.
‘I take it they beat you,’ she said.
It was a cold, cavalier statement, reducing his long night of torture to a stated fact. She knew how he’d spent his night, and under her hands, his day was likely about to get worse. And this teasing, her interminable slowness at carrying out her purpose, was unnerving. She reached out again, and with his nerves keyed to the highest pitch, Samm couldn’t stay still. He jerked away reflexively to avoid her touch, but his restraints held tight.
Surprisingly, she leapt back. Her hands flew to a holster at her side, but it was a few seconds before they retrieved the gun. A lesser soldier would have drawn it in a split second. Was she incompetent with firearms?
‘I was part of the group that captured you.’ So not untrained, clearly, he thought. Unless she was lying. ‘I’m not trying to threaten you, I’m just telling you how serious I am. We’ve got five days together, and if you want to spend them fighting, I’m more than ready.’
He studied her, trying to work out what she meant. Her stance was aggressive; her words contradictory. She didn’t wish to threaten, but she’d drawn a weapon on a bound prisoner. She implied that he’d fought her, which was ludicrous. He was strapped down and at her mercy. Even without the gun, she had all the power.
The girl stepped back again, then lowered and stowed her gun. ‘In case you couldn’t tell, everyone here is pretty much terrified of you. We don’t know what you can do or how you work. For all we know, you’re a biological weapon on legs.’
She was trying to communicate not just facts, he realised, but information that was usually passed along the link. Without it, everything had to be verbal. It was nevertheless an annoying method of interaction, a deluge of words devoid of the typical emotion that accompanied them.
Another hand gesture redirected his attention back to the girl. This time, it was a half wave in his direction, following by a loud release of breath before she continued speaking.
‘Fine then, if you don’t want to talk, that’s fine. I don’t think I would be in your situation either, frankly, but then again, I don’t know if I could help myself. Humans are very social creatures …’
It seemed like she would continue unless he responded-which would have to be verbally, too, since she couldn’t receive his link. Though the first thing that came to mind now was irritation at the incessant flow of chatter. Samm opened his mouth and rasped, ‘You talk too much.’ The air felt like fire pushing through his lungs; he was in worse shape than he thought.
The girl stopped midsentence, her mouth gaping open at him. There was silence for half a minute, then she started up again.
‘Point taken.’ Her voice had a different timbre to it suddenly, a lighter quality. ‘But first, let me explain …’
He closed his eyes wearily as her words turned ominously towards medical terminology. It must mean that she was warming up to begin at last.
‘Let me at least warn you,’ she said, ‘this finger poker is going to hurt a bit-it’s nothing horrible, just a spring-loaded pin about two millimetres long. Are you going to let me use your finger, or are we going to fight again?’
His finger? Surely that couldn’t be what she wanted. He opened her eyes to see that she wasn’t lying: the finger poker was exactly as she had described, grasped firmly and innocently in her hand. He wasn’t sure what she’d meant by a fight, and the fact that she was practically asking him, and politely, as though he had a right to refuse, was perplexing in itself. It was a level of decency he had not been expecting, not after everything … He wasn’t even sure he wanted it, from this human he hated, who was partly responsible for the death of his unit and his capture, who had spoken so cavalierly before about chopping his hand off.
But he stretched his hand open to give her access to his finger.
‘Thank you,’ she said, surprising him yet again. There was something soothing to the sensation that accompanied it. A balm over the wounds from her callous words the previous day. You matter, her thanks said. You deserve respect. His breath caught painfully in his throat as the unexpected emotion threatened to undo him.
True to her word, the pinprick hurt, but almost imperceptibly. It was embarrassing that he even flinched at such a tiny jab. She pressed a tiny vial to the wound and they watched his blood trickle slowly into the tube. It managed to fill half of it before his platelets took over, knitting the prick site closed.
‘Your blood pressure must be low,’ the girl commented as she removed the vial. ‘Usually I can fill two vials with one finger. Unless …’ She looked from tube to finger, evidently just making the connection. She voiced her amazement as she studied the tube more closely, and then fell silent, looking at him and back to his blood again. It fit with what she’d said before-she really didn’t know much, if anything, about Partial physiology at all. Why she didn’t was the mystery, as it seemed unlikely that she would have embarked on this study without collating existing information from the other humans. Though she’d implied that humans as a whole didn’t actually know much about them any more.
Humans as a whole meaning the tiny fraction of the once-burgeoning population. It occurred to Samm then that their human creators could well have died without passing on their knowledge. With that came the chilling thought: Is our mission futile, then? If the humans don’t have the answers …
There was an ironic caveat to that conclusion. There was another way to get answers. A direct flip of his current situation, with humans on the receiving end. A part of him wondered, with no small amount of horror, if that had been in the D Company leaders’ plans all along.
The girl was studying him intensely again, some deep thought clearly running through her head, but without the link, Samm couldn’t even being to fathom what it was. She’d just expressed astonishment at how quickly he’d healed over. That she was surprised by how quickly he healed, he was certain. Was she planning to follow up on this discovery? Would she hurt him now, given an opportunity to test his defences? It was the logical move to perform on a test subject, but he felt his stomach twist at the thought. If she were to do exactly what he’d imagined she meant to now, after she’d spoken to him as an equal, it was going to hurt ten times as much as if she’d simply walked in at the beginning and stabbed him without a word.
‘I’m not going to torture you,’ she said finally, ‘but I do have to get another blood sample.’ She worked on another tube as she continued to explain the intricacies of his blood-she knew something about that at least-and drew out the finger poker again. ‘Get ready for another poke.’
Knowing what to expect this time, he could remain still as she drew the sample. Once she removed it, she expertly taped a cotton ball to his finger-a useless move, but one that mollified Samm. She’d treated him like a human, even having just witnessed his inhuman healing capabilities. Her eyes met his again, then looked away quickly, but he sensed it was different from the previous times she had averted her gaze. There was some kind of emotion involved, but he could only guess at it. Regret? Embarrassment?
She retreated with her vials of his blood, without a comment this time, and proceeded to the tables. The computers and screens were too far away and at too awkward an angle for Samm to see what she was up to there - not that he would have understood the analysis - so he stared up at the ceiling as she worked, the beeps and chirps of the equipment and the faint murmurs of her voice as she muttered to herself, forming a backdrop to his thoughts.
She was studying RM, he recalled, as he caught some of her faint exclamations and connected it with his vague memories from the trial. The humans were trying to understand it, to find a cure. They-no, she-had been shouting about saving their children, not that any of the others had disputed it.
The answer swooped down upon him in a staggering revelation: RM killed all the human babies. Every child in the past eleven years had died.
It disconfirmed eleven years of Partial intelligence reports about the Long Island human population. None of their scouts had ever reported any anomalies-the humans were settling down, scavenging supplies, organising military defence, growing food; their numbers were small but varied, the disease having left a sizeable gene pool intact. Now that he thought about it, there had never been any mention of human children about, though that wasn’t something any of them would have flagged as extraordinary-the concept of children was alien to Partials. Even before the revolution, Samm’s exposure to them had been minimal. An image from his dream, with the dying infant, resurfaced. Yes, humans reproduced and their young grew. How could he have forgotten?
It appeared now that RM immunity was not hereditary, that the humans had all along been facing an expiration date of their own, though in their case it was more species- rather than individual-focused. Of course, the individual problem of expiration is equivalent to a species-wide one. We can’t make any new Partials. Especially not if it’s true that the humans who made us are really dead. All the same, it was an issue that gave the dynamics of the whole situation a greater complexity than he could wrap his head around.
‘You made pretty damn sure we couldn’t get away from this thing, didn’t you?’ Samm turned to see the girl glaring at him. Her words had been forceful, delivered at a higher amplitude. It reflected … anger?
More pieces of the puzzle fell into place. It was perhaps no wonder eleven years hadn’t tempered the humans’ animosity towards Partials-they believed the disease had come from Partials, and the disease was killing them yet.
‘You can’t reproduce,’ he said, verbalising his theory. ‘That’s why you’re trying to cure RM. We don’t have children, so their absence didn’t seem odd at first, but you don’t have any, do you? You’re trying to cure RM because your children don’t survive it.’
She didn’t answer immediately. Her face went through a dizzying array of changes again. When she finally spoke, her words were cutting.
‘You, Partial. What do you know about RM?’
He recoiled at the contemptuous way she addressed him, so different from the previous courtesy she had afforded him. Samm felt a mixture of petulance and caution. She’d had him for at least an hour and it was the first time she’d thought to ask directly for his input. The condescension chafed at him, while her reversion to hostility gave him pause. If he admitted what he did know-that years of Partial study had turned up no profitable line of inquiry-would she in accept this and concede failure? He suspected she wouldn’t.
But there were others listening in, too, Samm remembered suddenly. They were more likely to take Samm’s answer as an indication that the study was useless and he, the Partial, should be killed immediately.
No, I need more time to figure this out. There were things he had to work out, which hinted at the solution he’d set out to find.
‘Oh, come on, are we going to go through this again?’ The girl reverted back to a conversational sentence structure, dropping her imperative tone so quickly it could give him whiplash. ‘Can’t you at least say something?’
‘Well,’ Samm considered his words carefully. ‘Human,’ he addressed her directly. ‘You’re going to kill me in five days. I don’t see much of an incentive to say anything.’
She responded with more drama than he had expected: flinging herself across the room into a chair, wiping her hands across her face, moving about … all accompanied by rapid facial movements. Samm felt certain he had discomfited her, and it gave him some small satisfaction, however petty. At last, she settled back at her table with the computers and screens and the room returned to its previous electronic hum.
With the bigger picture now in view, Samm started to feel his hatred ebb away on waves of empathy. The similarity of their situations-Partials and humans-presented itself clearly. Both species faced impending extinction and the accompanying desperation to cure it. Put in that light, even his capture, torture and examination was understandable.
He wasn’t blind to the hypocrisy of his feelings in the matter. For all his resentment at the way the humans regarded him, Samm couldn’t deny that the Partials’ motives with respect to the humans were all that different.
If we didn’t manage to get answers from a human under questioning, we’d resort to studying them like this, too.
And he had to admit, despite her talk of mutilation at the hearing, the girl hadn’t attempted anything of the sort. She’d even treated him with consideration. Humanely. He watched her for a moment, now engrossed in one of the screens on the table. She was young, no more than seventeen. It struck him that she must possess an enormous amount of courage. She’d ventured into no-man’s land without the backing of her leaders, with the express intent of capturing a highly dangerous enemy, who in all likelihood would kill her first. With this in mind, he allowed that her manner during the trial might have been a show of bravado.
He’d believed, too, that the girl had turned to secure experimentation as a first line of inquiry because she didn’t see him as an equal being, capable of reasonable exchange. This new perspective suggested fear as a motivation: a view of him as a dangerous enemy who hated them in return.
This fit with the ferocity of his interrogators, how they had attacked him as though seeking vengeance. When the Partials had revolted, their resentment had been fuelled by several years of suffering. The humans had faced their extinction via RM for eleven years, and if they believed that the Partials had been responsible for the plague …
But we didn’t create it. There had been no reason to, not when they had overthrown most of the government within months, not when it was all practically under their control. We were winning the war.
‘What?’ The girl, roused from her work, turned to him, and he realised he must have spoken aloud. ‘Why the hell are you bringing that up?’
‘Because you think we created the virus.’ This one mistaken belief explained more than just the human’s on-going hatred of Partials, he realised. It underscored their conviction that he held the answers they were desperate for. ‘That’s why you’re studying me as part of your mission to cure it. You think we engineered it; we didn’t.’
‘Obviously I expect you to lie to me, but I was hoping you’d be a little more creative.’
He supposed it wouldn’t be that easy to convince her. Unlike them, the humans weren’t motivated to relieve the Partials of their culpability. ‘It’s the truth.’
Her voice rose in amplitude again, a change he decided must be associated with anger. ‘It is not true!’ Her arms swung up away from her sides. ‘You attacked us, you killed us, and you released that virus to finish the job.’
She needs to believe we did, he realised. Probably because … if she accepted his words as truth, she would realise the answers she was searching for, that the risks she had taken were all in vain.
‘We were winning the war,’ Samm repeated, wondering if the logic would be enough to convince her when she was so invested in believing he held the answers. He laid out the military reasoning for her: the dominance of their rebellion, the pure waste of losing the humans who had created and maintained their whole society.
‘Was that your plan?’ she interrupted. ‘To use us as slaves? As labour to maintain your infrastructure?’
Irritation surged through his link. ‘You mean the same thing you had done to us?’
He was beginning to place her reactions better. This time, when she moved away stiffly and threw something into the corner of the room, he identified her petulance without difficulty.
‘We didn’t want to enslave you,’ he told her. The rebellion had never been about turning the tables on the humans, but freeing themselves from oppression. But maybe she wasn’t in any state to accept that yet. He tried a different tack. ‘Even if we did, we didn’t want or need to kill you to do it. There was no purpose, tactical or political or otherwise, in releasing a killer virus.’
‘You expect me to believe that a perfect supervirus, which destroyed humans and left you unscathed, was coincidentally released in the middle of your attack-and that you had nothing at all to do with it?’
She’d hit him back with the one fact that had haunted the Partials for years. The timing and the effects of RM, so perfectly aligned to favour Partials over humans had left them with a profound, unsettled guilt that somehow, despite never having planned it, they’d been responsible. Could he blame the humans for not believing their innocence?
‘I admit that it seems far-fetched.’
‘Far-fetched is an understatement.’
‘We’ve been searching for an explanation ever since, but we still don’t know where it came from.’
She shook her head, still unconvinced. ‘I don’t know why I am even talking to you.’
Just when he thought he had her figured out, she threw him for a loop. He hadn’t initiated the conversation, yet she was acting as though he’d drawn her into it. Her mental twists and turns were too erratic for him to follow. She was back to pacing the room, turning her head back and forth from him to the computers. She settled back into her chair, but even then couldn’t stop swivelling it in half circles. At last she seemed to reach a conclusion and settled on facing him.
‘All right, since you’re in such a talkative mood.’ Her eyes locked on him. ‘Why were you in Manhattan?’
She’d managed to go from their discussion of RM and the revolution to the part of the problem he hadn’t managed to analyse properly yet. Intuition told him they were treading into dangerous waters-this was the answer they’d tried to beat out of him last night. He became acutely aware of the cameras again, certain that if ever the other humans, the ones in charge, were listening in, it would be now. Had they tasked the girl to question him?
‘What was your mission? Why were you so close to our border?’
Samm met her clear, searching gaze. For some reason, he felt compelled to respond, even if he couldn’t reveal anything.
‘I can’t tell you.’
Her innocence revealed itself in her next, guileless question: ‘Why not?’
It conveyed an expectation of harmlessness, an assumption that if he revealed his secrets, the humans’ angry retribution would not fall swiftly and irreversibly. Samm looked away from her, wondering if she truly believed that.
‘Because,’ he said slowly, wondering how best to convey to her that whatever he said was bound to have immediate consequences, ‘I don’t want them to kill me.’
‘Why would they …’ She fell silent, the implications of what he’d said evidently sinking in. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said at last, speaking as much to herself as to him. ‘They gave us-they gave me five days.’
Samm held his tongue, avoiding looking back at her, though he could sense her still staring at him. Eventually she gave up and returned to her work. For the rest of the day, she busied herself at the computers, either avoiding him due to their last exchange or simply not needing to examine him further. The latter seemed unusual, since her task was ostensibly to study him for answers. Taking a blood sample and then periodically ignoring him didn’t seem to tally with his idea of ‘study’ … surely there wasn’t that much in his blood that could sustain her interest for so long?
On the bright side, it really didn’t seem as though her study was meant to be invasive or torturous.
Just like she said.
She was interrupted around midday by the white-haired doctor, who arrived bearing a plate of food.
‘It’s not for you,’ he said. ‘You can go to the cafeteria. I’ll feed the Partial and review your notes while you’re gone.’
The girl stood, blinking bemusedly at the plate … as though she had forgotten food existed, thought Samm. Amusement crept up on him, along with some satisfaction that he was starting to make some sense of the girls’ nonverbal expressions. She looked up and stammered, ‘I hadn’t written out a report yet.’
The doctor surveyed her with what must be disapproval, and she quickly added, ‘I meant to do a comprehensive report at the end of the day, you know, when I’d analysed everything. But I’ll type something out now, just give me half an hour, and I’ll come get you when I’m done. And I’ll, um-’ she grabbed the plate and glanced at Samm, ‘feed it.’
‘No need.’ The doctor’s tone sounded sour. He looked up at the cameras, then turned and left without clarifying which part of her sentence he was referring to.
The girl stared down at the plate she was holding and then back at Samm again. ‘Um …’ She approached him slowly, with a rosy tint to her brown cheeks. Samm didn’t need the link to recognise her embarrassment. It was mirrored in him as she awkwardly held the small roll of bread for him to bite into. He devoured it quickly, not wanting to prolong the experience.
‘Sorry about that,’ she muttered quickly, turning away.
She typed rapidly for the next fifteen minutes, finishing off the report she had promised in half the time. The doctor reappeared soon, taking over her spot and settling in to read her work without bothering to look at Samm. When the girl returned half an hour later, Samm listened intently, curious to know what she had written, but the doctor only said, ‘Leave the full report when you leave tonight.’
The girl worked late into the night. She ate her dinner out of a container she’d brought with her from the cafeteria before, clearly too engrossed to leave again, although she remembered his presence and they went through the same silent, awkward feeding procedure. She’d brought him something that tasted nutty and good this time, which was at least a nice change from the stale bread.
When she finally got up, long after the natural light outside the window faded, her movements were slow and fatigued. She nodded in his direction, and then she left.
The first day of study was over. He had only four more.