shiiki
in
shiikifics
FIC: Five Days, Chapter 4
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: Choice
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Samm, Kira Walker, Shaylon Brown, Duna Mkele, Dr. Skousen, OCs
Word Count: 3,845
Chapter Summary: The opportunity for Samm to escape arrives ... but brings with it a difficult choice.
Day 3
The man burst into the room, livid with rage. He was another uniformed soldier, and he came straight to Samm's table, swinging the rifle he carried at Samm. The end of it connected solidly with Samm's forehead.
'I watched my parents die in the plague, you evil scum.' The rifle smacked down on Samm's head again, making black spots erupt in his vision. 'They boiled alive from the inside.' Another blow. 'Do you know what that's like, you monster?' His voice cracked on the last word.
Quick footsteps announced the arrival of the man's companions-Samm's interrogators for the night, no doubt. He resigned himself to another violent night.
'Private Thornton,' said a voice sharply. 'Step away. You're overwrought.'
'It killed my parents!' yelled Thornton. 'And yours! It killed all of our families!'
'And we will deal with it.' Arms pulled Thornton away from Samm, revealing the face of Mkele behind him. 'You are out of line, Private. You have no clearance to be here.' Mkele gestured to two other soldiers who had followed him in. 'Report to Commander Weist with Private Thornton immediately.'
They saluted, and there was a slight scuffle as Thornton was escorted out of the room. Mkele glared at Samm. 'I told you we should have acted already. Already we're losing control.'
Dr. Skousen answered from the side of the room. He'd entered in the midst of the commotion, and was now sorting through Kira's files on the table. 'And you'll get your way soon enough.' He looked up, and a significant look passed between the two men. 'I take it you have no further questioning tonight?'
'Whatever secrets it has, it can keep them,' said Mkele. 'It doesn't matter any more.'
Dr. Skousen nodded. 'Well, I still intend to see what I can get out of this experiment.' He rose, and Samm saw the syringe in his hands. There was no escaping the sedation. It flowed quickly into his veins once the doctor injected him, and again, Samm was drifting into foggy unconsciousness.
*
He stumbled blindly out of the college building, both his mind and link shaken. The horror in the college interviewer's words, the instant rejection … they hadn't even known, not until he'd said, 'I'm a Partial.' And then they'd thrown him out without ceremony.
Distracted, he nearly ran over a toddler on the sidewalk. Samm apologised automatically, reaching to set the girl back on her feet. Her father grabbed his arm and Samm braced himself. But the man only steadied him and asked, 'Are you all right?'
Of course-in the suit he'd bought for the interview, he looked like just another human on the street.
'Yes,' he said shortly.
The little girl stared at him with solemn eyes. Unexpectedly, she reached for his hand. Samm took it, and the girl broke into a bright, gap-toothed smile.
The man patted his arm. 'Take care of yourself, son,' he said.
It was a colloquial use of the word, but still Samm's eyes sparked with tears, his emotions overwhelming intense.
No one had ever called him 'son' before.
They released Samm and continued on their way down the street, the man swinging his daughter up in his arms and onto his shoulders as they went. She turned back and waved at him before they disappeared around the corner of the block.
*
Samm awoke in the morning light, a trace of tears still dotting the corners of his eyes. His dreams had been so vivid these past few nights, calling up events from so many years past. Was it because of his proximity to humans again that he was dredging up the memories of his long-ago interactions with them?
This one was particularly poignant. It was perhaps his only lasting memory of a human family, and it gave him a sense of longing. Yesterday, he had spoken to Kira about the guilt of killing their parents, and it was true-humans were their parents, but in a very general sense. Partials didn't have families the way humans understood them. Was it why their community fractured so quickly? They were created based on the human template, with the same emotions, but they lacked the connective experiences to accompany them. Even the Partials' drive to cure expiration had an inherent selfishness that the humans' motivation to cure RM lacked. As a Partial he was an entity into himself: disconnected from a family heritage, unable to perpetuate his genes. He'd never considered himself from this perspective before, and it left him with a dull ache, like there was something inside him that needed to be fixed.
He thought of the way Thornton had attacked him yesterday, crying vengeance for a long-dead family, and felt a sharp, empathic sorrow. Maybe they were all broken, in some way.
'Good morning.'
His heart leapt at the sound of Kira's voice. She entered with her arms full of books, but once she laid them down on her workspace, she came over to Samm to examine him.
'They beat you again,' she said sadly, running her fingers over the new bruises Thornton had left. His arms bore traces of new scars as well. He supposed Dr. Skousen had done it, though in retrospect it had been surprisingly decent of him to sedate Samm first.
Kira's eyes darted towards the cameras. 'They shouldn't be doing this to you,' she said softly. 'It's inhumane.'
Samm's heart warmed at her concern. 'I'm not sure that statement has any bearing on me,' he said, uncertain that the word 'humane' could even have any conclusive meaning, let alone one that encompassed himself.
'It doesn't matter if you're human or not. They're human, and that means they need to act like it.'
Samm wasn't sure what to say to this, the assertion that humanity lay in how you behaved, rather than how you were made. Kira bent over his legs-his heart did a strange dive as she rolled up the leg of his pants-and revealed several more incision sites that were already healing over.
'None of these wounds has ever gotten infected.' She paused, and he could see her turning this information over in her mind like an interesting puzzle. 'You should be okay,' she said at last, and left his side with a gentle pat on the arm. It reminded him of the man and his daughter in his dream.
Did Kira have memories like that? He guessed her to be in her late teens, which meant that she would have been quite a young child during the Break. How far back did humans remember? Was she haunted by memories of a father, or a mother she lost, or did she, like him, feel the invisible ache of a family heritage she should have but didn't?
He supposed he should just ask. I did mean to talk to her at some point today, anyway.
'Did you have a mother?'
Kira turned to stare at him, with a quaint look of bemusement on her face. 'What?'
He repeated the question, but it seemed her issue wasn't that she hadn't heard, but that she found it astounding. 'I … of course I had a mother,' she said in puzzlement. 'Everyone has a mother.'
Everyone human. 'We don't,' he reminded her.
'You know you're the second person in the last twelve hours to ask me about my mother?' said Kira, a tad defensively.
Did it perhaps hurt her to remember someone she'd lost? 'I was only curious.'
'It's okay, I never really knew my mother.' Kira leaned forward in her chair, setting her elbows on her knees and placing her chin in her hands. 'I guess that makes us more alike than we thought.'
'Your father, then.' Samm tried, the image of the toddler and her father coming to mind again.
'Why do you want to know about him? I was five when he died, I can barely remember him.'
So she did share his lack of connection to parents. 'I've never had a father either.'
'Why are you so curious?' said Kira, wheeling herself over in her chair. 'You never talk, for two solid days, and now this morning all of a sudden you're obsessed with families?' Her hands lifted and spread out, palms facing upwards. 'What's going on?'
She was staring at him with open curiosity, wide and receptive. Samm took the chance. 'I've been doing something-a lot of thinking,' he amended. 'You're aware than we can't reproduce?'
'You were built that way,' said Kira. 'You were … well, you were intended to be weapons, not people.' Her mouth twisted ruefully. 'They didn't want self-replicating weapons.'
She'd summed it up better than he could: they were but the cold, calculative design of their creators. 'Yes, the Partials were never intended to exist outside the infrastructure that created us.' Perfectly created, complete with a self-destruct button. Except they'd also come packaged with the emotions to be hurt by this discovery. 'But we do, and now all those old design parameters are-' He stopped himself before he ended up inadvertently revealed the issue of expiration. The cameras were still watching. Samm's heart pounded as he surveyed Kira, still listening wide-eyed to his words. He supposed it was now or never.
'Listen,' he said, launching into his plan, 'do you trust me?'
A moment of hesitation, then she shook her head. 'No.'
Not yet, then. Samm forged ahead. 'I suppose not. Do you think you ever could?'
'Ever?'
'If we worked together-if we ever offered a truce. Peace. Could you learn to trust us?'
'I …' Kira's answer came slowly, deliberatively. 'I could trust you if you proved yourself trustworthy. I don't … I don't know that I distrust you on principle, if that's what you're asking. Not any more. But a lot of people do.'
He'd concluded as much yesterday. But out of curiosity, he asked, 'And what would it take to earn their trust?'
'Not having destroyed our world eleven years ago,' said Kira promptly. Then she considered, more seriously, 'Short of that … I don't know. Putting it back together.'
Samm turned this over in his head. She gave him more possibility to hope than he'd believed there to be. It reaffirmed his belief that she was open and willing to listen and consider him as an ally in her quest.
'Why are you telling me this?'
'Because the only hope, for either of us, is to help each other. To work together.'
'You've said that before.' He hadn't, exactly, but he'd meant to imply it. His message had got through after all.
'You've asked about our mission,' he said, recalling the question she had fallen back on each time their conversations had strolled down this path. Might as well give her an answer for it. 'That was it, Kira-we were coming here to try to make peace. To see if we could work together. You need our help to cure RM, but we need you just as much.'
'Why?'
He supposed the question was unavoidable. He couldn't share the secret of expiration, not until she'd taken more concrete steps to help him-and certainly not before those damnable cameras-but he could try and work around it. 'I can't tell you yet.'
'But you have to tell me-isn't that why you're here? If you came on a mission of peace, what were you going to say? "We need your help, but we can't say why?"'
Samm recalled his ruminations of the day before, the circuitous routes he'd taken to draw his conclusions that she was his best hope, and invented, 'We didn't know how much you still hated us. We thought perhaps we could persuade you with an offer to work together.' He watched her carefully, alert to any sign of doubt. The other humans would probably have dismissed this as a lie without blinking, but Kira continued to pay full attention. 'When I was captured and brought here, when I saw what's going on here … there was no way. But you, Kira-' he no longer had to fake truth here, 'you listen. More than that, you understand what's at stake.' He drew on an image of her own conviction to cure RM. 'That no price is too high to pay when it means the survival of your species.'
Kira clasped her hands together. 'So just tell me. Forget the cameras, forget whoever's listening on the other side, and tell me what's going on.'
'It's not just a matter of them not believing me,' said Samm, shaking his head. 'If they find out why I'm here-the instant they know the reason-I'm a dead man.'
It surprised him that Kira reacted uneasily to this, turning warily to the cameras. It wasn't the first time he'd mentioned the fact. 'It's okay,' he reassured her. 'They know I have a secret.'
She leaned back and stared at him, her arms folded across her chest. Samm waited patiently, watching her face go through its captivating array of expressions as she thought through all he had said.
Finally, she said, 'No, it's too perfect. It's like you're saying exactly what I want to hear. I don't believe you.'
Samm's hopes threatened to plummet again at her distrust, but he latched on to what she'd also said. She wanted to believe. Her emotions were still warring with logic. She'd already conceded their similarities; he needed to remind her that they shared a desire to survive.
'Why would we want anything else?' Samm appealed to the first thing he'd ever known about Kira-her desire to cure RM. 'It's the most basic instinct of life-to outlive yourself. To build another generation that's going to see tomorrow.' He wondered if she would pick up on the subtle hint that if the Partials shared a similar obstacle to this goal.
'But you've never even known family,' Kira objected, reasoning in a completely different direction. 'You didn't have families, you didn't grow up, you have no idea what it's even like.'
Broken, thought Samm, shuddering slightly.
'What if creation is just a phantom instinct, held over from some lost shred of DNA?' Kira paused, her eyes suddenly distant, lost in a strand of thought. When she focused again, there was sorrow in her gaze. 'What do you think it says about us that we don't have any parents? I don't mean us, I don't mean kids, I mean no fathers at all-a whole society, two whole societies,' she amended, including the Partials, 'with no parents at all. What do you think that's done to us?'
A rush of emotion choked him and his eyes threatened to tear up. Thoughts of strategy, missions, and escape left him as he simply felt their shared underlying pain: the emptiness of two effectively orphaned species. What was the solution to that?
Only peace. It was ironic that he'd started thinking about it as a means to an end, only to arrive now at a wider realisation that it was indeed the only goal worth achieving.
Samm stared into Kira's eyes for a long while, until she finally looked away, blinking hard.
A sudden buzz interrupted their moment, and a soldier ran in, his hands cupped protectively around a syringe. Samm's eyes snapped warily to him, but it was Kira the soldier ran to.
'The nurse said to give you this. She said you'd know what to do with it.'
'You're not allowed in here,' said Kira, standing such that she was between Samm and the soldier.
'She said it was an emergency,' said the soldier, holding out the syringe. Kira took it carefully, and the soldier peered around her. 'So that's him?'
Something about the soldier's words struck a chord with Samm. Kira didn't reply him, though, asking instead, 'What is it?'
'She said you'd know,' said the soldier. 'It's from the maternity ward.'
Kira burst into a frenzy of activity, evidently drawing some connection in her head. 'It's from a newborn! One of the mothers had her baby! Do you know which one?'
'She said you'd know what to do with it!' The soldier followed her to the counter, blocking Samm's view of what she was doing.
'I do know, calm down.' Kira rushed over to her medical scanner. 'This is uninfected blood, do you understand? The babies are born healthy and then the virus hits them, and we have only minutes, maybe less, before the virus morphs and attacks.' Samm listened in interest as she explained, effectively summarising her findings from her previous days' findings. So she'd managed to make some headway after all.
The machine ran its analysis. Samm couldn't see the result that popped up, but the soldier gasped, 'The baby's a Partial?'
What?! Shocked, Samm craned his neck to get a better view.
'No,' said Kira quickly, 'it means the object it found only partially matches the records in the database.'
Okay, false alarm. Samm could almost appreciate the comical side of their exchange. He settled back against his table and studied the soldier. There was something about him that stood out …
Is that him? Samm put his finger on the nagging discrepancy at last. This soldier was the first person other than Kira to address him with a human pronoun. Samm eyed him with greater interest. It was the first sign Samm had that there might be other humans sharing Kira's potential for understanding. He was fairly young, possibly around Samm's own age. Near to Kira's, too. Was it their youth that gave them a greater openness? Or the fact that their age at the time of the Break coloured their perspectives differently from their elders?
All of a sudden, the soldier sprung into a defensive crouch. Samm tensed, recognising the position.
'What's going on-' Kira began. The soldier pulled her down roughly, such that only the tops of their heads remained in Samm's line of sight.
'Get down! There's someone here, someone sneaking around. They think it might be a jailbreak.'
Samm's heart raced at the unexpected intelligence. He'd been working all along on the assumption that his squad was dead, and that he'd been presumed dead along with them. Had he been wrong? He glanced at Kira and was suddenly alarmed. There were only two ways a jailbreak could end: in one version, its failure would likely mean execution for him and the end of whatever trust he'd built with Kira.
In the successful ending, Kira would likely be killed. She was hopelessly unprepared-unarmed … no, she'd realised that too and dashed to her pistol, but it wouldn't give her much defence against an organised attack.
Samm didn't even have time to marvel at how he'd automatically viewed the consequences of a successful jailbreak. An explosion shook the room, blowing the far wall into smithereens, throwing Kira and the soldier violently away from it. Samm's operating table flew clean off the floor and slammed into another wall, fortunately back first, giving him some protection from the crash. His limbs felt freer; the impact must have damaged the table. Samm struggled against them and felt them tear away from their fixings.
He was free.
Here was his chance. The blast had left a gaping hole in the wall, a clear passage out of his prison. Whatever the cause-Partial or human rebels-he could escape. He sensed no one nearby on the link, but the logical decision was still to get away, find cover, and make his way off the island while the humans were still distracted by the explosion.
'Help … me …'
There was a sizzle and a burst of heat as one of the machines, knocked over in the blast, began to burn. An awful stench, like charred flesh, hit Samm's nose.
The door, held fast by solid rubble, gave a rattle and inched open. He needed to go, now, before the humans outside pushed through.
'It's the girl. Is anyone else alive in there?'
'You have to help me, my heart is stopping.' Kira's voice came faintly from under the burning machine.
Samm's thoughts were a whirlwind, full of contradictions. Hard cold survival against the knowledge that if he fled now, he'd leave Kira to die. The humans would never get to her in time.
Samm stopped thinking and acted.
The machine was incredibly heavy and his body was weakened from three days of captivity. Even so, he had enough strength to heave it slowly off Kira's legs. Sparks caught at his clothes, threatening to flame up, but he beat them off once he managed to shift the machine. Kira twitched feebly on the ground, coughing.
The door to the room shuddered under the efforts of the humans behind it. He could probably still run for it, but his window of opportunity was shrinking.
Instead, Samm knelt and scooped Kira up. Her legs were a mess of burns that he didn't even know how to begin treating. Her upper body fared better, but she was still covered in cuts and bruises. He couldn't ascertain what was the extent of her internal injuries.
'Thank you,' she whispered. Her arms circled around him and Samm's heart skipped a beat. 'I think he got away.'
She thought he'd run. He should have. He couldn't have. The world seemed to move in slow motion, then come to a stop, hinging on the sole fact that he was here, holding on to her.
'I'm right here, Kira.'
Her eyes fluttered open. 'You saved me.'
Soldiers battered the door down and surrounded them. 'Put her down!' they shouted. Everything came back into focus-the ruins of the room, the hole that was no longer a possibility for escape, angry soldiers and the barrels of their guns aimed at his face.
'He saved me,' gasped Kira.
'Put her down now!'
Samm set Kira down as gently as he could. The soldiers swarmed him, battering at him with their guns. Over the thuds of their beatings, he could hear Kira's weeping. He didn't know how long they continued their attack. His mind still felt fairly stunned. It was as though there were two Samms: one groaning in pain beneath the boots and rifle butts, and another trying separately to make sense of what was happening, what he had just done.
The choice he had just made.
You idiot, said a voice in his head, that reminded him vaguely of Heron, you should have chosen survival. The choice is always survival. There wasn't much chance of that now… if they didn't kill him there and then on the spot, he didn't think they'd draw out his life much longer. And he'd brought it on himself, with his decision not to run.
Despite this knowledge, he felt a sense of giddy satisfaction settle over him. Whatever happened, whatever his fate now, it was because of his own actions. Not some mission from his commander, not some decision by another person.
I chose.
He'd never felt more human.
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: Choice
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Samm, Kira Walker, Shaylon Brown, Duna Mkele, Dr. Skousen, OCs
Word Count: 3,845
Chapter Summary: The opportunity for Samm to escape arrives ... but brings with it a difficult choice.
Day 3
The man burst into the room, livid with rage. He was another uniformed soldier, and he came straight to Samm's table, swinging the rifle he carried at Samm. The end of it connected solidly with Samm's forehead.
'I watched my parents die in the plague, you evil scum.' The rifle smacked down on Samm's head again, making black spots erupt in his vision. 'They boiled alive from the inside.' Another blow. 'Do you know what that's like, you monster?' His voice cracked on the last word.
Quick footsteps announced the arrival of the man's companions-Samm's interrogators for the night, no doubt. He resigned himself to another violent night.
'Private Thornton,' said a voice sharply. 'Step away. You're overwrought.'
'It killed my parents!' yelled Thornton. 'And yours! It killed all of our families!'
'And we will deal with it.' Arms pulled Thornton away from Samm, revealing the face of Mkele behind him. 'You are out of line, Private. You have no clearance to be here.' Mkele gestured to two other soldiers who had followed him in. 'Report to Commander Weist with Private Thornton immediately.'
They saluted, and there was a slight scuffle as Thornton was escorted out of the room. Mkele glared at Samm. 'I told you we should have acted already. Already we're losing control.'
Dr. Skousen answered from the side of the room. He'd entered in the midst of the commotion, and was now sorting through Kira's files on the table. 'And you'll get your way soon enough.' He looked up, and a significant look passed between the two men. 'I take it you have no further questioning tonight?'
'Whatever secrets it has, it can keep them,' said Mkele. 'It doesn't matter any more.'
Dr. Skousen nodded. 'Well, I still intend to see what I can get out of this experiment.' He rose, and Samm saw the syringe in his hands. There was no escaping the sedation. It flowed quickly into his veins once the doctor injected him, and again, Samm was drifting into foggy unconsciousness.
*
He stumbled blindly out of the college building, both his mind and link shaken. The horror in the college interviewer's words, the instant rejection … they hadn't even known, not until he'd said, 'I'm a Partial.' And then they'd thrown him out without ceremony.
Distracted, he nearly ran over a toddler on the sidewalk. Samm apologised automatically, reaching to set the girl back on her feet. Her father grabbed his arm and Samm braced himself. But the man only steadied him and asked, 'Are you all right?'
Of course-in the suit he'd bought for the interview, he looked like just another human on the street.
'Yes,' he said shortly.
The little girl stared at him with solemn eyes. Unexpectedly, she reached for his hand. Samm took it, and the girl broke into a bright, gap-toothed smile.
The man patted his arm. 'Take care of yourself, son,' he said.
It was a colloquial use of the word, but still Samm's eyes sparked with tears, his emotions overwhelming intense.
No one had ever called him 'son' before.
They released Samm and continued on their way down the street, the man swinging his daughter up in his arms and onto his shoulders as they went. She turned back and waved at him before they disappeared around the corner of the block.
*
Samm awoke in the morning light, a trace of tears still dotting the corners of his eyes. His dreams had been so vivid these past few nights, calling up events from so many years past. Was it because of his proximity to humans again that he was dredging up the memories of his long-ago interactions with them?
This one was particularly poignant. It was perhaps his only lasting memory of a human family, and it gave him a sense of longing. Yesterday, he had spoken to Kira about the guilt of killing their parents, and it was true-humans were their parents, but in a very general sense. Partials didn't have families the way humans understood them. Was it why their community fractured so quickly? They were created based on the human template, with the same emotions, but they lacked the connective experiences to accompany them. Even the Partials' drive to cure expiration had an inherent selfishness that the humans' motivation to cure RM lacked. As a Partial he was an entity into himself: disconnected from a family heritage, unable to perpetuate his genes. He'd never considered himself from this perspective before, and it left him with a dull ache, like there was something inside him that needed to be fixed.
He thought of the way Thornton had attacked him yesterday, crying vengeance for a long-dead family, and felt a sharp, empathic sorrow. Maybe they were all broken, in some way.
'Good morning.'
His heart leapt at the sound of Kira's voice. She entered with her arms full of books, but once she laid them down on her workspace, she came over to Samm to examine him.
'They beat you again,' she said sadly, running her fingers over the new bruises Thornton had left. His arms bore traces of new scars as well. He supposed Dr. Skousen had done it, though in retrospect it had been surprisingly decent of him to sedate Samm first.
Kira's eyes darted towards the cameras. 'They shouldn't be doing this to you,' she said softly. 'It's inhumane.'
Samm's heart warmed at her concern. 'I'm not sure that statement has any bearing on me,' he said, uncertain that the word 'humane' could even have any conclusive meaning, let alone one that encompassed himself.
'It doesn't matter if you're human or not. They're human, and that means they need to act like it.'
Samm wasn't sure what to say to this, the assertion that humanity lay in how you behaved, rather than how you were made. Kira bent over his legs-his heart did a strange dive as she rolled up the leg of his pants-and revealed several more incision sites that were already healing over.
'None of these wounds has ever gotten infected.' She paused, and he could see her turning this information over in her mind like an interesting puzzle. 'You should be okay,' she said at last, and left his side with a gentle pat on the arm. It reminded him of the man and his daughter in his dream.
Did Kira have memories like that? He guessed her to be in her late teens, which meant that she would have been quite a young child during the Break. How far back did humans remember? Was she haunted by memories of a father, or a mother she lost, or did she, like him, feel the invisible ache of a family heritage she should have but didn't?
He supposed he should just ask. I did mean to talk to her at some point today, anyway.
'Did you have a mother?'
Kira turned to stare at him, with a quaint look of bemusement on her face. 'What?'
He repeated the question, but it seemed her issue wasn't that she hadn't heard, but that she found it astounding. 'I … of course I had a mother,' she said in puzzlement. 'Everyone has a mother.'
Everyone human. 'We don't,' he reminded her.
'You know you're the second person in the last twelve hours to ask me about my mother?' said Kira, a tad defensively.
Did it perhaps hurt her to remember someone she'd lost? 'I was only curious.'
'It's okay, I never really knew my mother.' Kira leaned forward in her chair, setting her elbows on her knees and placing her chin in her hands. 'I guess that makes us more alike than we thought.'
'Your father, then.' Samm tried, the image of the toddler and her father coming to mind again.
'Why do you want to know about him? I was five when he died, I can barely remember him.'
So she did share his lack of connection to parents. 'I've never had a father either.'
'Why are you so curious?' said Kira, wheeling herself over in her chair. 'You never talk, for two solid days, and now this morning all of a sudden you're obsessed with families?' Her hands lifted and spread out, palms facing upwards. 'What's going on?'
She was staring at him with open curiosity, wide and receptive. Samm took the chance. 'I've been doing something-a lot of thinking,' he amended. 'You're aware than we can't reproduce?'
'You were built that way,' said Kira. 'You were … well, you were intended to be weapons, not people.' Her mouth twisted ruefully. 'They didn't want self-replicating weapons.'
She'd summed it up better than he could: they were but the cold, calculative design of their creators. 'Yes, the Partials were never intended to exist outside the infrastructure that created us.' Perfectly created, complete with a self-destruct button. Except they'd also come packaged with the emotions to be hurt by this discovery. 'But we do, and now all those old design parameters are-' He stopped himself before he ended up inadvertently revealed the issue of expiration. The cameras were still watching. Samm's heart pounded as he surveyed Kira, still listening wide-eyed to his words. He supposed it was now or never.
'Listen,' he said, launching into his plan, 'do you trust me?'
A moment of hesitation, then she shook her head. 'No.'
Not yet, then. Samm forged ahead. 'I suppose not. Do you think you ever could?'
'Ever?'
'If we worked together-if we ever offered a truce. Peace. Could you learn to trust us?'
'I …' Kira's answer came slowly, deliberatively. 'I could trust you if you proved yourself trustworthy. I don't … I don't know that I distrust you on principle, if that's what you're asking. Not any more. But a lot of people do.'
He'd concluded as much yesterday. But out of curiosity, he asked, 'And what would it take to earn their trust?'
'Not having destroyed our world eleven years ago,' said Kira promptly. Then she considered, more seriously, 'Short of that … I don't know. Putting it back together.'
Samm turned this over in his head. She gave him more possibility to hope than he'd believed there to be. It reaffirmed his belief that she was open and willing to listen and consider him as an ally in her quest.
'Why are you telling me this?'
'Because the only hope, for either of us, is to help each other. To work together.'
'You've said that before.' He hadn't, exactly, but he'd meant to imply it. His message had got through after all.
'You've asked about our mission,' he said, recalling the question she had fallen back on each time their conversations had strolled down this path. Might as well give her an answer for it. 'That was it, Kira-we were coming here to try to make peace. To see if we could work together. You need our help to cure RM, but we need you just as much.'
'Why?'
He supposed the question was unavoidable. He couldn't share the secret of expiration, not until she'd taken more concrete steps to help him-and certainly not before those damnable cameras-but he could try and work around it. 'I can't tell you yet.'
'But you have to tell me-isn't that why you're here? If you came on a mission of peace, what were you going to say? "We need your help, but we can't say why?"'
Samm recalled his ruminations of the day before, the circuitous routes he'd taken to draw his conclusions that she was his best hope, and invented, 'We didn't know how much you still hated us. We thought perhaps we could persuade you with an offer to work together.' He watched her carefully, alert to any sign of doubt. The other humans would probably have dismissed this as a lie without blinking, but Kira continued to pay full attention. 'When I was captured and brought here, when I saw what's going on here … there was no way. But you, Kira-' he no longer had to fake truth here, 'you listen. More than that, you understand what's at stake.' He drew on an image of her own conviction to cure RM. 'That no price is too high to pay when it means the survival of your species.'
Kira clasped her hands together. 'So just tell me. Forget the cameras, forget whoever's listening on the other side, and tell me what's going on.'
'It's not just a matter of them not believing me,' said Samm, shaking his head. 'If they find out why I'm here-the instant they know the reason-I'm a dead man.'
It surprised him that Kira reacted uneasily to this, turning warily to the cameras. It wasn't the first time he'd mentioned the fact. 'It's okay,' he reassured her. 'They know I have a secret.'
She leaned back and stared at him, her arms folded across her chest. Samm waited patiently, watching her face go through its captivating array of expressions as she thought through all he had said.
Finally, she said, 'No, it's too perfect. It's like you're saying exactly what I want to hear. I don't believe you.'
Samm's hopes threatened to plummet again at her distrust, but he latched on to what she'd also said. She wanted to believe. Her emotions were still warring with logic. She'd already conceded their similarities; he needed to remind her that they shared a desire to survive.
'Why would we want anything else?' Samm appealed to the first thing he'd ever known about Kira-her desire to cure RM. 'It's the most basic instinct of life-to outlive yourself. To build another generation that's going to see tomorrow.' He wondered if she would pick up on the subtle hint that if the Partials shared a similar obstacle to this goal.
'But you've never even known family,' Kira objected, reasoning in a completely different direction. 'You didn't have families, you didn't grow up, you have no idea what it's even like.'
Broken, thought Samm, shuddering slightly.
'What if creation is just a phantom instinct, held over from some lost shred of DNA?' Kira paused, her eyes suddenly distant, lost in a strand of thought. When she focused again, there was sorrow in her gaze. 'What do you think it says about us that we don't have any parents? I don't mean us, I don't mean kids, I mean no fathers at all-a whole society, two whole societies,' she amended, including the Partials, 'with no parents at all. What do you think that's done to us?'
A rush of emotion choked him and his eyes threatened to tear up. Thoughts of strategy, missions, and escape left him as he simply felt their shared underlying pain: the emptiness of two effectively orphaned species. What was the solution to that?
Only peace. It was ironic that he'd started thinking about it as a means to an end, only to arrive now at a wider realisation that it was indeed the only goal worth achieving.
Samm stared into Kira's eyes for a long while, until she finally looked away, blinking hard.
A sudden buzz interrupted their moment, and a soldier ran in, his hands cupped protectively around a syringe. Samm's eyes snapped warily to him, but it was Kira the soldier ran to.
'The nurse said to give you this. She said you'd know what to do with it.'
'You're not allowed in here,' said Kira, standing such that she was between Samm and the soldier.
'She said it was an emergency,' said the soldier, holding out the syringe. Kira took it carefully, and the soldier peered around her. 'So that's him?'
Something about the soldier's words struck a chord with Samm. Kira didn't reply him, though, asking instead, 'What is it?'
'She said you'd know,' said the soldier. 'It's from the maternity ward.'
Kira burst into a frenzy of activity, evidently drawing some connection in her head. 'It's from a newborn! One of the mothers had her baby! Do you know which one?'
'She said you'd know what to do with it!' The soldier followed her to the counter, blocking Samm's view of what she was doing.
'I do know, calm down.' Kira rushed over to her medical scanner. 'This is uninfected blood, do you understand? The babies are born healthy and then the virus hits them, and we have only minutes, maybe less, before the virus morphs and attacks.' Samm listened in interest as she explained, effectively summarising her findings from her previous days' findings. So she'd managed to make some headway after all.
The machine ran its analysis. Samm couldn't see the result that popped up, but the soldier gasped, 'The baby's a Partial?'
What?! Shocked, Samm craned his neck to get a better view.
'No,' said Kira quickly, 'it means the object it found only partially matches the records in the database.'
Okay, false alarm. Samm could almost appreciate the comical side of their exchange. He settled back against his table and studied the soldier. There was something about him that stood out …
Is that him? Samm put his finger on the nagging discrepancy at last. This soldier was the first person other than Kira to address him with a human pronoun. Samm eyed him with greater interest. It was the first sign Samm had that there might be other humans sharing Kira's potential for understanding. He was fairly young, possibly around Samm's own age. Near to Kira's, too. Was it their youth that gave them a greater openness? Or the fact that their age at the time of the Break coloured their perspectives differently from their elders?
All of a sudden, the soldier sprung into a defensive crouch. Samm tensed, recognising the position.
'What's going on-' Kira began. The soldier pulled her down roughly, such that only the tops of their heads remained in Samm's line of sight.
'Get down! There's someone here, someone sneaking around. They think it might be a jailbreak.'
Samm's heart raced at the unexpected intelligence. He'd been working all along on the assumption that his squad was dead, and that he'd been presumed dead along with them. Had he been wrong? He glanced at Kira and was suddenly alarmed. There were only two ways a jailbreak could end: in one version, its failure would likely mean execution for him and the end of whatever trust he'd built with Kira.
In the successful ending, Kira would likely be killed. She was hopelessly unprepared-unarmed … no, she'd realised that too and dashed to her pistol, but it wouldn't give her much defence against an organised attack.
Samm didn't even have time to marvel at how he'd automatically viewed the consequences of a successful jailbreak. An explosion shook the room, blowing the far wall into smithereens, throwing Kira and the soldier violently away from it. Samm's operating table flew clean off the floor and slammed into another wall, fortunately back first, giving him some protection from the crash. His limbs felt freer; the impact must have damaged the table. Samm struggled against them and felt them tear away from their fixings.
He was free.
Here was his chance. The blast had left a gaping hole in the wall, a clear passage out of his prison. Whatever the cause-Partial or human rebels-he could escape. He sensed no one nearby on the link, but the logical decision was still to get away, find cover, and make his way off the island while the humans were still distracted by the explosion.
'Help … me …'
There was a sizzle and a burst of heat as one of the machines, knocked over in the blast, began to burn. An awful stench, like charred flesh, hit Samm's nose.
The door, held fast by solid rubble, gave a rattle and inched open. He needed to go, now, before the humans outside pushed through.
'It's the girl. Is anyone else alive in there?'
'You have to help me, my heart is stopping.' Kira's voice came faintly from under the burning machine.
Samm's thoughts were a whirlwind, full of contradictions. Hard cold survival against the knowledge that if he fled now, he'd leave Kira to die. The humans would never get to her in time.
Samm stopped thinking and acted.
The machine was incredibly heavy and his body was weakened from three days of captivity. Even so, he had enough strength to heave it slowly off Kira's legs. Sparks caught at his clothes, threatening to flame up, but he beat them off once he managed to shift the machine. Kira twitched feebly on the ground, coughing.
The door to the room shuddered under the efforts of the humans behind it. He could probably still run for it, but his window of opportunity was shrinking.
Instead, Samm knelt and scooped Kira up. Her legs were a mess of burns that he didn't even know how to begin treating. Her upper body fared better, but she was still covered in cuts and bruises. He couldn't ascertain what was the extent of her internal injuries.
'Thank you,' she whispered. Her arms circled around him and Samm's heart skipped a beat. 'I think he got away.'
She thought he'd run. He should have. He couldn't have. The world seemed to move in slow motion, then come to a stop, hinging on the sole fact that he was here, holding on to her.
'I'm right here, Kira.'
Her eyes fluttered open. 'You saved me.'
Soldiers battered the door down and surrounded them. 'Put her down!' they shouted. Everything came back into focus-the ruins of the room, the hole that was no longer a possibility for escape, angry soldiers and the barrels of their guns aimed at his face.
'He saved me,' gasped Kira.
'Put her down now!'
Samm set Kira down as gently as he could. The soldiers swarmed him, battering at him with their guns. Over the thuds of their beatings, he could hear Kira's weeping. He didn't know how long they continued their attack. His mind still felt fairly stunned. It was as though there were two Samms: one groaning in pain beneath the boots and rifle butts, and another trying separately to make sense of what was happening, what he had just done.
The choice he had just made.
You idiot, said a voice in his head, that reminded him vaguely of Heron, you should have chosen survival. The choice is always survival. There wasn't much chance of that now… if they didn't kill him there and then on the spot, he didn't think they'd draw out his life much longer. And he'd brought it on himself, with his decision not to run.
Despite this knowledge, he felt a sense of giddy satisfaction settle over him. Whatever happened, whatever his fate now, it was because of his own actions. Not some mission from his commander, not some decision by another person.
I chose.
He'd never felt more human.