Fragments

“. . . which is just the kind of thing we’re trying to stop in the first place,” Senator Tovar was saying.

“You can’t be serious,” said the new senator, and Marcus focused his concentration to hear him better. “You were the leader of the Voice,” he told Tovar. “You threatened to start, and by some interpretations actually started, a civil war.”

“Violence being occasionally necessary isn’t the same thing as violence being good,” said Tovar. “We were fighting to prevent atrocity, not to punish it after the fact—”

“Capital punishment is, at its heart, a preventative measure,” said the senator. Marcus blinked—he’d had no idea that execution was even being considered for Weist and Delarosa. When you have only 36,000 humans left, you don’t jump right to executing them, criminal or not. The new senator gestured toward the prisoners. “When these two die for their crimes, in a community so small everyone will be intimately aware of it, those crimes are unlikely to be repeated.”

“Their crimes were conducted through the direct application of senatorial power,” said Tovar. “Who exactly are you trying to send a message to?”

“To anyone who treats a human life like a chip in a poker game,” said the man, and Marcus felt the room grow tense. The new senator was staring at Tovar coldly, and even in the back of the room Marcus could read the threatening subtext: If he could do it, this man would execute Tovar right along with Delarosa and Weist.

“They did what they thought was best,” said Senator Kessler, one of the former senators who’d managed to weather the scandal and maintain her position. From everything Marcus had seen, and the inside details he’d learned from Kira, Kessler and the others had been just as guilty as Delarosa and Weist— they had seized power and declared martial law, turning Long Island’s tiny democracy into a totalitarian state. They had done it to protect the people, or so they claimed, and in the beginning Marcus had agreed with them: Humanity was facing extinction, after all, and with those kinds of stakes it’s hard to argue that freedom is more important than survival. But Tovar and the rest of the Voice had rebelled, and the Senate had reacted, and the Voice had reacted to that, and on and on until suddenly they were lying to their own people, blowing up their own hospital, and secretly killing their own soldier in a bid to ignite fear of a fictional Partial invasion and unite the island again. The official ruling had been that Delarosa and Weist were the masterminds, and everyone else had simply been following orders—you couldn’t punish Kessler for following her leader any more than you could punish a Grid soldier for following Kessler. Marcus still wasn’t sure how he felt about the ruling, but it seemed pretty obvious that this new guy didn’t like it at all.

Marcus crouched down and put a hand on Isolde’s shoulder. “Remind me who the new guy is.”

“Asher Woolf,” Isolde whispered. “He replaced Weist as the representative from the Defense Grid.”

“That explains that,” said Marcus, standing back up. You don’t kill a soldier without making every other soldier in the army an enemy for life.

“‘What they thought was best,’” Woolf repeated. He looked at the crowd, then back at Kessler. “What they thought was best, in this case, was the murder of a soldier who had already sacrificed his own health and safety trying to protect their secrets. If we make them pay the same price that boy did, maybe the next pack of senators won’t think that kind of decision is ‘best.’”

Marcus looked at Senator Hobb, wondering why he hadn’t spoken yet. He was the best debater on the Senate, but Marcus had learned to think of him as the most shallow, manipulative, and opportunistic. He was also the one who’d gotten Isolde pregnant, and Marcus didn’t think he could ever respect the man again. He certainly hadn’t shown any interest in his unborn child. Now he was showing the same hands-off approach with the sentence. Why hadn’t he picked a side yet?

“I think the point’s been made,” said Kessler. “Weist and Delarosa have been tried and convicted; they’re in handcuffs, they’re on their way to a prison camp, they’re paying for—”

“They’re being sent to an idyllic country estate to eat steaks and stud for a bunch of lonely farm girls,” said Woolf.

“You watch your tongue!” said Kessler, and Marcus winced at the fury in her voice. He was friends with Kessler’s adopted daughter, Xochi; he’d heard that fury more times than he cared to count, and he didn’t envy Woolf’s position. “Whatever your misogynist opinion of our farming communities,” said Kessler, “the accused are not going to a resort. They are prisoners, and they will be sent to a prison camp, and they will work harder than you have ever worked in your life.”

“And you’re not going to feed them?” asked Woolf.

Kessler seethed. “Of course we’re going to feed them.”

Woolf creased his brow in mock confusion. “Then you’re not going to allow them any fresh air or sunshine?”

“Where else are they going to work at a prison farm but outside in a field?”

“Then I’m confused,” said Woolf. “So far this doesn’t sound like much of a punishment. Senator Weist ordered the coldhearted killing of one of his own soldiers, a teenage boy under his own command, and his punishment is a soft bed, three square meals, fresher food than we get here in East Meadow, and all the girls he could ever ask for—”

“You keep saying ‘girls,’” said Tovar. “What exactly are you envisioning here?”

Woolf paused, staring at Tovar, then picked up a piece of paper and scanned it with his eyes as he talked. “Perhaps I misunderstood the nature of our ban on capital punishment. We can’t kill anyone because, in your words, ‘there are only thirty-five thousand people left on the planet, and we can’t afford to lose any more.’” He looked up. “Is that correct?”

“We have a cure for RM now,” said Kessler. “That means we have a future. We can’t afford to lose a single person.”

“Because we need to carry on the species,” said Woolf with a nod. “Multiply and replenish the Earth. Of course. Would you like me to tell you where babies come from, or should we get a chalkboard so I can draw you a diagram?”

“This is not about sex,” said Tovar.

“You’re damn right it’s not.”

Kessler threw up her hands. “What if we just don’t let them procreate?” she asked. “Will that make you happy?”

“If they can’t procreate, we have no reason to keep them alive,” Woolf shot back. “By your own logic, we should kill them and be done with it.”

“They can work,” said Kessler, “they can plow fields, they can grind wheat for the whole island, they can—”

“We’re not keeping them alive for reproduction,” said Tovar softly, “and we’re not keeping them alive as slaves. We’re keeping them alive because killing them would be wrong.”

Woolf shook his head. “Punishing criminals is—”

“Senator Tovar is correct,” said Hobb, rising to his feet. “This is not about sex or reproduction or manual labor or any of these other issues we’ve been arguing. It’s not even about survival. The human race has a future, like we’ve said, and food and children and so on are all important to that future, but they are not the most important. They are the means of our existence, but they cannot become the reason for it. We can never be reduced—and we can never reduce ourselves—to a level of pure physical subsistence.” He walked toward Senator Woolf. “Our children will inherit more than our genes; more than our infrastructure. They will inherit our morals. The future we’ve gained by curing RM is a precious gift that we must earn, day by day and hour by hour, by being the kind of people who deserve to have a future. Do we want our children to kill one another? Of course not. Then we teach them, through our own example, that every life is precious. Killing a killer might send a mixed message.”

“Caring for a killer is just as confusing,” said Woolf.

“We’re not going to care for a killer,” said Hobb, “we’re going to care for everybody: old and young, bond and free, male and female. And if one of them happens to be a killer—if two or three or a hundred happen to be killers—we still care for them.” He smiled mirthlessly. “We don’t let them kill anybody else, obviously; we’re not stupid. But we don’t kill them, either, because we’re trying to be better. We’re trying to find a higher ground. We have a future now, so let’s not start it by killing.”

There was a scattering of applause in the room, though Marcus thought some of it felt obligatory. A handful of people shouted back in disagreement, but the tenor of the room had changed, and Marcus knew the argument was done; Woolf didn’t look happy about it, but after Hobb’s words he didn’t look eager to keep calling for execution, either. Marcus tried to get a look at the prisoners’ reactions but still couldn’t see them. Isolde was muttering, and he stooped back down to hear her.

“What did you say?”

“I said he’s a stupid glad-handing bastard,” Isolde snapped, and Marcus backed away with a grimace. That was not a situation he wanted any part of. She insisted that her encounter with Hobb had been willing—she’d been his assistant for months, and he was very handsome and charming—but her attitude had soured significantly in the months since.

“It doesn’t look like we’re going to be deliberating any further,” said Tovar. “I call for a vote: Marisol Delarosa and Cameron Weist will be sentenced to a life of hard labor on the Stillwell Farm. All in favor.”

Tovar, Hobb, and Kessler all raised their hands; a moment later Woolf did the same. A unanimous vote. Tovar leaned down to sign the paper in front of him, and four Grid soldiers walked in from the wings to escort the prisoners out. The room grew noisy as a hundred little conversations started up, people arguing back and forth about the verdict and the sentence and whole drama that had unfolded. Isolde stood up, and Marcus helped her into the hall.

“All the way outside,” said Isolde. “I need to breathe.” They were ahead of most of the crowd and reached the outer doors before the main press of people. Marcus found them a bench, and Isolde sat with a grimace. “I want french fries,” she said. “Greasy and salty and just huge fistfuls of them—I want to eat every french fry in the entire world.”

“You look like you’re going to throw up, how can you even think about food?”

“Don’t say ‘food,’” she said quickly, closing her eyes. “I don’t want food, I want french fries.”

“Pregnancy is so weird.”

“Shut up.”

The crowd thinned as it reached the front lawn, and Marcus watched as groups of men and women either wandered off or stood in small groups, arguing softly about the senators and their decision. “Lawn,” perhaps, was misleading: There used to be a lawn in front of the high school, but no one had tended it in years, and it had become a meadow dotted with trees and crisscrossed with buckling sidewalks. Marcus paused to wonder if he’d been the last person to mow it, two years ago when he’d been punished for playing pranks in class. Had anyone mowed it since? Had anyone mowed anything since? That was a dubious claim to fame: the last human being to ever mow the lawn. I wonder how many other things I’ll be the last to do.

He frowned and looked across the street to the hospital complex and its full parking lot. Much of the city had been empty when the world ended—not a lot of people eating out and seeing movies while the world collapsed in plague—but the hospital had been bustling. The parking lot spilled over with old cars, rusted and sagging, cracked windows and scratched paint, hundreds upon hundreds of people and couples and families hoping vainly that the doctors could save them from RM. They came to the hospital and they died in the hospital, and all the doctors with them. The survivors had cleaned out the hospital as soon as they settled in East Meadow—it was an excellent hospital, one of the reasons the survivors had chosen East Meadow as a place for their settlement in the first place—but the parking lot had never been a priority. The last hope for humanity was surrounded on three sides with a maze of rusted scrap metal, half junkyard and half cemetery.

Marcus heard a surge of voices and turned around, watching Weist and Delarosa emerge from the building with an escort of Grid soldiers and a crowd of people, many of them protesting the verdict. Marcus couldn’t tell if they wanted something harsher or more lenient, but he supposed there were probably different factions calling for each. Asher Woolf led the way, slowly pushing through the people and clearing a path. A wagon was waiting to take them away—an armored car rigged with free axles and drawn by a team of four powerful horses. They stomped as they waited, whiffling and blustering as the noise of the crowd grew closer.

“They look like they’re going to start a riot,” said Isolde, and Marcus nodded. Some of the protestors were blocking the doors of the wagon, and others were trying to pull them away while the Grid struggled helplessly to maintain order.

No, thought Marcus, frowning and leaning forward. They’re not trying to maintain order, they’re trying to . . . what? They’re not stopping the fight, they’re moving it. I’ve seen them quell riots before, and they were a lot more efficient than this. More focused. What are they—?

Senator Weist fell to the ground, his chest a blossom of dark red, followed almost immediately by a deafening crack. The world seemed to stand still for a moment, the crowd and the Grid and the meadow all frozen in time. What had happened? What was the red? What was the noise? Why did he fall? The pieces came together one by one in Marcus’s mind, slowly and out of order and jumbled in confusion: The sound was a gunshot, and the red on Weist’s chest was blood. He’d been shot.

The horses screamed, rearing up in terror and straining against the heavy wagon. Their scream seemed to shatter the moment, and the crowd erupted in noise and chaos as everyone began running—some were looking for cover, some were looking for the shooter, and everyone seemed to be trying to get as far away from the body as they could. Marcus pulled Isolde behind the bench, pressing her to the ground.

“Don’t move!” he said, then sprinted toward the fallen prisoner at a dead run.

“Find the shooter!” screamed Senator Woolf. Marcus saw the senator pull a pistol from his coat, a gleaming black semiautomatic. The civilians were fleeing for cover, and some of the Grid as well, but Woolf and some of the soldiers had stayed by the prisoners. A spray of shrapnel leaped up from the brick wall behind them, and another loud crack rolled across the yard. Marcus kept his eyes on the fallen Weist and dove to the ground beside him, checking his pulse almost before he stopped moving. He couldn’t feel much of anything, but a wave of blood bubbling up from the wound in the man’s chest told Marcus the heart was still beating. He clamped down with his hands, applying as much pressure as he could, and cried out suddenly as someone yanked him backward.

“I’m trying to save him!”

“He’s gone,” said a soldier behind him. “You need to get to cover!”

Marcus shrugged him off and scrambled back to the body. Woolf was shouting again, pointing through the meadow to the hospital complex, but Marcus ignored them and pressed down again. He hands were red and slick, his arms coated with warm arterial spray, and he shouted for assistance. “Somebody give me shirt or a jacket! He’s bleeding front and back and I can’t stop it all with just my hands!”

“Don’t be stupid,” said the soldier behind him. “You’ve got to get to cover.” But when Marcus turned to look at him, he saw Senator Delarosa, still in handcuffs. She was crouched between them.

“Save her first!” said Marcus.

“He’s over there!” cried Woolf, pointing again to the buildings behind the hospital. “The shooter’s in there, somebody circle around!”

Blood pumped thickly through Marcus’s fingers, staining his hands and covering the prisoner’s chest; blood from the exit wound flowed steadily from the man’s back, spreading out in a puddle and soaking Marcus’s knees and pants. There was too much blood—too much for Weist to ever survive—but Marcus kept the pressure on. The prisoner wasn’t breathing, and Marcus called again for help. “I’m losing him!”

“Let him go!” shouted the soldier, loud and more angry. The world seemed drenched in blood and adrenaline, and Marcus struggled to stay in control. When hands finally jutted forward to help with the bleeding, he was surprised to see that they were not the soldier’s, but Delarosa’s.

“Somebody get over there!” Woolf was shouting. “There’s an assassin somewhere in those ruins!”

“It’s too dangerous,” said another soldier, crouching low in the brush. “We can’t just charge in there while a sniper has us pinned down.”

“He’s not pinning you down, he’s aiming for the prisoners.”

“It’s too dangerous,” the soldier insisted.

“Then call for backup,” said Woolf. “Surround him. Do something besides stand there!”

Marcus couldn’t even feel a heartbeat anymore. The blood in the victim’s chest was stagnant, and the body was inert. He kept the pressure on, knowing that it was useless but too stunned to think of anything else.

“Why do you even care?” asked the soldier. Marcus looked up and saw the man talking to Senator Woolf. “Five minutes ago you were calling for an execution, and now that he’s dead you’re trying to capture his killer?”

Woolf whirled around, shoving his face mere inches from the soldier’s. “What’s your name, Private?”

The soldier quailed. “Cantona, sir. Lucas.”

“Private Cantona, what did you swear to protect?”

“But he’s—”

“What did you swear to protect!”

“The people, sir.” Cantona swallowed. “And the law.”

“In that case, Private, you’d better think good and hard the next time you tell me to abandon them both.”

Delarosa looked at Marcus, her hands and arms covered in her fellow prisoner’s blood. “This is how it ends, you know.”

They were the first words Marcus had heard her speak in months, and they shocked him back to consciousness. He realized he was still flexing his arms against Weist’s lifeless chest. He pulled back, staring and panting. “How what ends?”

“Everything.”

think it was the Grid,” said Xochi.

Haru snorted. “You think the DG killed the man who used to represent them in the Senate.”

“It’s the only explanation,” said Xochi. They were sitting in the living room, nibbling on the last remnants of dinner: grilled cod and fresh-steamed broccoli from Nandita’s garden. Marcus paused on that thought, noting that he still thought of it as Nandita’s garden even though she’d been missing for months—she hadn’t even been the one to plant this crop, Xochi had done it. Xochi and Isolde were the only ones left in the house, and yet in his mind it was still “Nandita’s garden.”

Of course, in his mind this was still “Kira’s house,” and she’d been gone for two months. If anything, Marcus spent more time here now than before she’d left, always hoping she’d turn up at the door one day. She never did.

“Think about it,” Xochi went on. “The Grid’s found nothing, right? Two days of searching and they haven’t found a single piece of evidence to lead them to the sniper: not a bullet casing, not a footprint, not even a scuff mark on the floor. I’m no fan of the Grid, but they’re not inept. They’d find something if they were looking, therefore they’re not looking. They’re covering it up.”

“Or the sniper’s just extremely competent,” said Haru. “Is that a possibility, or do we have to jump straight to the conspiracy theory?”

“Well, of course he’s competent,” said Xochi. “He’s Gridtrained.”

“This sounds like a circular argument,” said Isolde.

“Weist was part of the Grid,” said Haru. “He was their own representative on the council. If you think a soldier would kill another soldier, you don’t know much about soldiers. They’re ferociously vindictive when one of their own gets attacked. They wouldn’t be covering this up, they’d be lynching the guy.”

“That’s exactly what I mean,” said Xochi. “Whatever else Weist did, he killed a soldier in cold blood—maybe not personally, but he gave the order. He arranged the murder of a soldier under his own command. The Grid would never just let that slide, you said it yourself: They’d hunt him down and lynch him. The new Grid senator, Woolf or whatever, Isolde said he was practically screaming for the death penalty, but then they didn’t get it, so they went to plan B.”

“Or more likely,” said Haru, “this is exactly what the Grid says it is: an attempt on Woolf or Tovar or someone like that. One of the senators still in power. There’s no reason to kill a convicted prisoner.”

“So the sniper just missed?” asked Xochi. “This amazingly competent super-sniper, who can evade a full Grid investigation, was aiming for one of the senators, but he’s just a really crappy shot? Come on: He’s either a pro or he’s not, Haru.”

Marcus tried to stay out of these arguments—“these” meaning “any argument with Haru”—and this was exactly why. He’d seen firsthand the way the soldiers had reacted to the attack, and he still had no idea if it was a conspiracy or not. The soldier had tried to pull Marcus off Weist, but did he do it because he was trying to save Marcus, or because he was trying to keep Marcus from saving Weist? Senator Woolf seemed practically offended by the attack, as if killing the prisoner had been a personal insult against him, but was that genuine or was he just playing up the ruse? Haru and Xochi were passionate, but they were too quick to jump to extremes, and Marcus knew from experience that they’d argue back and forth for hours, maybe for days. He left them to it, and turned instead to Madison and Isolde, both cooing quietly over Madison’s baby, Arwen.

Arwen was the miracle baby—the first human child in almost twelve years to survive the ravages of RM, thanks to Kira’s cure self-replicating in her bloodstream. She was asleep now in Madison’s arms, wrapped tightly in a fleece blanket, while Madison talked softly with Isolde about pregnancy and labor. Sandy, Arwen’s personal nurse, watched quietly in the corner—the Miracle Child was too precious to risk without fulltime medical attention, so Sandy followed mother and daughter everywhere, but she had never really fit into their group socially. There were more in their retinue as well: To help protect the child, the Senate had assigned them a pair of bodyguards. When a crazed woman—the mother of ten dead children—had tried to kidnap Arwen the day Madison first brought her to the outdoor market, they had doubled the guards and reinstated Haru to the Defense Grid. There were two guards here tonight, one in the front yard and one in the back. The radio on Haru’s belt chirped softly every time one of them checked in.

“Any luck with that?” asked Madison, and Marcus snapped back to attention.

“What?”

“The cure,” said Madison. “Have you had any luck with it?”

He grimaced, glancing at Isolde, and shook his head. “Nothing. We thought we had a breakthrough a couple of days ago, but it turned out to be something the D team had already tried. Dead end.” He grimaced again at his own word choice, though this time he managed to avoid glancing at Isolde; better to let that reference disappear in shame than call any more attention to it.

Isolde looked down, rubbing her belly the way Madison always used to. Marcus worked as hard as he could—everyone on the cure teams did—but they were still no closer to synthesizing the cure for RM. Kira had figured out what the cure was and was able to obtain a sample from the Partials on the mainland, but Marcus and the other doctors were still a far cry from being able to manufacture it on their own.

“Another died this weekend,” said Isolde softly. She looked up at Sandy for confirmation, and the nurse nodded sadly. Isolde paused, her hand on her belly, then turned to Marcus. “There’s more, you know—the Hope Act is gone, none of our pregnancies are mandatory anymore, and yet there are more now than ever before. Everyone wants to have a child, trusting that you’ll have figured out how to manufacture the cure reliably by the time they come to term.” She looked back down. “It’s funny— we always called them ‘infants’ in the Senate, back before the cure, like we were trying to hide from the word ‘child.’ When all it was was death reports, we never wanted to think of them as babies, as children, as anything but subjects in a failed experiment. Now that I’m . . . here, though, now that I’m . . . making one of my own, growing another human being right inside of me, it’s different. I can’t think of it as anything besides my baby.”