WHY?
Samm did his best not to respond, focusing his thoughts—and through them, his link data—on the stirring Partial. He had approached Heron about her apparent confusion before, but every time he did, she left immediately. He didn’t know what she was trying to figure out, but she wasn’t interested in talking about it—but neither did she seem interested in leaving the Preserve entirely. The one thing he knew for sure about Heron was that if you saw her lurking in the shadows, it was only because she wanted you to. What did she want now? He would have to think about it later, when the link wouldn’t give him away.
Partial Number Five had been sending out link data of his own, and Samm returned his focus to that. It was both fascinating and tragic. The link was designed to carry tactical information in the field of battle, informing your squad mates of both danger and safety and syncing everyone to the same informed, efficient emotional state. One of the side effects of this system was that it was triggered from an imaginary stimulus as easily as it was from real life, making Partial soldiers vaguely aware of their sleeping companions’ dreams. The effects were more muted—a simple dream about pizza or a flashback to basic training wouldn’t usually register for anyone else—but an intense emotional experience would often spread through the squad like subtle magic, until they were all sharing the same, or a similar, dream. Like a contagious vision. If one soldier had a nightmare, soon everyone had one; if one soldier dreamed of a girl, the entire squad might wake up with an awkward mix of high fives and embarrassed chuckles. Samm’s sergeant had once dreamed of falling, and the entire group had woken up in the same terrifying moment, gasping with one loud, unified breath as the half-remembered terror subsided. A Partial soldier with a history of good dreams—or simply a very strong memory of a woman—was welcome in any squad, while a soldier haunted by darkness and nightmares was sometimes looked upon as a curse.
The comatose Partials from Dr. Vale’s lab were a pit of darkness Samm could barely stand to be next to. It wasn’t that Number Five’s dreams were dark, for there were many bursts of active, tense, and even happy data that Samm had come to identify as the sleeping Partial’s dreams. What broke his heart was the rest of the time—all the long, troubled, hopeless hours where Five wasn’t dreaming at all. The soldier seemed to exist in a state of constant pain and despair, sensing on some unconscious level that something was deeply and horribly wrong, but lacking the observation and the rational thought to decipher what it was. The other sleeping Partials were the same, with only small variations in the length and magnitude of their brief dreaming respites. Samm could feel their dark pall hanging over the entire floor of the hospital, and he worried about the turmoil they might bring with them when they finally woke up. You couldn’t spend thirteen years in that kind of a pit without being horribly, perhaps irrevocably, scarred by the experience. What would they do when they awoke? Would they be cheered by their recovery, or marked for life by their trauma? Samm had no way of knowing.
As he watched the waking Partial, thinking these thoughts, Samm couldn’t help but feel again inadequate to the unsought task that seemed ready to crush him: the leadership of the Preserve. He was not a leader, not by design and not by nature; he was an underling at best, the perfect soldier, ready to follow his commander through the gates of hell but choked by doubts when it came time to lead the charge himself. And yet here he was, stronger and better informed than almost anybody else in the Preserve, and they had started to look to him for leadership. Laura was technically in charge, but Samm was the one who knew about the sleeping Partials; Samm was the one who knew where Kira and Vale had been taken, and why; Samm was the one who gave his own breath and body to produce the RM cure and save their newborn infants. He had all the power, and they knew it—he could probably beat any ten of them in a fight, too, and he supposed they knew that as well. Even Heron followed him, often wordlessly, though he supposed that was less out of subservience than a simple distaste for taking any leadership herself.
Samm watched the Partial twitching back to life, sensing the horror in its soul, and wondered again if it was a good idea to bring them back at all. Nine Partials could destroy a community like this; nine angry, possibly unhinged Partials would cut through it like a rain of blades.
It should be Kira deciding this,
he thought,
not me—she was the leader, the thinker, the visionary. I’m just some guy.
Like it or not, though, it was his decision, and he wasn’t going to make one against his own people. Thus the Partials were nursed back to health, risks and all, and when they woke up, they’d find some guy named Samm waiting to say hello. He would do his best. He brought children into their rooms sometimes, and tried to send happy thoughts over the link and hoped those actions could counteract their thirteen years of darkness. It was a simple plan, but he was a simple man, and sometimes simple was good. He hoped this was one of those times.
“Here he comes,” said Heron. Samm glanced at her, surprised that she would be the first to announce the final step of Number Five’s awakening, but a sudden cry from Calix made him look back. Heron was right. The gaunt soldier was struggling actively now, not just waking up naturally but striving, practically clawing at the universe to force himself awake by choice. He coughed and sputtered, and Samm jumped up, reaching for the breathing tube and pulling it from Five’s throat. The soldier’s eyes flew open, and his hand shot up to grab Samm’s arm, clamping down with surprising strength for someone so atrophied.
“Help.” His voice was ragged from disuse, thin and raw, but the link data slammed into Samm like a moving truck. The newly opened eyes were wild with terror, and Samm felt the same terror welling up in his own gut—a numbing, crippling, overwhelming sense of wrongness, of helplessness, of boundless fear. Samm raced to sort through his thoughts, trying desperately to separate his own mind from this irrational fright before the link overwhelmed him; he closed his eyes and repeated every comforting detail he could think of, one after the other like a mantra.
You’re safe. We’re your friends. We’re protecting you. We’re healing you. You’re safe.
He realized the soldier probably thought he’d been captured, waking up abruptly with none of his companions nearby and no officer to reassure him; any of his squad mates he could sense on the link would be broadcasting the same catastrophic confusion that he was.
We’re your friends. We’re protecting you. We’re healing you. You’re safe.
“Help.” The soldier’s voice was painful to hear, as if the words themselves were bleeding. “Arm.”
“What does that mean?” asked Calix. “Does his arm hurt? Why did he say ‘arm’?”
“He knows he’s unarmed,” said Phan. “He’s afraid.”
“He’s still waking up,” said Laura, shaking her head. “He’s not rational. Give him time.”
“He might never be rational,” said Heron. “We don’t know what kind of brain damage he’s sustained from being asleep for thirteen years.”
“You’re not helping,” said Calix.
“I could shoot you again,” said Heron. “Would that help?”
“You’re safe,” said Samm. “We’re your friends. We’re protecting you. We’re healing you.”
“Hole,” said the soldier. “Blood.”
One of the hospital’s few nurses burst into the room. “One of the others is waking up.” She looked over her shoulder, listening to a distant shout, then turned back with a frantic mania. “Two of them.”
Five of the nine were awake before morning, though all but one of them had to be restrained. They seemed insane, mad and squalling like superpowered children; Laura thought their minds had been destroyed by Vale’s enforced coma, while Calix, more charitably, suggested that their minds were simply still asleep, and only their bodies had awoken. Samm thought about it just long enough to decide that he didn’t have enough information to decide, and that his course of action would be the same no matter what was wrong. He helped to hold their thrashing limbs while the nurses tied each Partial down with sturdy leather cords.
He worried, briefly, that the damage to their minds was his own fault, having somehow harmed them when they disconnected the Partials from their life support systems, but he pushed that thought away. There was no turning back now, and nothing he could do. He could only solve so many problems at once, so he would spare no time worrying about things he couldn’t change.
When the sun rose and the next shift of nurses arrived at the hospital, Samm briefed them in full before sending the night shift back to their apartments. He murmured his thanks as they left, but stayed himself; there were still four Partials set to wake up, and while they had been preemptively bound, he still wanted to be there when they woke up.
I don’t want them to wake up and think they’re in prison,
he thought. Phan urged him to get some sleep, but Samm was fine—fatigued, yes, but not overly so. He had been designed for far worse physical punishment than a single sleepless night. Emotional punishment, on the other hand . . .
That was another problem he couldn’t solve, and so he pushed it away. Others could help the Partials as they awoke, whispering and soothing and calming their unfocused agitation, but only with words. He was the only one who could speak to them through the link, and so he stayed. The air itself, thick with the link data of nine traumatic disasters, hung around him like a poison. He sat in the room of Partial Number Three, the next one they expected to rise, and tried to think happy thoughts.
WHY?
The thought rang in his head for nearly a minute before he realized it was not his own. He looked up and saw Heron standing in the corner behind the door, though he was certain she hadn’t been there before. Either he was going crazy, or she was specifically trying to be mysterious. He guessed it was the latter, and wondered what petulance would spark such an odd behavior. Or maybe she simply didn’t want anyone else to see her.
“You’re not a ghost,” said Samm. “I know you didn’t walk through that wall.”
“And you’re not as observant as you think,” said Heron. She stepped out of the darkness and walked toward him, padding across the floor like a cat. Samm imagined her pouncing on him with her teeth bared, tearing the flesh from his face, and realized that he was probably much more exhausted than he realized. Partials were rarely struck by such colorful daydreams. Heron turned the room’s other chair and plopped into it with a distinct lack of grace. She was exhausted as well. “I suppose it’s a wonder you saw me at all, with so much hell in the air.”
“I linked you,” said Samm, then paused, too exhausted to explain himself clearly. “Though I guess there are even more link distractions than visual ones.”
“You don’t have to do this.”
Samm looked around. “I’m just sitting in a room. That’s all I’d be doing if I went home.”
“Home is a few thousand miles away.”
“You know what I mean.”
“No, I don’t,” said Heron. “You think of this place as home? We shouldn’t even be here.”
“You didn’t have to stay.”
“Neither did you.”
“I promised I would,” said Samm. “That means I have to, as surely as if I was chained here.”
“If promises are chains,” said Heron, “you should learn not to make any.”
“You don’t understand,” said Samm. He watched Partial Number Three as he lay in the hospital bed, his eyes blinking rapidly—he was dreaming, and from the intensity of his link data Samm knew it was something terrible. The Partial was running, as fast as he could, blasting the room with his fear.
GET OUT
And underneath it, softer but ever-present, Heron’s unspoken question:
WHY?
Samm looked at her, tired of games, and asked her directly, “Why what?”
She narrowed her eyes.
Samm leaned forward. “You really don’t understand why I’m here, do you? That’s what you keep asking about.” He peered into her face, lost in the link and trying to read her eyes, her mouth, her expressions. The way humans did. But it was just a face.
Maybe Heron didn’t have any emotions, on her face or the link. Just questions in an empty shell.
“You stayed too,” he said. “You sold us out to Morgan, but you stayed. Why are you still here?”
“You only have a few months left to live,” said Heron. “Dr. Morgan is looking for a cure, but you can’t get it out here.”
“So you stayed to help me get back?”
“Do you want to go back?”
Yes,
thought Samm, but he didn’t say it out loud. It wasn’t that easy anymore. He hesitated, knowing his confusion would be clear to her on the link, but there was no helping that.
GET OUT,
linked the soldier, writhing in his restraints, trapped in his own nightmare.
Samm took a slow breath. “I promised to stay.”
“But you don’t want to.”
“It’s my own choice.”
“But why?” Her voice was louder now, and the question hammered into him on the link. “Why are you here? You want to know what I’m asking? I’m asking why you’re here. You want to know why I stayed? Because I want to know why
you
did. We’ve known each other for almost twenty years now, we fought together in two wars, I followed you through a toxic hell because I trust you, because you’re the closest thing I’ve ever had to a friend, and now you’re going to kill yourself with inaction. That’s not a decision a rational person makes. Your expiration date will come, and you’ll die, and . . . why? You think you’re saving these people, but you’re only buying them, what, eight extra months? A few more infants saved, a slightly larger generation lives, and then you die and they stop having children and their slightly larger generation grows up and they can’t have any children and the whole world dies. Eight months later than it would have.” Her voice was hot and angry, spitting the words through clenched teeth. “Why?”
Samm pointed at Number Three. “I’m helping them, too.”
“By putting them through this?” Heron yanked on the leather cords.