Dan Wells - Fragments

Kira stood up and walked through the entire floor, going slowly, watching for anything else that looked out of place or looted. She found a printer missing, but she couldn’t tell if it had been taken before or after the Break. When she finished the central room, she searched the handful of offices along the back wall, and gasped in surprise when she found that one of them had been completely gutted: the computer gone, the shelves emptied, everything. There was enough corporate detritus to make it look like a once-functioning office—a phone and a wastebasket and various little stacks of papers and so on—but nothing else. This office had far more shelving than the others as well, all empty, and Kira wondered just how much, exactly, had been stolen from it.

She paused, staring at the empty desk. Something else was different about this one, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. There was a small desk organizer knocked onto the floor, just as there had been in the cubicles, which implied that the office had been raided with the same sense of anxious haste. Whoever had stolen these items had been in an awfully big hurry. The now-empty cables all hung in the same way, though the office had far more of them than the cubicles. She racked her brain, trying to figure out what was bothering her, and finally hit on it: the small office had no photos. Most of the desks she’d been scouring for the last two days had held at least one family photo, and many of them had more: smiling couples, groups of kids in coordinated outfits, the preserved images of families now long dead. This room, however, had no photos at all. That meant one of two things: first, that the man or woman who worked here had no family, or didn’t care enough about them to display photos. Second, and more tantalizing, whoever had taken the equipment had also taken the photos. And the most likely reason for that was that the person who’d taken the photos was the same person who’d once worked in the room.

Kira looked at the door, which read afa demoux, and below it in thick block letters, it. Was “IT” a nickname? It didn’t seem like a very nice one, but her understanding of old-world culture was sketchy at best. She checked the other doors and found that each followed the same pattern, a name and a word, though most of the words were longer: operations, sales, marketing. Were they titles? Departments? “IT” was the only one written all in capital letters, so it was probably an acronym, but Kira didn’t know what it stood for. Invention . . . Testing. She shook her head. This wasn’t a lab, so Afa Demoux wasn’t a scientist. What had he done here? Had he come back for his own equipment? Was his work so vital, or so dangerous, that someone else had come back after to take it? This wasn’t a random looting— no one hiked up twenty-two stories for a couple of computers when there were plenty to be had at ground level. Whoever had taken these had taken them for a reason—for something important that was stored in them. But who had it been? Afa Demoux? Someone from East Meadow? One of the Partials?

Who else was there?

his hearing is now in session.”

Marcus stood in the back of the hall, craning to see over the crowd of people filling the room. He could see the senators well enough—Hobb and Kessler and Tovar and a new one he didn’t know, all seated on the stage behind a long table—but the two accused were out of his sight. The city hall they used to use for these sessions had been trashed in a Voice attack two months ago, before Kira had found the cure for RM and the Voice had reintegrated with the rest of society. Without the hall, they’d taken to using the auditorium of the old East Meadow High School instead; the school had been closed a few months before, so why not? Of course, Marcus thought, the building is the least of the things that have changed since then. The old leader of the Voice was one of the senators now, and two of the former senators were the ones on trial. Marcus stood on his tiptoes, but the auditorium was packed, standing room only. It seemed like everyone in East Meadow had come to see Weist and Delarosa’s final sentence.

“I’m going to be sick,” said Isolde, clutching Marcus’s arm. He dropped down from his toes to stand flat on the ground, grinning at Isolde’s morning sickness, then grimacing in pain as her grip tightened and her fingernails dug into his flesh. “Stop laughing at me,” she growled.

“I wasn’t laughing out loud.”

“I’m pregnant,” said Isolde, “my senses are like superpowers. I can smell your thoughts.”

“Smell?”

“It’s a very limited superpower,” she said. “Now seriously, get me some fresh air or I’m going to make this room a lot grosser than it already is.”

“You want to go back out?”

Isolde shook her head, closing her eyes and breathing slowly. She wasn’t showing yet, but her morning sickness had been terrible—she’d actually lost weight instead of gained it, because she couldn’t keep any food down, and Nurse Hardy had threatened her with inpatient care at the hospital if she didn’t improve soon. She’d been taking the week off work to relax, and it had helped a bit, but she was too much of a political junkie to stay away from a hearing like this. Marcus looked around the back of the auditorium, saw a seat near an open door, and pulled her toward it.

“Excuse me, sir,” he said softly, “can my friend have this chair?”

The man wasn’t even using it, just standing in front of it, but he glowered at Marcus in annoyance. “It’s first come, first served,” he said lowly. “Now stay quiet so I can hear this.”

“She’s pregnant,” said Marcus, and nodded smugly as the man’s entire demeanor changed in seconds.

“Why didn’t you say so?” He stepped aside immediately, offering Isolde the seat, and walked off in search of somewhere else to stand. Works every time, thought Marcus. Even after the repeal of the Hope Act, which had made pregnancy mandatory, pregnant women were still treated as sacred. Now that Kira had discovered a cure for RM, and there was a real hope that infants would actually survive more than a few days, the attitude was even more prevalent. Isolde sat down, fanning her face, and Marcus positioned himself behind her seat, where he could discourage people from blocking her airflow. He looked back up at the front of the room.

“. . . 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.