“I know you’re a Partial,” said Heron, “if that’s what you’re asking. Some kind of crazy Partial none of the doctors could identify.” She smiled slightly, raising her eyebrow. “I take it you’re still keeping this a secret? You never told your human friends before you left them?”

“It’s not that easy,” said Kira.

“It’s the easiest thing in the world,” said Heron, “unless . . . You’re still trying to play both sides, aren’t you? Partial and human at the same time? Trying to save both? Not gonna work.”

Kira felt herself growing angry. “You’re suddenly the expert on my life?”

Heron raised her hands in mock defensiveness. “Whoa, tiger, where’d all the hostility come from?”

Kira nearly snarled. “The last time I saw you, you were strapping me down to an operating table. You worked for Dr. Morgan then, and I don’t see why I should trust you now.”

“Because I haven’t killed you yet.”

“I don’t think you understand trust very well,” said Kira.

“You can trust her because I trust her,” said Samm. He paused. “That is, assuming you still trust me.”

Kira studied him, remembering how he’d betrayed her—and how he’d saved her. Did she trust him? A little, yes, but how much? She blew out a long breath of air and gestured helplessly. “Give me a reason.”

“I defected from Dr. Morgan’s faction when I freed you from the lab,” said Samm. “Heron followed us, waited for you to leave, and after we had discussed everything we’d seen, she proposed a plan: finding our own cure for the expiration date. That’s why we had joined Morgan’s faction in the first place, but her methods had become . . . distasteful.”

Kira raised an eyebrow. “That’s an understatement.”

“The expiration date is going to kill us in less than two years,” said Heron, and Kira heard a flash of cold anger in her voice. “Every single Partial in the world, dead. Faced with genocide, Morgan’s methods don’t seem quite so extreme.”

Kira glanced at Heron, then back at Samm. “And yet you still left her.”

“We left because of you,” said Samm. Kira felt a flush of warmth creep through her body, but listened quietly as Samm continued. “Discovering that you were a Partial changed everything, Kira—you are literally, right now, exactly what we’ve hoped to be for almost twenty years.”

“Lost?”

“Human.” Samm tapped the photo of her as a little girl. “You age. You grow. You aren’t enslaved to a chemical caste system. Dr. Morgan’s preliminary scans of your body suggest that you’re not even sterile.”

Kira furrowed her brow. “How do you know this?”