“Hey,” said Samm.

Kira sat, looking at him, not sure what to say or how to say it. “Thanks for coming back.”

“You told me to.”

“I mean, thanks for coming to find me. At all. You didn’t have to.”

“You told me to do that, too,” said Samm. “We said we’d learn what we could, then get back together and compare notes.”

“We did,” said Kira, scooting back to rest against the wall. “So. What do you know?”

“I know we’re dying.”

Kira nodded. “The expiration date.”

“You say that,” said Samm, “but do you really appreciate what it means?”

“Partials die after twenty years.”

“The first wave of Partials arrived at the Isolation War twenty-one years ago,” he said. “They were created the year before that. All our leaders, all our front-line veterans, are already dead. The closest thing we have to ancestors.” He paused again. “I was in the last group made, and I turn nineteen in a few months. Heron’s been nineteen for a while. Do you know how many of us are left?”

“All we ever talk about is ‘a million Partials,’” said Kira. “‘There are a million Partials right on the other side of the sound.’ I guess that’s not true anymore, is it?”

“We’ve lost more than half.”

Kira brought her knees in closer to her chest, suddenly colder. The room felt small and fragile, like a house of sticks ready to crumble in the wind.

Five hundred thousand dead, she thought. More than five hundred thousand. The sheer size of the number, nearly twenty times the entire human population, terrified her. Her next thought came unbidden: It won’t be long before we’re even.

Immediately she felt terrible, even for thinking it. She didn’t want anyone to die anymore, human or Partial; she certainly didn’t want to “get even” with them. She’d been angry at them before, before she started to understand them, but she’d moved past that. Hadn’t she? She was one of them, after all. It occurred to her then that she might have to face an expiration date as well—and moments later she realized that she was so different from the other Partials, she might not have an expiration date at all. The first thought terrified her, but the second stunned her with a deep, empty sadness. The last of Partial left. The last of my people.

Which side am I on?