Woolf said something else, inaudible through the ringing in Marcus’s ears. They kept low to the ground and crouched against a wall, hoping to put as many barriers between them and the gunfight as possible. Marcus couldn’t use his right arm, and when he examined it he found a long groove in the meat of his triceps—a gunshot wound that had scraped the surface, shredding the muscle but too shallow to damage the bone. He stood up in a daze, headed to look for a first aid kit, but Woolf pulled him back down, yelling something Marcus could almost hear. Marcus shook his head, pointing at his ears to let Woolf know he couldn’t hear anything; the commander frowned, puzzled, then shouted something obviously angry and dug in his breast pocket, pulling out a pair of orange foam earplugs and pressing them into Marcus’s hand. Woolf and the last remaining soldier, a man named Galen, conferred with each other over something, and Marcus pushed the plugs into his ears.

We’re going to die, he thought. There’s no way out of here—it doesn’t matter who wins the fight in the waiting room, the entire city is a war zone. Marcus considered again what they were up against: an army of the perfect soldiers. Humans are less agile, they have slower reaction times, they’re less coordinated, they’re not on the link—

“We’re not on the link!” Marcus shouted, grabbing Woolf’s arm. Woolf looked at him, confused, and Marcus explained his realization; his own voice sounded distant and muted through his ringing ears. “The link—the pheromonal system they use to communicate—they’re all reading each other’s minds. One guy picks up his gun to shoot, and on a battlefield he just shoots and the other guy dies, but in these tight quarters, the other guy’s close enough to pick up the first guy’s link data, so he knows he’s going to shoot, and he gets out of the way. That’s why none of them can hit each other.”

Woolf said something in response, but Marcus still couldn’t hear it. He pushed on anyway. “The Partials use the link to track each other, so when they want to hide, they wear gas masks. If you can’t link with them, you can’t defend against them. In the land of the Partials, we’re like . . . stealth fighters.”