Isolde looked down, rubbing her belly the way Madison always used to. Marcus worked as hard as he could—everyone on the cure teams did—but they were still no closer to synthesizing the cure for RM. Kira had figured out what the cure was and was able to obtain a sample from the Partials on the mainland, but Marcus and the other doctors were still a far cry from being able to manufacture it on their own.

“Another died this weekend,” said Isolde softly. She looked up at Sandy for confirmation, and the nurse nodded sadly. Isolde paused, her hand on her belly, then turned to Marcus. “There’s more, you know—the Hope Act is gone, none of our pregnancies are mandatory anymore, and yet there are more now than ever before. Everyone wants to have a child, trusting that you’ll have figured out how to manufacture the cure reliably by the time they come to term.” She looked back down. “It’s funny—we always called them ‘infants’ in the Senate, back before the cure, like we were trying to hide from the word ‘child.’ When all it was was death reports, we never wanted to think of them as babies, as children, as anything but subjects in a failed experiment. Now that I’m . . . here, though, now that I’m . . . making one of my own, growing another human being right inside of me, it’s different. I can’t think of it as anything besides my baby.”

Sandy nodded. “We did the same thing in the hospital. We still do. The deaths are still too close, so we try to keep death distant.”

“I don’t know how you can do it,” said Isolde softly. Marcus thought he heard her voice crack, but he couldn’t see her face to tell if she was crying.

“You have to have some kind of progress, though,” Madison told Marcus. “You have four teams—”

“Five,” said Marcus.

“Five teams now,” said Madison, “all trying to synthesize the Partial pheromone. You have all the equipment, the samples to work from, you have everything. It . . .” She paused. “It can’t be a dead end.”

“We’re doing everything we can,” said Marcus, “but you have to understand how complex this thing is. It doesn’t just interact with RM, it’s part of the RM life cycle somehow—we’re still trying to understand how it works. I mean . . . we still don’t even understand why it works. Why would the Partials have the cure for RM? Why would it be part of their breath, in their blood? As near as we could gather from Kira before she left, the Partials don’t even know they have it, it’s just part of their genetic makeup.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” said Sandy.

“Not unless there’s some larger plan,” said Marcus.