The crowd moved in on them, the open path to the gate become smaller and smaller as the crowd closed in. Kira swung her gun around wildly, trying to balance Samm with her other arm. “Please, Samm, I need you to wake up.”

“I’m awake,” he said, the crowd now mere feet away from them. “I can walk.”

Kira let go of him, and he stayed steady enough. “We have to—”

Vale fired.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

“I apologize for my absence,” said Nandita. “I was trying to save the world.” She stood in the living room of her old house—the one Ariel had run away from so many years ago, and swore she’d never come back to.

Ariel clenched her fists and snapped back. “You lied to us before,” she said. “What makes you think we’ll believe you now?”

“Because you’re adults now,” said Nandita, “or close enough. Children need to be protected from the truth, but teenage girls need to face it.”

Five faces stared back at her, all the women in Ariel’s life: her sisters Madison and Isolde, her friend Xochi Kessler, and Xochi’s mother, the former senator Kessler. Even Arwen was here, the miracle baby. All trapped by the Partial army, brought back here to simmer and worry and die. They’d gathered in Nandita’s house because it was the only home they had left. If they knew how close we were to Kira, Ariel thought, we’d be in even more trouble than we are.

“The Grid’s been searching for you for a year,” said Senator Kessler. “Where the hell have you been, and what are your ties to the Partial army?”

“I created them,” said Nandita.

“What?” Kessler stammered, the first to manage a response. Ariel was too shocked to say anything. “You created the Partials?”

“I was on the team that built their genetic code,” said Nandita, taking off her coat and shawl. Her hands were wrinkled, but missing the calluses Ariel had always seen on her. Wherever she’d been, she hadn’t been working in a garden, or in any kind of manual labor.

Kessler seethed with anger. “You just admit it? Just like that? You created one of the greatest forces for evil this world has ever—”

“I created people,” said Nandita, “like any other mother. And the Partials, like any other children, have the capacity for good or evil. I’m not the one who raised them, and I’m not the one who oppressed them so harshly they were forced to rebel.”

“Forced?” demanded Kessler.

“You’d have done no less in their place,” snapped Nandita. “You’re more eager to fight what you don’t agree with than anyone I know; anyone but Kira, perhaps.”

“Just let her talk, Erin,” said Xochi. Ariel had never heard the girl call her mother by anything but her first name.