“How about this?” she asked, too angry to stop the tirade. “The Partial who produces the sedative; his name is Williams. He’s a living weapon who cannot, by definition, coexist with any other Partials. Vale altered his DNA, and he can’t alter him back because the equipment broke. The only way to really free them is to—” She stopped suddenly, realizing that she wasn’t just talking about Williams anymore. She was talking about herself. The living weapon that threatened every other Partial merely by existing. “The only way they can be free,” she said softly, “is for him to die.” Her voice choked up, and she forced herself to ask the final question. “What do you do with him?” Please don’t say you’d kill him, she thought. Please don’t say you’d kill me.

“I think . . .” He stopped, and Kira could tell he was thinking deeply. “I hadn’t thought of that yet,” he said. “It’s not simple, but it’s . . .”

Please let him say no, she thought.

“I guess that sometimes one person has to suffer so everyone else can be free,” he said, and Kira’s face went pale.

“So you would kill him?”

“I’m not happy about it,” said Samm, “but what’s the alternative? Sacrificing a whole community for one person? You have to do what’s best for the group, or all you have are tyrants.”

“So you’d sacrifice one guy for the other nine,” said Kira, “but you won’t sacrifice ten guys to save a few thousand. That’s a weird inconsistency, don’t you think? This town full of humans isn’t one of those groups you have to do what’s best for?”

“What I’m saying is that we can’t use people,” said Samm, “because people aren’t things. Though I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, since that’s exactly the way we treated Afa.”

“Excuse me?” asked Kira. “I’m the one who defended him—I’m the one who stood up for him the entire time, who did everything I could to keep him healthy, to be nice to him—”

“We dragged him into a situation he had no business in,” said Samm, “because we needed him. We used him for our own ends, and I’m not saying you did it—we all did it, we all brought him along. But we were wrong to do it, and now he’s dead, and we have to learn our lesson from that.”