“Please,” he said, gesturing to a chair, “have a seat. It’s Walker, right?”

Kira nodded, sitting straight-backed on the edge of the chair. “Yes, sir.”

“I was impressed with your paper.”

Kira’s eyes widened in surprise. “You read it?”

Skousen nodded. “Very few interns attempt to publish research papers; it caught my attention.” He smiled. “Imagine my surprise when it turned out to be not only well researched but wholly original. Your conclusions on the structure of RM were flawed, but innovative. You show a lot of promise as a researcher.”

“Thank you,” said Kira, feeling a surge of warmth flow through her body. This might actually work. “That’s what I came to talk to you about: more research.”

Skousen leaned back in his chair, his eyes focused on her; he wasn’t enthusiastic, but he was listening. Kira plunged ahead.

“Consider this: The Hope Act is really just a streamlined version of the same thing we’ve been doing for eleven years—have as many newborns as possible—and in eleven years it hasn’t yielded a single viable success. We’re throwing mud at a wall to see what sticks, and eleven years is long past time to say that more mud is not the answer. We need to start throwing something else.”

Skousen stared back, stone-faced. “What do you suggest?”

“I want to transfer from maternity to research.”

“Done,” he said. “I was going to suggest that anyway. What else?”

Kira took a deep breath. “I think we need to seriously consider the benefits of opening a program for the study of Partial physiology.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“For lack of a better way to put it, sir, I think we should organize a team to cross onto the mainland and obtain a Partial for study.”

Dr. Skousen was silent. Kira waited, watching him, not even daring to breathe. She heard the hum of the electric bulb, a stringent buzz just at the threshold of her awareness.

Skousen’s voice was low and hard. “I thought you were taking this seriously.”

“I’ve never been more serious in my life.”

“Your life is not a very large sample size.”

“This is about extinction,” said Kira. “You said so yourself. Our one and only plan at this point is to put on gas masks and isolate the mothers and keep good notes on how the babies die. And yes, against all odds we’ve managed to glean some useful information from those notes, but I’m not willing to hang my species’ future on a long-shot version of what was already a long shot to begin with. The Partials are immune: They engineered a virus perfectly designed to kill human beings, but they’re immune to it.”

“That’s because they’re not human,” said Skousen.

“But they have human DNA,” said Kira, “at least in part. The virus should affect them just as much as it does us. But it doesn’t, and that means their immunity was engineered, and that means we can decipher it and use it.”