They left the trail to give the house a wide berth and broke through the trees onto a cracked asphalt road that wound north through a parade of faded lakeside homes. By silent agreement they broke into a run, the only sound their shoes slapping wetly against the road. They ran half a mile before Green risked speaking.

“Do you know where we’re going?”

“Sort of.”

“That’s good enough?”

“I had a map before I was captured,” said Kira. “There’s a causeway up here—if we’re on the right island.”

“And if we’re not?”

“Then we have to cross the water again,” said Kira. “So let’s hope we’re on the right island.”

They ran in silence for a moment, and then Green asked another question. His voice was dark and worried. “What happened back there?”

“In the house?”

“I thought I was back in China again. Like, I literally thought I was there, in the middle of the Isolation War, in one of the subway tunnels we used to take their larger cities, except . . . I never had to fight in those tunnels. Other units did, but not mine.”

“I got the drop on the first guard because they didn’t know I was there,” said Kira. “The only way to get the second was to use the link against him.”

“I thought you weren’t on the link.”

“It wasn’t my data,” said Kira. She hesitated. “I borrowed it from the other dead Partial.”

He shot her a probing look. “Borrowed?”

“Extracted via combat knife,” said Kira. He looked horrified, and she felt queasy at the memory. “Look, I wish I didn’t have to do it, but it was the only way. Normally you don’t link the data until it’s out in the air, diffused, but inside the pheromonal glands it’s still liquid, and intensely concentrated.” She shrugged helplessly. “Apparently his unit did fight in the subway tunnels, and we remembered it through his link data.”

“Who—” said Green, stopping abruptly. Kira checked her steps, almost tripping, and looked back at him. He peered at her in confusion. “Did you just say ‘we’ remembered it?”

Crap, thought Kira. It wasn’t that she desperately needed to keep her nature secret, it was just that she hadn’t told him before, and she didn’t want it to look like she’d been withholding something from him. She cleared her throat.

“You’re not on the link,” Green insisted. He walked toward her, furrowing his brow. “Maybe it’s the concentrated data, like you said—when it’s that strong, maybe humans can sense it too?”

This could be a way into recruiting Green to my cause, she thought. If he thinks humans can sense link data, even only in a case like this, he could see a stronger connection between the species. He might be more open to helping me, helping the humans.