Armin’s face grew more serious, and he repeated his question in a somber tone. “Do you know what’s going to happen when the world ends? We call it the end of the world, but it’s only the end of us. The world will go on, the planet and the life that lives on it. Rivers will keep flowing, the sun and the moon will keep turning, vines will creep up across the cars and the concrete. There will come soft rain. The world will forget that we were ever here. Human thought—the glorious zenith of five billion years of evolution—will go out like a candle, gone forever. Not because it was time, not because the world moved past us, but because we, as a people, were fools. Too selfish to live in peace, and too proud to stop our wars long after they ceased to have any real meaning. Your precious human souls, your Partial brothers and sisters, all of whom you seem to think can live together in peace, are out there right now tearing this island to shreds, fighting and killing and dying not because they see a way out, not because they have a cure or a clue or a solution to any of their problems, but because that’s what they do. The only thing left of any value on this entire planet is their lives, but that’s not worth anything while the other guy still has his, so they kill each other. They are in a desperate race toward the final death. The winner will be the last one standing, and his prize is the final and most terrible solitude this world has ever known.”

Kira wanted to protest, but her eyes fell to the body of the Ivie she’d shot, barely thirty feet away, its blood spreading thickly across the floor. She thought of the people she’d killed to get here, the bodies in her wake. A collapsed apartment building in New York City. The Manhattan Bridge. Afa Demoux. Delarosa and her nuke. Kira’s own bloody hands, as red as her father’s, stabbing a dagger into the skull of a dead Partial soldier.