Shon seethed, staring at the map until his vision turned red, and he slammed his fist into the table. It cracked under the force of the blow, and he collapsed to the floor of the middle-school gym he had made his base camp. Human rebels still swarmed through the forest, hiding and sniping and slipping away, killing his soldiers and attacking their supplies and leading them ever farther to the east: always north and east. Away from the mainland and away from East Meadow, and now White Plains was gone and East Meadow was emptying like a sieve. In hindsight it was obvious—the humans’ actions were a powerful deception precisely because they weren’t successful. Victory after victory, prisoner after prisoner, they had swept across the island and mopped up the guerrillas and played straight into their hands like fools. The ruse had worked, and the human civilians were getting away.

The sheer coldheartedness of it enraged him. War was war, but he had tried to conduct it honorably. He had stopped Morgan’s executions as soon as Morgan’s orders stopped coming. He had gathered the humans but he hadn’t hurt them; he’d tried to quell their uprisings peacefully when he could, and he’d worked to bring East Meadow food and water. They had repaid him with a vicious bioweapon, a campaign of terrorism, and now a nuclear explosion that had undoubtedly wiped most of the Partial species off the planet. His friends, his leaders . . . he had felt abandoned before, with no new orders for weeks, but now he was completely cut off. He would never receive new orders; he would never receive another message on the radio; he would never rejoin the rest of his army because it did not exist. He had twenty thousand Partials under his command, and there would never be reinforcements because they were the last living Partials in the world.

In ten more days the next batch would expire, and they would be down to seventeen thousand. A month later they’d lose six thousand more.

He was done being honorable.

A messenger walked toward him but kept his distance, probably because of the shattered table and the angry link data still boiling through the air around his head. He took a breath to calm himself before speaking.

“Report.”

“One of the prisoners is talking,” said the messenger. “Apparently the rebels have been spreading word of the nuke, telling people to flee south before it went off.”

“And we never discovered this?”

“You had given explicit orders not to torture anyone,” said the messenger. “Now that we are, they’re . . . We’re learning a lot.”

“Who was behind it?”

“A resistance group called the White Rhinos,” said the messenger. “They’ve been in operation since just after the occupation of East Meadow began.”

“I know who they are,” said Shon. “They’ve been notoriously hard to catch—do we have any in custody?”

“Just one, sir.”