“I used to wonder what I was for,” said Kira. She looked up at him, meeting his eyes for the first time that evening. His face was a warm bronze, almost glowing in the firelight, and his eyes were as black as the clouded, starless sky. “When I found out I was a Partial, I thought that they must have built me for some grand purpose. Something evil, maybe, like I was a bomb carrying a new strain of RM, or a spy just waiting to be activated. I hoped, though, that just maybe I was the key to saving us all, the cure for everything or a hybrid model, or something that could bring the two species together.” She smiled, but it felt sour and forced, the kind of smile that led almost instantly to tears. “Turns out I’m useless, at least as far as saving the world goes.” She wiped her eye. “I don’t carry the cure for RM, and while I don’t think I expire, I can’t do much to keep other Partials from doing so. Now Armin wants me for my DNA, and I can’t help but wonder if that’s all I’m good for. I used to wonder if I was really going to live through this, but now I can’t help but think that maybe . . . I shouldn’t.”

“Don’t say that.”

“I thought I was made for something terrible,” said Kira, “and then I thought I was made for something great, and now it turns out I wasn’t made for anything. I’m just . . . here.”

“You mean like everybody else?” asked Marcus. His eyes were kind, almost smiling, but Kira looked away.

“It’s not like that,” she said.

“It’s exactly like that,” said Marcus. “Nobody has a . . . destiny. I mean, nobody has some kind of inescapable path for their life. This mug was made from clay, and that clay could have been anything at all until somebody made it into a mug. People aren’t mugs, we’re clay. Living, breathing, thinking, feeling clay, and we can shape ourselves into anything we want, and we keep shaping ourselves all our lives, getting better and better at whatever we want to be, and when we want to be something else we just smooth out the clay and start over. Your lack of ‘purpose’ is the single best thing about you, because it means you can be whatever you want.”

She closed her eyes, her chest swelling with hope, her heart crying out to believe him, but she couldn’t. Not yet. “What about the Partial soldiers?” she asked. “They were built for one thing, and one thing only—are they locked in one place? They can’t even disobey orders without working against their own biology. What are they supposed to do now?”