Kira stood in the hallway outside Dr. Morgan’s office, her hand poised above the doorknob. If she explained her plan, the scientist would go for it; they would capture a human, extract the virus, and test it for anti-expiration properties. Kira was certain they would find some; in a world where nothing seemed to make sense, this did. The secrets she’d spent years uncovering, the plan she’d traveled halfway across the world to reveal, the unsolvable secrets buried inside every human and Partial and viral RM spore—they all pointed to this answer, this complex, hidden, brilliant interaction of biology and politics and human nature. Working together was the answer: Partials could cure humans, and now humans could cure Partials. She was sure of it. All she had to do was prove it, and Morgan could help her do that.

But was that as far as it would go?

Dr. Vale had enslaved Partials to help keep his tiny band of humans alive, and Morgan was more than capable of doing the same thing in reverse. Kira thought about the Partials in the Preserve, eternally sedated, tended like a human garden and harvested like gaunt, skeletal herbs. Unwilling victims, forever on the precipice of death. Morgan would do the same to humans—her records of early experiments already told horror stories of humans kept in cages, starving and naked, subjected to horrible tortures, all in the name of saving the Partials. She had the power to make it happen again, and Kira was about to give her the reason. It didn’t have to be that way—it didn’t have to be one side ravaging the other—but it would be. It always had been, and this new revelation was only going to make it worse. The situation wouldn’t change.

Unless Kira changed it herself.

But how?

The hospital corridor was empty; there were a handful of Partial soldiers Morgan had pressed into service as lab assistants, but they were in other parts of the complex today. The building was powered, but the rooms and halls were hollow and abandoned, devoid of life and sound and movement. No one would see Kira standing here, locked in indecision . . . she could turn around and leave if she wanted to. She could probably leave the whole complex without even being seen or raising an alarm, as Morgan had lost all interest in keeping her here. She was a failed experiment; a shattered dream.