I could go, she thought, but where? What was left to do in a world this ruined? What answers could she even try to look for, what hope could she possibly find? She had an answer here, practically in the palm of her hand, and she had the means to take it and mold it and make it a reality. The implications were terrible, and the fallout would be catastrophic, but if she was right, civilization would survive—humans and Partials, enslaved and immoral and unconscionably compromised, but alive. Things would be bad, but they would get better; maybe not for generations, but someday.

Is that enough? thought Kira. Is survival really all that matters? If I tell Morgan, and Morgan enslaves the human race to save the Partials, they’ll live—but they’ll live in hell. How can I make that decision? If I have the chance to save even one life, and I don’t do it, am I a killer? If I have the chance to save the entire world and I let it die, how much worse am I? Yet I would be responsible for the greatest oppression ever forced upon the human species. Every person I saved would curse my name, from now until the end of time.

I can’t think of any other way, but I can’t bring myself to go through with it.

Her hand hovered over the doorknob, an inch and a half from making her decision. The heat from her palm was warming it, hot blood pumping through her veins, radiating out in an aura of vitality. If she left now, that heat would remain, a ghostly afterimage of her presence, here and gone in an instant. Another few months for the Partials, another few years for the humans. The rain would fall, the plants would grow, the animals would eat and kill and die and grow again, and the ghost of sentient life would fade away, an insignificant blip in the memory of the Earth. Someday, a million years away, maybe a billion, when another species evolved or awoke or descended from the stars, would they even know that anybody had been here?

There might be buildings, or plastic residue, or something to say that we existed, but nothing to say why. Nothing to say what made us worth remembering.

I could go, she thought again. I could find Samm, or Xochi or Isolde or Madison. I could see Arwen one last time. I could find Marcus.

Marcus.

He wanted to marry me, and I wanted him. What changed? I guess I did. I had to find out what I was, and what I meant, and now I know that I’m nothing. Just another girl who can’t save the world.

Well, not unless I damn it.