“Which is also why you’re still here,” said Tovar.

“My wife and child are in East Meadow,” said Haru, “and you know who they are—every human being alive knows who they are. And that means you know why we don’t have time to waste. Arwen is the only human child in the world, and she’s going to attract some attention—for all we know, they’re already in Partial custody somewhere, ready to be cut open and studied.”

“We can’t lose that child,” said Tovar, and Haru could see that the fear in his face was real. “Arwen represents the future. If she dies in that explosion, or in the fallout after . . .”

“That’s why we have to evacuate now,” said Haru, “before Delarosa detonates that nuke. There’s got to be a way.”

“Hobb’s plan uses the explosion as a distraction,” said Mkele. “But what if we distracted them another way?”

“If we could create a distraction big enough to overthrow the Partials, we’d have done it already,” said Hobb. “The nuke is all we have.”

Mkele shook his head. “We don’t need to overthrow them, just pull their attention. Delarosa’s guerrillas have been doing that already, more or less, but if we went all out—”

“We’d die,” said Tovar. “It’s like Hobb said, if we could do it safely, we’d have done it already.”

“So we don’t do it safely,” said Mkele.

The other men went quiet.

“This is as final and as deadly as any situation can be,” said Mkele. “We’re talking about a nuclear explosion forty miles from the last group of human beings on the planet. Even our best-case scenario, where somebody finds Delarosa and stops her in time, leaves us trapped in the hands of an occupying species that treats us like lab rats. An all-out attack on the Partials is going to kill every human soldier who tries it—none of us hold any illusions about that—but if there’s a chance that the rest of the humans could escape, then how can we possibly argue that it’s not worth it?”

Haru thought about his family: his wife, Madison, and his baby girl. He couldn’t bear to think of leaving Arwen without a father, but Mkele was right—when the only alternative is extinction, an awful lot of horrors become acceptable. “We’re going to die anyway,” he said. “At least this way our deaths will mean something.”

“Don’t go volunteering just yet,” said Tovar. “This is a two-part plan: One group provides the distraction, and the other gets everyone as far south as humanly possible. No pun intended.”

“Then we run,” said Mkele. His voice was somber. “Away from our only source of the cure. Or did we all forget?”