“I do not enjoy what I’m doing,” said Armin. “Don’t think me heartless for accepting the inevitable—no more than an oncologist is being cruel when he tells a cancer patient that he only has a month to live. That doctor isn’t a monster, he’s simply doing his job. The difference here is that I can do something no oncologist has ever been able to do; no doctor, no politician, no holy man. I can save them, Kira.”
“By killing them?”
“By harvesting the best of them—their strength, their will, their creativity. All of it encoded in their DNA.” He held up a jar of blood and tissue, then peered into her eyes. “Kira, what do you think is going to happen when the world ends?”
“We survived it once,” she said. “We can survive again.”
“We can’t.” He shook his head. “We had a plan for the world, you know. I still believe it would have worked. I designed that biology myself, and it was flawless. But it’s all gone now. It was human nature that made it impossible, human and Partial.”
“So I was right,” said Kira. She looked at Green and Marcus, then back at her father. “I solved the puzzle; I discovered the process you engineered: the secrets buried in RM and expiration and the Partial DNA. I knew there was a plan, and that the plan was for peace, because I knew you.” Her eyes darkened, and she stared at the jar in his hands in horror. “At least I thought I did.”
“That dream is gone now.”
“How can you say that?” she asked. “You were determined to care for the life you’d created; you fought for Partial rights before the Partials even existed. You knew they were destined to be a second-class species, not even accepted as people, and you devised the entire plan to ensure that Partials and humans had to see each other as equals if they wanted to survive. You tried to eliminate racism on a biological level, for all time.” She gestured to the jar of tissue, to his gloved hands red with drying blood, to the Ivies behind him standing silent in the doorways of murdered patients. “How did you go from that to this? How could you ever convince yourself that this was the only way?”
Armin’s face grew more serious, and he repeated his question in a somber tone. “Do you know what’s going to happen when the world ends? We call it the end of the world, but it’s only the end of us. The world will go on, the planet and the life that lives on it. Rivers will keep flowing, the sun and the moon will keep turning, vines will creep up across the cars and the concrete. There will come soft rain. The world will forget that we were ever here. Human thought—the glorious zenith of five billion years of evolution—will go out like a candle, gone forever. Not because it was time, not because the world moved past us, but because we, as a people, were fools. Too selfish to live in peace, and too proud to stop our wars long after they ceased to have any real meaning. Your precious human souls, your Partial brothers and sisters, all of whom you seem to think can live together in peace, are out there right now tearing this island to shreds, fighting and killing and dying not because they see a way out, not because they have a cure or a clue or a solution to any of their problems, but because that’s what they do. The only thing left of any value on this entire planet is their lives, but that’s not worth anything while the other guy still has his, so they kill each other. They are in a desperate race toward the final death. The winner will be the last one standing, and his prize is the final and most terrible solitude this world has ever known.”
Kira wanted to protest, but her eyes fell to the body of the Ivie she’d shot, barely thirty feet away, its blood spreading thickly across the floor. She thought of the people she’d killed to get here, the bodies in her wake. A collapsed apartment building in New York City. The Manhattan Bridge. Afa Demoux. Delarosa and her nuke. Kira’s own bloody hands, as red as her father’s, stabbing a dagger into the skull of a dead Partial soldier.
“These people are already dead,” said Armin. “Leaving them alive is no mercy, for they’ll only be killed by someone else, and yet I can’t abandon them. I’ve played my part in their destruction, don’t think I’ve forgotten that. Don’t think I’ve forgiven myself. But Jerry has set the stage for a new beginning. And when the snows melt and the sun returns and the world erupts in young green leaves, I will make sure that someone’s there to see it. I will make sure there are eyes to behold it, and minds to understand it, and voices to carry on our story. You are breaking yourself in pieces to give a dying man a few more seconds of life. I’m going to take that man’s blood and build a child and a future and a legacy that will last for another five billion years. To cover the Earth and reach out into the stars and fill the universe with poetry and laughter and art. To write new books and sing new songs.”
