The Partials Sequence Complete Collection by Dan Wells

Author:Dan Wells
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Another pack of Watchdogs trailed them from Camelback Mountain to the Susquehanna River but never moved in to attack. Samm tied their food and equipment high in the trees every night, and Heron and Kira did their best to protect the horses. Afa stopped talking to Samm completely, and only barely to Heron; the few times he did, both girls began to suspect he was confusing her for Kira. He was better in the mornings, when his mind was rested, but as each day wore on he became more suspicious, more furtive; Kira began to see a third personality emerge, a dangerous cross between the confused child and the paranoid genius. It was this version of Afa that stole a knife from Kira’s gear, and tried to stab Samm with it the next time he got too close to his backpack. They got the knife away from him, but Kira worried that the struggle was even more damaging in the long run, feeding his distrust and paranoia.

As they traveled, Kira thought about her experience with the link—about the times she could sense something, and the times she couldn’t. She couldn’t quite puzzle it out, but that didn’t mean it didn’t make sense, just that she didn’t yet have all the tools she needed to make sense of it. She tried to concentrate, willing herself to feel Samm’s emotions, or to transmit something to him, but it didn’t seem to work—unless they were in a high-stress situation, like combat. After a few days of trying and failing, she approached Samm about it directly.

“I want you to teach me how to use the link.”

Samm looked at her passively, though she knew he must be sending some kind of link data to reflect his emotional state. Was he confused? Skeptical? She clenched her teeth and tried to sense it, but she couldn’t. Or she couldn’t tell the difference between that and what she thought she was picking up intuitively.

“You can’t learn how to link,” said Samm. “That’s like . . . learning how to see. Either your eyes work or they don’t.”

“Then maybe I’m already doing it and I just can’t recognize it,” said Kira. “Teach me how it works, so I know when it happens.”

Samm rode in silence for a moment, then shook his head—a surprisingly human gesture he must have picked up from her or Heron. “I don’t know how to describe it because I can’t imagine not having it,” he said. “It’s like not having eyes. You use your eyes for everything—vision is so important to human and Partial function that it colors every other aspect of our lives. Even that—the word ‘colors’ as a synonym for ‘affects.’ It’s a visual metaphor being used to describe something nonvisual. When you imagine someone trying to function without sight, that’s how I imagine someone trying to function without the link.”

“But vision fails all the time,” said Kira. “Blind people can still function in society, and I bet all of them understand metaphors like ‘colors.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.