Partials by Dan Wells

outside,” he explained. “Chimney still works, too, so with a storm like this to hide the smoke, you can’t even tell I’m here.”
    “We followed the tracks,” said Marcus, pulling off his coat.
    “The tracks don’t lead here,” said Tovar. “At least not directly.”
    “I heard you,” said Jayden, a small smile creeping through the corner of his mouth. “Dolly needs a few lessons in stealth.”
    Tovar shook his head. “She wanted more sugar. Figures you folks’d be passin’ by for the two seconds she decides to argue the point. Most folks—meanin’ those folks nosy enough to be lookin’—never find this place at all. They just follow my tracks down around the next house, back through the woods, and then give up when they hit the creek. Turns out the bridge is fallen down, if you’ll believe it, and the planks I use to get across are pretty well hidden on the wrong side.”
    “You’re a drifter,” said Jayden.
    “I’m a salesman. That makes me a target for all kinds of unsavories, but that doesn’t mean I have to be a target of opportunity.” He moved a pile of blankets from the couch nearest the fire. “Best seats to the ladies, naturally. This place is pretty cozy with just me in it, but we’re going to get downright neighborly with this many people trying to sleep.”
    Kira watched the man as he sorted out the blankets, squeezing between the dusty couches to arrange sleeping space for ten people and a donkey. Is he a part of the Voice? There was no way to tell, not unless he tried to blow them up.
    The drifter handed a blanket to Brown, who stared at him suspiciously before yanking it gruffly from his hands. Tovar smiled and stepped back.
    “This is going to be an awful long night if we keep not trusting each other. You really think I’m a Voice?”
    Brown said nothing, and Tovar turned to Gianna. “How about you?” He turned again, stopping in front of Jayden and opening his arms. “What about you, do you think I’m a Voice? Is risking my own life and sharing my dry blankets all part of some larger plan to destroy the last human civilization?”
    “I think you’re ex-military,” said Kira, inching closer to the fire.
    Tovar cocked his head to the side. “What makes you say that?”
    “Some of the words you use,” said Kira, “like ‘intel’ and ‘target of opportunity.’ The way you stowed your gun when we came in. The way you and Jayden are standing with absolutely identical postures right now.”
    Jayden and Tovar looked at each other, then at themselves: feet shoulder-width apart, back straight, arms folded loosely behind them. They moved away from each other awkwardly, shifting their weight and shaking out their wrists.
    “Being ex-military doesn’t mean he’s not in the Voice,” said Brown. “A lot of them are soldiers, too.”
    “If being a soldier is proof of guilt,” said Tovar, “seven out of ten people in this room are looking awfully guilty.”
    “So tell us about yourself,” said Marcus, settling into a couch. “If I’m going to spend the whole night waiting for you guys to stop flirting and shoot each other, I want to at least be entertained.”
    “Owen Tovar,” he repeated with a bow, “born and raised in Macon, Georgia. I played varsity football for two years, graduated, joined the marines, and blew off four of my toes in the war—this would be the Iranian war, not the Isolation War, the one with the Chinese that you kids are probably thinking of, the one we sent the Partials to fight for us. Though I suppose most of you are what, late teens? Two or three years old when that war ended, five or six when the whole world ended a few years later? No, when I say ‘war,’ you’re probably thinking of the Partial War, things bein’ what they are, but I hate to break it to you that that wasn’t no kind of war at all, just some fightin’ and some dyin’ and some ‘that’s all she wrote.’ War, see, is when two sides fight, maybe not evenly,