COPYRIGHT

First published in hardback in the USA by HarperCollins Publishers Inc. in 2013 First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2013 HarperCollins Children’s Books is a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd, 1 London Bridge Street, SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright © 2013 by HarperCollins Publishers

Dan Wells asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of the work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9780007465231

Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2013 ISBN: 9780007465583

Version: 2017-05-18

This book is dedicated to everyone who ever admitted they were wrong. It’s not a sign of weakness or a lack of dedication, it’s one of the greatest strengths a person—human or Partial—can have.

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

PART 1

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

PART 2

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

PART 3

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

PART 4

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

CHAPTER FORTY

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

CHAPTER FIFTY

KEEP READING

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

aise a glass,” said Hector, “to the best officer in New America.”

The room came alive with the clink of glass and the roar of a hundred voices. “Cornwell! Cornwell!” The men tipped their mugs and bottles and drained them in gurgling unison, slamming them down or even throwing them at the floor when the booze within was gone. Samm watched in silence, adjusting his spotting scope almost imperceptibly. The window was murky, but he could still see the soldiers grin and grimace as they slapped one another on the back, laughed at ribald jokes, and tried not to look at the colonel. The link would be telling them everything about Cornwell anyway.

Hidden in the trees on the far side of the valley, well outside the effective range of the link, Samm had no such luxury.

He twisted the knob on his tripod, swiveling the microphone barely a fraction of a millimeter to the left. At this distance even a small change of angle swept the sound across a vast portion of the room. Voices blurred through his earbuds, snatches of words and conversations in a quick aural smear, and then he was listening to another voice, just as familiar as Hector’s—it was Adrian, Samm’s old sergeant.

“. . . never knew what hit them,” Adrian was saying. “The enemy line shattered, exactly as planned, but for the first few minutes that made it all the more dangerous. The enemy became disoriented, firing in all directions at once, and we were pinned down too fiercely to reinforce him. Cornwell held the corner through the whole thing, never flinching, and all the time the Watchdog was howling and howling; it nearly deafened us. No Watchdog was as loyal as his. She worshipped Cornwell. That was the last major battle we saw in Wuhan, and a couple of days later the city was ours.”

Samm remembered that battle. Wuhan had been taken almost sixteen years ago to the day, in March 2061, one of the last cities to fall in the Isolation War. But it had been one of Samm’s first enemy engagements; even now he could remember the sounds, the smells, the taste of the gunpowder sharp in the air. His head buzzed with the memory, and phantom link data coursed through his brain, just enough to stir his adrenaline. Instincts and training surfaced almost immediately, heightening Samm’s awareness as he crouched on the darkened hillside, prepping him for a battle that existed only in his mind. This was followed almost immediately by an opposite reaction—a calming wave of familiarity. He hadn’t linked to anyone in days, and the sudden feeling, real or not, was almost painfully comfortable. He closed his eyes and held on to it, concentrating on the memories, willing himself to feel them again, stronger, but after a few fleeting moments they slipped away. He was alone. He opened his eyes and looked back through the scope.

The men had brought out the food now, wide metal trays heaped high with steaming pork. Herds of wild pigs were common enough in Connecticut, but mostly in the deep forest away from Partial settlements. They must have hunted pretty far afield for a feast like this. Samm’s stomach rumbled at the sight of it, but he didn’t move.

Far away the soldiers stiffened, only slightly but all in unison, warned by the link about something Samm could only guess at. The colonel, he thought, and twisted his scope to look at Cornwell: He was as bad as ever, cadaverous and rotten, but his chest still rose and fell, and there didn’t seem to be anything immediately wrong. A twinge of pain, perhaps. The men in the room were ignoring it, and Samm chose to do the same. It wasn’t time yet, it seemed, and the party continued. He listened in on another conversation, more reminiscing about the old days in the Isolation War, and here and there a story about the revolution, but nothing that fired Samm’s memory as profoundly as the sergeant’s story. Eventually the sight of the pork ribs and the sound of chewing became too much, and Samm carefully dug a plastic bag of beef jerky from his pack. It was a pale imitation of the juicy ribs his former comrades were enjoying, but it was something. He turned his eyes back to the scope and found Major Wallace right as he stood up to speak.

“Lieutenant Colonel Richard Cornwell is unable to speak to you today, but I’m honored to say a few words on his behalf.” Wallace moved slowly, not just his walk but his gestures, his speech—every motion was measured and deliberate. He looked as young as Samm, like an eighteen-year-old human, but in real time he was nearing twenty—the expiration date. In another few months, maybe only a few weeks, he’d start to decay just like Cornwell. Samm felt cold, and pulled his jacket tighter around his shoulders.

The party grew as quiet as Samm, and Wallace’s voice carried powerfully through the hall, echoing tinnily in Samm’s earbuds. “I’ve had the honor of serving with the colonel my entire life; he pulled me out of the growth tank himself, and he put me through boot camp. He’s a better man than most I’ve met, and a good leader to all his men. We don’t have fathers, but I’d like to think that if we did, mine would be something like Richard Cornwell.”

He paused, and Samm shook his head. Cornwell was their father, in every sense but the strictly biological. He had taught them, led them, protected them, done everything a father was supposed to do. Everything Samm would never have the chance to do. He tweaked the zoom on the spotting scope, pushing in as close on the major’s face as he could. There were no tears, but his eyes were gaunt and tired.

“We were made to die,” said the major. “To kill and then to die. Our lives have but two purposes, and we finished the first one fifteen years ago. Sometimes I think the cruelest part wasn’t the expiration date, but the fifteen years we had to wait to find out about it. The youngest of you have it worst, because you’ll be the last to go. We were born in war, and we earned our glory, and now we sit in a fading room and watch each other die.”

The roomful of Partials stiffened again, harder this time, some jumping to their feet. Samm swung his scope wildly, looking for the colonel, but the tight zoom on the major’s face made him lose his bearings, and he searched helplessly for a few panicked seconds, listening to shouts of “The colonel!” and “It’s time!” Finally Samm pulled back, reset the scope, and zoomed in again from nearly a full mile away. He found the colonel’s bed, in a place of honor at the front of the room, and watched as the old man shook and coughed, flecks of black blood dribbling from the corners of his mouth. He looked like a corpse already, his cells degenerating, his body rotting away almost visibly as Samm and the other soldiers watched. He sputtered, grimaced, hacked, and lay still. The room was silent.

Samm watched, stone-faced, as the soldiers prepared the final death rite: Without speaking a word, the windows were thrown open, the curtains cleared, the fans turned on. Humans met death with crying, with speeches, with wailing and gnashing of teeth. The Partials met it as only Partials could: through the link. Their bodies were designed for the battlefield: When they died, they released a burst of data to warn their fellow soldiers of danger, and when they felt it, those soldiers would release more data of their own to spread the word. The fans churned at the air, blowing that data out into that world so that everyone would link it and know that a great man had died.

Samm waited, tense, feeling the breezes blow back and forth across his face. He wanted it, and he didn’t; it was both connection and pain, community and sadness. It was depressing how often those two came together these days. He watched the leaves flutter on the trees below him in the valley, watched the branches sway gently as the wind brushed past them. The data never came.

He was too far away.

Samm packed up his scope and the directional microphone, stowing them in his pack with their small solar battery. He searched the site twice, making sure he’d left nothing behind— the plastic bag of food was back in his satchel, the earbuds were stowed in his pack, his rifle was slung over his shoulder. Even the marks of the tripod in the dirt he kicked smooth with his boot. There was no evidence he had ever been here.

He looked one last time at his colonel’s funeral, pulled on his gas mask, and slipped back into exile. There was no room in that warehouse for deserters.

he sun beat down through the gaps in the skyline, mapping out a pattern of ragged yellow triangles on the broken streets below. Kira Walker watched the road carefully, crouched beside a rusted taxi at the bottom of a deep urban canyon. Grass and scrub and saplings stood motionless in the cracked asphalt, untouched by wind. The city was perfectly still.

Yet something had moved.

Kira brought her rifle to her shoulder, hoping for a better view with the telescopic sight, then remembered—for the umpteenth time—that her scope had been broken in the cave-in last week. She cursed and lowered the gun again. As soon as I’m done here, I’m going to find another gun store and replace the stupid thing. She peered down the road, trying to separate shape and shadow, and raised her gun again before cursing under her breath. Old habits die hard. She ducked her head and scuttled to the back end of the taxi; there was a delivery truck a hundred feet down sticking halfway into the street, which should be able to hide her movements from whatever—or whoever—was down there. She peered out, stared for nearly a minute at the unmoving street, then gritted her teeth and ran. No bullets or clatters or roars. The truck did its job. She trotted up behind it, dropped to one knee, and peeked out past the bumper.

An eland moved through the underbrush, long horns curling into the sky, its long tongue picking at shoots and greens growing up through the rubble. Kira stayed still, watching intently, too paranoid to assume that the eland was the same thing she’d seen moving before. A cardinal screeched overhead, joined moments later by another, bright red streaks spinning and diving and chasing each other through the power lines and traffic lights. The eland nibbled at the small green leaves of a maple sapling, peaceful and oblivious. Kira watched until she was certain there was nothing else to see, then watched some more just in case. You could never be too careful in Manhattan—the last time she’d come here she’d been attacked by Partials, and so far on this trip she’d been chased by both a bear and a panther. The memory made her pause, turn, and check behind her. Nothing. She closed her eyes and concentrated, trying to “feel” a nearby Partial, but it didn’t work. It never had, not in any way she could recognize, even when she had spent a week in close contact with Samm. Kira was a Partial, too, but she was different—she appeared to lack the link and some of their other traits, plus she aged and grew like a normal human. She didn’t really know what she was, and she had no one she could turn to for answers. She didn’t even have anyone to talk to about it—only Samm and the mad Partial scientist Dr. Morgan knew what she was. Kira hadn’t even told her boyfriend—her best friend—Marcus.

She shivered uneasily, grimacing at the uncomfortable confusion that always followed her questions about herself. That’s what I’m here to find, she thought. Answers to the questions.

She turned and sat on the broken asphalt, leaning against the truck’s flat tire and pulling out her notebook again, though at this point she had the address memorized: Fifty-fourth and Lexington. It had taken her weeks to find the address, and several more days to make it here through the ruins. Maybe she was being too cautious. . . .

She shook her head. There was no such thing as “too cautious.” The unsettled areas were too dangerous to take any chances, and Manhattan was more dangerous than most. She’d played it safe and she was still alive; she wasn’t going to second guess a strategy that had proven itself so successful.

She looked at the address again, then up at the weather-beaten street signs. This was definitely the right place. She tucked the notebook back into her pocket and hefted her rifle. Time to go inside.

Time to visit ParaGen.

The office building had once had glass doors and floor-to-ceiling windows, but glass didn’t last long since the Break, and the entire ground floor now stood naked to the elements. It wasn’t the ParaGen headquarters—that was out west somewhere, on the other side of the country—but it was something. A financial branch, located in Manhattan solely to interface with other corporations’ financial branches. It had taken her weeks of searching even to find that the office existed. Kira picked her way through the pellets of shattered safety glass, and the mounds of siding and facade sloughed off from the building’s upper floors. Eleven years of neglect had filled the floor inside with dirt, thick enough that small weeds and grasses were already beginning to sprout through. Low benches, once upholstered in sleek vinyl, had been weakened by sun and rain and torn apart by what looked like cats’ claws. A wide desk that had probably held a receptionist was now weathered and sagging, the epicenter of a loose scattering of yellowed plastic ID tags. A plaque on the wall named dozens of businesses in the building, and Kira browsed the weather-beaten listings until she found ParaGen: the twenty-first floor. Three elevator doors stood in the wall behind the reception desk, though one was hanging crooked in its frame. Kira ignored them and went to the stairway door in the back corner. There was a black panel in the wall next to it, a sensor pad for a magnetic lock, but with no electricity it was meaningless—the hinges would be the biggest problem. Kira leaned against it, pushing gently at first to test it, then harder as the ancient hinges resisted the force. Finally it gave way, and she walked in to look up the towering stairwell.

“Twenty-first floor,” she sighed. “Of course.”

Many of the older buildings in the world were too treacherous to climb around in, devastated in the first winter after the Break: The windows broke, the pipes burst, and by spring the rooms and walls and floors were full of moisture. Ten freeze-thaw cycles later, the walls were warped, the ceilings were drooping, and the floors were crumbling to pieces. Mold got into the wood and carpets, insects dug into the cracks, and a once-solid structure became a precarious tower of crumbs and fragments; rubble that hadn’t fallen down yet, waiting for a kick or a step or a loud voice to bring it crashing to the ground. Bigger buildings, though, and especially ones this new, were far more durable— their bones were steel girders, and their flesh sealed concrete and carbon fiber. The skin, so to speak, was still weak—glass and plaster and Sheetrock and carpet—but the building itself was sturdy. Kira’s stairwell was particularly well preserved, dusty without being filthy, and the extra staleness to the air made her wonder if it had stayed more or less sealed since the Break. It gave the stairwell an eerie feeling, like a tomb, though there was nobody buried in it that she could see. She began to wonder if there was, higher up—if someone had been walking the stairs when RM finally claimed them, and they had been sealed in here ever since—but by the time she reached the twenty-first floor, she still hadn’t seen any bodies. She thought about going on to look for some, to satisfy twenty-one floors of pent-up curiosity, but no. There were bodies enough in a city this size; half the cars on the street held skeletons, and the homes and offices held millions more. One body more or less in an old forgotten stairwell wouldn’t change anything. She pried open the door with a squeal of hinges and walked into the ParaGen office.

It wasn’t the main office, of course; she had seen that in a photograph a few weeks ago: herself as a child, her father, and her adopted guardian, Nandita, standing before a great glass building framed by snowy mountains. She didn’t know where it was, she didn’t remember the photo being taken, and she certainly didn’t recall knowing Nandita before the Break, but there it was. She had been only five when the world ended, maybe only four in the photo. What did it mean? Who was Nandita, really, and what connection did she have to ParaGen? Had she worked there? Had her father? She knew he’d worked in an office, but she’d been too young to remember more. If Kira was really a Partial, was she a lab experiment? An accident? A prototype? Why hadn’t Nandita ever told her?

That was the biggest question of all, in some ways. Kira had lived with Nandita for nearly twelve years. If she’d known what Kira really was—if she’d known the whole time and never said a word—Kira didn’t like that at all.

The thoughts made her queasy, just as they had on the street outside. I’m fake, she thought. I’m an artificial construct that thinks she’s a person. I’m as fake as the faux-stone finish on this desk. She walked into the front office and touched the peeling reception desk: painted vinyl over pressed plastic board. Barely even natural, let alone real. She looked up, forcing herself to forget about the discomfort and focus on the task at hand. The reception area was spacious for Manhattan, a wide room filled with splitting leather couches and a rugged rock structure, probably a former waterfall or fountain. The wall behind the reception desk showed a massive metal ParaGen logo, the same one on the building in the photo. She opened her bag, pulled out the carefully folded picture, and compared the two images. Identical. She put the photo away and walked around to the back of the reception desk, picking carefully through the papers strewn across the top of it. Like the stairwell, this room had no external opening and had thus stayed closed off from the elements; the papers were old and yellowed, but they were intact and neatly ordered. Most of it was unimportant clutter: phone directories and company brochures and a paperback book the receptionist had been reading, I Love You to Death, with the image of a bloody dagger on the cover. Maybe not the most politically correct thing to be reading while the world ended, but then again the receptionist hadn’t even been here during the Break. She would have been evacuated when RM got really bad, or when it was first released, or maybe even as early as the start of the Partial War. Kira tapped the book with her finger, noting the bookmark about three quarters through. She never found out who was loving whom to death.

Kira glanced again at the directory, noting that some of the four-number phone extensions started with 1, and some with 2. The office took up two floors of the building, maybe? She flipped through the pages and found in the back a section of longer numbers, ten digits each: several starting with 1303 and others with 1312. She knew from talking to adults, people who remembered the old world, that these were area codes for different parts of the country, but she had no idea which parts, and the directory didn’t say.

The brochures were stacked neatly in a corner of the desk, their front covers adorned with a stylized double helix and a picture of the building from Kira’s photo, though from a different angle. Kira picked it up to look more closely and saw similar buildings in the background, most notably a tall, blocky tower that seemed to be made of great glass cubes. In flowing script at the bottom of the page was the phrase: “Becoming better than what we are.” Inside were page after page of smiling photos and sales pitches for gene mods—cosmetic mods to change your eye or hair color, health mods to remove congenital illness or shore up your resistance to other diseases, even recreational mods to make your stomach flatter or your breasts larger, to improve your strength or speed, your senses or reaction time. Gene mods had been so common before the Break that almost all the survivors on Long Island had them. Even the plague babies, the children so young during the Break that they couldn’t remember what life was like before it, had been given a handful of gene scrubs when they were born. They’d become standard procedure in hospitals around the world, and ParaGen had developed a lot of them. Kira had always thought she’d had the basic infant mods, and had occasionally wondered if she had something more: Was she a good runner because of DNA from her parents, or because an early gene mod had made her so? Now she knew it was because she was a Partial. Built in a lab as a human ideal.

The last half of the brochure talked about the Partials directly, though it referred to them as BioSynths, and there were far more “models” than she had expected to find. The military Partials were presented first, more as a success story than an available product: one million successful field tests for their flagship biotechnology. You couldn’t “buy” a soldier model, of course, but the brochure had other, less humanoid versions of the same technology: hyperintelligent Watchdogs, bushy-maned lions rendered docile enough to keep as pets, even something called the MyDragon™, which looked like a spindly, winged lizard the size of a house cat. The last page at the end promoted new kinds of Partials—a security guard based on the soldier template, and others to be looked up online. Is that what I am? A security guard or a love slave or whatever kind of sick garbage these people were selling? She read through the brochure again, looking for any clue she could find about herself, but there was nothing else; she threw it down and picked up the next, but it turned out to be the same interior with an alternate cover. She threw that one down as well and cursed.

I’m not just a product in a catalog, she told herself. Somebody made me for a reason—Nandita was staying with me, watching me, for a reason. Am I a sleeper agent? A listening device? An assassin? The Partial scientist who captured me, Dr. Morgan—when she found out what I was, she nearly exploded, she was so nervous. She’s the most frightening person I’ve ever met, and just thinking about what I might be made her terrified.

I was made for a reason, but is that reason good or evil?

Whatever the answer, she wouldn’t find it in a company brochure. She picked one back up and stowed it in her pack, just in case it ever came in handy, then hefted her rifle and walked to the nearest door. There wasn’t likely to be anything dangerous this high up, but . . . that dragon in the picture had made her nervous. She’d never seen one alive, not the dragon or the lion or anything else, but it didn’t hurt to be careful. This was the enemy’s own lair. They’re artificial species, she told herself, engineered as dependent, docile pets. I’ve never seen one because they’re all dead, hunted to extinction by real animals who know how to survive in the wild. Somehow, the thought depressed her and didn’t do much to calm her fears. She was still likely to find the rooms full of corpses—so many people had died here that the city was practically a tomb. She put a hand on the door, summoned her courage, and pushed.

The air on the other side rushed in to meet her, fresher and more rich than the dead air in the lobby and the stairs. The door opened into a short hallway lined with offices, and Kira could see at the end long banks of windows broken out and open to the air. She peeked through the door of the first office, propped open by a wheeled black chair, and caught her breath in surprise as a trio of yellow-brown swallows took sudden flight from their nest in a bookcase. A warm breeze from the glassless window touched her face, stirring the wisps of hair that weren’t tied back in her ponytail. The room once had floor-to-ceiling windows, and so was now like a recessed cave in the side of a cliff, and she looked out warily on the overgrown ruins of the city below.

The name on the door said david harmon, and he had kept his workspace sparse: a clear plastic desk, a shelf of books crusted over with bird droppings, and a faded whiteboard on the wall. Kira shouldered her rifle and stepped in, looking for some kind of records she could search through, but there was nothing— not even a computer, though she wouldn’t be able to search it anyway without electricity to power it. She stepped close to the bookshelf, trying to read the titles without touching the excrement, and found row upon row of financial reference guides. David Harmon must have been an accountant. Kira glanced around a final time, hoping for a last-minute revelation, but the room was empty. She stepped back into the hallway and tried the next office.

Ten offices later she had still found nothing that shed any more light on her mysteries: a handful of ledgers, and the occasional filing cabinet, but even those were either empty or filled with profit statements. ParaGen had been obscenely wealthy: She knew that with certainty now, but almost nothing else.

The real information would be on the computers, but the office didn’t seem to have any. Kira frowned, disturbed, because everything she’d heard about the old world said that they relied on computers for everything. Why didn’t the office have any of the flat screen monitors or metallic towers that she was used to seeing nearly everywhere? She sighed and shook her head in frustration, knowing that even if she found the computers, she wouldn’t know what to do with them. She’d used some at the hospital, medicomps and scanners and so on when a treatment or a diagnosis called for one, but those were mostly isolated machines with a singular purpose. Computers in the old world had been part of a vast network capable of communicating instantly, all over the world. Everything had been on computers, from books to music to, apparently, ParaGen’s vast scheming plans. But these offices didn’t have any computers. . . .

But this one has a printer. She stopped, staring at a side table in the last office on the floor—a bigger office than the rest, with the name GUINEVERE CREECH on the door: probably the local vice president or whatever their ranks were called. There was blank paper scattered around the floor, wrinkly and discolored from past rainstorms blowing through the broken window, and a small plastic box on a side table by the desk. She recognized it as a printer—there were dozens in the hospital back home, useless now because they had no ink, and she’d been tasked once with moving them from one storage closet to another. In the old world they’d used them to write out documents directly from a computer, so if there was a printer in this room, there must have been a computer as well, at least at one time. She picked the thing up to examine it more closely: no cord, or even a place to put one, which meant it was wireless. She set it back down and knelt on the floor, looking under the side table; nothing there. Why had someone gone through and removed all the computers—was it to hide their data when the world fell apart? Surely Kira couldn’t be the first person to think of coming here; ParaGen had built the Partials, for goodness’ sake, and they were the world experts in biotech. Even if they didn’t get blamed for the Partial War, the government would have contacted them about curing RM. Assuming, of course, that the government didn’t know that the Partials carried the cure. She pushed the thought away. She wasn’t here to entertain conspiracy theories, she was here to uncover facts. Maybe their computers had been seized?

She looked up, scanning the room from her hands and knees, and from this vantage point saw something she hadn’t before: a shiny black circle in the black metal frame of the desk. She moved her head and it winked at her, losing and catching the light. She frowned, stood, then shook her head at the stupid simplicity of it all.

The desks were the computers.

Now that she saw it, it was obvious. The clear plastic desks were almost exact replicas, in large scale, of the medicomp screen she used at the hospital. The brain—the CPU and the hard drive and the actual computer—were all embedded in the metal edge, and when turned on, the entire desk would light up with touch screens and keyboards and everything else. She got down on her knees again, checking the base of the frame’s metal legs, and shouted in triumph when she found a short black cord plugged into a power socket in the floor. Another flock of sparrows lifted up and flew away at the sound. Kira smiled, but it wasn’t truly a victory—finding the computers meant nothing if she couldn’t turn them on. She would need a charging unit, and she hadn’t packed one when she hastily left East Meadow; she felt stupid for the oversight, but there was no changing it now. She would have to try to scavenge one in Manhattan, maybe from a hardware store or electronics shop. The island had been considered too dangerous to travel on since the Break, so most of it hadn’t been looted yet. Still, she didn’t relish the thought of hauling a fifty-pound generator up those twenty-one flights of stairs.

Kira blew out a long, slow breath, gathering her thoughts. I need to find out what I am, she thought. I need to find out how my father is connected to this, and Nandita. I need to find the Trust. She pulled out the photo again, she and her father and Nandita all standing in front of the ParaGen complex. Someone had written a message on it: Find the Trust. She didn’t even know exactly what the Trust was, let alone how to find it; she didn’t even know who’d left her the photo or written the note on it, for that matter, though she assumed from the handwriting that it was Nandita. The things she didn’t know seemed to settle on her like a great, heavy weight, and she closed her eyes, trying to breathe deeply. She had pinned all her hopes on this office, the only part of ParaGen she could reach, and to find nothing of use in it, not even another lead, was almost too much to bear.

She rose to her feet, walking quickly to the window for air. Manhattan stretched out below her, half city and half forest, a great green mass of eager trees and crumbling, vine-wrapped buildings. It was all so big, overwhelmingly big, and that was just the city—beyond it there were other cities, other states and nations, entire other continents she had never even seen. She felt lost, worn down by the sheer impossibility of finding even one small secret in a world so huge. She watched a flock of birds fly by, oblivious to her and her problems; the world had ended, and they hadn’t even noticed. If the last of the sentient species disappeared, the sun would still rise and the birds would still fly. What did her success or failure really mean?

And then she raised her head, set her jaw, and spoke.

“I’m not giving up,” she said. “It doesn’t matter how big the world is. All that gives me is more places to look.”

Kira turned back to the office, going to the filing cabinet and pulling open the first drawer. If the Trust had something to do with ParaGen, maybe a special project that was connected to the Partial leadership, like Samm had implied, this financial office would have had to process some money for it sooner or later, and there might be a record she could find. She wiped the dirt from the table screen and started pulling files from the cabinet, searching through them line by line, item by item, payment by payment. When she finished with a folder, she swept it onto the floor in the corner and started on a new one, hour after hour, stopping only when it had grown too dark to read. The night air was cold, and she thought about starting a small fire—on top of one of the desks, where she could contain it—but decided against it. Her campfires down in the streets were easy to hide from anyone who might be watching, but a light up here would be visible for miles. She retreated instead to the foyer at the top of the stairs, closing all the doors and setting up her bedroll in the shelter of the reception desk. She opened a can of tuna and ate it quietly in the dark, picking it up with her fingers and pretending it was sushi. She slept lightly, and when she woke in the morning, she went straight back to work, combing through the files. In midmorning she finally found something.

“Nandita Merchant,” she read, a jolt through her system after searching for so long. “Fifty-one thousand one hundred and twelve dollars paid on December 5, 2064. Direct deposit. Arvada, Colorado.” It was a payroll statement, a massive one that seemed to include employees from the entire multinational company. She frowned, reading the line again. It didn’t say what Nandita’s job was, only what they’d paid her, and she had no idea what that represented—was it a monthly wage, or a yearly? Or a one-time fee for a specific job? She went back to the ledgers and found one for the previous month, flipping through it quickly to find Nandita’s name. “Fifty-one thousand one hundred and twelve dollars on November 21,” she read, and saw the same on November 7. So it’s a biweekly salary, making her yearly . . . about one point two million dollars. That sounds like a lot. She had no frame of reference for old-world salaries, but as she glanced over the list she saw that $51,112 was one of the highest figures. “So she was one of the bigwigs in the company,” Kira muttered, thinking out loud. “She earned more than most, but what did she do?”

She wanted to look up her father, but she didn’t even know his last name. Her own last name, Walker, was a nickname she’d earned from the soldiers who’d found her after the Break, walking mile after mile through an empty city, searching for food. “Kira the Walker.” She’d been so young that she couldn’t remember her own last name, or where her father worked, or even what city they’d lived in—

“Denver!” she shouted, the name suddenly coming to her. “We lived in Denver. That was in Colorado, right?” She looked at Nandita’s listing again: Arvada, Colorado. Was that near Denver? She folded the page carefully and stowed it in her pack, vowing to search later for an old bookstore with an atlas. She looked back at the payroll report, searching for her father’s first name, Armin, but the payments were organized by surname, and finding a single Armin among the tens of thousands of people would be more trouble than it was worth. At best, finding his name would confirm what the photo already suggested: that Nandita and her father had worked in the same location at the same company. It still wouldn’t tell her what they did or why.

Another day of research turned up nothing she could use, and in a fit of petulance she snarled and threw the last folder out the broken window; as soon as she threw it she berated herself for doing something to attract the attention of anyone else who might be prowling the city. The odds were against it, of course, but that didn’t make it smart to tempt fate. She stayed back from the window, hoping that whoever saw it would chalk the errant paper up to wind or animal activity, and moved on to her next project: the second floor.

It was really the twenty-second floor, she reminded herself, as she trudged up the stairway to the next door. This one, oddly, was only barely closed, and when she pushed it open she stepped into a sea of cubicles. There was no reception area here, and only a handful of offices; everything else was low partitions and shared workspace. Many of the cubicles had computers, she noticed, or obvious docks where a portable computer could be plugged in—there were no fancy desk-screens on this floor— but what really caught her attention were the cubicles that had empty cables. Places where a computer should be, but wasn’t.

Kira froze, surveying the room carefully. It was windier in here than on the floor below, thanks to a long wall of broken windows and the lack of office walls to break up the airflow. The occasional piece of paper or swirl of dust blew past the cubicle partitions, but Kira ignored them, looking instead at the six desks nearest to her. Four were normal—monitors, keyboards, organizers, family photos—but in two of them the computers were gone. Not just gone, but ransacked; the organizer and photos had been pushed aside or even knocked on the floor, as if whoever took the computers was in too great of a hurry to bother preserving anything else. Kira crouched down to examine the nearest one, where a picture frame had fallen facedown. A layer of dirt had collected over and around it, and with time and moisture mushrooms had taken root in the dirt. It was hardly surprising—after eleven years of open-air access, half the buildings in Manhattan had a layer of soil inside of them—but what stood out to her was a small yellow stem, like a blade of grass, curling out from beneath the photo. She looked up at the windows, gauging the angle, and guessed that yes, for a few hours of the day this spot would get plenty of sunlight, more than enough to nurture a green plant. There were other blades of grass around it as well, but again, that wasn’t the issue. It was the way the grass grew out from underneath the photo. She picked up the photo and tipped it away, exposing a small mass of beetles and mushrooms and short, dead grass. She sat back, mouth open, stunned at the implications.

The photo had been knocked off the table after the grass had already started to grow.

The act hadn’t been recent. The picture frame had enough dirt and muck on top of it, and around the edges, to show that it had lain there for several years. But it hadn’t been lying there the full eleven. The Break had come and gone, the building had been abandoned, the dirt and weeds had collected, and then the cubicle had been raided. Who could have done it? Human, or Partial? Kira examined the space under the desk, finding a handful of other cables but no clear evidence of who had taken the CPU they were connected to. She crawled into the next cube over, the other one that had been looted, and found similar remains. Someone had climbed up to the twenty-second floor, stolen two computers, and lugged them all the way back down again.

Why would someone do it? Kira sat back, puzzling through the possibilities. If somebody wanted information, she supposed it was easier to haul the computers down the stairs rather than haul a generator up. But why these two and none of the others? What was different about them? She looked around again and noted with surprise that these two cubicles were the closest to the elevator. That made even less sense than anything else: After the Break, there would have been no power to make the elevators run. That couldn’t be the connection. There weren’t even names on the cubicle walls; if someone had targeted these two computers specifically, they had to have inside knowledge.

Kira stood up and walked through the entire floor, going slowly, watching for anything else that looked out of place or looted. She found a printer missing, but she couldn’t tell if it had been taken before or after the Break. When she finished the central room, she searched the handful of offices along the back wall, and gasped in surprise when she found that one of them had been completely gutted: the computer gone, the shelves emptied, everything. There was enough corporate detritus to make it look like a once-functioning office—a phone and a wastebasket and various little stacks of papers and so on—but nothing else. This office had far more shelving than the others as well, all empty, and Kira wondered just how much, exactly, had been stolen from it.

She paused, staring at the empty desk. Something else was different about this one, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. There was a small desk organizer knocked onto the floor, just as there had been in the cubicles, which implied that the office had been raided with the same sense of anxious haste. Whoever had stolen these items had been in an awfully big hurry. The now-empty cables all hung in the same way, though the office had far more of them than the cubicles. She racked her brain, trying to figure out what was bothering her, and finally hit on it: the small office had no photos. Most of the desks she’d been scouring for the last two days had held at least one family photo, and many of them had more: smiling couples, groups of kids in coordinated outfits, the preserved images of families now long dead. This room, however, had no photos at all. That meant one of two things: first, that the man or woman who worked here had no family, or didn’t care enough about them to display photos. Second, and more tantalizing, whoever had taken the equipment had also taken the photos. And the most likely reason for that was that the person who’d taken the photos was the same person who’d once worked in the room.

Kira looked at the door, which read afa demoux, and below it in thick block letters, it. Was “IT” a nickname? It didn’t seem like a very nice one, but her understanding of old-world culture was sketchy at best. She checked the other doors and found that each followed the same pattern, a name and a word, though most of the words were longer: operations, sales, marketing. Were they titles? Departments? “IT” was the only one written all in capital letters, so it was probably an acronym, but Kira didn’t know what it stood for. Invention . . . Testing. She shook her head. This wasn’t a lab, so Afa Demoux wasn’t a scientist. What had he done here? Had he come back for his own equipment? Was his work so vital, or so dangerous, that someone else had come back after to take it? This wasn’t a random looting— no one hiked up twenty-two stories for a couple of computers when there were plenty to be had at ground level. Whoever had taken these had taken them for a reason—for something important that was stored in them. But who had it been? Afa Demoux? Someone from East Meadow? One of the Partials?

Who else was there?

his hearing is now in session.”

Marcus stood in the back of the hall, craning to see over the crowd of people filling the room. He could see the senators well enough—Hobb and Kessler and Tovar and a new one he didn’t know, all seated on the stage behind a long table—but the two accused were out of his sight. The city hall they used to use for these sessions had been trashed in a Voice attack two months ago, before Kira had found the cure for RM and the Voice had reintegrated with the rest of society. Without the hall, they’d taken to using the auditorium of the old East Meadow High School instead; the school had been closed a few months before, so why not? Of course, Marcus thought, the building is the least of the things that have changed since then. The old leader of the Voice was one of the senators now, and two of the former senators were the ones on trial. Marcus stood on his tiptoes, but the auditorium was packed, standing room only. It seemed like everyone in East Meadow had come to see Weist and Delarosa’s final sentence.

“I’m going to be sick,” said Isolde, clutching Marcus’s arm. He dropped down from his toes to stand flat on the ground, grinning at Isolde’s morning sickness, then grimacing in pain as her grip tightened and her fingernails dug into his flesh. “Stop laughing at me,” she growled.

“I wasn’t laughing out loud.”

“I’m pregnant,” said Isolde, “my senses are like superpowers. I can smell your thoughts.”

“Smell?”

“It’s a very limited superpower,” she said. “Now seriously, get me some fresh air or I’m going to make this room a lot grosser than it already is.”

“You want to go back out?”

Isolde shook her head, closing her eyes and breathing slowly. She wasn’t showing yet, but her morning sickness had been terrible—she’d actually lost weight instead of gained it, because she couldn’t keep any food down, and Nurse Hardy had threatened her with inpatient care at the hospital if she didn’t improve soon. She’d been taking the week off work to relax, and it had helped a bit, but she was too much of a political junkie to stay away from a hearing like this. Marcus looked around the back of the auditorium, saw a seat near an open door, and pulled her toward it.

“Excuse me, sir,” he said softly, “can my friend have this chair?”

The man wasn’t even using it, just standing in front of it, but he glowered at Marcus in annoyance. “It’s first come, first served,” he said lowly. “Now stay quiet so I can hear this.”

“She’s pregnant,” said Marcus, and nodded smugly as the man’s entire demeanor changed in seconds.

“Why didn’t you say so?” He stepped aside immediately, offering Isolde the seat, and walked off in search of somewhere else to stand. Works every time, thought Marcus. Even after the repeal of the Hope Act, which had made pregnancy mandatory, pregnant women were still treated as sacred. Now that Kira had discovered a cure for RM, and there was a real hope that infants would actually survive more than a few days, the attitude was even more prevalent. Isolde sat down, fanning her face, and Marcus positioned himself behind her seat, where he could discourage people from blocking her airflow. He looked back up at the front of the room.

“. . . which is just the kind of thing we’re trying to stop in the first place,” Senator Tovar was saying.

“You can’t be serious,” said the new senator, and Marcus focused his concentration to hear him better. “You were the leader of the Voice,” he told Tovar. “You threatened to start, and by some interpretations actually started, a civil war.”

“Violence being occasionally necessary isn’t the same thing as violence being good,” said Tovar. “We were fighting to prevent atrocity, not to punish it after the fact—”

“Capital punishment is, at its heart, a preventative measure,” said the senator. Marcus blinked—he’d had no idea that execution was even being considered for Weist and Delarosa. When you have only 36,000 humans left, you don’t jump right to executing them, criminal or not. The new senator gestured toward the prisoners. “When these two die for their crimes, in a community so small everyone will be intimately aware of it, those crimes are unlikely to be repeated.”

“Their crimes were conducted through the direct application of senatorial power,” said Tovar. “Who exactly are you trying to send a message to?”

“To anyone who treats a human life like a chip in a poker game,” said the man, and Marcus felt the room grow tense. The new senator was staring at Tovar coldly, and even in the back of the room Marcus could read the threatening subtext: If he could do it, this man would execute Tovar right along with Delarosa and Weist.

“They did what they thought was best,” said Senator Kessler, one of the former senators who’d managed to weather the scandal and maintain her position. From everything Marcus had seen, and the inside details he’d learned from Kira, Kessler and the others had been just as guilty as Delarosa and Weist— they had seized power and declared martial law, turning Long Island’s tiny democracy into a totalitarian state. They had done it to protect the people, or so they claimed, and in the beginning Marcus had agreed with them: Humanity was facing extinction, after all, and with those kinds of stakes it’s hard to argue that freedom is more important than survival. But Tovar and the rest of the Voice had rebelled, and the Senate had reacted, and the Voice had reacted to that, and on and on until suddenly they were lying to their own people, blowing up their own hospital, and secretly killing their own soldier in a bid to ignite fear of a fictional Partial invasion and unite the island again. The official ruling had been that Delarosa and Weist were the masterminds, and everyone else had simply been following orders—you couldn’t punish Kessler for following her leader any more than you could punish a Grid soldier for following Kessler. Marcus still wasn’t sure how he felt about the ruling, but it seemed pretty obvious that this new guy didn’t like it at all.

Marcus crouched down and put a hand on Isolde’s shoulder. “Remind me who the new guy is.”

“Asher Woolf,” Isolde whispered. “He replaced Weist as the representative from the Defense Grid.”

“That explains that,” said Marcus, standing back up. You don’t kill a soldier without making every other soldier in the army an enemy for life.

“‘What they thought was best,’” Woolf repeated. He looked at the crowd, then back at Kessler. “What they thought was best, in this case, was the murder of a soldier who had already sacrificed his own health and safety trying to protect their secrets. If we make them pay the same price that boy did, maybe the next pack of senators won’t think that kind of decision is ‘best.’”

Marcus looked at Senator Hobb, wondering why he hadn’t spoken yet. He was the best debater on the Senate, but Marcus had learned to think of him as the most shallow, manipulative, and opportunistic. He was also the one who’d gotten Isolde pregnant, and Marcus didn’t think he could ever respect the man again. He certainly hadn’t shown any interest in his unborn child. Now he was showing the same hands-off approach with the sentence. Why hadn’t he picked a side yet?

“I think the point’s been made,” said Kessler. “Weist and Delarosa have been tried and convicted; they’re in handcuffs, they’re on their way to a prison camp, they’re paying for—”

“They’re being sent to an idyllic country estate to eat steaks and stud for a bunch of lonely farm girls,” said Woolf.

“You watch your tongue!” said Kessler, and Marcus winced at the fury in her voice. He was friends with Kessler’s adopted daughter, Xochi; he’d heard that fury more times than he cared to count, and he didn’t envy Woolf’s position. “Whatever your misogynist opinion of our farming communities,” said Kessler, “the accused are not going to a resort. They are prisoners, and they will be sent to a prison camp, and they will work harder than you have ever worked in your life.”

“And you’re not going to feed them?” asked Woolf.

Kessler seethed. “Of course we’re going to feed them.”

Woolf creased his brow in mock confusion. “Then you’re not going to allow them any fresh air or sunshine?”

“Where else are they going to work at a prison farm but outside in a field?”

“Then I’m confused,” said Woolf. “So far this doesn’t sound like much of a punishment. Senator Weist ordered the coldhearted killing of one of his own soldiers, a teenage boy under his own command, and his punishment is a soft bed, three square meals, fresher food than we get here in East Meadow, and all the girls he could ever ask for—”

“You keep saying ‘girls,’” said Tovar. “What exactly are you envisioning here?”

Woolf paused, staring at Tovar, then picked up a piece of paper and scanned it with his eyes as he talked. “Perhaps I misunderstood the nature of our ban on capital punishment. We can’t kill anyone because, in your words, ‘there are only thirty-five thousand people left on the planet, and we can’t afford to lose any more.’” He looked up. “Is that correct?”

“We have a cure for RM now,” said Kessler. “That means we have a future. We can’t afford to lose a single person.”

“Because we need to carry on the species,” said Woolf with a nod. “Multiply and replenish the Earth. Of course. Would you like me to tell you where babies come from, or should we get a chalkboard so I can draw you a diagram?”

“This is not about sex,” said Tovar.

“You’re damn right it’s not.”

Kessler threw up her hands. “What if we just don’t let them procreate?” she asked. “Will that make you happy?”

“If they can’t procreate, we have no reason to keep them alive,” Woolf shot back. “By your own logic, we should kill them and be done with it.”

“They can work,” said Kessler, “they can plow fields, they can grind wheat for the whole island, they can—”

“We’re not keeping them alive for reproduction,” said Tovar softly, “and we’re not keeping them alive as slaves. We’re keeping them alive because killing them would be wrong.”

Woolf shook his head. “Punishing criminals is—”

“Senator Tovar is correct,” said Hobb, rising to his feet. “This is not about sex or reproduction or manual labor or any of these other issues we’ve been arguing. It’s not even about survival. The human race has a future, like we’ve said, and food and children and so on are all important to that future, but they are not the most important. They are the means of our existence, but they cannot become the reason for it. We can never be reduced—and we can never reduce ourselves—to a level of pure physical subsistence.” He walked toward Senator Woolf. “Our children will inherit more than our genes; more than our infrastructure. They will inherit our morals. The future we’ve gained by curing RM is a precious gift that we must earn, day by day and hour by hour, by being the kind of people who deserve to have a future. Do we want our children to kill one another? Of course not. Then we teach them, through our own example, that every life is precious. Killing a killer might send a mixed message.”

“Caring for a killer is just as confusing,” said Woolf.

“We’re not going to care for a killer,” said Hobb, “we’re going to care for everybody: old and young, bond and free, male and female. And if one of them happens to be a killer—if two or three or a hundred happen to be killers—we still care for them.” He smiled mirthlessly. “We don’t let them kill anybody else, obviously; we’re not stupid. But we don’t kill them, either, because we’re trying to be better. We’re trying to find a higher ground. We have a future now, so let’s not start it by killing.”

There was a scattering of applause in the room, though Marcus thought some of it felt obligatory. A handful of people shouted back in disagreement, but the tenor of the room had changed, and Marcus knew the argument was done; Woolf didn’t look happy about it, but after Hobb’s words he didn’t look eager to keep calling for execution, either. Marcus tried to get a look at the prisoners’ reactions but still couldn’t see them. Isolde was muttering, and he stooped back down to hear her.

“What did you say?”

“I said he’s a stupid glad-handing bastard,” Isolde snapped, and Marcus backed away with a grimace. That was not a situation he wanted any part of. She insisted that her encounter with Hobb had been willing—she’d been his assistant for months, and he was very handsome and charming—but her attitude had soured significantly in the months since.

“It doesn’t look like we’re going to be deliberating any further,” said Tovar. “I call for a vote: Marisol Delarosa and Cameron Weist will be sentenced to a life of hard labor on the Stillwell Farm. All in favor.”

Tovar, Hobb, and Kessler all raised their hands; a moment later Woolf did the same. A unanimous vote. Tovar leaned down to sign the paper in front of him, and four Grid soldiers walked in from the wings to escort the prisoners out. The room grew noisy as a hundred little conversations started up, people arguing back and forth about the verdict and the sentence and whole drama that had unfolded. Isolde stood up, and Marcus helped her into the hall.

“All the way outside,” said Isolde. “I need to breathe.” They were ahead of most of the crowd and reached the outer doors before the main press of people. Marcus found them a bench, and Isolde sat with a grimace. “I want french fries,” she said. “Greasy and salty and just huge fistfuls of them—I want to eat every french fry in the entire world.”

“You look like you’re going to throw up, how can you even think about food?”

“Don’t say ‘food,’” she said quickly, closing her eyes. “I don’t want food, I want french fries.”

“Pregnancy is so weird.”

“Shut up.”

The crowd thinned as it reached the front lawn, and Marcus watched as groups of men and women either wandered off or stood in small groups, arguing softly about the senators and their decision. “Lawn,” perhaps, was misleading: There used to be a lawn in front of the high school, but no one had tended it in years, and it had become a meadow dotted with trees and crisscrossed with buckling sidewalks. Marcus paused to wonder if he’d been the last person to mow it, two years ago when he’d been punished for playing pranks in class. Had anyone mowed it since? Had anyone mowed anything since? That was a dubious claim to fame: the last human being to ever mow the lawn. I wonder how many other things I’ll be the last to do.

He frowned and looked across the street to the hospital complex and its full parking lot. Much of the city had been empty when the world ended—not a lot of people eating out and seeing movies while the world collapsed in plague—but the hospital had been bustling. The parking lot spilled over with old cars, rusted and sagging, cracked windows and scratched paint, hundreds upon hundreds of people and couples and families hoping vainly that the doctors could save them from RM. They came to the hospital and they died in the hospital, and all the doctors with them. The survivors had cleaned out the hospital as soon as they settled in East Meadow—it was an excellent hospital, one of the reasons the survivors had chosen East Meadow as a place for their settlement in the first place—but the parking lot had never been a priority. The last hope for humanity was surrounded on three sides with a maze of rusted scrap metal, half junkyard and half cemetery.

Marcus heard a surge of voices and turned around, watching Weist and Delarosa emerge from the building with an escort of Grid soldiers and a crowd of people, many of them protesting the verdict. Marcus couldn’t tell if they wanted something harsher or more lenient, but he supposed there were probably different factions calling for each. Asher Woolf led the way, slowly pushing through the people and clearing a path. A wagon was waiting to take them away—an armored car rigged with free axles and drawn by a team of four powerful horses. They stomped as they waited, whiffling and blustering as the noise of the crowd grew closer.

“They look like they’re going to start a riot,” said Isolde, and Marcus nodded. Some of the protestors were blocking the doors of the wagon, and others were trying to pull them away while the Grid struggled helplessly to maintain order.

No, thought Marcus, frowning and leaning forward. They’re not trying to maintain order, they’re trying to . . . what? They’re not stopping the fight, they’re moving it. I’ve seen them quell riots before, and they were a lot more efficient than this. More focused. What are they—?

Senator Weist fell to the ground, his chest a blossom of dark red, followed almost immediately by a deafening crack. The world seemed to stand still for a moment, the crowd and the Grid and the meadow all frozen in time. What had happened? What was the red? What was the noise? Why did he fall? The pieces came together one by one in Marcus’s mind, slowly and out of order and jumbled in confusion: The sound was a gunshot, and the red on Weist’s chest was blood. He’d been shot.

The horses screamed, rearing up in terror and straining against the heavy wagon. Their scream seemed to shatter the moment, and the crowd erupted in noise and chaos as everyone began running—some were looking for cover, some were looking for the shooter, and everyone seemed to be trying to get as far away from the body as they could. Marcus pulled Isolde behind the bench, pressing her to the ground.

“Don’t move!” he said, then sprinted toward the fallen prisoner at a dead run.

“Find the shooter!” screamed Senator Woolf. Marcus saw the senator pull a pistol from his coat, a gleaming black semiautomatic. The civilians were fleeing for cover, and some of the Grid as well, but Woolf and some of the soldiers had stayed by the prisoners. A spray of shrapnel leaped up from the brick wall behind them, and another loud crack rolled across the yard. Marcus kept his eyes on the fallen Weist and dove to the ground beside him, checking his pulse almost before he stopped moving. He couldn’t feel much of anything, but a wave of blood bubbling up from the wound in the man’s chest told Marcus the heart was still beating. He clamped down with his hands, applying as much pressure as he could, and cried out suddenly as someone yanked him backward.

“I’m trying to save him!”

“He’s gone,” said a soldier behind him. “You need to get to cover!”

Marcus shrugged him off and scrambled back to the body. Woolf was shouting again, pointing through the meadow to the hospital complex, but Marcus ignored them and pressed down again. He hands were red and slick, his arms coated with warm arterial spray, and he shouted for assistance. “Somebody give me shirt or a jacket! He’s bleeding front and back and I can’t stop it all with just my hands!”

“Don’t be stupid,” said the soldier behind him. “You’ve got to get to cover.” But when Marcus turned to look at him, he saw Senator Delarosa, still in handcuffs. She was crouched between them.

“Save her first!” said Marcus.

“He’s over there!” cried Woolf, pointing again to the buildings behind the hospital. “The shooter’s in there, somebody circle around!”

Blood pumped thickly through Marcus’s fingers, staining his hands and covering the prisoner’s chest; blood from the exit wound flowed steadily from the man’s back, spreading out in a puddle and soaking Marcus’s knees and pants. There was too much blood—too much for Weist to ever survive—but Marcus kept the pressure on. The prisoner wasn’t breathing, and Marcus called again for help. “I’m losing him!”

“Let him go!” shouted the soldier, loud and more angry. The world seemed drenched in blood and adrenaline, and Marcus struggled to stay in control. When hands finally jutted forward to help with the bleeding, he was surprised to see that they were not the soldier’s, but Delarosa’s.

“Somebody get over there!” Woolf was shouting. “There’s an assassin somewhere in those ruins!”

“It’s too dangerous,” said another soldier, crouching low in the brush. “We can’t just charge in there while a sniper has us pinned down.”

“He’s not pinning you down, he’s aiming for the prisoners.”

“It’s too dangerous,” the soldier insisted.

“Then call for backup,” said Woolf. “Surround him. Do something besides stand there!”

Marcus couldn’t even feel a heartbeat anymore. The blood in the victim’s chest was stagnant, and the body was inert. He kept the pressure on, knowing that it was useless but too stunned to think of anything else.

“Why do you even care?” asked the soldier. Marcus looked up and saw the man talking to Senator Woolf. “Five minutes ago you were calling for an execution, and now that he’s dead you’re trying to capture his killer?”

Woolf whirled around, shoving his face mere inches from the soldier’s. “What’s your name, Private?”

The soldier quailed. “Cantona, sir. Lucas.”

“Private Cantona, what did you swear to protect?”

“But he’s—”

“What did you swear to protect!”

“The people, sir.” Cantona swallowed. “And the law.”

“In that case, Private, you’d better think good and hard the next time you tell me to abandon them both.”

Delarosa looked at Marcus, her hands and arms covered in her fellow prisoner’s blood. “This is how it ends, you know.”

They were the first words Marcus had heard her speak in months, and they shocked him back to consciousness. He realized he was still flexing his arms against Weist’s lifeless chest. He pulled back, staring and panting. “How what ends?”

“Everything.”

think it was the Grid,” said Xochi.

Haru snorted. “You think the DG killed the man who used to represent them in the Senate.”

“It’s the only explanation,” said Xochi. They were sitting in the living room, nibbling on the last remnants of dinner: grilled cod and fresh-steamed broccoli from Nandita’s garden. Marcus paused on that thought, noting that he still thought of it as Nandita’s garden even though she’d been missing for months—she hadn’t even been the one to plant this crop, Xochi had done it. Xochi and Isolde were the only ones left in the house, and yet in his mind it was still “Nandita’s garden.”

Of course, in his mind this was still “Kira’s house,” and she’d been gone for two months. If anything, Marcus spent more time here now than before she’d left, always hoping she’d turn up at the door one day. She never did.

“Think about it,” Xochi went on. “The Grid’s found nothing, right? Two days of searching and they haven’t found a single piece of evidence to lead them to the sniper: not a bullet casing, not a footprint, not even a scuff mark on the floor. I’m no fan of the Grid, but they’re not inept. They’d find something if they were looking, therefore they’re not looking. They’re covering it up.”

“Or the sniper’s just extremely competent,” said Haru. “Is that a possibility, or do we have to jump straight to the conspiracy theory?”

“Well, of course he’s competent,” said Xochi. “He’s Gridtrained.”

“This sounds like a circular argument,” said Isolde.

“Weist was part of the Grid,” said Haru. “He was their own representative on the council. If you think a soldier would kill another soldier, you don’t know much about soldiers. They’re ferociously vindictive when one of their own gets attacked. They wouldn’t be covering this up, they’d be lynching the guy.”

“That’s exactly what I mean,” said Xochi. “Whatever else Weist did, he killed a soldier in cold blood—maybe not personally, but he gave the order. He arranged the murder of a soldier under his own command. The Grid would never just let that slide, you said it yourself: They’d hunt him down and lynch him. The new Grid senator, Woolf or whatever, Isolde said he was practically screaming for the death penalty, but then they didn’t get it, so they went to plan B.”

“Or more likely,” said Haru, “this is exactly what the Grid says it is: an attempt on Woolf or Tovar or someone like that. One of the senators still in power. There’s no reason to kill a convicted prisoner.”

“So the sniper just missed?” asked Xochi. “This amazingly competent super-sniper, who can evade a full Grid investigation, was aiming for one of the senators, but he’s just a really crappy shot? Come on: He’s either a pro or he’s not, Haru.”

Marcus tried to stay out of these arguments—“these” meaning “any argument with Haru”—and this was exactly why. He’d seen firsthand the way the soldiers had reacted to the attack, and he still had no idea if it was a conspiracy or not. The soldier had tried to pull Marcus off Weist, but did he do it because he was trying to save Marcus, or because he was trying to keep Marcus from saving Weist? Senator Woolf seemed practically offended by the attack, as if killing the prisoner had been a personal insult against him, but was that genuine or was he just playing up the ruse? Haru and Xochi were passionate, but they were too quick to jump to extremes, and Marcus knew from experience that they’d argue back and forth for hours, maybe for days. He left them to it, and turned instead to Madison and Isolde, both cooing quietly over Madison’s baby, Arwen.

Arwen was the miracle baby—the first human child in almost twelve years to survive the ravages of RM, thanks to Kira’s cure self-replicating in her bloodstream. She was asleep now in Madison’s arms, wrapped tightly in a fleece blanket, while Madison talked softly with Isolde about pregnancy and labor. Sandy, Arwen’s personal nurse, watched quietly in the corner—the Miracle Child was too precious to risk without fulltime medical attention, so Sandy followed mother and daughter everywhere, but she had never really fit into their group socially. There were more in their retinue as well: To help protect the child, the Senate had assigned them a pair of bodyguards. When a crazed woman—the mother of ten dead children—had tried to kidnap Arwen the day Madison first brought her to the outdoor market, they had doubled the guards and reinstated Haru to the Defense Grid. There were two guards here tonight, one in the front yard and one in the back. The radio on Haru’s belt chirped softly every time one of them checked in.

“Any luck with that?” asked Madison, and Marcus snapped back to attention.

“What?”

“The cure,” said Madison. “Have you had any luck with it?”

He grimaced, glancing at Isolde, and shook his head. “Nothing. We thought we had a breakthrough a couple of days ago, but it turned out to be something the D team had already tried. Dead end.” He grimaced again at his own word choice, though this time he managed to avoid glancing at Isolde; better to let that reference disappear in shame than call any more attention to it.

Isolde looked down, rubbing her belly the way Madison always used to. Marcus worked as hard as he could—everyone on the cure teams did—but they were still no closer to synthesizing the cure for RM. Kira had figured out what the cure was and was able to obtain a sample from the Partials on the mainland, but Marcus and the other doctors were still a far cry from being able to manufacture it on their own.

“Another died this weekend,” said Isolde softly. She looked up at Sandy for confirmation, and the nurse nodded sadly. Isolde paused, her hand on her belly, then turned to Marcus. “There’s more, you know—the Hope Act is gone, none of our pregnancies are mandatory anymore, and yet there are more now than ever before. Everyone wants to have a child, trusting that you’ll have figured out how to manufacture the cure reliably by the time they come to term.” She looked back down. “It’s funny— we always called them ‘infants’ in the Senate, back before the cure, like we were trying to hide from the word ‘child.’ When all it was was death reports, we never wanted to think of them as babies, as children, as anything but subjects in a failed experiment. Now that I’m . . . here, though, now that I’m . . . making one of my own, growing another human being right inside of me, it’s different. I can’t think of it as anything besides my baby.”

Sandy nodded. “We did the same thing in the hospital. We still do. The deaths are still too close, so we try to keep death distant.”

“I don’t know how you can do it,” said Isolde softly. Marcus thought he heard her voice crack, but he couldn’t see her face to tell if she was crying.

“You have to have some kind of progress, though,” Madison told Marcus. “You have four teams—”

“Five,” said Marcus.

“Five teams now,” said Madison, “all trying to synthesize the Partial pheromone. You have all the equipment, the samples to work from, you have everything. It . . .” She paused. “It can’t be a dead end.”

“We’re doing everything we can,” said Marcus, “but you have to understand how complex this thing is. It doesn’t just interact with RM, it’s part of the RM life cycle somehow—we’re still trying to understand how it works. I mean . . . we still don’t even understand why it works. Why would the Partials have the cure for RM? Why would it be part of their breath, in their blood? As near as we could gather from Kira before she left, the Partials don’t even know they have it, it’s just part of their genetic makeup.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” said Sandy.

“Not unless there’s some larger plan,” said Marcus.

“It doesn’t matter if there’s some huge hypothetical plan,” said Madison. “It doesn’t matter where the pheromone came from, or how it got there, or why the sky is blue—all you have to do is copy it.”

“We have to know how it works first—” said Marcus, but Isolde cut him off.

“We’re going to go take it,” said Isolde. There was an edge in her voice Marcus hadn’t heard before. He raised his eyebrows in surprise.

“You mean from the Partials?”

“The Senate talks about it every day,” said Isolde. “There’s a cure, but we can’t make it on our own, and babies are dying every week, and the people are getting restless. Meanwhile right across the sound there are a million Partials who make our cure every day, without even trying. It’s not ‘will we attack the Partials,’ it’s ‘how much longer will we wait.’”

“I’ve been across the sound,” said Marcus. “I’ve seen what Partials are capable of in a fight—we wouldn’t stand a chance against them.”

“It doesn’t have to be an all-out war,” said Isolde, “just a raid—in and out, grab one guy, done. Just like Kira and Haru did with Samm.”

That got Haru’s attention, and he looked up from his argument with Xochi. “What about me and Samm?”

“They’re talking about whether the Grid’s going to kidnap another Partial,” said Madison.

“Of course they’re going to,” said Haru. “It’s inevitable. They’ve been stupid to wait this long.”

Great, thought Marcus. Now I’m stuck in a conversation with Haru whether I like it or not.

“We don’t have to kidnap one,” said Xochi. “We could just talk to them.”

“You were attacked last time,” said Haru. “I’ve read the reports—you barely made it out alive, and that was with a Partial you trusted. I’d hate to see what happens with a Partial faction you don’t know anything about.”

“We can’t trust all of them,” said Xochi, “but the other thing you must have seen in the reports is that Samm disobeyed his commander to help us. Maybe there are more Partials who share his perspective.”

“If we could really trust them,” said Haru, “we wouldn’t have to rely on the one disobedient outlier to help us. I’ll believe in peace with the Partials as soon as I see them raise a finger to help us.”

“He talks big,” said Madison, “but he wouldn’t trust a Partial even then.”

“If you remembered the Partial War,” said Haru, “you wouldn’t either.”

“So we’re back to the beginning,” said Isolde. “Nobody in charge wants to make peace with them, and nobody in the hospital can make the cure without them, so our only option is war.”

“A small attack,” said Haru. “Just slip in and grab one and they won’t even notice.”

“Which will mean war,” said Marcus, sighing as they dragged him into the argument. “They’re already in a war with each other, and that’s probably the only reason they haven’t attacked us yet. The group we ran into across the sound was studying Kira to try to solve their own plague, their built-in expiration date, and there is clearly a faction of them that believes humans are the key and will stop at nothing to turn us all into experiments. The instant they win their civil war, they’ll come down here with guns blazing and kill or enslave us all.”

“So then war is inevitable,” said Haru.

“Almost as inevitable as you using the word ‘inevitable,’” said Marcus.

Haru ignored the jab. “Then there’s no reason for us to not raid them. In fact, it’s better to do it now, while they’re distracted; we’ll grab a few, extract enough of the cure to last us as long as we’ll need, kill them, and get out of Long Island before they ever have a chance to come after us.”

Sandy frowned. “You mean leave Long Island completely?”

“If the Partials start invading again, we’d be stupid not to run,” said Haru. “If we didn’t need them for the cure, we’d have done it already.”

“Just give us time,” said Marcus. “We’re close, I know we are.”

Marcus expected Haru to argue, but it was Isolde who responded first. “We’ve given you a chance,” she said coldly. “I don’t care if we synthesize it, steal it, form a treaty, or whatever you want, but I’m not going to lose my baby. People are not going to go back to how it used to be, not now that they know there’s a cure. And it doesn’t sound like the Partials are going to wait forever. We’re lucky we’re not looking down the business end of a Partial invasion already.”

“You’re in a race,” said Haru. “Make more of the cure, or war is inevitable.”

“Yeah,” said Marcus, standing up. “You said that. I need some air—the entire future of the human race resting on my shoulders is a little much all of a sudden.” He walked outside, glad that nobody stood up to follow him. He wasn’t mad, at least not at them; the truth was, the future of the human race was resting on his shoulders, on all their shoulders. With barely 35, 000 people left, it wasn’t like there was anybody else to rest it on.

He pushed open the back door and walked into the cool evening air. Twelve years ago, before the Break, there would have been electric lights all over the city, so bright they blotted out the stars, but tonight the sky was filled with twinkling constellations. Marcus looked up at them, breathing deeply, pointing out the few he remembered from school: Orion was the easiest, with his belt and his sword, and there was the Big Dipper. He closed one eye and traced the handle with his finger, looking for the North Star.

“You’re going the wrong way,” said a girl’s voice, and Marcus jerked in surprise.

“I didn’t realize anyone was out here,” said Marcus, hoping he hadn’t looked too stupid when he jumped. He turned to see who it was, wondering suddenly who would be hiding in Xochi’s backyard, and yelped in terror when a woman stepped out of the shadows with an assault rifle. He stumbled backward, trying to find his voice—trying just to process the unexpected appearance—and the woman held her finger to her lips. Marcus backed into the side of the house, steadying himself against the wall. The gesture, and the gleaming gun barrel, caused him to close his mouth.

The girl stepped forward, smiling like a cat. Marcus could see now that she was younger than he’d surmised at first—she was tall and slender, her movements full of power and confidence, but she was probably no more than nineteen or twenty years old. Her features were Asian, and her jet-black hair was pulled back in a tight braid. Marcus smiled back at her nervously, eyeing not only the rifle but the pair of knives he now saw clipped to her belt. Not one knife—a pair of knives. Who needs two knives? How many things does she have to cut at once? He was in no hurry to find out.

“You can talk,” said the girl, “just don’t scream or call for help or anything. I’d prefer to get through the evening without running—or, you know, killing anybody.”

“That’s great news,” said Marcus, swallowing nervously. “If there’s anything I can do to keep you from killing anybody, you just let me know.”

“I’m looking for someone, Marcus.”

“How do you know my name?”

She ignored the question and held out a photo. “Look familiar?”

Marcus peered at the photo—three people standing in front of a building—then held out his hand to take it, looking at the girl for permission. She nodded and held it closer, and he took it from her hand, holding it up to the starlight. “It’s kind of—”

She flicked on a small flashlight, training it on the image. Marcus nodded.

“—dark, thank you.” He looked closer at the photo, uncomfortably aware of the girl’s gun so close beside him. The picture showed three people, a man and a woman with a little girl between them, no more than three or four years old. Behind them was a great glass building, and Marcus realized with a start that the sign on the side of it said PARAGEN. He opened his mouth to comment on this, but realized with another shock that the woman in the picture was someone he’d known for years.

“That’s Nandita.”

“Nandita Merchant,” said the girl. She flicked off the light. “I don’t suppose you know where she is?”

Marcus turned back to face her, still trying to figure out what was going on. “Nobody’s seen Nandita in months,” he said. “This is her house, but . . . she used to go out on salvage runs and stuff all the time, looking for herbs for her garden, and the last time she went out, she never came back.” He looked at the picture again, then back at the girl. “Are you with Mkele? Or forget who you’re with, who are you? How do you know who I am?”

“We’ve met,” she said, “but you don’t remember. I’m very hard to see if I don’t want to be.”

“I’m getting that impression,” said Marcus. “I’m also getting the impression that you’re not exactly the East Meadow police. Why are you looking for her?”

The girl smiled, sly and mischievous. “Because she’s missing.”

“I suppose I walked into that one,” said Marcus, suddenly aware of how attractive this girl was. “Let me rephrase: Why do you need to find her?”

The girl flicked on the flashlight again, first blinding Marcus and then angling it away toward the photo in his hand. He looked at it again.

“Look closely,” said the girl. “Do you recognize her?”

“It’s Nandita Merchant,” said Marcus. “I already—”

“Not her,” said the girl. “The child standing next to her.”

Marcus looked again, holding the image close, peering intently at the little girl in the center. Her skin was light brown, her pigtails dark as coal, her eyes bright and curious. She wore a brightly colored dress, the kind a little girl would wear to a park on a summer day. The kind he hadn’t seen in twelve years. She looked happy, and innocent, and her face was slightly scrunched as she squinted one eye against the sun.

There was something familiar about that squint. . . .

Marcus’s mouth fell open, and he nearly dropped the photo in shock. “That’s Kira.” He looked up at the mystery girl, more confused now than ever. “That’s a picture of Kira from before the Break.” He looked at it again, studying her face; she was young, her round face soft with baby fat, but the features were still there. That was Kira’s nose, Kira’s eyes, and the same way Kira squinted in the sun. He shook his head. “Why is she with Nandita? They didn’t even meet until after the Break.”

“Exactly,” said the girl. “Nandita knew about this, and never told anyone.”

That was a weird way to phrase it, thought Marcus. Not “Nandita knew Kira,” but “Nandita knew about this.” “Knew about what?”

The girl flicked off her flashlight, slipped it into a pocket, and plucked the photo from Marcus’s hand. “Do you know where she is?”

“Kira or Nandita?” asked Marcus. He shrugged helplessly. “The answer’s no to both, so it doesn’t matter. Kira went looking for . . .” Kira was looking for the Partials, and he’d been careful never to tell anybody, but he supposed it didn’t matter in this case. “You’re a Partial, aren’t you?”

“If you talk to Kira, tell her that Heron says hello.”

Marcus nodded. “You’re the one who caught her; the one who took her to Dr. Morgan.”

Heron didn’t respond, tucking the photo away and glancing into the shadows behind her. “Things are going to get very interesting on this island, very soon,” she said. “You’re familiar with the expiration date Samm talked about?”

“You know Samm, too?”

“Kira Walker and Nandita Merchant are vital to the solution of the expiration date, and Dr. Morgan is determined to find them.”

Marcus frowned, confused. “What do they have to do with it?”

“Don’t get distracted by details,” said Heron. “It doesn’t matter why Dr. Morgan wants to find them, just that she does, and she is going to, and Partials have only two ways of doing things: my way, and everybody else’s way.”

“I’m not a big fan of your way,” said Marcus, eyeing the rifle. “Do I even want to know everybody else’s way?”

“You’ve seen it before,” said Heron. “It was called the Partial War.”

“In that case, I like your way better,” said Marcus.

“Then help me,” said Heron. “Find Nandita Merchant. She’s somewhere on this island. I’d do it myself, but I have business elsewhere.”

“Off the island,” said Marcus, and ventured a guess. “You’re looking for Kira.”

Heron smiled again.

“What do I do if I find her?” Marcus asked. “Assuming . . . that I look for her at all, because you’re not the boss of me.”

“Just find her,” said Heron. She took a step backward. “Trust me, you don’t want to do this their way.” She turned and walked into the shadows.

Marcus tried to follow her, but she was gone.

ira crouched low in the brush, staring through her new rifle scope at the door of the electronics store. This was the fourth one she’d visited, and every one had been previously scavenged. Normally this wouldn’t have been strange, but the ParaGen offices had made her wary, and her closer investigations had all proven the same thing: The scavenger, whoever he was, had come recently. This was more than just eleven-year-old looting from the end of the world—someone in the wilds of Manhattan had been collecting computers and generators within the last few months or so.

She’d been watching this place for nearly an hour and a half, focusing her energy, trying to be as cautious in tracking the looter as he was being in hiding his tracks. She watched a few minutes more, scanning the storefront, the neighboring storefronts, the four stories of windows above them—nothing. She checked the street again, empty in both directions. No one was here; it was safe to move in. She checked her pack, clutched her assault rifle tightly, and raced across the broken road. The door had been glass, and she leapt through the shattered opening without pausing; she checked her corners, gun up and ready for action, then carefully sighted down each aisle. It was a small store, mostly speakers and stereo systems, and most of that was long gone, thanks to the original looting. The only person here was the skeletal remains of the cashier, holed up behind the counter. Satisfied that it was safe, she slung her rifle over her shoulder and got down to business, examining the floor as carefully as she could. It didn’t take her long to find them: footprints in the dust, clear imprints that could only have been made long after the storefront was destroyed and the building had filled with dirt and debris. The prints here were even clearer than they’d been before, and she measured one with her hand—the same huge shoe size she’d seen before, maybe size fourteen or even fifteen. The prints were also shockingly well preserved: Wind and water would naturally erode the prints over time, especially those in the centers of the aisles, but here there had been almost no erosion at all. Kira dropped to her knees, examining the prints as gently as she could. The others had been made within the last year; these might have been made within the last week.

Whoever was stealing generators was still out there doing it.

Kira turned her attention to the shelves, trying to deduce from their condition, and from the placement of the footprints, exactly what the scavenger had taken. The main concentration of prints was, predictably, in the corner where the generators had been displayed, but the more she looked, the more she saw a deviation in the pattern: He had taken at least two trips to the opposite side of the store, one slow as if he were looking for something, and one firm, the prints deeper, as if he’d been carrying something heavy. She glanced over the shelves, her eyes sliding past dusty plastic phones still tethered to the metal frames, past slim notebook computers and tiny music players like Xochi used to collect. She followed the trail carefully through the rubble on the floor, ending at a low, empty shelf near the back. He’d definitely taken something. Kira bent down to brush away the dirt from the shelf tag, and struggled to decipher the weathered writing: ham. Ham? No electronics store would sell ham. She peered closer, picking out the faded, filthy word that followed: radio. HAM radio, the “ham” all in capital letters. Another acronym, like IT, that she’d never come across before.

Computers, generators, and now radios. Her mysterious scavenger was putting together quite the collection of old-world technology—and he was obviously an expert, as he’d known precisely what the thing on this shelf had been without having to clean up the tag first like she had. More than that, though, he’d taken some very specific equipment from the ParaGen offices, which couldn’t possibly be a coincidence; he wasn’t just grabbing certain kinds of technology, he was grabbing specific pieces of it. He was gathering old computers from ParaGen, and the generators to be able to access them. And now he was gathering radio systems, but who was he trying to call?

Manhattan was a no-man’s-land, empty, an unofficial demilitarized zone between the Partials and the human survivors. No one was supposed to be here, not because it was forbidden but because it was dangerous. If something happened to you out here, either side could get you, and neither side could protect you. It wasn’t even great territory for a spy, since there was nothing interesting to observe and report on—except, she supposed, the ParaGen files. She was looking for them, and this scavenger was doing the same—and he’d gotten there first. Now, thanks to him, there weren’t any generators left for her to take back to the ParaGen offices, and no guarantee that the computers left there would have the information she needed. She’d hoped to find a generator to get the top executive’s desk computer running again, to see if it contained what she was looking for, but this mysterious scavenger was obviously searching for the same things, and he had ignored the executive’s computer completely. Most likely, the scavenger had everything she was looking for. If she wanted to read those records, she’d have to find the scavenger himself.

She had to find out what ParaGen was doing with the Partials, with RM, with her, but there was another reason she was here. Nandita’s last note had told her to find the Trust— the Partial leaders, the high command who gave all the others their orders—and while she wasn’t going to find them here, she might, again, find some clues as to where to start her search. But . . . could she trust Nandita? Kira shook her head, frowning at the ravaged store. She used to trust Nandita more than anyone in the world, but learning that Nandita had known her father before the Break, had known Kira herself, and never once told her . . . Nandita had deceived her, and Kira had no way of knowing what her intentions were in telling Kira what to do next. But it was the only clue she had. She had to keep looking for information about ParaGen, scary mysterious scavenger or not—that was where the answers would be, and this new stranger was where she had to look for them. Whether he was a Partial or a human or double agent or whatever, it didn’t matter, she had to find him and learn what he knew.

Another thought came to her then, the mental image of a column of smoke. She’d seen it last time she was here, with Jayden and Haru and the others: a thin trail of smoke rising up from a chimney or a campfire. They’d gone to investigate it and run into Samm’s group of Partials, and in the rush to get back out, she’d forgotten that they’d never actually learned where the smoke was coming from. She’d assumed it was part of the Partial camp, but her experiences with them later made that seem almost laughably wrong—the Partials were far too clever to leave such an obvious sign of their presence, and far too hardy to need a campfire in the first place. It seemed more likely that the smoke came from a third party, and the Partials had shown up to investigate it the same time the humans did; their two groups had annihilated each other before either could find out what was going on. Maybe. It was a long shot, but it was better than anything else she had to go on. Certainly better than staking out hardware stores in a vain hope the scavenger would hit one while she was watching it.

She’d start with the same neighborhood they’d been investigating back then, and if he’d moved on—which seemed likely, after the massive firefight they’d held just a few blocks away— she’d look for more clues about where he might have headed next. There was somebody in this city, and she was determined to find him.

Finding the source of the smoke plume was harder than Kira had planned. It wasn’t there anymore, for one thing, so she had to go by memory, and the city was so big and confusing that she couldn’t remember clearly enough without jogging her memory visually. She had to go back, all the way south to the bridge they’d crossed on, and find the same building, and look out the same window. There, at long last, the landscape looked familiar—she could see the long strip of trees, the three apartment buildings, all the signs that had led her to the Partial attack those many months ago. That was where she’d first met Samm—well, not “met him” so much as “knocked him unconscious and captured him.” It was strange how much things had changed since then. If she had Samm here, now . . . Well, things would be a lot easier, for one thing.

But even as she thought it, she knew it was more than that. Staring out the window over the leafy city, she wondered again, for the hundredth time, if the connection she had felt between them had been the Partial link or something deeper. Was there any way to know? Did it even matter? A connection was a connection, and she had precious few of those these days.

But this wasn’t the time to think about Samm. Kira studied the cityscape, trying to fix in her mind exactly where the smoke had been coming from, and how to retrace her steps to find it. She went so far as to pull out her notebook and sketch out a map, but without a clear sense of how many streets there were, and what they were called, she didn’t know how useful the map would be. The buildings here were so tall, and the streets so narrow, the city was almost like a labyrinth, a maze of brick-and-metal canyons. Last time they’d had scouts to lead the way, but on her own Kira worried that she’d get lost and never find anything.

She finished her map as best she could, noting key landmarks that might help her navigate, then descended the long stairway and set out through the city. The streets were rough, filled with jumbled cars and spindly trees, their leaves fluttering in the soft wind. She passed an ancient car accident, a dozen or more vehicles piled together in a desperate bid to flee the plague-ridden city; she didn’t remember passing the pileup before, which made her nervous that she was following the wrong path, but soon she turned a corner and spotted one of her landmarks, and continued up the road more confidently. The center of each street was the easiest to travel in, less filled with debris than edges and sidewalks, but they were also the most visible, and Kira was too paranoid to leave the thicker cover. She hugged the walls and fences, stepping carefully through heaps of shifting rubble fallen down from the towering buildings. It was slow going, but it was safer, or at least that was what Kira told herself.

Here and there Kira spotted a bullet hole in a car or a mailbox, and she knew she was on the right track. They had run through here with a sniper behind them; Jayden had even been shot through the arm. The thought of Jayden sobered her, and she paused to listen: birds. Wind. Two cats yowling in a fight. It was foolish to think that there would be a sniper here now, but she couldn’t help herself. She ducked down behind a crumbling stairway, breathing heavily, telling herself that it was just nerves, but all she could think about was Jayden, shot through the arm—shot through the chest in the East Meadow hospital, bleeding out on the floor where he’d sacrificed himself to save her. He’d been the one to force her through her fear, to tell her to get up when she was too afraid to move. She gritted her teeth and stood up again, moving forward. She could be afraid all she wanted, but she wouldn’t let it stop her.

She reached the apartment complex when the sun was high in the sky: five buildings that had looked like three from her vantage point back in the skyscraper. It was the same place. There was a wide lawn around and between them, now filled with saplings, and she pushed through it carefully as she passed the buildings. This was the one we passed first, and this was the one we went into. . . . She came around the side and looked up, seeing the massive hole they’d blown in the wall three stories up. A vine wound around a dangling floor joist, and a bird perched on a crooked shard of rebar. The violence was gone, and nature was reclaiming it.

They had come here looking for the source of the smoke, and they’d chosen that apartment building because it looked out on what they assumed was the back of the occupied house. Kira kept her rifle up as she walked, rounding the first corner, then the next. This would be the street, and if she’d guessed correctly on her map, the house she was looking for would be six doors down. One, two three, four . . . no. Kira’s jaw dropped, and she stared in shock at the sixth townhouse in the row.

It was an empty crater, blown to pieces.

his Senate meeting will now come to order,” said Senator Tovar. “We extend an official welcome to all our guests today, and we look forward to hearing your reports. Before we begin, I’ve been asked to announce that there’s a green Ford Sovereign in the parking lot with its lights on, so if that’s yours, please . . .” He looked up, straight-faced, and the adults in the room all laughed. Marcus frowned, confused, and Tovar chuckled. “My apologies to all the plague babies in the room. That was an old-world joke, and not even a very good one.” He sat down. “Let’s start with the synthesis team. Dr. Skousen?”

Skousen stood, and Marcus placed his binder on his lap, ready in case the doctor asked him for anything. Skousen stepped forward, stopped to clear his throat, then paused, thought, and stepped forward again.

“I take it from your hesitance that you don’t have any good news,” said Tovar. “I guess let’s move on to whoever’s ready to not give us the next bad report.”

“Just let him speak,” said Senator Kessler. “We don’t need a joke in every single pause in conversation.”

Tovar raised his eyebrow. “I could make a joke when someone’s talking, but that seems rude.”

Kessler ignored him and turned to Skousen. “Doctor?”

“I’m afraid he’s correct,” said Skousen. “We have no good news. We have no bad news either, aside from the continued lack of progress—” He paused, stammering uncertainly. “We . . . have had no major setbacks, is what I’m saying.”

“So you’re no closer to synthesizing the cure than you were last time,” said Senator Woolf.

“We have eliminated certain possibilities as dead ends,” said Skousen. His face was worn and full of lines, and Marcus heard his voice drop. “It’s not much, as victories go, but it’s all we have.”

“We can’t continue like this,” said Woolf, turning to the other senators. “We saved one child, and almost two months later we’re no closer to saving any more. We’ve lost four more children in the last week alone. Their deaths are tragedies on their own, and I don’t want to gloss over them, but that’s not even our most pressing concern. The people know we have a cure—they know we can save infants, and they know that we’re not. They know the reasons for it, too, but that’s not exactly mollifying anyone. Having the cure so close, but still unattainable, is only making the tensions on this island worse.”

“Then what do you propose we do?” asked Tovar. “Attack the Partials and steal more pheromone? We can’t risk it.”

You might not have a choice soon, Marcus thought. If what Heron said is true . . . He squirmed in his seat, trying not to imagine the devastation of a Partial invasion. He didn’t know where Nandita was, or Kira, and he certainly didn’t want to hand them over to the Partials even if he could, on the other hand . . . a Partial invasion could mean the end of the human race—not a slow fade, dying off because they couldn’t reproduce, but a bloody, brutal genocide. The Partials had proven twelve years ago that they weren’t afraid of war, but genocide? Samm had insisted so fiercely that they weren’t responsible for RM. That they felt guilty for causing, even inadvertently, the horrors of the Break. Had things changed that much? Were they ready to sacrifice an entire species just to save themselves?

They’re asking me to do the same thing, he thought. To sacrifice Kira, or Nandita, to save humanity. If it comes right down to it, would I do it? Should I?

“We could send an ambassador,” said Senator Hobb. “We’ve talked about it, we’ve chosen the team—let’s do it.”

“Send them to who?” asked Kessler. “We’ve had contact with exactly one group of Partials, and they tried to kill the kids who contacted them. We tried to kill the Partial who contacted us. If there’s a peaceful resolution in our future, I sure as hell don’t know how to reach it.”

They were the same arguments, Marcus realized, that he and his friends had bandied around in Xochi’s living room. The same circular proposals, the same obvious responses, the same endless bickering. Are the adults just as lost as the rest of us? Or is there really no solution to this problem?

“From a medical standpoint,” said Dr. Skousen, “I’m afraid I must advocate—against my wishes—the . . .” He paused again. “The retrieval of a fresh sample. Of a new Partial, or at the very least a quantity of their pheromone. We have some remnants of the dose that was used on Arwen Sato, and we have the scans and records of the pheromone’s structure and function, but nothing can replace a fresh sample. We solved this problem last time by going to the source—to the Partials—and I believe that if we intend to solve it again, we will have to solve it the same way. Whether we get it by force or diplomacy doesn’t matter as much as the simple need to obtain it.”

A rush of whispers filled the room, soft mutterings like the rustle of leaves. It wasn’t “we” who solved this problem, Marcus thought, it was Kira, and Dr. Skousen was one of her biggest opponents. Now he was advocating the same action without even crediting her?

“You want us to risk another Partial War,” said Kessler.

“That risk has already been taken,” said Tovar. “The bear, as they say, has already been poked, and it hasn’t eaten us yet.”

“Being lucky is not the same thing as being safe,” said Kessler. “If there’s any way to synthesize this cure without resorting to military action, we have to explore it. If we provoke the Partials any further—”

“We’ve provoked them too much as it is!” said Woolf. “You’ve read the reports—there are boats off the North Shore, Partial boats patrolling our borders—”

Senator Hobb cut him off, while the audience whispered all the more wildly. “This is not the right venue to discuss those reports,” said Hobb.

Marcus felt like he’d been shot in the gut: The Partials were patrolling the sound. The Partials had kept to themselves for eleven years—a quick recon mission here and there, like Heron had done, but always undercover, so much so that the humans hadn’t even known about it. Now they were openly patrolling the border. He realized his mouth was hanging open, and he closed it tightly.

“The people need to know,” said Woolf. “They’re going to find out anyway—if the boats get too much closer, every farmer on the North Shore’s going to see them. For all we know small groups of them have landed already; our watch along that shore is anything but impenetrable.”

“So our cold war’s heated up,” said Skousen. He looked gray and frail, like a corpse from the side of the road. He paused a moment, swallowed, and sat down with a barely controlled thunk.

“If you’ll excuse me,” said Marcus, and realized that he was standing. He looked at the binder in his hands, unsure of what to do with it, then simply closed it and held it in front of him, wishing it was armor. He looked at the Senate, wondering if Heron was right—if one of them, or one of their aides, was a Partial agent. Did he dare to talk? Could he afford not to? “Excuse me,” he said again, starting over, “my name is Marcus Valencio—”

“We know who you are,” said Tovar.

Marcus nodded nervously. “I think I have more experience in Partial territory than anyone in this room—”

“That’s why we know who you are,” said Tovar, making a rolling motion with his hand. “Stop introducing yourself and get to your point.”

Marcus swallowed, suddenly not sure why he’d stood up—he felt like somebody needed to say something, but he didn’t feel at all qualified to say it. He wasn’t even sure what it was. He looked around the room, watching the faces of various gathered experts and politicians, wondering which of them—if any—was a traitor. He thought about Heron, and her search for Nandita, and realized that whatever he was trying to say, he was the only one who knew enough to say it. The only one who’d heard Heron’s warning. I just need to figure out how to phrase it without looking like a traitor myself. “I’m just saying,” he said at last, “that the Partials we encountered were conducting experiments. They have an expiration date—they’re all going to die—and they’re just as invested in curing that as we are in curing RM. More so, maybe, because it’s going to kill them sooner.”

“We know about the expiration date,” said Kessler. “It’s the best news we’ve had in twelve years.”

“Not counting the cure for RM, of course,” said Hobb quickly.

“It’s not good news at all,” said Marcus. “Their expiration date is like pushing us out of the frying pan and into the . . . molten core of the Earth. If they die, we die; we need their pheromone to cure ourselves.”

“That’s why we’re trying to synthesize it,” said Woolf.

“But we can’t synthesize it,” said Marcus, holding up his binder. “We could spend a couple of hours telling you everything we’ve tried, and all the reasons it hasn’t worked, and you wouldn’t understand half the science anyway—no offense—but that’s beside the point, because it hasn’t worked. ‘Why’ it hasn’t worked doesn’t matter.” He dropped the binder on the table behind him and turned back to face the senators. Seeing them again, staring at him silently, made Marcus feel suddenly queasy, and he smiled to cover it up. “Don’t everybody cheer at once, I have some bad news, too.”

Tovar pursed his lips. “I don’t know how you’re going to top the first bit, but I’m excited to hear it.”

Marcus felt the attention of the entire room bearing down on him and bit back the urge to make another wisecrack; he cracked jokes reflexively when he got too nervous, and he was more nervous now than he’d ever been. I shouldn’t be doing this, he thought. I’m a medic, not a public speaker. I’m not a debater, I’m not a leader, I’m not . . .

. . . I’m not Kira. That’s who should be here.

“Mr. Valencio?” asked Senator Woolf.

Marcus nodded, steeling his determination. “Well, you asked for it, so here it is. The leader of the Partial faction we ran into, the one who kidnapped Kira, was some kind of a doctor or a scientist; they called her Dr. Morgan. That was the reason they sent that Partial platoon into Manhattan all those months ago, and they kidnapped Kira because Dr. Morgan thinks the secret to curing Partials is somehow related to RM, which means it’s related to humans. Apparently they’d experimented on humans before, back during the Partial War, and if they think it will save their lives, they’ll kidnap as many more of us as they need, which might just be Kira again, but for all we know it’s all of us. They’re probably having the same meeting right now, on the other side of the sound, trying to decide how they can grab a few of us to experiment on—or if those reports you mentioned are true, they already had their meeting and might very well be putting their plan into motion.”

“That’s classified information,” said Senator Hobb. “We need—”

“If you’ll permit me to recap,” Marcus interrupted, holding up his hand, “there is a group of super-soldiers”—he put down his first finger—“trained specifically in military conquest”—he put down his second finger—“who outnumber us, like, thirty to one”—third finger—“who are desperate enough to try anything”—fourth finger—“and who believe that ‘anything’ in this case means ‘capturing human beings for invasive experimentation.’” He folded down his last finger and held his fist silently in the air. “Senators, the information might be classified, but it’s a pretty good bet the Partials will be unclassifying it a lot sooner than you think.”

The room was quiet, every eye focused on Marcus. Several long, heavy moments later, Tovar finally spoke.

“So you think we need to defend ourselves.”

“I think I’m scared to death, and I need to learn how to stop talking when everyone is staring at me.”

“Defending ourselves is not a viable option,” said Woolf, and the other senators stiffened in surprise. “The Defense Grid is well trained and as well equipped as a human army can possibly be. We have watches on every coast, we have bombs on every remaining bridge, we have ambush sites already mapped and ready to go at every likely invasion point. And yet no matter how well prepared we are, it will barely be a speed bump if a sizeable faction of Partials initiate an invasion. That’s an inescapable fact that cannot possibly be news to anyone in this room. We patrol this island because it’s all we can do, but if the Partials ever actually decide to invade, we will be conquered within days, if not hours.”

“The only remotely good news,” said Marcus, “is that their society is, if you’ll pardon the comparison, even more fractured than ours. The mainland was practically a war zone when we were over there, which could be the only reason they haven’t attacked us already.”

“So they kill each other and our problem solves itself,” said Kessler.

“Except for the RM,” said Hobb.

“Taking everything Mr. Valencio has said into account,” said Woolf, “we only have one real plan that has any hope of success. Step one, we sneak into that mainland war zone, hope nobody notices us, and grab a couple of Partials for Dr. Skousen to experiment on. Step two, we evacuate the entire island and get as far away as possible.”

The room was quiet. Marcus sat down. Leaving the island was crazy—it was their home, it was their only safe haven, that was why they’d come here in the first place—but that wasn’t really true anymore, was it? In the wake of the Partial War, this island had been like a sanctuary; they’d escaped from the Partials, they’d found a new life, and they’d started to rebuild. But that safety didn’t really have anything to do with the island, now that Marcus thought about it. They’d been safe because the Partials had ignored them, and now that the Partials were back—now that there were boats in the sound, and Heron hiding in the shadows, and the vicious Dr. Morgan trying to turn them all into experiments—that illusion of safety had melted away. Nobody had to say it out loud, nobody had to make an official decision, but Marcus knew it was done. He could see it in the faces of everyone in the room. The instant evacuation was broached as a possibility, it became a certainty.

The side door opened, and Marcus caught a glimpse of the Grid soldiers guarding the other side. They stepped aside and a large man stepped in: Duna Mkele, the “intelligence officer.” It occurred to Marcus that he didn’t know who, exactly, Mkele worked for; he seemed to have free access to the Senate, and some measure of authority over the Grid, but as far as Marcus could tell, he didn’t really answer to either group. Regardless of how those relationships worked, Marcus didn’t like the man. His presence was almost always a sign of bad news.

Mkele walked to Senator Woolf and whispered in his ear; Marcus tried to read their lips, or at least judge the reaction on their faces, but they turned their backs on the crowd. A moment later they walked to Tovar and whispered to him. Tovar listened solemnly, then looked at the crowd of people watching him. He turned back to Woolf and spoke in a loud stage voice obviously intended to carry throughout the room.

“They already know the first half; you might as well tell them the rest.”

Marcus saw clearly the stern look that passed over Mkele’s face. Woolf looked back unapologetically, then turned to face the crowd.

“It appears our timetable has been accelerated,” said Woolf. “The Partials have made ground on Long Island, near Mount Sinai Harbor, approximately five minutes ago.”

The meeting hall erupted in noisy conversations, and Marcus felt his stomach lurch with a sudden, terrifying fear. What did it mean—was this the end? Was this an invasion force, or a brazen raid to steal human test subjects? Was this Dr. Morgan’s group, Dr. Morgan’s enemies, or some other faction altogether?

Was Samm with them?

Did this mean Heron’s plan had failed? They couldn’t find Kira and Nandita through stealth and investigation, so it was time for a full invasion? He felt a moment of horrifying guilt, as if the entire invasion was his fault, personally, for failing to heed Heron’s warning. But he hadn’t seen Kira in months and Nandita in over a year; what could he have done? As the crowd roared in fear and confusion, as the reality of the situation sank into him, Marcus realized that it didn’t matter. He wasn’t ready to sacrifice anyone; he’d rather go down fighting than sell his soul for peace.

For the second time that day Marcus felt himself standing, heard his voice calling out. “I volunteer for the force that goes out to meet them,” he said. “You need a medic—I volunteer.”

Senator Tovar looked at him, nodded, then turned back to Mkele and Woolf. The room continued to buzz with fear and speculation. Marcus collapsed back into his chair.

I really need to learn to keep my mouth shut.

ira picked through the ruins of the town house, overwhelmed by the chaos: Walls had fallen in, floors and ceilings had collapsed, shards of furniture had separated and scattered and clustered again in random piles. Wood and books and paper and dishes and twisted chunks of metal filled the crater and spilled far into the street, thrown by the force of the blast.

The home had definitely been inhabited, and recently. Kira had seen a lot of old-world debris in her life; she had grown up surrounded by it, and it had become familiar: framed photos of long-dead families, little black boxes of media players and game systems, broken vases full of brittle stems. The details varied from house to house, but the feel was the same—forgotten lives of forgotten people. The debris from this home was different, and distinctly modern: stockpiles of canned food, now burst and rotting in the rubble; boarded windows and reinforced doors; guns and ammunition and handmade camouflage. Someone had lived here, long after the world was destroyed, and when someone else—the Partials?—had invaded their privacy, they blew up their own home. The pattern of the destruction was too complete, and too contained, to be an outside attack; an enemy would have used a smaller explosive to breach the wall, or a larger one that would have caught the neighboring houses as well. Whoever had destroyed this home had done their work pragmatically and with devastating thoroughness.

The crater reminded her, the more she thought about it, of a similar explosion she’d seen last year—before the cure, before Samm, before everything. She’d gone on a salvage run with Marcus and Jayden, somewhere on the North Shore of Long Island, and a building had been rigged to explode. It had been a booby trap, much like this one seemed to be—not designed to kill but to destroy evidence. What was the name of that little town? Asharoken; I remember how Jayden made fun of the name. And why were they looking in that building, anyway? It had been flagged by a preliminary salvage crew, and the soldiers had gone back to investigate; they’ d had specialists with them, like a computer guy or something. Something electronic? Her breath caught in her throat as the memory returned: It was a radio station. Someone had set up a radio station on the North Shore, and then blown it up to keep it secret. And now someone had done the same thing here. Was it the same someone?

Kira stepped back reflexively, as if the demolished building could somehow contain another bomb. She stared at the wreckage, summoned her courage, and walked in, placing her feet carefully in the unstable ruins. It didn’t take long to find the first body. A soldier dressed in a gray uniform—a Partial—was lodged under a fallen wall, a fractured corpse in the crumpled remains of composite body armor. His rifle lay beside him, and she pulled it from the rubble with surprising ease; the action moved stiffly, but it moved nonetheless, and the chamber still held a bullet. She popped out the clip and found it full—the soldier hadn’t fired a single round before he died, and his fellow soldiers had neither recovered his gear nor buried his body. That means the bomb took them by surprise, Kira thought, and it killed them all. There was no one left to recover the fallen.

Kira searched further, sifting cautiously through the fallen beams and bricks, and found at last the old familiar sight—the blackened fragments of a radio transceiver, just like in Asharoken. The two situations were too similar to dismiss: A group of scouts investigate something suspicious, find a fortified safe house full of communications equipment, and die in a defensive trap. Kira and the others had assumed the site in Asharoken belonged to the Voice, but Owen Tovar denied it then and now. The next most likely candidates were the Partials, yet here was a group of Partials caught in the same trap. Another Partial faction, then, thought Kira. But which belongs to Dr. Morgan—the spies with the radio, or the scouts that attacked it? Or neither? And how does this connect to ParaGen? Whoever had taken the computers from the offices had also taken the radios from the store, and now here were fragments of both in one place. There had to be a connection. It seemed likely that the faction collecting radios was the same faction that was establishing these radio stations throughout the ruins. But what were they doing? And why would they kill so freely to hide it?

“What I need is a clue,” said Kira, frowning at the devastation. She was talking to herself more and more these days, and she felt foolish to hear her voice ringing out through the empty city. On the other hand, hers was the only voice she’d heard in weeks, and it was oddly soothing every time she spoke. She shook her head. “Gotta talk to somebody, right? Even if it does make me look pathetic.” She bent down, examining the bits of paper sprinkled throughout the rubble. Whoever had made the safe houses and planted the bombs was still out there, and finding them would be all but impossible now that they’d blown up all the evidence. Kira laughed dryly. “But I suppose that’s kind of the point.”

She pulled one of the papers from the debris at her feet; it was a fragment of old-world newspaper, wrinkled and yellow, and the headline was just barely legible. DETROIT PROTEST TURNS VIOLENT, she read. The smaller words in the body of the article were only barely legible, but Kira deciphered the words “police” and “factory,” and several references to Partials. “So the faction collecting radios is also collecting articles about the Partial rebellion?” She frowned at the paper, then rolled her eyes and dropped it back to the ground. “Either that, or every newspaper from right before the Break talked about Partials, and this means nothing.” She shook her head. “I need something concrete. You know, aside from all the actual chunks of concrete.” She kicked a piece of rubble, and it skittered away across the crater, bouncing off the fallen radio antenna with a clang.

She walked over to the examine the antenna; it was large, probably several yards tall when it was still straight, but as thin as cable. It must have been pretty sturdy to have stood up straight, but the explosion and the fall had twisted it into tight creases and curls. Kira pulled on it, trying to drag it out from the fallen bricks and Sheetrock that held it half-buried. It moved about three feet before catching on something; she strained against it, but it refused to budge any further. She dropped the antenna, panting with exertion, and looked for more . . . anything. She found more news clippings, three more decaying Partial bodies, and a nest of garter snakes curled under the shelf of a fallen solar panel, but nothing that told her where the bombers had gone, or if they might have another radio station elsewhere in the city. She sat down beside another solar panel to rest, pulling out a canteen of water, when suddenly it occurred to her:

Why were there two banks of solar panels?

This type of solar panel was called a Zoble, and Kira knew them well; Xochi had installed one on their roof at home to run her music players, and there were several more at the hospital. They could draw a lot of power and transfer it very efficiently, and they were incredibly rare. Xochi had only been able to afford hers through her “mother” and her connections to the farms and the fresh food market. To find one in Manhattan wasn’t necessarily bizarre—demand was less, after all, with no other scavengers to compete with—but to find two, rigged to the same building, spoke of abnormally high power needs. She scoured the crater again, on her hands and knees this time, searching for the capacitor that stored all this energy, and found instead the broken shards of a third Zoble panel.

“Three Zobles,” whispered Kira. “Why do you need all that juice? For the radio? Can they possibly need that much?” She’d used walkie-talkies back home that fit snugly in the palm of her hand, running off tiny rechargeables. What kind of radio needed three Zoble panels and a five-meter antenna? It didn’t make sense.

Unless they were powering more than just a radio. Unless they were powering, say, a collection of stolen ParaGen computers.

Kira looked around, not at the crater but at the street behind her and the cold, lifeless buildings beyond. She felt exposed, as if a spotlight had just been pointed at her, and she stepped into the shadow of a fallen wall. If there were really something valuable under here, she thought, whoever was protecting this place would have come to dig it up by now. The extra juice was here to power the radio and the computers, and whoever I found collecting radios and computers was doing it in the last few months—long after this building exploded. They’re still out there, and they’re up to something weird.

She looked up at the roofline, and the darkening sky beyond it. And all I have to do to find them is to find what they need: a giant antenna and enough solar panels to run their radio. If there are other such sites in the city, I won’t be able to see them from down here.

“Time to go up.”

Kira’s plan was simple: climb the tallest building she could find, get a good view of the city, and watch. If she was lucky she’d see another smoke trail, though she had to assume her targets had learned their lesson after the last time; more likely, she’d just have to study the skyline as closely as she could, in all directions and in all angles of sunlight, hoping to catch a glimpse of a giant antenna and a bank—or banks—of solar panels.

“Then I just have to keep notes, find them on my map, and check them out in person,” said Kira, talking to herself as she climbed another flight of stairs. “And hope I don’t get blown up, like everyone else has so far.”

The building she’d chosen was relatively close to the ParaGen building, maybe a mile southwest—a massive granite skyscraper proudly proclaiming itself the Empire State Building. The outer walls were overgrown with vines and moss, like most of the city, but the inner structure seemed stable enough, and she’d only had to shoot one lock to get into the main stairway. She was on the 32nd floor now, slowly rounding the railing to the 33rd; according to the signs in the lobby, she had fifty-three to go. “I’ve got three liters of water,” she told herself, reciting her supplies as she climbed, “six cans of tuna, two cans of beans, and one last MRE from that army supply store on Seventh Avenue. I need to find another one of those.” She reached the landing of the 34th floor, stuck out her tongue, and kept climbing. “That food had better last me a while, because I don’t want to make this climb any more often than I have to.”

What felt like hours later she collapsed on the 86th floor with a gasp, pausing to drink more water before checking out the alleged “observatory.” It had a great view, but the walls were mostly windows, and almost all had been shattered, leaving the entire floor drafty and frigid. She trudged back to the stairway and ended up on the 102nd floor, at the base of a giant spire that continued up another two or three hundred feet. A plaque at the door congratulated her for climbing 1,860 individual stairs, and she nodded as she caught her breath. “Just my luck,” she gasped. “I’m going to have the best glutes left on the planet, and there’s nobody here to see them.”

While the 86th floor had been wide and square, with a slim balcony around the perimeter of the building, the 102nd floor was small and round, almost like a lighthouse. The only protection between observers and the street below was a circle of windows, mostly intact, but Kira couldn’t help but lean out one of the broken ones, feeling the rush of the wind and the insane thrill of the mind-numbing height. It was the kind of view she’d always imagined the old-world people had seen from their airplanes, so high up the world itself seemed distant and small. More importantly, it gave her an amazing view of the city—there were other buildings that were taller, but only a few, and their view wouldn’t be any better than this one. Kira dropped her bags and pulled out her binoculars, starting with the southern view and scanning the skyline for radio antennas. There were far more than she expected. She blew out a long, slow breath, shaking her head and wondering how she’d ever be able to find the one building she needed out of the thousands that filled the island. She closed her eyes.

“The only way to do it,” she said softly, “is to do it.” She plucked her notebook from the back of her bag, found the closest antenna to the south, and starting taking notes.

he farthest antenna Kira found was so far north she suspected it might be beyond the borders of Manhattan island, in the region called the Bronx; she hoped she didn’t have to go that far, as the proximity to the Partials still made her nervous, but if she had to do it, she swore that she would. The answers she stood to gain made any risk worth it.

The closest antenna was the giant spire on top of her own building, but there was no one in the building with her. Well— she didn’t think there was anyone else in the building with her who could be using it, but it was an awfully big building. “Maybe I’m being paranoid,” she told herself, climbing up to check the antenna. She stopped and corrected herself. “Maybe I’m being too paranoid. A little bit is probably pretty healthy.” The antenna turned out to be completely unpowered, and she was surprised at how relieved she felt. She studied the city, taking notes on each new antenna she found, and watched as the setting sun revealed new solar panels one by one, winking slyly as the fading light hit just the right angle, then sliding again into darkness. At night she slipped down a few floors to find an enclosed room, and bundled herself warmly in her sleeping bag. This high in the sky the buildings were remarkably clean—no windswept dirt, no budding shoots, no paw prints in the dust. It reminded her of home, of the buildings she and others had worked so hard to keep clean: her house, the hospital, the school. She wondered, not for the first time, if she would ever see any of them again.

On the fourth day her water ran dry, and she made the long climb down to street level looking for more. A park at the end of a long city block drew her attention, and she found what she was looking for—not a pool or puddle but a subway entrance, dark water lapping at the steps. In the old world the subway had been for transportation, but somehow it had flooded; the tunnels were now an underground river, slow but still flowing. Kira brought out her purifier and pumped three more liters, refilling her plastic bottles, always keeping a wary eye on the city around her. She found a grocery store and stocked up on several cans of vegetables, but stopped and grimaced when she found one that had swollen and burst—these cans were now more than eleven years old, and that was getting close to the shelf life of most canned foods. If some of these were already spoiling, she was better off not risking any of them. She sighed and put them back, wondering if she had the time to hunt live game.

“At least some snares,” she decided, and set a few simple rope traps near the top of the subway entrance. There were prints around the mouth of it, and she figured some of the local elands and rabbits were using it as a watering hole. She climbed back up to her observatory, set a few more snares for birds, and got back to work. Two nights later she had goose for dinner, roasted over a smokeless survival stove and turned on a spit made of old wire hangers. It was the best she’d eaten in weeks.

Five days and three water trips later she found her first big break—a gleam of light in a window, a tiny speck dancing redly for just a second, and then it was gone. Was it a signal? Had she only imagined it? She sat up straighter, watching the spot intently through her binoculars. A minute went by. Five minutes. Just as she was about to give up, she saw it again: a movement, a fire, and a closing door. Someone was letting out smoke; maybe their cook fire had gotten out of hand. She scrambled to identify the building before night fell too completely, and saw the dancing flame three more times in the next half hour. When the moon rose she looked for smoke, but there was nothing; they had dispersed it, or the wind had, too effectively to be seen.

Kira stood up, still staring toward the building now invisible in the darkness. It was one of the many she’d identified as a likely target—its roof was covered with solar panels, ringing a central antenna so large she thought it must have been an actual radio station. If someone had gotten that old equipment running again, they’d have a more powerful radio than either of the two she’d seen blown up.

“Do I go now, or wait for morning?” Staring into the darkness, she realized she still wasn’t sure what her plan was—knowing where the bad guys were hiding wouldn’t do her any good if she triggered a bomb as soon as she stepped inside. She could try to catch one of them, maybe in a larger version of her rabbit snares, and ask questions, or she could try to slip in when the bomb wasn’t armed—which, she supposed, was only when the mysterious bombers themselves were inside. That didn’t sound safe at all.

“The best thing to do,” she whispered, crouching lower in the window, “is exactly what I’m doing now—watch and wait and hope I can learn something useful.” She sighed. “It’s gotten me this far.”

But the question remained: Should she go tonight or wait for morning? A journey through the city would be more dangerous in the dark, but her targets had proven to be incredibly cautious—if they knew a flash of light and a trail of smoke had given away their position, they might move to a new location, leaving another booby trap in their wake, and Kira would lose them. Had the fire been an accident? Would it make them nervous enough to run? Kira had no way of knowing, and the uncertainty made her nervous in turn. This was one situation where the slow, cautious approach was too risky—she’d already lost five days; better to go now, she decided, than to take the chance of losing her only good lead. She packed her things, checked her rifle, and began the long descent through the pitch-dark bowels of the stairwell.

Feral cats prowled the lower levels, searching for food with bright, nocturnal eyes. Kira heard them moving in the shadows, waiting and watching and pouncing; the hiss of predators and the struggling of prey.

Kira scanned the street carefully before leaving the building, then moved softly from car to car, keeping to cover as much as possible. The building with the campfire was about three miles north, uncomfortably close to the giant forest of Central Park. Wild animals lived throughout the city, but the park was home to most of the big ones. Kira traveled as quickly as she dared, keeping her flashlight off and using the moon to see. The pale light made shadows deeper and more ominous; it also made the ground look smoother than it really was, and Kira stumbled on the rough terrain anytime she tried to move too fast. She skirted the west side of the park, watching for animals, but there were none out in the open. This was bad news: If there were deer out, it would at least give the predators something better to hunt than her. Feral house cats were hardly the most dangerous predators in the city.

A shadow shifted in her peripheral vision, and Kira whirled around to look. Nothing. She paused to listen . . . yes . . . there it was. A deep thrum, almost too low to hear. Something very big was breathing nearby, not just breathing but purring, almost growling. Something very good at hiding.

Kira was being hunted.

Before her was a large plaza, the concrete cracked and buckled and dotted with tufts of tall, dark weeds; the center statue stood solemn and unmoving. Cars circled the edge, their tires long ago turned flat and deflated. Kira backed slowly against a wall, cutting off the predator’s lines of attack, holding her breath to listen. The deep breathing was there, a bass rumble of giant lungs filling and exhaling. She couldn’t tell where it was coming from.

There are panthers in the city, she thought. I’ve seen them during the day—panthers and lions and once, I swear, I saw a tiger. Refugees from a zoo or a circus, well fed by the herds of wild deer and horses that roam Central Park. There are even elephants—I heard them last year. Do they feed on those, too?

Focus, she told herself. They’re going to feed on you if you don’t find a way out of this. Lions or panthers or worse.

Panthers. A terrifying thought occurred to her: Panthers are supposed to hunt at night, but I’ve only ever seen them in the day. Do they hunt in both now, or is this thing in the darkness something worse—something so dangerous the panthers had to change their habits to avoid it? Am I being hunted by a nocturnal panther, or are the panthers hiding, scared in their dens, to escape the creature that’s hunting me? Memories of the ParaGen brochure leapt unbidden to her mind—dragons and intelligent dogs, engineered lions and who only knew what else they’d done. They’d designed the Partials as the ultimate soldiers—had they designed an ultimate predator as well?

Kira stole a glance back down the street where she’d come, shaking her head at the long string of derelict cars and delivery vans; this creature could be hiding behind any one of them, waiting for her to pass by. It was the same with the plaza in front of her. Her best bet lay across the street, in the lobby of what might once have been a shopping mall: fallen mannequins, faded posters of bodies and faces, rack upon rack of ragged clothes. The beast could be in there, too—for all she knew the cluttered hallways could be its den—but there were doors as well, human-size and closed, and if she could get inside one and close it again behind her, she would be safe. Safe until it went away, safe until morning if it took that long. She heard the same rumbling growl, closer now than ever, and set her jaw fiercely.

“It’s now or never.” She leapt to her feet, charging across the broken street to the mall beyond, dodging around the corner of a car as a rush of air tore past behind her. She imagined giant claws swiping inches from her back, and struggled to regain her footing as she raced in through the shattered glass facade of the building. Debris clattered in her wake, far more than she could ever dislodge by herself, but she didn’t dare look back; she raised her gun over her shoulder, firing wildly behind her, turning again as she reached a cracking pillar. The interior of the mall was bigger than she’d expected, glistening metal stairways climbing up and down in pairs, a vast courtyard yawning wide in the center of the floor below her. It was too dark to see the bottom or the top; too dark to see much of anything. The door she’d been aiming for was on the other side; she turned to the right, skirting the pit, and brought her gun back in front of her, switching on the light. The thing seemed to be scrabbling on the slick floor; Kira found the first door she could and sprinted straight toward it.

The light beam jerked wildly as she ran, up and down, back and forth, shining back from the tiled floor and the metal stairs and the mirrored plates across the walls. In a flash of reflected light the wall before her showed her own image, a massive black shape bearing down from behind, and then the beam jerked again and the scene was gone, a strobing nightmare of light and darkness and fear. She fixed her eyes on the doorway, running like she’d never run before, and moments before she got there she lowered her rifle, sighted on the doorknob, and fired a semiautomatic burst. The lock blew clear, the door fell open, and Kira dove through without a pause, slamming her hand against the left wall to help propel her toward the right and another open door. She grabbed at this one as she passed, slamming it closed behind her, and leaned against it just as something hit it from the other side, cracking it loudly; still, though, it held, and Kira braced herself tightly against it as the thing came back for another hit.

She looked around wildly, aiming the rifle awkwardly with one hand to shine its light on the room, and saw a large wood desk. Claws scraped across the other side of the door—it was pawing at the barrier now, not smashing it, and she took the risk, jumping over the desk and heaving against it, pushing it back to block the door. The scratching turned to thumping; the door shook, and suddenly Kira was deafened by a massive roar. She lost her footing, dropped her rifle, and threw herself against the desk again, slamming it up against the door just as the thing on the other side slammed it again, shaking the room. The desk held. Kira fell back, reaching for the rifle’s light, and brought it up to illuminate the top half of the door, riven with cracks and splintered away from the frame. Something moved beyond it, nearly as tall as the ceiling; the light reflected against a huge amber eye, narrowing to a slit as the light blinded it. Kira reeled at the sheer size of it, scooting away almost involuntarily. A massive paw clawed at the gap in the door, giant claws gleaming silver in the halogen beam, and Kira fired a burst from her rifle, clipping it in the toe. The creature roared again, but this time Kira roared back, cornered and furious. She climbed on the desk, sighted straight through the broken doorway, and fired at the wall of fur and muscle before her. It howled in rage and pain, thrashing wildly at the door, and Kira ejected the spent clip, slapped in another one, and fired again. The creature turned and fled, disappearing into the darkness.

Kira stood frozen in the doorway, her knuckles white as bone as they clutched the rifle. A second became a minute; a minute became two. The monster didn’t return. The adrenaline rush wore off and Kira began to shake, subtly at first and then harder, faster, shaking uncontrollably. She climbed down from the desk, nearly falling to the floor, and collapsed in the corner, sobbing.

The dawn light didn’t reach through the maze of walls and doorways, but Kira could hear the sounds of morning: birds singing to greet the sun, bees buzzing through the flowers in the asphalt, and yes, even the distant trumpet of an elephant. Kira stood up slowly, peering through the cracked doorway. Her light was still on, though the batteries were failing; the room beyond was covered in sprays and smears of blood, but the creature itself was gone. She pulled back the desk, carefully opening the door; it was lighter out here, and she saw a beam of sunlight on the cluttered floor of the mall. Red-brown footprints led out to the street and into the plaza, but Kira didn’t bother following them. She took a drink from her canteen, sloshing the cold water on her face. It had been stupid to go out at night, she knew, and she promised herself she would never do it again.

She shook her head, working out the kinks in her back and arms and fingers. The men she was chasing were probably too far away to have heard the gunfire last night, but if she was unlucky with the echoes, who was to say what could have happened? It didn’t change her plan—she had already been in a rush to find their building, and it was only more urgent now. She pulled her map from her backpack, locating herself and her quarry and planning out the best route to take. With a sigh and another sip of water, she set off through the city.

Kira traveled cautiously, wary now not only of Partial patrols but of giant hairy claw monsters; she saw movement in every shadow, and had to force herself to stay calm and levelheaded. When she arrived at the right neighborhood, it took her a few hours to positively identify the building with the antenna, though most of that was her fear of being seen. She ended up climbing another building’s staircase to get a bird’s-eye view, and from there spotted the antenna easily. The buildings here were shorter, only three or four stories for most of them. Knowing what she was looking for, it was easy to spot some of the more subtle clues that the building was inhabited—many of the windows were boarded over, especially on the third floor, and faint tracks in the built-up dirt showed that someone had recently used the front steps.

This was the tricky part. She didn’t dare to move in until she knew who lived there, where they were, and whether the bombs were set to explode. The most likely scenario, at least to her, was that this was some kind of outpost for a faction of Partials—and not a faction friendly to Dr. Morgan, since their last meeting at the other outpost had gone so destructively. That didn’t automatically mean that these Partials were friendly to humans, though, and Kira didn’t want to walk into a trap. She would watch, and wait, and see what happened.

Nothing happened.

Kira watched the building all day and night, holed up in the apartment across the street. She ate cold cans of beans and huddled under a moth-eaten blanket to avoid starting a fire. Nobody went in and nobody went out, and when night fell there were no fires in the windows, no smoke rising up through a crack in the boards. Nothing happened the second day either, and Kira was beginning to get nervous—they must have left before she got there, or slipped out a back way. She crept down to the street and did a quick perimeter check, searching for other entrances and exits, but nothing looked used, either generally or recently. If they’d left at all, they’d done it through the front door. She settled back in to watch it.

That night, someone came out.

Kira leaned forward, careful to stay out of the moonlight in the window. The man was large, easily seven feet tall, with the heft and girth to match. He probably outweighed Kira by two hundred pounds. His skin was dark, but probably no darker than her own; it was hard to tell in the faint light of a cloudy moon. He opened the front door cautiously, lifted a small cart through the door and down the stairs, and carefully locked the door behind him. The cart was full of jugs, and Kira guessed he was off to retrieve water. He wore a heavy pack full of something she couldn’t identify, and she couldn’t see his weapon. Safer to assume the worst, then, she thought, as there could easily be a high-caliber handgun or submachine gun hidden in the folds of his loose-fitting trench coat.

Kira grabbed her things quietly, packing in the dark, and stole down the stairs to follow him. He was already at the corner when she reached the street, and she waited until he rounded it before slipping out after him, stepping as lightly as she could through the rubble in the street. She peered around the corner and saw him walking slowly, pulling the cart behind him. He moved strangely, almost like a waddle, and Kira wondered if it was just his bulk or some other factor. He reached the end of the block and stepped into the street without pausing, as if completely unconcerned that he would be seen or, worse, eaten. How had he survived this long without running into that nocturnal monster? He disappeared around a low wall, and Kira crept after him.

He stood at the mouth of a subway tunnel, filling his plastic jugs with a long-tubed pump similar to her own. He huffed as he worked, as if the exertion was too much for him, but the rest of his mannerisms spoke of long familiarity and expertise. He’d done this often enough to be very good at it.

Was he a Partial? Kira stayed motionless in the shadows observing him, trying to . . . not to listen, not to smell, but to feel him, in the way that she’d been able to feel Samm. The link. It was more emotional than informational; if she linked with this man at all, it would be through feeling the things he felt. She examined her emotions closely: She was curious; she was tired; she was sure of her purpose. Did any of that come from him? What would he be feeling? He was muttering to himself, not angrily but simply talking, the way she had started talking to herself. She couldn’t hear the words.

The more she watched him, methodically filling the jugs, the more she realized that his size suggested he was human. The Partials had been engineered not just as soldiers but as specific soldiers: the infantry were all young men, the generals were all older men, and Samm had said that their doctors were women and their pilots were petite girls designed to fit easily into small vehicles and tight cockpits. The military contractors had saved billions of dollars building undersized jets. Obviously there were exceptions—Kira had no idea what role Heron was intended to fill, the tall, leggy supermodel who’d captured her for Dr. Morgan—but did one of the templates include this man? He was huge, especially now that she saw him from ground level. Some kind of super-soldier among super-soldiers? A heavy-weapons specialist, maybe, or a close-combat expert? Samm hadn’t mentioned anyone like that, but there had been a lot of things he’d never mentioned. Kira concentrated as hard as she could, willing herself to detect this giant through whatever version of the link she possessed, but she felt nothing.

Aside from his size was the simple fact that he was winded. He’d walked only a couple of blocks, and yet he was huffing like he’d just run a marathon. That didn’t make sense for a physically perfect super-soldier, but it was perfect for an overweight human.

He was illuminated fairly well, thanks to a large moon and a cloudless sky, and Kira quietly pulled out her binoculars to look at him more closely. She was barely thirty yards away, crouched behind a rusting car, but she wanted to confirm his weaponry at the very least. There was nothing on his legs or hips, no holsters or knives, and there seemed to be nothing in the cart but plastic jugs. He finished filling a jug and lifted it, turning toward her as he placed it in the cart, and for just a moment his coat fell open and she saw his chest and sides: He had no weapons in there either, no shoulder holsters or bandoliers or anything. Kira frowned. No one would travel in the wilderness unarmed, so his weapon must be concealed, but why conceal it if you thought you were alone—

In a flash Kira realized that she had walked into a trap: This man, big and slow and unarmed, had been sent outside as bait, while the others circled around to cut off her escape. She dropped to the ground, lowering her profile in case anyone tried to shoot her right there, and looked around wildly for the attackers. The city was too dark; there could be snipers in a hundred different windows and doorways and shadows around her, but she couldn’t see deep enough into any of them. Her only hope was to run, just like with the monster in the plaza. The building behind had some kind of storefront, maybe an old pizza place; there would be a back room at the very least, probably a basement, and if she was lucky a stairwell that accessed the rest of the building. She could slip in, find another exit, and slip out before they had a chance to close their trap.

The man by the subway stairs was stretching, his backpack lying gently on the ground beside him. Was he prepping for a strike? She had to go now. Kira scrambled to her feet and bolted toward the storefront, bracing herself for the impact of bullets in her back. Behind her she heard a yelp, like a cry of fear, but she didn’t turn around. At the back of the old pizza place was a thin wooden door, and beyond it an office; Kira dove through and slammed it closed behind her, switching on her light to look for another exit. There was none.

She was trapped.

ira swept her arm across the metal desk in the center of the room, clearing away decades-old dust and thick stacks of papers. Last was a thin computer monitor, which she knocked aside on her backswing before flipping the desk on its side, diving behind it for an extra layer of shielding. She crouched low behind the barrier, her rifle tucked into the side of her face, the barrel trained squarely on the door; if the knob so much as twitched, she could put a whole clip into whoever stood beyond it. She waited, barely daring to breathe.

She waited.

A minute went by. Five minutes. Ten minutes. She imagined another gunman on the far side of the door, lying in wait as carefully as she was. Which one of them would break first? There were more of them, and they had the advantage; they had more room to maneuver, and more people to do it with. But she wasn’t going to give up that easily. If they wanted her, they had to come in and get her.

Ten more minutes went by, and Kira shifted her weight painfully from one leg to the other. She blinked sweat from her eyes, feeling them red and raw, but still she refused to move. Another ten minutes. Her throat was parched and painful, her fingers cramped around the handgrip of her gun. Nothing moved. No sound disturbed the night.

Kira’s flashlight flickered, sick and yellow as the batteries started to fail. They’d been weak for a few days, and she hadn’t found any replacements yet. Ten minutes later the light winked out for good, and Kira closed her eyes uselessly against the utter blackness, listening with every ounce of her focus: for the doorknob, for the creak of floorboards or the squeak of shoes, for the click of a gun as it readied to fire. Ten more minutes. Twenty. An hour. Were they really this patient?

Or was there nobody there?

Kira rubbed her eyes, thinking back on the attack. She had assumed there was a trap—it was the most logical explanation— but she hadn’t actually seen anyone. Was it really possible that the man outside, unarmed and alone in a dead city full of monsters, was really the only one? It was extremely unlikely, but yes, it was possible. Was she ready to bet her life on that possibility?

She lowered her gun, whimpering silently at the ache in her stiff shoulders. She moved as quietly as she could to the side of the room, out of the line of fire that would come through the door, and listened again. All was quiet. She reached out with one hand, hugging the wall tightly, and touched the doorknob. Nobody shot her. She took a breath, gripped the knob tightly, and threw it open as fast as she could, yanking her hand back and rolling away from the opening. No gunfire, no shouts, no noise at all but the creak of the door. She stared at the dark black doorway, trying to work up the courage to go through it, and decided to try one more thing; she picked up the monitor she’d knocked off the desk, found a good stance, and heaved it out the door, hoping to draw the fire of anyone lurking on the other side. The monitor clattered to the ground, the screen cracked, and the silence returned.

“Nobody shoot me,” she said, just in case, and slowly came around the corner of the door frame. The pizza place beyond was as empty as ever, and out in the street the sagging metal cars reflected shafts of moonlight. She crept outside, rifle up and ready, checking her corners and watching for an ambush, but she was alone. On the far side of the street stood the subway entrance, and beside it the large man’s cart, motionless and abandoned. A jug lay on the ground nearby, dropped on its side, the water now long spilled out. A few feet away, where he had laid it against the wall of the subway entrance, was the man’s bulging backpack.

Kira walked a full circuit of the intersection, running from car to car for cover, before approaching the backpack. It was enormous, practically as big as she was, and she couldn’t help but think of the shattered craters of the previous two houses she’d seen. Did she really want to open a bomber’s backpack? He could have left it here as a trap specifically to kill her . . . but honestly, he’d had so many easier opportunities to just shoot her if he really wanted her dead. Or were explosives the only weapon he knew? Maybe he really didn’t have a gun at all.

She circled the bag warily, rubbing her face with her palm, trying to make a decision. Was it worth it? The nocturnal monster still haunted her—the one time she’d taken a major risk, she’d nearly died. But her caution was costing her time, and time wasn’t a resource she could afford to spend this freely. The answers she was looking for—what is the Trust? How are the Partials connected to RM? Who am I, and what plan am I a part of? Those were the answers that could save the human race or destroy it. As dangerous as her choices were, she still had to make them. She slung her rifle behind her shoulder and reached for the bag—

—and heard a voice.

Kira scrambled back, ducking behind the wall of the subway entrance. The voice was soft, but it carried well in the midnight silence—a faint muttering from a side street, maybe half a block down and closing. She gripped her rifle, looking for somewhere to run, but she was trapped in the open. Instead she crept slowly to the side, keeping the subway entrance between her and the speaker. As he drew nearer, the muttering got louder and louder until at last she understood the words.

“Never leave the backpack, never leave the backpack.” It was the same phrase, over and over: “Never leave the backpack.” She peeked out and saw the large man from before, trudging up the street with his same waddling gait. “Never leave the backpack.” His hands twitched, and his eyes darted back and forth across the street. “Never leave the backpack.”

Kira wasn’t sure what it was; something about the way he walked, or spoke, or rubbed his hands together—probably a combination of all that and more—that made her decide. She’d wasted enough time. She had to act. She slung her rifle back over her shoulder, spread her hands wide to show that they were empty, and stepped out from her hiding place, between him and the backpack.

“Hello.”

The man jerked to a stop, his eyes wide with horror, and he turned and bolted back the way he had come. Kira stepped forward to follow, not certain if she should, when suddenly he stopped, bending low at the waist as if wounded, and shook his head violently. “Never leave the backpack,” he said, turning toward her, “never leave the backpack.” He saw her again and ran a few more steps away, as if it were an involuntary reaction, but then he stopped again, turning and eyeing the backpack with a pained, terrified expression. “Never leave the backpack.”

“It’s all right,” said Kira, wondering what was happening. This wasn’t at all what she’d expected. “I’m not going to hurt you.” She tried to look as harmless as possible.

“I need the backpack,” he said, his voice practically dripping with desperation. “I’m not supposed to ever leave the backpack, I always take it with me, it’s everything I have.”

“Are these your supplies?” she asked, stepping to the side. The move gave the man a better view of the backpack, and he surged forward five more steps, his hand reaching out as if to snatch it away from her from fifty feet away. “I’m not here to steal from you,” she said slowly. “I just want to talk. How many others are there?”

“That’s the only one,” he pleaded. “I need it, I can’t lose it, it’s everything I have—”

“Not the backpack,” she said, “other people: How many other people are with you in the safe house?”

“Please give me the backpack,” he said again, creeping forward. He stepped into the light, and she could see tears in his eyes. His voice was hoarse and desperate. “I need it, I need it, I need the backpack. Please give it back to me.”

“Is it medicine? Do you need help?”

“Please give it back,” he muttered, over and over. “Never leave the backpack.” Kira considered for a moment, then stepped to the side, moving twenty feet away to the other side of the water cart—far enough that he could come up and grab the backpack while still staying well outside her reach. He rushed forward and collapsed on it, clutching it and crying, and Kira looked again for an ambush—for snipers in the windows, or men coming up behind him in the street. He seemed to be completely alone. What’s going on here? Could this be the bomber who’ d been so hard to track, who’ d set traps so cunning that even Partials didn’t find them until it was too late?

He didn’t seem eager to talk about anything but the backpack, though, so she focused on that.

“What’s in it?”

He answered without looking up. “Everything.”

“Your food? Your weapons?”

“No weapons,” he said firmly, shaking his head, “no weapons. I’m a noncombatant, you can’t shoot me, I don’t have any weapons.”

Kira took a small step forward. “Food, then?”

“Are you hungry?” He seemed to perk up at this, his head rising.

Kira thought carefully, then nodded. “A little.” She paused, then gestured toward her own pack. “I have some beans if you want some, and a can of pineapple I found in a drugstore.”

“I have lots of pineapple,” he said, climbing slowly to his feet. He brushed off his hands and hefted the backpack up onto his shoulders. “I like fruit cocktail best: It has pineapples and peaches and pears and cherries. Come back to my house and I’ll show you.”

“Your house,” she said, thinking back to the craters. She was more sure now than ever that this man was no Partial; if anything, he seemed like a giant child. “Who else is back there?”

“Nobody,” he said, “nobody at all. I’m a noncombatant, you can’t shoot me. We’ll eat fruit cocktail in my house.”

Kira thought about it a moment longer, then nodded. If this was a trap, it was the weirdest one she’d ever encountered. She put out her hand to shake. “My name is Kira Walker.”

“My name is Afa Demoux.” He placed the fallen water jug on the cart, gathered his pump, and began towing it all back to the safe house. “You’re a Partial, and I’m the last human being on Earth.”

Afa’s safe house turned out to be an old TV station, old enough to contain some equipment from before the days of computerized entertainment. Kira had done salvage runs on a handful of local news stations back on Long Island, and their systems had been arcane but small: cameras, cables, and little bits of computer equipment feeding everything into the cloud. This building had that as well—every TV station probably did, she thought, given the old world’s obsession with the internet—but it had older devices as well: broad banks of manual mixing equipment, a room of mysterious broadcasting machines designed to send everything into the sky, to be picked up by remote antennas instead of beamed directly through satellite links. This was why the building still had its enormous antenna, and that was why Afa lived here. She knew this because he told her, over and over, for nearly an hour.

“The cloud went down,” he said again, “but radios don’t need the cloud—it’s a point-to-point communication system. All you need is a radio, an antenna, and enough electricity to run it. I can broadcast to anyone, and they can broadcast to me, and we don’t need a network or a cloud or anything. With an antenna this big I can broadcast all over the world.”

“That’s great,” said Kira, “but who do you talk to? Who’s out there?” There had to be more survivors than just Long Island— she’d always hoped but never dared to believe.

Afa shook his head—broad and brown-skinned, with a bushy black beard salted liberally with gray. Kira guessed that he was Polynesian, but she didn’t know the individual islands well enough to guess which one. “There’s nobody out there,” he said. “I’m the last human on Earth.”

He did live alone; that much, at least, was true. He had converted the TV station into a twisting warren of stored equipment: generators, portable radios, stockpiles of food and explosives, and pile after pile of papers. He had stacks of files and folders, bundles of news clippings held together by twine, boxes of yellowed printouts next to more boxes of scraps and receipts and notarized documents. Thick binders overflowed with photos, some of them glossy, some of them printed on weathered office paper; other photos bulged from boxes or spilled out of rooms, entire offices filled floor to ceiling with records and filing cabinets and always, everywhere, more photos than she’d ever imagined. Those few walls not covered with cabinets and bookshelves and tall stacks of boxes were papered over with maps: maps of New York State and others, maps of the United States, maps of the NADI alliance, maps of China and Brazil and the entire world. Covering the maps was a dense nest of pushpins and strings and crooked metal flags. They made Kira dizzy just looking at them, and all the time, on every surface, even crunching and rustling underfoot, were the papers and papers and papers that defined and bounded Afa’s life.

Kira pressed him again, setting down her can of fruit cocktail. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m the last human on Earth.”

“There are humans on Long Island,” she said. “What about them?”

“Partials,” he said quickly, waving his hand to dismiss the idea. “All Partials. It’s all here, all in the files.” He gestured around grandly, as if the mounds of unordered papers were plain evidence of universal truth. Kira nodded, irrationally grateful for this fleck of insanity—when he had first called her a Partial it had scared her, truly disturbed her. He’d been the first human ever to say the words out loud to her, and the accusation—the knowledge that someone might actually know, might actually say it—had shaken her to the core. Knowing that Afa was merely delusional, thinking everyone in the world was a Partial, made it easier to bear.

Kira pressed again, hoping that more specific questions might draw out a more specific answer. “You used to work for ParaGen.”

He stopped, his eyes locked on hers, his body tense, then returned to his eating with forced nonchalance. He didn’t answer.

“Your name was on a door at the ParaGen office,” she said. “That’s where you got some of this equipment.” She gestured around at the rows of computers and monitors. “What are they for?”

Afa didn’t answer, and Kira paused again to watch him. There was something wrong with his mind, she was certain— something about the way he moved, the way he talked, even the way he sat. He didn’t think as quickly, or at least not in the same ways, as anyone Kira had met before. How had he survived on his own like this? He was cautious, certainly, but only about certain things; his home was miraculously well defended, filled with ingenious traps and security measures to keep himself hidden and his equipment safe, but on the other hand, he’d gone outside unarmed. The best explanation, Kira told herself, is that there’s somebody else with him. Based on what I’ve seen, there’s no way he’s capable of defending himself this well, and certainly no way he could set up all this equipment. He’s like a child. Maybe whoever’s really running this safe house uses him as an assistant? But as much as Kira had tried, she hadn’t been able to see or hear anyone else in the building. Whoever it was was hiding too well.

Talking about ParaGen just makes him clam up, she told herself, so I need to try a different tactic. She saw him eyeing her half-eaten can of fruit and held it out to him. “Do you want the rest?”

He grabbed it quickly. “It has cherries in it.”

“Yes, it does. Do you like cherries?”

“Of course I like cherries. I’m human.”

Kira almost laughed, but managed to stop herself. She knew plenty of humans who hated cherries. Sharing the fruit seemed to undo the nervousness she’d caused by mentioning ParaGen, so she probed him about a new topic. “It’s very brave of you to go out at night,” she said. “A few nights ago I got attacked by something huge; I barely got away with my life.”

“It used to be a bear,” said Afa, his mouth full of fruit cocktail. “You need to wait till it catches something.”

“What happens when it catches something?”

“It eats it.”

Kira shook her head. “Well, yeah, but I mean why do you need to wait for that to happen? What does that mean?”

“If it’s eating something, it’s not hungry,” he said, staring blankly at the floor. “Wait until it eats, and then go outside to get water while it’s busy. That way it won’t eat you. But always remember to take the backpack,” he said, pointing in front of him with his spoon. “You can’t ever leave the backpack.”

Kira marveled at the simplicity of his plan, but even so, his answer sparked a dozen new questions: How did he know when the monster had eaten? What did he mean that it “used to be” a bear? What was so important about the backpack, and who had told him all these strategies in the first place? She decided to pursue the latter question, as it seemed like the best opportunity to broach the topic again.

“Who told you not to leave the backpack?”

“Nobody told me,” he said. “I’m a human. Nobody’s in charge of me, ’cause I’m the only one left.”

“Obviously nobody’s in charge of you,” said Kira, frustrated by the circular conversation, “but what about your friend? The one who warned you not to lose the backpack?”

“No friends,” said Afa, shaking his head in a strange, loose sort of way that shook his entire torso as well. “No friends. I’m the last one.”

“Were there others before? Other people with you, here in the safe house?”

“Just you.” His voice changed when he said it, and Kira was struck by the thought that he might very well have been completely alone—that she might be the first person he’d spoken to in years. Whoever had saved him and taught him to survive, whoever had set up this and the other radio stations—whoever had rigged them with explosives—was probably long dead, lost to Partials or wild animals or illness or accident, leaving this fifty-year-old child all alone in the ruins. That’s why he says he’s the last one, she thought. He watched the last ones die.

Kira spoke softly, her voice tender. “Do you miss them?”

“The other humans?” He shrugged, his head bouncing on his shoulders. “It’s quieter now. I like the quiet.”

Kira sat back, frowning. Everything he said confused her more, and she felt as if she was even further now than before from understanding his situation. Most confusing of all was the name on the door at ParaGen—Afa Demoux had had an office, an office with his name on it, and ParaGen didn’t strike her as the kind of place that let a mentally handicapped man have an office just to keep him entertained. He had to have worked there; he had to have done something, or been something, important.

What had it said on his door? She struggled to remember, then nodded as the word came back: IT. Was it just a cruel joke? Call the weirdo “it”? That could explain why he didn’t want to talk about ParaGen. But no; it didn’t make sense. Nothing she knew about the old world suggested that kind of behavior, at least not so officially in a major corporation. The letters on the door had to mean something else. She watched his face as he finished the can of fruit, trying to guess his emotional state. Could she bring up ParaGen again, or would he just go silent like before? Maybe if she didn’t mention ParaGen, and just asked about the letters.

“You seem to know a lot about . . . I-T.” She winced, hoping that wasn’t a stupid question—or worse, an insulting one. Afa’s eyes lit up, and Kira felt a thrill of success.

“I was an IT director,” he said. “I used to do everything—they couldn’t do anything without me.” He smiled broadly, gesturing at the computers arrayed around the room. “See? I know everything about computers. I know everything.”

“That’s amazing,” said Kira, barely containing her grin. Finally she was getting somewhere. She scooted forward. “Tell me about it—about I-T.”

“You have to know how everything works,” he said. “You have to know where everything is; some’s in the cloud, and some’s in the drives, but if it’s the wrong kind of drive, then it won’t work without power. That’s why I have the Zobles on the roof.”

“The solar panels,” said Kira, and Afa nodded.

“Zobles and Hufongs, though those are a lot harder to find, and they break a lot. I turned the generators in room C into capacitors to hold extra electricity from the Hufongs, and they can hold on to it for a while, but you have to keep them cycling or they run down. Now,” he said, leaning forward and gesturing with his hands, “with the right kind of electricity you can access any drive you need. Most of what I have here is solid state, but the big ones, the ones in that corner, are disc-based servers— they use a lot more electricity, but you can store a lot more data, and that’s where most of the sequences are.”

He kept going, more rapidly and with more animation than anything he’d done or said before. Kira reeled at the sudden burst of information, understanding most of the words but only about half the concepts; he was obviously talking about the digital records, and the different ways they were stored and powered and accessed, but he spoke so quickly, and Kira had such a poor background in the subject, that most of his meaning flew right over her head.

What stood out to her more than anything was the sudden, almost shocking proficiency he had with the topic. She’d assumed he was slow, too childlike to do more than fetch water on somebody else’s instructions, but she saw now that her first impression had been wildly wrong. Afa had his quirks, certainly, and she didn’t doubt that there was something off about him, but on at least one subject the man was brilliant.

“Stop,” she said, holding up her hands, “wait, you’re going too fast. Start at the beginning: What does I-T mean?”

“Information technology,” said Afa. “I was an IT director. I kept everyone’s computers running, and I set up the servers, and I maintained cloud security, and I saw everything on the network.” He leaned forward, staring at her intently, stabbing the floor with his finger. “I saw everything. I watched it all happen.” He leaned back and spread his arms, as if to encompass the entire room, maybe the entire building, in his gesture. “I have it all here, almost all of it, and I’m going to show everyone, and they’re going to know the whole story. They’re going to know exactly how it happened.”

“How what happened?”

“The end of the world,” said Afa. He swallowed, his face turning red as he raced to speak without pausing for breath. “The Partials, the war, the rebellion, the virus. Everything.”

Kira nodded, so excited her fingers started to tingle. “And who are you going to tell?”

Afa’s face fell, and his arms dropped to his sides. “No one,” he said. “I’m the last human being left alive.”

“No, you’re not,” said Kira firmly. “There’s an entire community on Long Island—there are nearly thirty-six thousand humans left there, and goodness knows how many more on other continents. There have to be more. What about me?”

“You’re a Partial.”

The accusation, again, made her uncomfortable, especially since she couldn’t counter it with a flat refusal. She tried a misdirection instead. “How do you know I’m a Partial?”

“Humans don’t come to Manhattan.”

“You’re here.”

“I was here before; that’s different.”

Kira ground her teeth, caught again in Afa’s circular, selfreferential arguments. “Then why did you let me into you house?” she asked. “If the Partials are so bad, why trust me?”

“Partials aren’t bad.”

“But—” Kira frowned, exasperated by his simple, matter-offact answers, which seemed to make no sense. “You’re out here alone,” she said. “You hide, you protect yourself like crazy, you blow up your radio stations anytime anyone gets too close to them. You’ve got a huge community to the east, and a huge community on the north, and you don’t join either of them. If the Partials aren’t bad, why keep yourself separate?” It occurred to her, as she said it, that the question applied equally well to her. She’d been out here alone for months, avoiding Partials and humans alike.

Not avoiding them, she told herself, saving them. Saving both of them. But the thought still bothered her.

Afa scraped the last bits of fruit from his can. “I stay here because I like the quiet.”

“You like the quiet.” Kira laughed, more helpless than amused, and stood up from the floor, stretching and rubbing her eyes. “I don’t understand you, Afa. You collect information that you do and don’t want to show anyone; you live in a giant radio tower and yet you don’t like talking to people. Why do you have the radios, by the way? Is it just part of the information gathering? Are you just trying to know everything?”

“Yes.”

“And you didn’t think that maybe somebody else could benefit from all this information you’re putting together?”

Afa stood up. “I have to go to sleep now.”

“Wait,” said Kira, abashed by his discomfort. She’d been arguing with the brilliant IT director, almost yelling at him in her frustration, but here she was confronted with the child again, awkward and slow, a tiny mind in a giant body. She sighed, and realized how tired she was, as well. “I’m sorry, Afa. I’m sorry I got upset.” She reached toward his hand, hesitating as she watched his eyes. They had never touched, Afa always keeping his shy distance, and she realized with a rush of emotion that she hadn’t touched anyone—not a single human contact—in weeks. Afa, if she understood his situation correctly, hadn’t touched anyone in years. Her hand hovered over his, and she saw in his eyes the same mixture of fear and longing that she felt in herself. She lowered her palm, resting it on his knuckles, and he flinched but didn’t move away. She felt the pressure of his bones, the softness of his flesh, the leathery texture of his skin, the warm beat of his pulse.

She felt a tear in the corner of her eye and blinked it away. Afa began to cry, more like a lost child than anyone she’d met in ten years, and Kira drew him into an embrace. He hugged her back tightly, sobbing like a baby, nearly crushing her with his massive arms, and Kira let her own tears run freely. She patted him softly on the back, soothing him gently, luxuriating in the sheer presence of another person, real and warm and alive.

arcus ran as fast as he could through the forest, trying to keep his feet under him and his head from cracking into low-hanging branches and vine-crusted poles. The soldier beside him fell abruptly, red blood blossoming on his back as a bullet brought him down. Marcus faltered, instinctively turning to help the fallen soldier, but Haru grabbed him and dragged him forward, crashing headlong through the trees.

“He’s gone,” Haru shouted. “Keep running!”

More shots flew past them, whistling through the leaves and exploding against trunks and old boards. This part of Long Island had been heavily wooded even before the Break, and in the twelve years since then, nature had reclaimed the neighborhood, tearing down rotten fences and collapsing old roofs and walls, filling the lawns and gardens with new growth. Even the sidewalks and streets were cracked and split by a dozen years of freezes and thaws, and trees had sprung up in every gap and rift and crevice. Marcus leapt over a crumbling brick retaining wall and followed Haru through a living room so filled with vines and brush it was almost indistinguishable from the world outside. He dodged a sapling sprouting up through the floorboards, and cringed as another Partial bullet whooshed past his ear and shattered the glass in a picture frame not ten feet in front of him. Haru turned down a sagging hallway, dropping a live grenade just around the corner, and Marcus’s eyes went wide in terror as he leapt over it, putting on an extra burst of speed he didn’t know he had. He tumbled out the far side of the house just as it exploded. Haru hauled him to his feet again with an urgent grunt.

“If they’re as close behind as I think they are, that got at least one of them,” said Haru, puffing as he ran. “Either way it’s going to slow down anyone who followed us into the house, and it’s going to make them think twice about following us into the next one.”

“Sato, you all right?” A woman’s voice cut sharply through the trees, and Marcus recognized it as Grant, the sergeant of this squad of Grid soldiers. Haru ran a little faster to catch up, and Marcus snarled with exhaustion as he struggled to keep up.

“Just dropped a frag in that last house,” said Haru. “Medic and I are fine.”

“Grenades are fun, but you’re gonna miss ’em when they’re gone,” said Grant.

“It didn’t go to waste,” Haru insisted. Another soldier beside them twisted and fell in midstride, claimed by another bullet, and Marcus ducked involuntarily before sprinting forward again. They’d been running like this for nearly an hour, and the forest had become a nightmare of death unmoored from the familiar rules of cause and effect. Bullets came from nowhere, people lived one second and died the next, and all they could do was run.

“We need to make a stand,” said Haru. He was in better shape than Marcus, but fatigue was more than evident in his voice.

Grant shook her head almost imperceptibly, conserving her energy as they ran. “We tried that, remember? We lost half the squad.”

“We didn’t have a good ambush point,” said Haru. “If we can find a good spot, or if we can regroup with more soldiers, we might have a chance. The one thing we did accomplish was to get a good look at their forces, and they’re not very big. We outnumber them, and we know the terrain better—there’s got to be a way to make this work.”

Another bullet flew past, and Marcus stifled a scream. “You have an absolutely heartwarming level of optimism.”

“There’s a work farm near here,” said Grant, “on the grounds of an old golf course. We can make a stand there.”

They redoubled their efforts, discarding grenades here and there as they ran, hoping the erratic explosions would deter their pursuers enough to buy a few precious extra seconds. Marcus saw a sign for a golf course and marveled at Grant’s presence of mind—he was too scared and frantic even to notice their environment, let alone recognize it. A voice from the trees called out for them to halt, but they barreled forward as Grant shouted back, “Partials behind us! Hold your positions and fire!” Marcus followed the soldiers past the line of cars that marked the edge of the parking lot, and dove to the ground behind the largest truck he could find.

A man in rough farming clothes crouched next to them, clutching a shotgun. “We heard the reports on the radio. Is it true?” His eyes were wild with fear. “Are they invading?”

Grant readied her assault rifle as she answered, checking the clip for ammo and then slapping it back into place. “Full-scale. The Grid base in Queens is gone, and the watch posts on the North Shore are reporting Partial landing craft from there all the way out to Wildwood.”

“Mother of mercy,” the farmer muttered.

“Incoming!” shouted another soldier, and Grant and Haru and the rest reared up, bracing themselves behind the line of cars and firing furiously into the trees. Ten or so farmers, already gathered by the radio reports, joined them with grim looks. Marcus threw his hands over his head and ducked lower, knowing he should help but too terrified to move. The Partials returned fire, and the cars shook with the staccato rhythm of bullet impacts. Grant shouted more directions, but she stopped mid-word with a sickening gurgle, falling to the ground in a red mist of blood. Marcus moved to help her, but she was dead before she even landed.

“Fall back,” Haru hissed.

“She’s dead,” said Marcus.

“I know she’s dead, fall back!” Haru emptied his ammo clip into the forest, then dropped behind cover to reload. He glared at Marcus fiercely. “The farm’s back there somewhere, and anyone left in it is not a fighter—if they were, they’d be out here. Find them and get them out of here.”

“And go where?” asked Marcus. “Grant said the Partials are everywhere.”

“Go south,” said Haru. “We’ll try to catch up, but get the civilians moving now. You’ll need all the time you can get.”

“Going ‘south’ won’t be enough,” said Marcus. “This isn’t a raid, it’s an invasion. Even if we make it to East Meadow, they’ll be right on our heels.”

“You want to stay here then?” asked Haru. “I don’t know if they’re here to capture us or kill us, but neither one sounds pleasant.”

“I know,” said Marcus, “I know.” He glanced toward the farmhouse, trying to work up his courage to run. Haru rose, turned, and fired again into the trees.

“This is what I get for volunteering,” said Marcus, and ran for the farm.

fa slept on a king-size bed on the seventh floor of the building, in what looked like it used to be a dressing room. Kira tucked him in like a child before searching for a room of her own, eventually finding a vast, dark studio with stadium seats on one side and half of a stylized living room on the other. A talk show set, she guessed, though the logo on the back wall didn’t spark any memories. She knew that talk shows existed, because someone had watched one in her house—her nanny, maybe— but she doubted she could recognize even that one’s logo. Afa had filled the chairs with boxes, each carefully labeled, but the talk show couch was empty, and she checked it for spiders before laying down her bedroll and going to sleep. She dreamed of Marcus, and then of Samm, and wondered if she’d ever see either of them again.

There was no natural light in the building, thanks to Afa’s logical insistence on blackout curtains, and even less light in the studio, but Kira had been fending for herself for too long, and jerked awake at the same time as always. She found her way to a window and peeked out, seeing the same familiar sight that greet her every morning: ruined buildings laced with green, and tinged with blue light as the dark sky turned pale in the sunrise.

It didn’t sound like Afa was awake yet, and Kira took the opportunity to skim through some of his files, starting with the boxes in the studio. They were numbered 138 through 427, one box per chair with more ringing the walls, back-to-back around the entire perimeter of the room. She started with the nearest box, number 221, and pulled out the page on top, a folded printout with a faded military letterhead.

“‘To whom it may concern,’” she read. “‘My name is Master Sergeant Corey Church, and I was part of the Seventeenth Armored Cavalry in the Second Nihon Invasion.’” The First Nihon Invasion was one of the early major defeats for the NADI forces in the Isolation War, the world’s failed attempt to take back Japan from a suddenly hostile China. She remembered learning about it in school in East Meadow, but didn’t remember much of the details. The Second Nihon Invasion was the one that worked—the one where they went back with two hundred thousand Partial soldiers and drove the Isolationists back to the mainland, kicking off the long campaign that finally ended the war. It was the reason the rest of the Partials had been built. Kira read more of the letter, some kind of battlefield report, recounting the man’s experience fighting alongside the Partials; he referred to them as “new weapons” and said that they were “well trained and precise.” Kira had grown up knowing Partials only as bogeymen, the monsters that had destroyed the world, and even having met Samm—even knowing that she herself was some kind of a Partial—it was strange to see them referred to so positively. And yet so clinically, as if they were a new kind of Jeep from the quartermaster. The master sergeant mentioned that they seemed “insular,” that they kept to themselves and ignored the human soldiers, but that was hardly a negative—a bit ominous, in light of their eventual rebellion, but not immediately threatening or scary.

“This is how it started,” she said out loud, setting it down and picking up another paper from the same box. It was another combat report, this time from a Sergeant Major Seamus Ogden. He talked about the Partials the same way, not as monsters but as tools. She read another document, then another, and the attitude was the same in each one—it wasn’t that they thought the Partials were harmless, it was that they barely thought of them at all. They were weapons, like bullets in a clip, to be spent and used and forgotten.

Kira moved to another box, 302, pulling out a newspaper clipping from something called the Los Angeles Times: partial rights groups protest on capitol steps. Beneath it in the box was a similar clipping from the Seattle Times, and beneath that another from the Chicago Sun. The dates in this box were all from late in 2064, just a few months before the Partial War. Kira would have just turned five. Obviously the Partials would have been all over the news at the time, but she didn’t remember her father ever talking about them; now that she knew he’d been working for ParaGen, that made more sense. If he’d worked with them, or even helped create them, he would have had a different attitude from the rest of the world—probably a pretty unpopular attitude. At least I hope he had a different attitude, she thought. Why else would he raise one as his daughter? She vaguely remembered her nanny as well, and a housekeeper, but they never talked about Partials either. Had her father asked them not to?

Had they even known what Kira really was?

Kira turned to the earliest numbered boxes in the room, finding number 138 and pulling out the top piece of paper. It was another newspaper clipping, this time from the financial section of something called the Wall Street Journal, describing in vague terms the awarding of a massive military contract: In March of 2051 the US government contracted ParaGen, a budding biotechnology company, to produce an army of “biosynthetic soldiers.” The focus of the article was entirely on the cost of the project, the ramifications for stockholders, and the impact this would have on the rest of the biotech industry. There was no mention of civil rights, of diseases, of any of the massive issues that had come to define the world right before the Break. Only money. She searched through the rest of the box and found more of the same: a transcript from a news interview with ParaGen’s chief financial officer; an internal ParaGen memo about the company’s new windfall contract; a magazine called Forbes with the ParaGen logo on the cover and the crisp silhouette of an armed Partial soldier in the background. Kira flipped through the pages of the magazine, finding article after article about money, about technologies being used to make more money, about all the ways the Isolation War, despite being “a terrible tragedy,” would help heal the American economy. Money, money, money.

Money had a place in East Meadow society, but that place was a small one. Almost everything they needed was free: If you wanted a can of food, a pair of pants, a book, a house, whatever it was, all it cost you was the effort to go out and find one. Money was used almost exclusively for fresh food, things like wheat from the farms and fish from the coastal villages—things you had to work for—and even then, most of those commodities were traded in kind, through a barter system in the marketplace. Nandita and Xochi had built a lucrative business trading herbs for fresh food, and Kira had always eaten well because of it. Money, such as it was, was usually just work credits: government vouchers for her time spent in the hospital, her reward for performing a vital service that didn’t actually produce a tradable commodity. It was enough to keep her in fresh fish and vegetables for lunch, but not much else. It was a minor, almost insignificant aspect of her life. The documents in box 138 described a world in which money was everything— not just the means of sustaining life but the purpose of living it. She tried to imagine being happy about the war with the Partials or the Voice, rejoicing because it would somehow bring her extra work credits, but the idea was so foreign she laughed out loud. If that was how the old world worked—if that was all they really cared about—maybe it was better that it had fallen apart. Maybe it was inevitable.

“You’re real,” said Afa.

Kira spun around, startled, hiding the magazine behind her guiltily. Would he be mad at her for looking at his records?

“Did you say I’m . . .” She paused. “Real?”

“I thought you were a dream,” said Afa, shuffling into the room. He stopped at one of the boxes and sifted through it idly, almost as if he were petting an animal. “I haven’t talked to anyone in so long—and then last night there was a person in my house, and I thought that I’d dreamed it, but you’re still here.” He nodded. “You’re real.”

“I’m real,” she assured him, placing the magazine back into box 138. “I’ve been admiring your collection.”

“It has everything—almost everything. It even has video, but not in this room. I have the whole story.”

Kira stepped toward him, wondering how long he’d stay talkative this time. “The story of the Partial War,” she said, “and the Break.”

“That’s just part of it,” said Afa, picking up two stapled sheaves of paper, examining his own pen marks in the upper corners, and then reordering them in the box. “This is the story of the end of the world, the rise and fall of human civilization, the creation of the Partials and the death of everything else.”

“And you’ve read all of it?”

Afa nodded again, his shoulders slack as he moved from box to box. “All of it. I’m the only human being on the planet.”

“I guess that makes sense, then,” said Kira. She stopped by a box—number 341—and pulled out some kind of government report; a court order, by the look of it, with a round seal stamped in the corner. She wanted answers, but she didn’t want to pressure him again, to freak him out by saying or mentioning anything he didn’t want to remember. I’ll keep it generic for now. “How did you find it all?”

“I used to work in the clouds,” he said, then immediately corrected himself: “In the cloud. I lived my whole life up there, I could go anywhere and find anything.” He nodded at a box of dusty clippings. “I was like a bird.”

I saw your name at ParaGen, she wanted to say again. I know you have information about the Trust: about RM, the expiration date, what I am. She’d been looking for these answers for so long, and now they were right here, split into boxes and trapped in a failing brain. Is it just from the loneliness? Maybe his brain works fine, he just hasn’t spoken to someone in so long he’s forgotten how to interact with people. She wanted to sit him down and ask him a million questions, but she’d waited this long; she could wait a little longer. Win him over, don’t freak him out, get him on your side.

She read a bit of the court order in her hand, something about the words “Partial Nation” being declared a sign of terrorist sympathy. Students couldn’t write or say them on school campuses, and anyone caught using them in graffiti was subject to prosecution as a threat to national security. She waved it lightly, grabbing his attention. “You’ve got a lot about the last days before the war,” she said. “You’ve really worked hard to put this together. Do you have anything . . .” She paused, almost too cautious to ask. She wanted to know about the Trust, which Samm had implied was part of the Partial leadership, but she worried that if she just blurted it out, like she had with ParaGen, he might shut down again. “Do you have anything about the Partials themselves? The way they’re organized?”

“They’re an army,” said Afa. “They’re organized like an army.” He was on the floor now, looking at two of his boxes and the papers in them; every third or fourth one he frowned at and moved to the other box.

“Yes,” said Kira, “but I mean, the leaders of the army—the generals. Do you know anything about where they are now?”

“This one died,” said Afa, holding up a paper without looking away from his boxes. Kira walked to him and took it carefully; it was an article from the New York Times, like some of the others she’d seen, but printed out from a website instead of clipped from a real paper. The headline read north atlantic fleet sunk in lower bay.

Kira looked up, surprised. “They sank a Partial fleet?”

“The Partials didn’t have a navy,” said Afa, still sorting his papers. “That was a human fleet, sunk by the Partial Air Force, just off the shore of Brooklyn. It was the biggest military strike in the war, in retaliation for the death of General Craig. I have one about him, too.” He held up another page, and Kira snatched it away, poring over the information: “‘General Scott Craig, leader of the Partial uprising and former mouthpiece of the Partial rights movement, was assassinated last night in a daring strike by human commandos—’ We killed him?”

“It was a war.”

“And then they destroyed an entire fleet.” She counted up the ships in the article, a massive group sailing north to attack the concentration of Partial forces in New York State. The ships had been undermanned, their crews already ravaged by the plague. “Twenty ships, and they just . . . killed everyone on them.”

“It was a war,” said Afa again, taking the papers from her hands and dropping them back in the box.

“But it didn’t have to be,” said Kira, following him across the room. “The Partials didn’t want to kill everyone—you said yourself that they weren’t evil. They wanted equality, they wanted to live normal lives, and they could have done that without killing all those thousands of people on those ships.”

“They killed billions of people,” said Afa.

“Do you know that for sure?” Kira demanded. “You have all these documents and articles and everything else—do you have something about RM? About where it came from?”

“I’m the last human being on the planet,” he said loudly, walking more quickly to stay ahead of her, and Kira realized that she was practically shouting at him. She backed off, forcing herself to calm down; he had to have something about the virus, but she’d never find it without his help. She need to keep him, and herself, calm.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry I got loud. I’m very . . .” She took a deep breath, collecting herself. “I’ve been looking for some very important answers, and you’ve found them, and I just got overexcited.”

“You’re still real,” he said, backing into a corner. “You’re still here.”

“I’m here and I’m your friend,” she said softly. “You’ve done an amazing thing here—you’ve found all the information I need. But I don’t know your system; I don’t know how it’s organized. Will you please help me find what I’m looking for?”

Afa’s voice was soft. “I have everything,” he said, his head nodding up and down. “I have almost everything.”

“Can you tell me who created RM?” She clenched her fists, forcing herself not to get loud or aggressive.

“That’s easy,” said Afa. “It was the Trust.”

“Yes,” said Kira, nodding eagerly, “the Trust, keep going. The Trust are the Partial leaders, the generals and the admirals and the people who made the decisions, right? You say they made RM?” That was completely the opposite of what Samm had told her; he’d insisted that the Partials had nothing to do with it, but she’d already suspected that might be a lie—not Samm’s lie, but one that had been told to him by his superiors. If the cure for RM was in their breath, manufactured in their own bodies, then the connection between the Partials and the virus was undeniable. To learn that they had created it and released it was an easy jump to make.

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