Fragments

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.