Fragments. Dan Wells
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?
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