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