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