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
