up, but get the civilians moving now. You’ll need all the time you can get.”
“Going ‘south’ won’t be enough,” said Marcus. “This isn’t a raid, it’s an invasion. Even if we make it to East Meadow, they’ll be right on our heels.”
“You want to stay here then?” asked Haru. “I don’t know if they’re here to capture us or kill us, but neither one sounds pleasant.”
“I know,” said Marcus, “I know.” He glanced toward the farmhouse, trying to work up his courage to run. Haru rose, turned, and fired again into the trees.
“This is what I get for volunteering,” said Marcus, and ran for the farm.
There was no natural light in the building, thanks to Afa’s logical insistence on blackout curtains, and even less light in the studio, but Kira had been fending for herself for too long, and jerked awake at the same time as always. She found her way to a window and peeked out, seeing the same familiar sight that greet her every morning: ruined buildings laced with green, and tinged with blue light as the dark sky turned pale in the sunrise.
It didn’t sound like Afa was awake yet, and Kira took the opportunity to skim through some of his files, starting with the boxes in the studio. They were numbered 138 through 427, one box per chair with more ringing the walls, back-to-back around the entire perimeter of the room. She started with the nearest box, number 221, and pulled out the page on top, a folded printout with a faded military letterhead.
“‘To whom it may concern,’” she read. “‘My name is Master Sergeant Corey Church, and I was part of the Seventeenth Armored Cavalry in the Second Nihon Invasion.’” The First Nihon Invasion was one of the early major defeats for the NADI forces in the Isolation War, the world’s failed attempt to take back Japan from a suddenly hostile China. She remembered learning about it in school in East Meadow, but didn’t remember much of the details. The Second Nihon Invasion was the one that worked—the one where they went back with two hundred thousand Partial soldiers and drove the Isolationists back to the mainland, kicking off the long campaign that finally ended the war. It was the reason the rest of the Partials had been built. Kira read more of the letter, some kind of battlefield report, recounting the man’s experience fighting alongside the Partials; he referred to them as “new weapons” and said that they were “well trained and precise.” Kira had grown up knowing Partials only as bogeymen, the monsters that had destroyed the world, and even having met Samm—even knowing that she herself was some kind of a Partial—it was strange to see them referred to so positively. And yet so clinically, as if they were a new kind of Jeep from the quartermaster. The master sergeant mentioned that they seemed “insular,” that they kept to themselves and ignored the human soldiers, but that was hardly a negative—a bit ominous, in light of their eventual rebellion, but not immediately threatening or scary.
“This is how it started,” she said out loud, setting it down and picking up another paper from the same box. It was another combat report, this time from a Sergeant Major Seamus Ogden. He talked about the Partials the same way, not as monsters but as tools. She read another document, then another, and the attitude was the same in each one—it wasn’t that they thought the Partials were harmless, it was that they barely thought of them at all. They were weapons, like bullets in a clip, to be spent and used and forgotten.
Kira moved to another box, 302, pulling out a newspaper clipping from something called the Los Angeles Times: partial rights groups protest on capitol steps. Beneath it in the box was a similar clipping from the Seattle Times, and beneath that another from the Chicago Sun. The dates in this box were all from late in 2064, just a few months before the Partial War. Kira would have just turned five. Obviously the Partials would have been all over the news at the time, but she didn’t remember her father ever talking about them; now that she knew he’d been working for ParaGen, that made more sense. If he’d worked with them, or even helped create them, he would have had a different attitude from the rest of the world—probably a pretty unpopular attitude. At least I hope he had a different attitude, she thought. Why else would he raise one as his daughter? She vaguely remembered her nanny as well, and a housekeeper, but they never talked about Partials either. Had her father asked them not to?
Had they even known what Kira really was?
Kira turned to the earliest numbered boxes in the room, finding number 138 and pulling out the top piece of paper. It was another newspaper clipping, this time from the financial section of something called the Wall Street Journal, describing in vague terms the awarding of a massive military contract: In March of 2051 the US government contracted ParaGen, a budding biotechnology company, to produce an army of “biosynthetic soldiers.” The focus of the article was entirely on the cost of the project, the ramifications for stockholders, and the impact this would have on the rest of the biotech industry. There was no mention of civil rights, of diseases, of any of the massive issues that had come to define the world right before the Break. Only money. She searched through the rest of the box and found more of the same: a transcript from a news interview with ParaGen’s chief financial officer; an internal ParaGen memo about the company’s new windfall contract; a magazine called Forbes with the ParaGen logo on the cover and the crisp silhouette of an armed Partial soldier in the background. Kira flipped through the pages of the magazine, finding article after article about money, about technologies being used to make more money, about all the ways the Isolation War, despite being “a terrible tragedy,” would help heal the American economy. Money, money, money.
Money had a place in East Meadow society, but that place was a small one. Almost everything they needed was free: If you wanted a can of food, a pair of pants, a book, a house, whatever it was, all it cost you was the effort to go out and find one. Money was used almost exclusively for fresh food, things like wheat from the farms and fish from the coastal villages—things you had to work for—and even then, most of those commodities were traded in kind, through a barter system in the marketplace. Nandita and Xochi had built a lucrative business trading herbs for fresh food, and Kira had always eaten well because of it. Money, such as it was, was usually just work credits: government vouchers for her time spent in the hospital, her reward for performing a vital service that didn’t actually produce a tradable commodity. It was enough to keep her in fresh fish and vegetables for lunch, but not much else. It was a minor, almost insignificant aspect of her life. The documents in box 138 described a world in which money was everything— not just the means of sustaining life but the purpose of living it. She tried to imagine being happy about the war with the Partials or the Voice, rejoicing because it would somehow bring her extra work credits, but the idea was so foreign she laughed out loud. If that was how the old world worked—if that was all they really cared about—maybe it was better that it had fallen apart. Maybe it was inevitable.
“You’re real,” said Afa.
Kira spun around, startled,
