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.