Kira met Afa in the hall, both silent; he shut off the alarm and listened. If it was a false alarm, maybe wind or a stray cat pawing at the glass, the building would stay silent. Kira listened with her eyes closed, praying that nothing would—

Beep. Beep.

Afa shut it off again, permanently this time, jogging heavily down the hall to another bank of switches. The solar panels on the roof stored massive amounts of electricity, more than enough to power their jury-rigged security systems at night. Afa woke up a sleeping monitor, the picture jerking to life like a slide show, just in time to see a black-clad figure in body armor slip through the window. The helmet was round and faceless, the too-familiar calling card of the Partial army, though this armor was battle-scarred and damaged to the point that Kira wondered if it was salvaged. The brief outline of the intruder’s body against the moonlit street beyond showed that it was female, though the second form climbing in behind her was probably male. Kira glanced at Afa, his face of rictus of anxiety and indecision: His other safe houses he’d simply blown up when they were threatened, but this was his headquarters, his main library of documents, his life’s work. He didn’t want to blow it up.

But then again, he wasn’t exactly a clear thinker in stressful situations.

Kira and Afa were on the seventh floor, and there were two full levels of security measures before any ground-level intruders reached the important stuff. The first story was the explosives, enough to bring the entire building down, and Kira carefully placed herself between Afa and the manual trigger for the bombs. They watched on scratchy, closed-circuit cameras as the intruders—only two—picked their way carefully through the rooms and hallways, from one camera to another, the different angles and monitors giving their path a crazed, disjointed trajectory. Left to right on the third monitor; right to left on the first. Top to bottom on the second and fourth simultaneously, one in front and one behind. They moved slowly, rifles at the ready, colorless shapes in the darkness. Their helmets seemed to provide augmented night vision, and the two figures were seamlessly coordinated in their movements. A surefire sign of the link at work. They were most definitely Partials.

Kira checked her ammunition carefully, never taking her eyes off the monitors; she might be able to drop one of the Partials if she surprised him, but the odds of beating two in concert were minuscule. If she didn’t run now, she’d probably wake up back in Dr. Morgan’s lab, stretched out naked on an operating table while the mad doctor cut her open to find her secrets.