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 were either empty or filled with profit statements. ParaGen had been obscenely wealthy: She knew that with certainty now, but almost nothing else.

The real information would be on the computers, but the office didn’t seem to have any. Kira frowned, disturbed, because everything she’d heard about the old world said that they relied on computers for everything. Why didn’t the office have any of the flat screen monitors or metallic towers that she was used to seeing nearly everywhere? She sighed and shook her head in frustration, knowing that even if she found the computers, she wouldn’t know what to do with them. She’d used some at the hospital, medicomps and scanners and so on when a treatment or a diagnosis called for one, but those were mostly isolated machines with a singular purpose. Computers in the old world had been part of a vast network capable of communicating instantly, all over the world. Everything had been on computers, from books to music to, apparently, ParaGen’s vast scheming plans. But these offices didn’t have any computers. . . .