But this one has a printer. She stopped, staring at a side table in the last office on the floor—a bigger office than the rest, with the name GUINEVERE CREECH on the door: probably the local vice president or whatever their ranks were called. There was blank paper scattered around the floor, wrinkly and discolored from past rainstorms blowing through the broken window, and a small plastic box on a side table by the desk. She recognized it as a printer—there were dozens in the hospital back home, useless now because they had no ink, and she’d been tasked once with moving them from one storage closet to another. In the old world they’d used them to write out documents directly from a computer, so if there was a printer in this room, there must have been a computer as well, at least at one time. She picked the thing up to examine it more closely: no cord, or even a place to put one, which meant it was wireless. She set it back down and knelt on the floor, looking under the side table; nothing there. Why had someone gone through and removed all the computers—was it to hide their data when the world fell apart? Surely Kira couldn’t be the first person to think of coming here; ParaGen had built the Partials, for goodness’ sake, and they were the world experts in biotech. Even if they didn’t get blamed for the Partial War, the government would have contacted them about curing RM. Assuming, of course, that the government didn’t know that the Partials carried the cure. She pushed the thought away. She wasn’t here to entertain conspiracy theories, she was here to uncover facts. Maybe their computers had been seized?

She looked up, scanning the room from her hands and knees, and from this vantage point saw something she hadn’t before: a shiny black circle in the black metal frame of the desk. She moved her head and it winked at her, losing and catching the light. She frowned, stood, then shook her head at the stupid simplicity of it all.

The desks were the computers.