“The people are gone,” said Kira, “but the city’s still there. The records are still there. We want to help you finish your work—to fill in all the missing pieces about the Trust, and the Partials, and the Failsafe. Don’t you want to learn all that?”

Afa paused. “I have everything in my backpack,” he said at last. “I never leave my backpack.”

“You have almost everything,” said Kira. “You don’t have the Trust—not their plans, not their formulas, not their secrets or their reasons or anything. We need that information, Afa, it might be the only way to save any of us, humans and Partials.”

“Too dangerous,” Afa muttered. “You’ll burn up. You’ll be poisoned.”

Kira glanced at Samm, then turned back to Afa’s door. “We’ll be as safe as possible,” she said. “My friends are the best wilderness scouts I know, and I’m pretty handy myself. We can cover ourselves, we can carry our water, we can defend ourselves from wild animals—we can make it. Trust me, Afa, we can get you the records you’ve been looking for.”

“I think you might be overselling us a little,” whispered Heron. “The wasteland is going to be hell no matter how well we prepare.”

“He doesn’t have to know that,” Kira whispered back.

The drugstore was silent, everyone listening quietly while Afa thought. Birds wheeled between the broken buildings outside, watched closely by a feral cat perched high in a windowsill. The morning sun turned the rusted cars into fuzzy shadows on the road.

“You could go to Chicago,” said Afa.

Kira snapped back to look at the bunker door. “What?”

“ParaGen was in Denver, but their data center was in Chicago,” said Afa. His voice was clearer now, more lucid and confident. “Remember what I told you about the cloud? All the information in the cloud was stored somewhere, on a physical computer, and most of that physical storage was in huge central locations called data centers. ParaGen’s was in Chicago.”

“Why would their data not be in their own offices?”

“Because the cloud made distance meaningless,” said Afa. Kira heard a bolt slide back, then another, then two more. The door cracked open, but Afa stayed hidden behind it. “Storing digital information in Chicago was the same as storing it in Denver, or Manhattan, or wherever, because you could access it no matter where you were. As IT director, I worked with the Chicago center all the time, setting up permissions and security and making sure nobody could get the data but us. Unless it was all hard copies, I guarantee it’s in the data center.”

“If it’s that easy,” asked Samm, “why haven’t you gone to get it before?”