“I don’t,” said Marcus. “Kira won’t tell me. She’s been acting strange ever since Morgan’s lab, like they did something to her that she doesn’t want to talk about.”

“It was a pretty traumatic experience,” said Xochi.

“I know,” said Marcus quickly, “I know, but I mean . . . Let me ask you this: What’s your earliest memory of Kira?”

Xochi played with the straps of her backpack, rolling them into little cylinders as she spoke. “It was at school, the old one by the hospital. I’d been in the farms with Kessler for a couple of years, but we fought like tigers—even then—and so when I turned eight she sent me into East Meadow for school.”

Marcus almost smiled at the memory. “You beat up Benji Haul on your first day.”

Xochi shrugged. “He had it coming. I spent the afternoon in detention, and Kira was in there for, I can’t remember, starting a fire with all the phosphorus from the lightbulbs or something—one of those crazy brainiac schemes you and Kira were always getting into.”

“What about Nandita?” asked Marcus.

Xochi frowned. “What about Nandita?”

“When was the first time you met her?” asked Marcus. “Soon after that?”

“Not for another year at least,” said Xochi. “I never came here because I was confined to the school—Kessler’s orders—and I never saw Nandita there because I always ran and hid when they did presentations or fairs or whatever. I had enough problems with my own fake mom, I didn’t need to hang out with anybody else’s. Why are you asking about Nandita?”

Marcus leaned closer. “I haven’t told you everything,” he said. “Do you remember the Partial that followed Samm after we left Morgan’s lab? An assassin or something; Samm said she was watching when we got into the boat to come home.”

“I remember that it happened, yeah,” said Xochi. “Why?”

“Because she was here,” said Marcus. “Four or five weeks ago, in this backyard.”

“Here?”

“She was looking for Kira,” said Marcus, “but she was also looking for Nandita. She had a photo of Kira and Nandita together, before the Break, standing in front of the ParaGen building.”

Xochi froze. “Nandita never knew Kira before the Break.”

“That’s what I thought, too,” said Marcus. “Did either of them ever actually say it?”

“She talked about meeting the girls,” Xochi spluttered. “She told these little stories about finding each one of them, one by one—”

“What was the story about Kira?”

Xochi stuck out her lower lip, thinking. “She found her on the mainland,” she said, “in a refugee camp. A big group of soldiers, US or NADI or whatever, marched in one day with a whole ton of survivors they’d picked up, and Nandita saw Kira cussing out one of the guards because he didn’t have any pudding.”

Marcus raised an eyebrow. “Cussing him out?”