Xochi laughed. “Have you met Kira? She’s a fireball now, and she was a fireball then. Nandita used to call her the Little Explosion. Besides, she was five years old and she’d just spent who knows how long with no one to talk to but soldiers; she probably had a monster vocabulary. The soldier kept apologizing about the pudding, and this skinny little girl kept calling his mother into serious moral question, and Nandita swooped in to teach her some manners.” Xochi smiled distantly. “I think she thought the situation was just too adorable to pass up, but she always insisted she did it to teach her.”

“To teach her?”

“That’s all she’s talked about,” said Xochi, “the whole time I’ve known her: She needed to teach her girls. I don’t know what—I’m the one she taught herbology.”

“If Nandita knew Kira before,” said Marcus, “why would she pretend like she didn’t?”

“You said the picture was taken in front of a ParaGen building, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, if she was involved with ParaGen, it’s not all that surprising that she’d keep it a secret,” said Xochi. “Some ParaGen employees got lynched in the first days after the Break, before the Senate got organized and started imposing order. If I’d worked for the company that made the Partials, even as a janitor, I wouldn’t have told anyone.”

“But what does that have to do with Kira?” Marcus asked.

“I’m working on that part,” said Xochi, pursing her lips. “How about this: Nobody who landed on this island had ever met any of the others. The population of the US dropped from four hundred fifty million to forty thousand. That’s like one out of every twelve hundred people—the chances that any of them knew each other were ridiculous, and in the few cases where two survivors did know each other, like Jayden and Madison, Dr. Skousen and his doctors interviewed the living daylights out of them, trying to find anything that might be a correlating factor of survival. If Nandita waltzed in claiming she and Kira went way back, they would never have rested until they found every possible piece of information. And if one of those pieces said that Nandita worked at ParaGen, she was probably very reasonably afraid of being held prisoner and interrogated, or worse—maybe killed, if the people were angry enough.”

“‘Every possible piece of information,’” said Marcus, half to himself. “I almost wish they’d done it.”

“Killed Nandita?”

“Interrogated her,” said Marcus. He put his finger on the low wooden coffee table, tracing patterns in the grain of the wood. “Every possible piece of information about the two people the Partials are tearing our island apart to find.” He nodded. “Yeah, I kind of wish they’d done it.”

“You need to tell the Senate about Heron,” said Xochi.