“The first question I need to ask you, assuming you’re even listening, is how you met Nandita. I’ve talked to the other girls she adopted, and they all tell me that by the time they met her, you were already with her. Isolde said something about Philadelphia, that you were there when Nandita found you. That’s actually the same place Xochi’s from, but I don’t know if that means anything. What I want to know is . . . where did you come from, I guess? How did you meet Nandita? Was it just the standard ‘lone little kid wandering the streets’ kind of story? We have a lot of those on the island—a heartwarming number of them, in a weird kind of way. Your family’s dead, your neighbors are all dead, you get hungry or scared or whatever and go out looking for something. For me it was milk—we had plenty of cold cereal in my house, and it was the one thing I knew how to make when I was five, so I ate it every day, for every meal, and it didn’t take long to run out of milk. I tried a few other meals, peanut butter and jelly on tortillas, that kind of thing. I couldn’t even work the can opener.” He laughed, and rubbed a tear from the corner of his eye. “So anyway, I went out looking for milk. I don’t know where I expected to find any, and the whole world was just sitting there, you know? A couple of things were burning, like a car and a drugstore, but this was Albuquerque, and there wasn’t a lot of foliage to help the flames spread around. A couple of hoses were running, just running and running, making a little stream in a gutter. But no people anywhere. I walked all the way to the nearest store I knew—my uncle’s place, a little Abarrotes shop just a few blocks away—but it was locked, and I couldn’t get in, so I just kept going, and going, and the entire city was just empty. Not a single living person. I found a Walmart, eventually—walk far enough in a town like that and you’ll inevitably find a Walmart—and I went inside to look for milk and there was this guy, I’d never seen him before in my life, filling a wheelbarrow with bottles of water. He looked at me, and I looked at him, and he lifted me up into the wheelbarrow and gave me a pack of lunch meat. He even found some milk in the back of the store, shelf-stable so it hadn’t gone bad yet, and I ate a bowl of cereal while he gathered up everything he needed. His name was Tray, I don’t know his last name. Tray carried me all the way to Oklahoma City before we finally met up with the National Guard. I lost track of him, and I honestly don’t know if he even made it the rest of the way here—I’m ashamed to say I haven’t thought about him much in the last few years. I suppose if he’s here, he lives in the wilds somewhere, fishing or farming or whatever. I’d have found him if he lived in town. And I don’t know why I told you that whole story, except to say that those are the kinds of people we need—those are the kinds of people we are. Nobody survived unless they worked together, and helped each other, and that’s what makes RM and the Break the most over-the-top natural selection process of all time. I don’t know how Nandita found you, but she found you, and she saved you, and she brought you here, and now she’s missing and I’m just trying to figure out what’s going on. What did she know, what did she do, why was she here? Why are the Partials looking for her?”