“Nandita Merchant,” she read, a jolt through her system after searching for so long. “Fifty-one thousand one hundred and twelve dollars paid on December 5, 2064. Direct deposit. Arvada, Colorado.” It was a payroll statement, a massive one that seemed to include employees from the entire multinational company. She frowned, reading the line again. It didn’t say what Nandita’s job was, only what they’d paid her, and she had no idea what that represented—was it a monthly wage, or a yearly? Or a one-time fee for a specific job? She went back to the ledgers and found one for the previous month, flipping through it quickly to find Nandita’s name. “Fifty-one thousand one hundred and twelve dollars on November 21,” she read, and saw the same on November 7. So it’s a biweekly salary, making her yearly . . . about one point two million dollars. That sounds like a lot. She had no frame of reference for old-world salaries, but as she glanced over the list she saw that $51,112 was one of the highest figures. “So she was one of the bigwigs in the company,” Kira muttered, thinking out loud. “She earned more than most, but what did she do?”

She wanted to look up her father, but she didn’t even know his last name. Her own last name, Walker, was a nickname she’d earned from the soldiers who’d found her after the Break, walking mile after mile through an empty city, searching for food. “Kira the Walker.” She’d been so young that she couldn’t remember her own last name, or where her father worked, or even what city they’d lived in—

“Denver!” she shouted, the name suddenly coming to her. “We lived in Denver. That was in Colorado, right?” She looked at Nandita’s listing again: Arvada, Colorado. Was that near Denver? She folded the page carefully and stowed it in her pack, vowing to search later for an old bookstore with an atlas. She looked back at the payroll report, searching for her father’s first name, Armin, but the payments were organized by surname, and finding a single Armin among the tens of thousands of people would be more trouble than it was worth. At best, finding his name would confirm what the photo already suggested: that Nandita and her father had worked in the same location at the same company. It still wouldn’t tell her what they did or why.