“Glued almost solid,” he said. “This could take a while.”

“There are a few more cans in the store if we need them,” said Kira, setting the cans heavily on the metal grating near the tank. “I brought a funnel.”

“First we need to make sure this is the right tank,” said Afa. “Samm looked around, and there are several more on this floor, and from the looks of this wiring there are more upstairs as well.”

“That means we can’t put it off any longer,” said Samm. “We have to figure out which server ParaGen’s data is on.”

Afa nodded. “Records of which servers are ParaGen’s will be found in an administration office; probably upstairs.”

They found the nearest staircase and trudged up; Kira exulted in the feeling as she finally stepped up above the water level. The second story held nothing but servers, as did the third, but the fourth had a number of small offices along one row of broken windows. Afa set down his pack and zipped it open, pulling out a Tokamin—a phone-shaped battery that provided nearly perpetual power, but only in small quantities, and the device’s benefits had traditionally been negated by the ambient radiation it emitted. The old world had never produced them beyond the proof of concept, and though the survivors on Long Island had toyed with the idea, they’d deemed it too dangerous for practical use. When you only have a handful of humans left, there’s no sense giving them cancer. Afa, it seemed, had made his own; Kira stepped back from it, and noticed that Samm and Heron did the same. Afa pressed the button to power it on, and Kira cringed, half expecting a burst of gaseous green energy, but all it did was light up a small doughnut-shaped icon in the center. He plugged it into the desk computer, one of the black-framed glass ones Kira had seen in the Manhattan ParaGen office, and turned it on.

The desk flickered, a five-foot panel of clear glass—on, off, on, on, off. With a final burst of blue light the desk lit up, showing essentially a larger version of Afa’s handheld screen. It was like a window had opened into another world, replacing the sheet of glass with a view of a verdant green jungle, so sharp and clear Kira reached out to touch it. It was the same glass, covered with drifts of dust and dirt, and marred here and there by pixelated glitches in the image. Glowing softly in the center was a small box requesting a password, and Afa tried a few simple words before turning back to his pack and rooting around for something.