“Look for notes,” he said, gesturing haphazardly at the rest of the room. “Seventy-eight percent of office workers leave their passwords written down near their computers.” Kira and Samm scoured the ruined office for pieces of paper, though twelve years of broken windows and full access to the elements had left the room so disheveled she didn’t expect to find anything useful. Heron turned instead to the room’s few remaining photos, turning them around to see if any had names on the back. While they searched, Afa retrieved a memory stick from his backpack and inserted it into a port in the frame of the desk. Before anyone could find a password, Afa barked a short laugh. “Got it.”

Kira looked up. “The password?”

“No, but these desks had a maintenance mode, and I was able to trigger it. I can’t see any of the data, and I can’t modify anything at all, but this will let me see the settings and, more importantly, the file tree.” The image on the screen wasn’t even an image anymore; the jungle and the icons had been replaced with scrolling text, broken into branches and offshoots like a word-based root system. Afa’s fingers flew across the image, expanding it here, compressing it there, flipping past row after row of names and files. “This is perfect.”

“So you’re going to be able to find the ParaGen servers?” asked Samm. Afa nodded, his eyes glued to the screen. Samm waited a moment, then asked, “How long?”

“Unless we get really lucky, most of the night,” said Afa. “Can you bring me some more of that nacho sauce?”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Samm stirred the gas tank, and Kira heard a satisfying slosh as the liquid inside slapped against the metal walls. “Sounds like we’re ready.”

“This should give us enough juice to power the whole floor for most of the day,” said Afa. Samm screwed the valve tight on the gas tank, they all stepped back, and Afa flipped the switch to start it. On the fourth try it spluttered, stiff from disuse, and on the seventh it roared angrily to life. Almost immediately the emergency lighting came on, those few bulbs that hadn’t burned out or broken, and moments later the klaxons on the ceiling began to sound, two of them blaring an urgent warning that the power supply to the data center had been compromised, and the third merely hissing air and dislodging a cloud of dust.

Heron looked at them through slitted eyes. “That’s going to get annoying.”

“Let’s go,” said Afa. “We don’t have long.”

“I thought you said we had power for most of the day?” asked Kira.