“Power yes, but cooling no. That entire facility next door is just to keep this one cool, and there’s no way to get that running again—even if we could get it started, it uses some rare chemicals we’re not going to find in the corner doggie hardware store. Without a cooling system, these servers could melt their circuits and each other pretty quickly.”

The ParaGen server was two rows over, and about halfway down; physically close to the generator that served it and about eighty other machines. Even with the generator running, the servers didn’t seem to have enough power to get going, so Afa sent Kira and Samm around to every other computer on the same circuit with an order to cut the power. It took Kira a while to figure out which of the many cables was for power, but once she found the first one, the rest were simple. She’d done about twenty, still not speaking to Samm, when Afa shouted triumphantly.

“It’s on!”

Samm stood to go back, but Kira kept working. If unplugging half of them helped, unplugging the rest would help even more; besides, she was still mad at both Samm and Heron, and didn’t want to be around them. How could they be so closed-minded? Racism had all but disappeared since the Break, with humans of every shape and color working together freely because there was literally no one else to work with. Kira remembered one holdout in an outer fishing village, a man she’d met on a salvage run who’d called her a towelhead for her obvious Indian ancestry, but he was such a bitter, solitary man, and she had lived so long without any kind of ethnic hate, that the insult rolled off her almost humorously. It was joke, a thing to laugh about with her friends: Was this guy for real? On Long Island, everyone worked together, everyone got along, and no matter what you looked like, you were still human.

. . . unless you were a Partial.

She paused, a discarded power cable in her hand, suddenly seeing the situation from the other side. Just as Samm and Heron saw themselves as innately superior, the humans saw all Partials as innately evil—so different, and so lesser, that they didn’t even qualify as people. Up until a few months ago she’d thought the same thing, but it had all changed when she met Samm.

Samm.