Kira finished binding Afa’s wound while he was still unconscious, and checked each attacker in turn, pulling out their weapons to count the bullets. One of them, in fact, had a sidearm that was short one bullet. Kira couldn’t tell how long ago the weapon had been fired, but it didn’t seem likely that a trained soldier would enter combat with anything less than a full clip, and so this was likely the one who’d shot Afa. But “likely,” she knew, wasn’t the same as “true.”

“Scavenging ammo?” asked Heron. Kira turned to find the Partial spy standing behind her, looking disheveled but alert. Kira slapped the clip back into the gun and dropped it on the fallen Partial’s chest.

“This one shot Afa,” she said, and rose to her feet. She tried to keep her voice casually curious. “Why do you think they shot him and tried to tranq the rest of us?”

“They were probably shooting the screen to kill the light,” said Heron. “They were prepared for the dark and we weren’t—standard ambush procedure. Those tranq darts don’t have the penetrating power to shatter a piece of glass like that.”

“That makes sense,” Kira admitted, and it did. Maybe. She shook her head. “Shooting the screen almost guaranteed hitting Afa in the process. If they were trying to take us alive, why risk hitting him somewhere lethal?”

Heron smirked, and pulled the Partial girl’s helmet off. Her face was Chinese, like Heron’s, and strikingly gorgeous. “She’s espionage. There was no risk.”

“How many?” asked Samm. He came around the corner of a computer tower, still shaking off the effects of the drug; he was groggy, and his speech was slurred. Kira added “recovering from sedatives” to her long list of things Heron seemed to be better at than the other Partials. She wasn’t kidding when she said she was designed to be superior.

“Three,” said Kira, looking down at the girl’s body. “One spy and two soldiers, I guess, though I’m obviously not as familiar with the model types as . . . whoa.” She knelt down, seeing something strange under the folds of the Partial’s hair. She brushed it back, revealing three rows of frilled slits on the girl’s neck. “Heron, do you have gills?”

Heron crouched down, pulling the girl’s head to the side to inspect her neck. “These are Morgan’s,” she said. “Special operatives, complete with Morgan’s recent ‘adaptations.’ Check the others.” They pulled the helmets off the two males, finding the same gills. Heron whistled. “Not exactly soldiers at all, then.” She looked up at Kira. “And you killed two of them?”