Now it was Marcus’s turn to be shocked into silence. He cast about for something to say, and finding nothing, he simply walked forward, putting himself between Trimble and the view screen. Forcing her to look at him. She was an older woman, late sixties, maybe, the same age as Nandita and with similar coloring. Nandita is the other reason we’re here, he thought. We need to find her, too, just like Kira. He seized on this thought, and when her eyes finally met his, he spoke softly.

“I’m looking for a friend of mine,” he said. “Another human. A woman named Nandita Merchant. Do you know her?”

A spark of recognition lit up in Trimble’s eye, and Marcus considered again her statement that she had once been human; no Partial he’d met was that visually expressive. Her hands came up to her face, half covering her mouth, her eyes going wide. “Is Nandita alive?”

“I don’t know,” said Marcus softly, still surprised that the woman seemed to know who Nandita was. “We haven’t seen her in months. Do you know . . . anything about her? Maybe you’ve seen something on your screens to help us find her?” He paused, watching her face, watching her eyes grow moist with tears. He decided to push his luck just one step further. “We haven’t seen Kira Walker, either.”

An odd look passed over her face, like she was peering into a long-forgotten memory. “Nandita didn’t have anything to do with Kira,” she said, cocking her head to the side. “Hers was called . . . Aura, I think. Aria. No, Ariel; it was Ariel.”

Marcus’s eyes went wide, a thousand questions crowding his mind so abruptly that none of them managed to come out. Ariel? Trimble knew about Nandita and Ariel? That could only mean that Nandita had communicated with her at some point; maybe she’d even come here. And yet Trimble had asked if Nandita was alive, implying that even if she’d come here before, she was gone now. As he searched for words an alarm sounded, and Trimble swung her chair to the side, tapping a button on her console that sent a rippling cascade across the wall of screens, calling up a score of new videos and images: roaring artillery, crumbling buildings, long lists of names and numbers scrolling by so fast Marcus couldn’t hope to read them.

“A new assault,” said the guard, apparently recovered from his forced silence. He stepped forward to tap a small console of his own, glancing at the holovid map. “Inside the city this time.”

“An assault here?” asked Woolf. He reached for his waist, grasping at something that wasn’t there, and Marcus found himself doing the same—reflexively reaching for a weapon. If an army of Partials attacked, their band of humans was trapped in the middle without so much as a pointy stick.