She silently apologized to him, and then rifled through the desks on the floor, searching for a directory or a map—some hint of where to start looking. Obviously the Trust wouldn’t be mentioned by that name anywhere, at least she didn’t think so, but she knew most of their names from the records they’d found in Chicago. She repeated them again in her mind: Graeme Chamberlain, Kioni Trimble, Jerry Ryssdal, McKenna Morgan, Nandita Merchant, and Armin Dhurvasula. My father. She found a small directory and scanned it for their names, but found nothing.

She decided to try another tack, approaching the problem from another angle: What clues had she already gathered, and what pieces did she already know? It took her a moment to align her thoughts; she had been so busy getting here the last few weeks and had thought of little aside from survival. She had to remind herself of the mysteries she was trying to solve. Dr. Morgan had been assigned to create the Partials’ incredible physical attributes: their strength, their reflexes, their resistance to disease, and their incredible ability to heal. Jerry Ryssdal had worked on their senses. Kira’s father had created the link, and the entire system of pheromonal communication. She still didn’t know about Trimble. Last of all came Graeme Chamberlain and Nandita, who had been assigned to the Failsafe project. The world-ending plague they had come to know as RM. They’d learned in Chicago that the Failsafe was designed to kill the Partials if they ever got out of hand—it had been requested by the American government, and mandated by the ParaGen executives, and that mandate seemed to be the defining incident that sparked the lead scientists to form the Trust in the first place. And somehow, when the virus finally appeared, it killed humans instead. That couldn’t possibly be what the Trust decided to do—she couldn’t allow herself to think that anyone, let alone her father and the only mother figure she had ever known, would willingly, knowingly, unconscionably destroy so many people. And Graeme had killed himself, which didn’t tell her anything but still left her deeply unsettled.

Still, she thought, the Trust had been fractured, even as they tried to make their plans. Dr. Morgan knew nothing about the expiration date, for example, but somebody must have programmed it into their DNA, someone with a plan. There were others, too, the names Morgan had screamed when she thought Kira was a spy: Cronus and Prometheus. Were they code names for some of the people on this list? Or new people altogether? And where did Dr. Vale fit into this?