Another thought came to her then, the mental image of a column of smoke. She’d seen it last time she was here, with Jayden and Haru and the others: a thin trail of smoke rising up from a chimney or a campfire. They’d gone to investigate it and run into Samm’s group of Partials, and in the rush to get back out, she’d forgotten that they’d never actually learned where the smoke was coming from. She’d assumed it was part of the Partial camp, but her experiences with them later made that seem almost laughably wrong—the Partials were far too clever to leave such an obvious sign of their presence, and far too hardy to need a campfire in the first place. It seemed more likely that the smoke came from a third party, and the Partials had shown up to investigate it the same time the humans did; their two groups had annihilated each other before either could find out what was going on. Maybe. It was a long shot, but it was better than anything else she had to go on. Certainly better than staking out hardware stores in a vain hope the scavenger would hit one while she was watching it.

She’d start with the same neighborhood they’d been investigating back then, and if he’d moved on—which seemed likely, after the massive firefight they’d held just a few blocks away—she’d look for more clues about where he might have headed next. There was somebody in this city, and she was determined to find him.

Finding the source of the smoke plume was harder than Kira had planned. It wasn’t there anymore, for one thing, so she had to go by memory, and the city was so big and confusing that she couldn’t remember clearly enough without jogging her memory visually. She had to go back, all the way south to the bridge they’d crossed on, and find the same building, and look out the same window. There, at long last, the landscape looked familiar—she could see the long strip of trees, the three apartment buildings, all the signs that had led her to the Partial attack those many months ago. That was where she’d first met Samm—well, not “met him” so much as “knocked him unconscious and captured him.” It was strange how much things had changed since then. If she had Samm here, now . . . Well, things would be a lot easier, for one thing.

But even as she thought it, she knew it was more than that. Staring out the window over the leafy city, she wondered again, for the hundredth time, if the connection she had felt between them had been the Partial link or something deeper. Was there any way to know? Did it even matter? A connection was a connection, and she had precious few of those these days.