Kira picked through the ruins of the town house, overwhelmed by the chaos: Walls had fallen in, floors and ceilings had collapsed, shards of furniture had separated and scattered and clustered again in random piles. Wood and books and paper and dishes and twisted chunks of metal filled the crater and spilled far into the street, thrown by the force of the blast.

The home had definitely been inhabited, and recently. Kira had seen a lot of old-world debris in her life; she had grown up surrounded by it, and it had become familiar: framed photos of long-dead families, little black boxes of media players and game systems, broken vases full of brittle stems. The details varied from house to house, but the feel was the same—forgotten lives of forgotten people. The debris from this home was different, and distinctly modern: stockpiles of canned food, now burst and rotting in the rubble; boarded windows and reinforced doors; guns and ammunition and handmade camouflage. Someone had lived here, long after the world was destroyed, and when someone else—the Partials?—had invaded their privacy, they blew up their own home. The pattern of the destruction was too complete, and too contained, to be an outside attack; an enemy would have used a smaller explosive to breach the wall, or a larger one that would have caught the neighboring houses as well. Whoever had destroyed this home had done their work pragmatically and with devastating thoroughness.

The crater reminded her, the more she thought about it, of a similar explosion she’d seen last year—before the cure, before Samm, before everything. She’d gone on a salvage run with Marcus and Jayden, somewhere on the North Shore of Long Island, and a building had been rigged to explode. It had been a booby trap, much like this one seemed to be—not designed to kill but to destroy evidence. What was the name of that little town? Asharoken; I remember how Jayden made fun of the name. And why were they looking in that building, anyway? It had been flagged by a preliminary salvage crew, and the soldiers had gone back to investigate; they’d had specialists with them, like a computer guy or something. Something electronic? Her breath caught in her throat as the memory returned: It was a radio station. Someone had set up a radio station on the North Shore, and then blown it up to keep it secret. And now someone had done the same thing here. Was it the same someone?