Kira stepped back reflexively, as if the demolished building could somehow contain another bomb. She stared at the wreckage, summoned her courage, and walked in, placing her feet carefully in the unstable ruins. It didn’t take long to find the first body. A soldier dressed in a gray uniform—a Partial—was lodged under a fallen wall, a fractured corpse in the crumpled remains of composite body armor. His rifle lay beside him, and she pulled it from the rubble with surprising ease; the action moved stiffly, but it moved nonetheless, and the chamber still held a bullet. She popped out the clip and found it full—the soldier hadn’t fired a single round before he died, and his fellow soldiers had neither recovered his gear nor buried his body. That means the bomb took them by surprise, Kira thought, and it killed them all. There was no one left to recover the fallen.

Kira searched further, sifting cautiously through the fallen beams and bricks, and found at last the old familiar sight—the blackened fragments of a radio transceiver, just like in Asharoken. The two situations were too similar to dismiss: A group of scouts investigate something suspicious, find a fortified safe house full of communications equipment, and die in a defensive trap. Kira and the others had assumed the site in Asharoken belonged to the Voice, but Owen Tovar denied it then and now. The next most likely candidates were the Partials, yet here was a group of Partials caught in the same trap. Another Partial faction, then, thought Kira. But which belongs to Dr. Morgan—the spies with the radio, or the scouts that attacked it? Or neither? And how does this connect to ParaGen? Whoever had taken the computers from the offices had also taken the radios from the store, and now here were fragments of both in one place. There had to be a connection. It seemed likely that the faction collecting radios was the same faction that was establishing these radio stations throughout the ruins. But what were they doing? And why would they kill so freely to hide it?

“What I need is a clue,” said Kira, frowning at the devastation. She was talking to herself more and more these days, and she felt foolish to hear her voice ringing out through the empty city. On the other hand, hers was the only voice she’d heard in weeks, and it was oddly soothing every time she spoke. She shook her head. “Gotta talk to somebody, right? Even if it does make me look pathetic.” She bent down, examining the bits of paper sprinkled throughout the rubble. Whoever had made the safe houses and planted the bombs was still out there, and finding them would be all but impossible now that they’d blown up all the evidence. Kira laughed dryly. “But I suppose that’s kind of the point.”