She pulled one of the papers from the debris at her feet; it was a fragment of old-world newspaper, wrinkled and yellow, and the headline was just barely legible. DETROIT PROTEST TURNS VIOLENT, she read. The smaller words in the body of the article were only barely legible, but Kira deciphered the words “police” and “factory,” and several references to Partials. “So the faction collecting radios is also collecting articles about the Partial rebellion?” She frowned at the paper, then rolled her eyes and dropped it back to the ground. “Either that, or every newspaper from right before the Break talked about Partials, and this means nothing.” She shook her head. “I need something concrete. You know, aside from all the actual chunks of concrete.” She kicked a piece of rubble, and it skittered away across the crater, bouncing off the fallen radio antenna with a clang.

She walked over to the examine the antenna; it was large, probably several yards tall when it was still straight, but as thin as cable. It must have been pretty sturdy to have stood up straight, but the explosion and the fall had twisted it into tight creases and curls. Kira pulled on it, trying to drag it out from the fallen bricks and Sheetrock that held it half-buried. It moved about three feet before catching on something; she strained against it, but it refused to budge any further. She dropped the antenna, panting with exertion, and looked for more . . . anything. She found more news clippings, three more decaying Partial bodies, and a nest of garter snakes curled under the shelf of a fallen solar panel, but nothing that told her where the bombers had gone, or if they might have another radio station elsewhere in the city. She sat down beside another solar panel to rest, pulling out a canteen of water, when suddenly it occurred to her:

Why were there two banks of solar panels?

This type of solar panel was called a Zoble, and Kira knew them well; Xochi had installed one on their roof at home to run her music players, and there were several more at the hospital. They could draw a lot of power and transfer it very efficiently, and they were incredibly rare. Xochi had only been able to afford hers through her “mother” and her connections to the farms and the fresh food market. To find one in Manhattan wasn’t necessarily bizarre—demand was less, after all, with no other scavengers to compete with—but to find two, rigged to the same building, spoke of abnormally high power needs. She scoured the crater again, on her hands and knees this time, searching for the capacitor that stored all this energy, and found instead the broken shards of a third Zoble panel.