She turned and sat on the broken asphalt, leaning against the truck’s flat tire and pulling out her notebook again, though at this point she had the address memorized: Fifty-fourth and Lexington. It had taken her weeks to find the address, and several more days to make it here through the ruins. Maybe she was being too cautious. . . .

She shook her head. There was no such thing as “too cautious.” The unsettled areas were too dangerous to take any chances, and Manhattan was more dangerous than most. She’d played it safe and she was still alive; she wasn’t going to second-guess a strategy that had proven itself so successful.

She looked at the address again, then up at the weather-beaten street signs. This was definitely the right place. She tucked the notebook back into her pocket and hefted her rifle. Time to go inside.

Time to visit ParaGen.

The office building had once had glass doors and floor-to-ceiling windows, but glass didn’t last long since the Break, and the entire ground floor now stood naked to the elements. It wasn’t the ParaGen headquarters—that was out west somewhere, on the other side of the country—but it was something. A financial branch, located in Manhattan solely to interface with other corporations’ financial branches. It had taken her weeks of searching even to find that the office existed. Kira picked her way through the pellets of shattered safety glass, and the mounds of siding and facade sloughed off from the building’s upper floors. Eleven years of neglect had filled the floor inside with dirt, thick enough that small weeds and grasses were already beginning to sprout through. Low benches, once upholstered in sleek vinyl, had been weakened by sun and rain and torn apart by what looked like cats’ claws. A wide desk that had probably held a receptionist was now weathered and sagging, the epicenter of a loose scattering of yellowed plastic ID tags. A plaque on the wall named dozens of businesses in the building, and Kira browsed the weather-beaten listings until she found ParaGen: the twenty-first floor. Three elevator doors stood in the wall behind the reception desk, though one was hanging crooked in its frame. Kira ignored them and went to the stairway door in the back corner. There was a black panel in the wall next to it, a sensor pad for a magnetic lock, but with no electricity it was meaningless—the hinges would be the biggest problem. Kira leaned against it, pushing gently at first to test it, then harder as the ancient hinges resisted the force. Finally it gave way, and she walked in to look up the towering stairwell.

“Twenty-first floor,” she sighed. “Of course.”