This was the tricky part. She didn’t dare to move in until she knew who lived there, where they were, and whether the bombs were set to explode. The most likely scenario, at least to her, was that this was some kind of outpost for a faction of Partials—and not a faction friendly to Dr. Morgan, since their last meeting at the other outpost had gone so destructively. That didn’t automatically mean that these Partials were friendly to humans, though, and Kira didn’t want to walk into a trap. She would watch, and wait, and see what happened.

Nothing happened.

Kira watched the building all day and night, holed up in the apartment across the street. She ate cold cans of beans and huddled under a moth-eaten blanket to avoid starting a fire. Nobody went in and nobody went out, and when night fell there were no fires in the windows, no smoke rising up through a crack in the boards. Nothing happened the second day either, and Kira was beginning to get nervous—they must have left before she got there, or slipped out a back way. She crept down to the street and did a quick perimeter check, searching for other entrances and exits, but nothing looked used, either generally or recently. If they’d left at all, they’d done it through the front door. She settled back in to watch it.

That night, someone came out.

Kira leaned forward, careful to stay out of the moonlight in the window. The man was large, easily seven feet tall, with the heft and girth to match. He probably outweighed Kira by two hundred pounds. His skin was dark, but probably no darker than her own; it was hard to tell in the faint light of a cloudy moon. He opened the front door cautiously, lifted a small cart through the door and down the stairs, and carefully locked the door behind him. The cart was full of jugs, and Kira guessed he was off to retrieve water. He wore a heavy pack full of something she couldn’t identify, and she couldn’t see his weapon. Safer to assume the worst, then, she thought, as there could easily be a high-caliber handgun or submachine gun hidden in the folds of his loose-fitting trench coat.