“Your house,” she said, thinking back to the craters. She was more sure now than ever that this man was no Partial; if anything, he seemed like a giant child. “Who else is back there?”

“Nobody,” he said, “nobody at all. I’m a noncombatant, you can’t shoot me. We’ll eat fruit cocktail in my house.”

Kira thought about it a moment longer, then nodded. If this was a trap, it was the weirdest one she’d ever encountered. She put out her hand to shake. “My name is Kira Walker.”

“My name is Afa Demoux.” He placed the fallen water jug on the cart, gathered his pump, and began towing it all back to the safe house. “You’re a Partial, and I’m the last human being on Earth.”

Afa’s safe house turned out to be an old TV station, old enough to contain some equipment from before the days of computerized entertainment. Kira had done salvage runs on a handful of local news stations back on Long Island, and their systems had been arcane but small: cameras, cables, and little bits of computer equipment feeding everything into the cloud. This building had that as well—every TV station probably did, she thought, given the old world’s obsession with the internet—but it had older devices as well: broad banks of manual mixing equipment, a room of mysterious broadcasting machines designed to send everything into the sky, to be picked up by remote antennas instead of beamed directly through satellite links. This was why the building still had its enormous antenna, and that was why Afa lived here. She knew this because he told her, over and over, for nearly an hour.

“The cloud went down,” he said again, “but radios don’t need the cloud—it’s a point-to-point communication system. All you need is a radio, an antenna, and enough electricity to run it. I can broadcast to anyone, and they can broadcast to me, and we don’t need a network or a cloud or anything. With an antenna this big I can broadcast all over the world.”

“That’s great,” said Kira, “but who do you talk to? Who’s out there?” There had to be more survivors than just Long Island—she’d always hoped but never dared to believe.

Afa shook his head—broad and brown-skinned, with a bushy black beard salted liberally with gray. Kira guessed that he was Polynesian, but she didn’t know the individual islands well enough to guess which one. “There’s nobody out there,” he said. “I’m the last human on Earth.”