“This is how it started,” she said out loud, setting it down and picking up another paper from the same box. It was another combat report, this time from a Sergeant Major Seamus Ogden. He talked about the Partials the same way, not as monsters but as tools. She read another document, then another, and the attitude was the same in each one—it wasn’t that they thought the Partials were harmless, it was that they barely thought of them at all. They were weapons, like bullets in a clip, to be spent and used and forgotten.

Kira moved to another box, 302, pulling out a newspaper clipping from something called the Los Angeles Times: PARTIAL RIGHTS GROUPS PROTEST ON CAPITOL STEPS. Beneath it in the box was a similar clipping from the Seattle Times, and beneath that another from the Chicago Sun. The dates in this box were all from late in 2064, just a few months before the Partial War. Kira would have just turned five. Obviously the Partials would have been all over the news at the time, but she didn’t remember her father ever talking about them; now that she knew he’d been working for ParaGen, that made more sense. If he’d worked with them, or even helped create them, he would have had a different attitude from the rest of the world—probably a pretty unpopular attitude. At least I hope he had a different attitude, she thought. Why else would he raise one as his daughter? She vaguely remembered her nanny as well, and a housekeeper, but they never talked about Partials either. Had her father asked them not to?

Had they even known what Kira really was?