Kira turned to the earliest numbered boxes in the room, finding number 138 and pulling out the top piece of paper. It was another newspaper clipping, this time from the financial section of something called the Wall Street Journal, describing in vague terms the awarding of a massive military contract: In March of 2051 the US government contracted ParaGen, a budding biotechnology company, to produce an army of “biosynthetic soldiers.” The focus of the article was entirely on the cost of the project, the ramifications for stockholders, and the impact this would have on the rest of the biotech industry. There was no mention of civil rights, of diseases, of any of the massive issues that had come to define the world right before the Break. Only money. She searched through the rest of the box and found more of the same: a transcript from a news interview with ParaGen’s chief financial officer; an internal ParaGen memo about the company’s new windfall contract; a magazine called Forbes with the ParaGen logo on the cover and the crisp silhouette of an armed Partial soldier in the background. Kira flipped through the pages of the magazine, finding article after article about money, about technologies being used to make more money, about all the ways the Isolation War, despite being “a terrible tragedy,” would help heal the American economy. Money, money, money.

Money had a place in East Meadow society, but that place was a small one. Almost everything they needed was free: If you wanted a can of food, a pair of pants, a book, a house, whatever it was, all it cost you was the effort to go out and find one. Money was used almost exclusively for fresh food, things like wheat from the farms and fish from the coastal villages—things you had to work for—and even then, most of those commodities were traded in kind, through a barter system in the marketplace. Nandita and Xochi had built a lucrative business trading herbs for fresh food, and Kira had always eaten well because of it. Money, such as it was, was usually just work credits: government vouchers for her time spent in the hospital, her reward for performing a vital service that didn’t actually produce a tradable commodity. It was enough to keep her in fresh fish and vegetables for lunch, but not much else. It was a minor, almost insignificant aspect of her life. The documents in box 138 described a world in which money was everything—not just the means of sustaining life but the purpose of living it. She tried to imagine being happy about the war with the Partials or the Voice, rejoicing because it would somehow bring her extra work credits, but the idea was so foreign she laughed out loud. If that was how the old world worked—if that was all they really cared about—maybe it was better that it had fallen apart. Maybe it was inevitable.