“You’re real,” said Afa.

Kira spun around, startled, hiding the magazine behind her guiltily. Would he be mad at her for looking at his records?

“Did you say I’m . . .” She paused. “Real?”

“I thought you were a dream,” said Afa, shuffling into the room. He stopped at one of the boxes and sifted through it idly, almost as if he were petting an animal. “I haven’t talked to anyone in so long—and then last night there was a person in my house, and I thought that I’d dreamed it, but you’re still here.” He nodded. “You’re real.”

“I’m real,” she assured him, placing the magazine back into box 138. “I’ve been admiring your collection.”

“It has everything—almost everything. It even has video, but not in this room. I have the whole story.”

Kira stepped toward him, wondering how long he’d stay talkative this time. “The story of the Partial War,” she said, “and the Break.”

“That’s just part of it,” said Afa, picking up two stapled sheaves of paper, examining his own pen marks in the upper corners, and then reordering them in the box. “This is the story of the end of the world, the rise and fall of human civilization, the creation of the Partials and the death of everything else.”

“And you’ve read all of it?”

Afa nodded again, his shoulders slack as he moved from box to box. “All of it. I’m the only human being on the planet.”

“I guess that makes sense, then,” said Kira. She stopped by a box—number 341—and pulled out some kind of government report; a court order, by the look of it, with a round seal stamped in the corner. She wanted answers, but she didn’t want to pressure him again, to freak him out by saying or mentioning anything he didn’t want to remember. I’ll keep it generic for now. “How did you find it all?”

“I used to work in the clouds,” he said, then immediately corrected himself: “In the cloud. I lived my whole life up there, I could go anywhere and find anything.” He nodded at a box of dusty clippings. “I was like a bird.”

I saw your name at ParaGen, she wanted to say again. I know you have information about the Trust: about RM, the expiration date, what I am. She’d been looking for these answers for so long, and now they were right here, split into boxes and trapped in a failing brain. Is it just from the loneliness? Maybe his brain works fine, he just hasn’t spoken to someone in so long he’s forgotten how to interact with people. She wanted to sit him down and ask him a million questions, but she’d waited this long; she could wait a little longer. Win him over, don’t freak him out, get him on your side.