“I don’t know,” said Afa, taking the folder from her hand. He sat down and began laying out the papers on the floor. “Everything they did was encrypted—that’s what all this gobbledygook is up here, and down here. I got through as much of it as I could, but they were being very careful.” He arranged another printout carefully on the floor in front of him. “This is the next one, though it doesn’t say much. I assume it’s in code, but not machine code, or I could have cracked it. They gave themselves pass codes and phrases so they could talk without their bosses understanding them.”

Kira sat down across from him and turned the document around. It was another email, from her father like the last one, but this time he was talking about company parking spaces. Afa had circled several words: Trust. Parallel. Failsafe.

“What do these mean?”

“I’m pretty sure ‘Parallel’ was the name of their plan,” said Afa. “Whatever they started coming up with that night. Or maybe a second plan, designed to go along with the first. The ‘Failsafe’ I’m not sure about, because they talk about it in different ways: Sometimes they’re trying to create something called a ‘Failsafe,’ sometimes it seems like they’re trying to work against it, and I can’t figure it out.”

“So what is this email saying?”

Afa took it from her hands, touching some of the marked words. “If I’ve deciphered their code the way I think I have, they’re saying that the plan is underway, and they’ve started work on the Failsafe, and they need to lie low and wait before holding another meeting.” He shrugged. “I can’t read any more than that. I’m the last human being left alive.”

Kira nodded, recognizing from his phrase that the moment of lucidity was passing; in a few more minutes Afa would be back to his old, mumbling self again. She pressed him, trying to learn as much as she could before he slipped away. “Where did you get this?”

“I pulled it out of the cloud. It was encrypted, but I knew most of the keys.”

“Because you worked at ParaGen.” She held her breath, praying that he wouldn’t shut down at the mention of it. He paused, staring, motionless, Kira clenching her fist in desperation.

“I was the IT director in the Manhattan office,” he said, and Kira breathed a sigh of relief. “I’d been watching this grow for years, from one piece to the next. I didn’t know where it would go. I didn’t know how far.”

“You got this from the office computers,” said Kira, looking up at the rows of computer drives lining the cafeteria. “Is there any way to get the rest?”