“I’m right here, Afa,” she said, trying to coax him back into coherence. “We can do this together. You’re not alone. Just tell me where the server is.”

“It’s in Denver,” said Afa. “It’s on the other side of the continent.” He looked back at the floor. “It may as well be on the other side of the world.”

“. . . moving through the LZ . . .”

The voice rose from the static like a breaching whale, surfacing in a moment of clarity before sinking back down in the deep. White noise filled the room again, a dozen different signals washing over and through one another in Kira’s ears. Afa had shut down completely, too spooked by their conversation—or by the thoughts their conversation had brought to mind—to think about anything important. She’d taken him to the food stores and given him fruit cocktail, hoping it would soothe him, and then left him alone to recover. She’d searched through his records for a while, desperate to find what she wanted, but without Afa’s guidance the filing system was impenetrable. As she explored, the sounds of static had brought her to the radio room, and she listened helplessly to the whisper of disembodied voices. Lights glowed like dim green stars on the console, hundreds of buttons and dials and switches arrayed before her. She didn’t touch them.

She listened.

“. . . in B Company. Don’t . . . until they get . . .”

“. . . orders from Trimble. That’s not for . . .”

“. . . everywhere! Tell him I don’t care . . .”

That last one had been human. Kira had learned to recognize the difference between human and Partial radio traffic, though it wasn’t exactly hard: The Partials were more professional, stiffer and colder in the way they talked. It wasn’t that they didn’t have emotions, it was that they weren’t accustomed to expressing them verbally. The link carried all their emotional cues chemically, and their radio communication was too disciplined to need any emotion at all. It was pragmatic, even in the midst of combat. And there was a lot of combat.

The Partials had invaded Long Island.

The human radio transmissions had a desperate, frightened quality that had confused her at first, chopped up as they were into tiny fragments devoid of sense or context. The people on Long Island were tense and terrified, but she couldn’t tell why. Soon she began to hear gunfire in the background, all-too-familiar pops and cracks as bullets flew back and forth behind the speakers. Was it the Voice again? Another civil war? The more she listened, the more obvious it became: It was the Partials. They had begun to mention landmarks she knew, cities she’d visited on Long Island, and the order in which they mentioned them suggested a relentless progress from the North Shore toward East Meadow.

And all Kira could do was listen.