She thought about Afa again, and what she might do to bring him back to normal. In hindsight, his occasional retreats from reality made a lot of sense: He’d been alone for twelve straight years since the break, and pretending to still be alone again might be the only way he could calm down. She laughed now at the irony of it: a man who knew exactly what she needed to know, but so lost, so crazy, he couldn’t even talk about it. The voices ebbed and flowed around her.

“. . . more room, get back to the . . .”

“. . . the farm last night, we haven’t counted . . .”

“. . . backup. Get me Sato’s . . .”

Kira’s eyes snapped open, the name shocking her out of her reverie. Sato? Are they talking about Haru? When she’d left East Meadow, he was still on work release, dishonorably discharged from the Grid for his role in kidnapping Samm. Had he been reinstated? Were they talking about a different Sato? Please, she thought, don’t let it be Madison. Don’t let it be Arwen. If they’re in trouble . . . She didn’t even want to think about it.

She looked at the control console, not really a single piece but a hodgepodge of salvaged transceivers, all cobbled together with wire and cable and duct tape. There was an old radio station here, underneath it all, but Afa had apparently rebuilt it almost from scratch. It was too dark to see everything clearly, and Kira tried her pocket flashlight before getting frustrated and going to the windows. Afa had walled them all off with cardboard and plywood, and Kira ripped one of the panels away, flooding the room with daylight. She ran back to the radio console and studied it carefully, trying to figure out which of the many speakers the message had come through. Who said “Sato”?

There was no way to tell for sure, but she narrowed it down to two. The controls seemed to be more or less grouped around the speaker they pertained to, and she searched the knobs for anything that looked familiar. She’d used radios before, of course, small walkie-talkies while out on salvage runs, but those were very simple: a volume and a tuner. Whatever else this had, it had to have those, too, right? She found what she thought was a tuner, on the speaker she thought had mentioned Sato, and turned it gingerly. The white noise poured through unchanged, broken here and there by the snippets from the other radios; she leaned in closer to the speaker, concentrating on its sound and ignoring everything else.

“. . . not crossed yet, repeat, the third . . .”