The brochures were stacked neatly in a corner of the desk, their front covers adorned with a stylized double helix and a picture of the building from Kira’s photo, though from a different angle. Kira picked it up to look more closely and saw similar buildings in the background, most notably a tall, blocky tower that seemed to be made of great glass cubes. In flowing script at the bottom of the page was the phrase: “Becoming better than what we are.” Inside were page after page of smiling photos and sales pitches for gene mods—cosmetic mods to change your eye or hair color, health mods to remove congenital illness or shore up your resistance to other diseases, even recreational mods to make your stomach flatter or your breasts larger, to improve your strength or speed, your senses or reaction time. Gene mods had been so common before the Break that almost all the survivors on Long Island had them. Even the plague babies, the children so young during the Break that they couldn’t remember what life was like before it, had been given a handful of gene scrubs when they were born. They’d become standard procedure in hospitals around the world, and ParaGen had developed a lot of them. Kira had always thought she’d had the basic infant mods, and had occasionally wondered if she had something more: Was she a good runner because of DNA from her parents, or because an early gene mod had made her so? Now she knew it was because she was a Partial. Built in a lab as a human ideal.

The last half of the brochure talked about the Partials directly, though it referred to them as BioSynths, and there were far more “models” than she had expected to find. The military Partials were presented first, more as a success story than an available product: one million successful field tests for their flagship biotechnology. You couldn’t “buy” a soldier model, of course, but the brochure had other, less humanoid versions of the same technology: hyperintelligent Watchdogs, bushy-maned lions rendered docile enough to keep as pets, even something called the MyDragon™, which looked like a spindly, winged lizard the size of a house cat. The last page at the end promoted new kinds of Partials—a security guard based on the soldier template, and others to be looked up online. Is that what I am? A security guard or a love slave or whatever kind of sick garbage these people were selling? She read through the brochure again, looking for any clue she could find about herself, but there was nothing else; she threw it down and picked up the next, but it turned out to be the same interior with an alternate cover. She threw that one down as well and cursed.