I only have three days left, she told herself. Stop whining and work. She struggled to concentrate on the DORD images, looking for any discrepancy between Samm’s physiology and that of a human, but she kept thinking about what he said yesterday. The sincerity in his voice. What if he was telling the truth—what then? If the Partials had never created the virus in the first place, then who did? The Lurker in his breath, whatever it was, proved that he had some relationship to RM, but that didn’t mean he made it. The Partials were soldiers, not geneticists; they had doctors, but they weren’t necessarily capable of this level of engineering. What if the similarity meant something else entirely?

What if it was a sign of common ancestry? What if RM and the Partials were both created by the same third party?

Kira closed her eyes, trying to remember what she’d learned in school. What was the name of the company? Para-something? It was so hard to remember the details of the old world—names and places and technologies that simply had no meaning in modern life. Food companies were easy, because the ruins were all around her: Starbucks and Panda Garcia and a dozen more like them. She could even remember eating at some of them as a child, before the Break. Genetics companies, on the other hand, were completely outside the realm of her experience. She’d learned the name in her history class, but they hadn’t made a big deal about it. It was the government who’d commissioned the Partials, Para-something was just the contractor.

Para-Genetics, she remembered. They were called ParaGen. Haru had mentioned them the other day. But what could they have to do with RM? Certainly they hadn’t created it—they were human too. It doesn’t make sense.

“Did you have a mother?” asked Samm. The question broke Kira’s train of thought in an instant, and she looked at him quizzically.

“What?”

“Did you have a mother?”

“I … of course I had a mother, everyone has a mother.”

“We don’t.”

Kira frowned. “You know you’re the second person in the last twelve hours to ask me about my mother?”

“I was only curious.”

“It’s okay,” said Kira. “I never really knew my mother. I guess that makes us more alike than we thought.”

“Your father, then,” said Samm.

“Why do you want to know about him? I was five when he died, I can barely remember him.”

“I’ve never had a father either.”

Kira scooted her chair closer, coming around the edge of the desk. “Why are you so curious?” she asked. “You never talk, for two solid days, and now this morning all of a sudden you’re obsessed with families. What’s going on?”

“I’ve been doing some thinking,” he said. “A lot of thinking. You’re aware that we can’t reproduce?”