They started their search in the front room, moving quickly through the building; it had been converted from a home to a business and was mostly empty. The back room held a lost fortune in holovid projectors, but those were useless now. She’d have traded the entire thing for a single pair of gloves. Finally in the back parking lot they found a rusted white van, weeds growing up around the flat, deformed tires, with the company’s logo faded and peeling off the side. Kira wrenched the door open and found the back full of power cords and old projector parts, and four pairs of canvas work gloves in the top drawer of a tool chest. They pulled on two pairs each and jogged back to the main road to make up for lost time. The sky was darker now, far darker than it should have been for the time of day, and the wind was practically howling.

“We need to find shelter,” said Kira.

“We need to find a boat,” said Green. “I told you before, the instant this clears up we need to get on the water.”

“Are you afraid it’s going to start up again?”

“I’m afraid that we’re running out of time.”

“Look,” said Kira, “I’m every bit as anxious about this as you are, but we’re not going to do any good if we’re dead of exposure. It feels like it’s dropped another five degrees in the last few hours—this weather is well below freezing, and Partials or not, we’re in a very real danger of hypothermia.”

“We don’t have time to sit around waiting,” Green snapped, and picked up his pace.

“We’ll live a lot longer if we get inside—”

“Really?” said Green.

Kira stopped, trying to figure out what he meant, and the answer hit her like a fist to the gut. She wrapped her arms tightly over her freezing chest and ran to catch up with him.

“How long do you have?”

His voice was emotionless—all the more eerie considering his words. “It just now occurred to you to ask?”

“I’m sorry,” said Kira. “I’ve been focused on expiration as a concept, as an enemy to overcome. . . . You left Morgan’s army. Does that mean you didn’t think she was going to cure it fast enough to matter?”

Green walked silently, head down.

“The youngest batch has seven months left,” said Kira. Samm’s batch, she thought. She swallowed nervously, feeling tears creep up behind her eyes. “Do you have half that?” Green didn’t answer, and she felt her heart sink. “Two months?”

“One,” said Green. “I’ll be dead by the end of the year.”

“That might be enough time to help you,” said Kira quickly, practically racing through the words. “The sooner we get across and find humans, the sooner we can—”

“Then stop arguing with me and look for a boat.”