Green heard it first, stopping in midstep and raising his head to listen. The other Partials stopped an instant later, warned by the link that something was happening. Kira tried to listen as well, but when the Partial soldiers all dropped to the ground in unison, taking cover and pulling up their rifles, she realized that her ears weren’t nearly as finely tuned. She pulled up her own rifle, crawling to the snow toward Green.

“What happened?”

“Gunshot,” said Green, and pointed down the road to a wide-open parking lot. “Two so far. Long gun, medium caliber by the sound of it. Sniper, but he missed what he was shooting at.”

“How can you tell all that?”

“If it was a real gunfight, they wouldn’t have been single shots, and we would have heard more than one gun.” He looked at her. “And if the sniper had hit what he was aiming for, he wouldn’t have had to shoot a second time.”

They crept down the road toward the sound, until the residential street gave way to a four-lane road with a massive shopping center on the other side. The closest building was a restaurant with a silhouette of a lobster on its sign; the parking lot was mostly empty. Looks like everyone in Hicksville decided to die at home, thought Kira. Beyond the restaurant was a strip mall, with a few of the storefronts blackened from a decades-old fire. Well, thought Kira, everyone but the looters.

“It came from over there,” said Falin, pointing past the strip mall to a multistory shopping mall two parking lots away.

“That’s good open ground,” said Kira, “easy to defend. Someone in a top window could shoot anyone who gets too close.”

“The shot came from inside,” said Green. “Which means I don’t know what this means.”

“It means it’s easier to avoid,” said Falin. “Back up a block, and we go south with cover and forget it ever happened.”

“I’d like to know what it is,” said Green, watching the mall with sharp eyes. “But I don’t need to. On the very small chance whatever it is comes after us, we’re better off out there than approaching a sniper’s nest.”

“What if it’s someone who needs our help?” asked Kira.

“If I die before expiration,” said Green, “it’s going to be because you said somebody needed our help.”

“I know,” said Kira. She scanned the parking lot, looking for anything out of the ordinary. “If you both say it’s safer to turn back, we turn—” She stopped suddenly. “Wait.”

“I see it too,” said Green. “A body, in the snow by that stand of trees.”

“We have to check it out,” said Kira.