At the mention of his name, Kira was lost in another dark reverie. It was Armin who had formed the Trust, he who had suggested the rash plan to save their million Partial “children” from death. If he had a plan to overcome expiration, what was it? Was he just relying on the same genetic equipment Morgan was? Before the Break, with access to the full resources of ParaGen, gene-modding a million people might have been a feasible plan, diving into their DNA and carving out the expiration code like a patch of rot in an apple. What Armin would have done, she could only guess. She’d lived with the man for five years, give or take—she had no idea how long she’d gestated in a growth vat before popping out to be taken care of. Armin had raised her as his own, so fully she’d never even suspected she wasn’t human, that she wasn’t really his daughter. She didn’t even know what her purpose was. Would she ever meet him? Would she ever get the chance to ask him?

Did knowing the truth about who he was, and what she was, make him less of a father? She remembered him with love—was that relationship any less meaningful now? She hadn’t decided yet. She wasn’t sure if she could. You didn’t need a biological connection to be a family; all of the family relationships post-Break were ones of adoption, and the love they felt was real. But none of those adoptive parents had lied to their children about the fundamental aspects of those children’s existence and species. None of those adoptive parents had synthetically engineered their children and grown them in a clear glass cylinder.

None of those adoptive parents had ended the world.

Well, except Nandita. I have all the luck with parents.

“Do you know where Armin is?” she asked softly.

“You asked about him before,” said Vale, pausing to turn and look at her. “What’s your interest in him?”

Kira wasn’t sure she wanted to share that part of her life with Vale or Morgan—at least not yet. “He’s the only one we can’t account for.”

“We don’t know much about Jerry Ryssdal, either.”

“But Jerry Ryssdal wasn’t the one who created the Trust.”

Vale shook his head helplessly. “Well, given the circumstances, I would assume Armin is dead.”

Kira swallowed, trying not to let her feelings show, even as she was unsure of what those feelings were. “But the Trust are all immune to RM. You gene-modded yourselves for protection.”

“There are plenty of ways to die that aren’t related to RM,” said Vale. “When things fell apart . . . he could have died in a looting scuffle, during a Partial bombing—”

“I thought the Partials didn’t attack civilians.”