Morgan sneered, but after a moment she stalked to the door. “Have your little pity party,” she said to Vale. “I have work to do.” She stormed into the hall and slammed the door behind her.

“I delight in anyone who stands up to that harridan,” said Vale, “but she’s arguably the most powerful person in the world right now. You need to keep a civil tongue.”

“People have been telling me that my whole life,” said Kira, only barely paying attention to him. She stared at the vast screen, cataloguing the data in her mind, searching for some kind of order in the chaos—some final, perfect key that would pull it all together and make sense of it. “What do you see here?”

“Your entire life, reduced to numbers,” said Vale. “Cellular decay rates, gene sequences, pH levels, white cell counts and bone marrow samples—”

“The answer’s not here,” said Kira.

“Of course it’s not here.”

She felt a tiny spark of excitement, the familiar thrill of solving a riddle slowly coming back to her. “But this is the most exhaustive biological study I’ve ever seen. It’s not just my data, it’s years’ worth of studies about expiring Partials and healthy Partials and human test subjects and everything else. Whatever else you want to accuse her of, Dr. Morgan is spectacularly thorough.”

“You’re acting like that’s good news,” said Vale, “but everything you’re saying only makes our situation worse. Morgan’s a brilliant scientist, and she’s been collecting this data for over a decade, and the answer’s still not here. If you’ve already looked everywhere and you can’t find your answer, your answer doesn’t exist. There is no cure for expiration.”

Kira spun around, her eyes alive with eagerness. “Do you know how I found the cure for RM?”

“By capturing a Partial and experimenting on him,” said Vale. “Kind of puts your current situation into an interesting karmic light.”

Kira ignored the jibe. “We did everything for RM that Morgan’s done for expiration, and we ran into this same wall—we’d tried everything, we’d failed at everything, and we thought we had nothing left. We found the cure because we looked in a Partial, and we looked in a Partial because he was literally the only thing we hadn’t looked in yet. It didn’t make sense, it didn’t follow from any data we’d previously collected, it was just a hunch—an absolute Hail Mary—but it worked, by pure process of elimination. If you’ve already looked everywhere and you can’t find your answer, you haven’t looked everywhere yet.”