Kira read through Dr. Morgan’s archive without sleeping, without leaving the room, not even pausing to eat. The grim scientist had studied RM, but only peripherally, and never in the context of Partial expiration. Most of her research on the subject was related to Pheromone 47, the mysterious particle that Kira had dubbed the Lurker, because it didn’t seem to have any purpose. Morgan’s hypothesis had been that the Lurker could cause RM, or somehow trigger it in a human who was carrying RM but had not yet manifested symptoms. Kira had deduced—over a year ago now, she realized—that the Lurker was in fact the cure for RM, but she had only made that connection because she’d spent months studying RM itself. Morgan had never done that.

The records also contained a fair bit about the other Partial factions, the ones who still held out against Morgan’s consolidation, and Kira read these now and then as breaks between the endless string of biology studies. Each rival faction was too small for the larger armies to bother with, and now that Trimble’s forces had been brought into her fold, Morgan seemed to be ignoring them completely. Each one was marked with an approximate location, and one or two lines explaining their reasons for not supporting Morgan: “disagrees with our methods”; “opposed to medical experimentation”; “formed a new, pacifist cult”; and so on. The nearest was a group called the Ivies, somewhere in northern Connecticut. She read each new entry with fascination, astonished not just at the variety, but at the one thing that made each group the same: Faced with the issue of supporting Dr. Morgan or dying of expiration, they chose the latter. None of them had firm plans to solve it on their own—or at least if they did, it wasn’t recorded in Morgan’s files. Kira wondered if Morgan’s records had a prideful blind spot, or if the other factions were really just ready to die. Trimble, it seemed, had been holding out for something to step in and cure it all for her. Were the others the same?

Did anyone, in the end, have any hope of being saved?

Scrolling through the medical records, Kira’s mind turned just as often to Arwen, the baby she’d saved from RM. But no, she wasn’t a baby anymore—that had been over a year ago. She’d be a toddler now. Setting aside her cursory glances of the children at the Preserve, Kira hadn’t seen a toddler since the Break, more than thirteen years ago, and though she had studied pregnancy and childbirth in excruciating detail, she realized she knew next to nothing about childhood itself. How fast did children grow? Would Arwen be walking by now? Talking? The entire concept of early childhood development had never come up before, for her or for anybody. Madison would be learning everything for the first time.