“The world you woke up in is not the world you left,” Samm continued. “I’ve already told you about the Break, and RM, and the Preserve. What happened to you was done out of a fear of extinction, and while that doesn’t make it excusable, it at least makes it understandable. Outside of the Preserve, the world is empty. The only other settlements on the continent—and as far as we can tell, the entire world—are back east: the humans have gathered on Long Island, in a town called East Meadow, where there’s approximately thirty-five thousand of them.”

The room filled with surprised link data, followed almost immediately by a crashing wave of confusion as the full implications of the Break finally hit home. Dwain was the first to speak.

“Only thirty-five thousand humans? As in, anywhere?”

“That’s the entire world population of the species,” said Samm. “There may be small pockets here and there, but within the next hundred years, at the most, they’ll be extinct.”

“So where are the Partials?” asked Gorman. “We were immune to RM, and there’s no way a group of thirty-five thousand could subdue all million of us in the army.”

Samm felt his chest constrict, and he hesitated before speaking, as if there was some way he could save them from the news he was about to give. “The Partials are just north of them,” he said, “in our old headquarters in White Plains. All”—he paused—“two hundred thousand of them.”

“Two hundred thousand?” asked Ritter. “You’re joking.”

“I am not.”

“What happened to the rest of us?” demanded Gorman. “Did the humans attack? We heard rumors of a naval assault, but then we came here and . . .” His voice broke, and the swirl of link data through the room turned bitter with sadness. “They did it, didn’t they? The Last Fleet broke through and slaughtered our army.”

“The Last Fleet was stopped,” said Samm. “The humans didn’t kill anyone.”

“At least not directly,” said Heron.

Gorman shot her a look, then turned back to Samm. His voice was weak, still wheezing on the respirator, but his link data practically sparked with indignation. “Then what happened?”

“About three years ago the first generation started dying,” said Samm. “The first wave of Partials they built for the war, all the veterans who were first on the shores in the Isolation War, just . . . died. Healthy one day and then rotting the next, like a piece of fruit left out in the sun. We discovered that every single one of us was built with an expiration date. On or around our twentieth birthday, every Partial dies.” Samm paused a moment, giving them a moment to absorb it. “The next batch goes in one month; the final batch—my batch—has about eight. Depending on when you came out of the vats, you have between four and thirty-two weeks to live.”