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cubicles were the closest to the elevator. That made even less sense than anything
     else: After the Break, there would have been no power to make the elevators run. That
     couldn’t be the connection. There weren’t even names on the cubicle walls; if someone
     had targeted these two computers specifically, they had to have inside knowledge.
    Kira stood up and walked through the entire floor, going slowly, watching for anything
     else that looked out of place or looted. She found a printer missing, but she couldn’t
     tell if it had been taken before or after the Break. When she finished the central
     room, she searched the handful of offices along the back wall, and gasped in surprise
     when she found that one of them had been completely gutted: the computer gone, the
     shelves emptied, everything. There was enough corporate detritus to make it look like
     a once-functioning office—a phone and a wastebasket and various little stacks of papers
     and so on—but nothing else. This office had far more shelving than the others as well,
     all empty, and Kira wondered just how much, exactly, had been stolen from it.
    She paused, staring at the empty desk. Something else was different about this one,
     something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. There was a small desk organizer knocked
     onto the floor, just as there had been in the cubicles, which implied that the office
     had been raided with the same sense of anxious haste. Whoever had stolen these items
     had been in an awfully big hurry. The now-empty cables all hung in the same way, though
     the office had far more of them than the cubicles. She racked her brain, trying to
     figure out what was bothering her, and finally hit on it: the small office had no
     photos. Most of the desks she’d been scouring for the last two days had held at least
     one family photo, and many of them had more: smiling couples, groups of kids in coordinated
     outfits, the preserved images of families now long dead. This room, however, had no
     photos at all. That meant one of two things: first, that the man or woman who worked
     here had no family, or didn’t care enough about them to display photos. Second, and
     more tantalizing, whoever had taken the equipment had also taken the photos. And the
     most likely reason for that was that the person who’d taken the photos was the same
     person who’d once worked in the room.
    Kira looked at the door, which read AFA DEMOUX , and below it in thick block letters, IT . Was “IT” a nickname? It didn’t seem like a very nice one, but her understanding
     of old-world culture was sketchy at best. She checked the other doors and found that
     each followed the same pattern, a name and a word, though most of the words were longer: OPERATIONS , SALES , MARKETING . Were they titles? Departments? “IT” was the only one written all in capital letters,
     so it was probably an acronym, but Kira didn’t know what it stood for. Invention . . . Testing. She shook her head. This wasn’t a lab, so Afa Demoux wasn’t a scientist. What had
     he done here? Had he come back for his own equipment? Was his work so vital, or so
     dangerous, that someone else had come back after to take it? This wasn’t a random
     looting—no one hiked up twenty-two stories for a couple of computers when there were
     plenty to be had at ground level. Whoever had taken these had taken them for a reason—for
     something important that was stored in them. But who had it been? Afa Demoux? Someone
     from East Meadow? One of the Partials?
    Who else was there?

CHAPTER THREE
    “T his hearing is now in session.”
    Marcus stood in the back of the hall, craning to see over the crowd of people filling
     the room. He could see the senators well enough—Hobb and Kessler and Tovar and a new
     one he didn’t know, all seated on the stage behind a long table—but the two accused
     were out of his sight. The city hall they used to use for these sessions had been
     trashed in a