“Twenty-first floor,” she sighed. “Of course.”
Many of the older buildings in the world were too treacherous to climb around in, devastated in the first winter after the Break: The windows broke, the pipes burst, and by spring the rooms and walls and floors were full of moisture. Ten freeze-thaw cycles later, the walls were warped, the ceilings were drooping, and the floors were crumbling to pieces. Mold got into the wood and carpets, insects dug into the cracks, and a once-solid structure became a precarious tower of crumbs and fragments; rubble that hadn’t fallen down yet, waiting for a kick or a step or a loud voice to bring it crashing to the ground. Bigger buildings, though, and especially ones this new, were far more durable—their bones were steel girders, and their flesh sealed concrete and carbon fiber. The skin, so to speak, was still weak—glass and plaster and Sheetrock and carpet—but the building itself was sturdy. Kira’s stairwell was particularly well preserved, dusty without being filthy, and the extra staleness to the air made her wonder if it had stayed more or less sealed since the Break. It gave the stairwell an eerie feeling, like a tomb, though there was nobody buried in it that she could see. She began to wonder if there was, higher up—if someone had been walking the stairs when RM finally claimed them, and they had been sealed in here ever since—but by the time she reached the twenty-first floor, she still hadn’t seen any bodies. She thought about going on to look for some, to satisfy twenty-one floors of pent-up curiosity, but no. There were bodies enough in a city this size; half the cars on the street held skeletons, and the homes and offices held millions more. One body more or less in an old forgotten stairwell wouldn’t change anything. She pried open the door with a squeal of hinges and walked into the ParaGen office.
It wasn’t the main office, of course; she had seen that in a photograph a few weeks ago: herself as a child, her father, and her adopted guardian, Nandita, standing before a great glass building framed by snowy mountains. She didn’t know where it was, she didn’t remember the photo being taken, and she certainly didn’t recall knowing Nandita before the Break, but there it was. She had been only five when the world ended, maybe only four in the photo. What did it mean? Who was Nandita, really, and what connection did she have to ParaGen? Had she worked there? Had her father? She knew he’d worked in an office, but she’d been too young to remember more. If Kira was really a Partial, was she a lab experiment? An accident? A prototype? Why hadn’t Nandita ever told her?
That was the biggest question of all, in some ways. Kira had lived with Nandita for nearly twelve years. If she’d known what Kira really was—if she’d known the whole time and never said a word—Kira didn’t like that at all.
The thoughts made her queasy, just as they had on the street outside. I’m fake, she thought. I’m an artificial construct that thinks she’s a person. I’m as fake as the faux-stone finish on this desk. She walked into the front office and touched the peeling reception desk: painted vinyl over pressed plastic board. Barely even natural, let alone real. She looked up, forcing herself to forget about the discomfort and focus on the task at hand. The reception area was spacious for Manhattan, a wide room filled with splitting leather couches and a rugged rock structure, probably a former waterfall or fountain. The wall behind the reception desk showed a massive metal ParaGen logo, the same one on the building in the photo. She opened her bag, pulled out the carefully folded picture, and compared the two images. Identical. She put the photo away and walked around to the back of the reception desk, picking carefully through the papers strewn across the top of it. Like the stairwell, this room had no external opening and had thus stayed closed off from the elements; the papers were old and yellowed, but they were intact and neatly ordered. Most of it was unimportant clutter: phone directories and company brochures and a paperback book the receptionist had been reading, I Love You to Death, with the image of a bloody dagger on the cover. Maybe not the most politically correct thing to be reading while the world ended, but then again the receptionist hadn’t even been here during the Break. She would have been evacuated when RM got really bad, or when it was first released, or maybe even as early as the start of the Partial War. Kira tapped the book with her finger, noting the bookmark about three quarters through. She never found out who was loving whom to death.
Kira glanced again at the directory, noting that some of the four-number phone extensions started with 1, and some with 2. The office took up two floors of the building, maybe? She flipped through the pages and found in the back a section of longer numbers, ten digits each: several starting with 1303 and others with 1312. She knew from talking to adults, people who remembered the old world, that these were area codes for different parts of the country, but she had no idea which parts, and the directory didn’t say.
The brochures were stacked neatly in a corner of the desk, their front covers adorned with a stylized double helix and a picture of the building from Kira’s photo, though from a different angle. Kira picked it up to look more closely and saw similar buildings in the background, most notably a tall, blocky tower that seemed to be made of great glass cubes. In flowing script at the bottom of the page was the phrase: “Becoming better than what we are.” Inside were page after page of smiling photos and sales pitches for gene mods—cosmetic mods to change your eye or hair color, health mods to remove congenital illness or shore up your resistance to other diseases, even recreational mods to make your stomach flatter or your breasts larger, to improve your strength or speed, your senses or reaction time. Gene mods had been so common before the Break that almost all the survivors on Long Island had them. Even the plague babies, the children so young during the Break that they couldn’t remember what life was like before it, had been given a handful of gene scrubs when they were born. They’d become standard procedure in hospitals around the world, and ParaGen had developed a lot of them. Kira had always thought she’d had the basic infant mods, and had occasionally wondered if she had something more: Was she a good runner because of DNA from her parents, or because an early gene mod had made her so? Now she knew it was because she was a Partial. Built in a lab as a human ideal.