Dan Wells - Fragments

And then she raised her head, set her jaw, and spoke.

“I’m not giving up,” she said. “It doesn’t matter how big the world is. All that gives me is more places to look.”

Kira turned back to the office, going to the filing cabinet and pulling open the first drawer. If the Trust had something to do with ParaGen, maybe a special project that was connected to the Partial leadership, like Samm had implied, this financial office would have had to process some money for it sooner or later, and there might be a record she could find. She wiped the dirt from the table screen and started pulling files from the cabinet, searching through them line by line, item by item, payment by payment. When she finished with a folder, she swept it onto the floor in the corner and started on a new one, hour after hour, stopping only when it had grown too dark to read. The night air was cold, and she thought about starting a small fire—on top of one of the desks, where she could contain it—but decided against it. Her campfires down in the streets were easy to hide from anyone who might be watching, but a light up here would be visible for miles. She retreated instead to the foyer at the top of the stairs, closing all the doors and setting up her bedroll in the shelter of the reception desk. She opened a can of tuna and ate it quietly in the dark, picking it up with her fingers and pretending it was sushi. She slept lightly, and when she woke in the morning, she went straight back to work, combing through the files. In midmorning she finally found something.

“Nandita Merchant,” she read, a jolt through her system after searching for so long. “Fifty-one thousand one hundred and twelve dollars paid on December 5, 2064. Direct deposit. Arvada, Colorado.” It was a payroll statement, a massive one that seemed to include employees from the entire multinational company. She frowned, reading the line again. It didn’t say what Nandita’s job was, only what they’d paid her, and she had no idea what that represented—was it a monthly wage, or a yearly? Or a one-time fee for a specific job? She went back to the ledgers and found one for the previous month, flipping through it quickly to find Nandita’s name. “Fifty-one thousand one hundred and twelve dollars on November 21,” she read, and saw the same on November 7. So it’s a biweekly salary, making her yearly . . . about one point two million dollars. That sounds like a lot. She had no frame of reference for old-world salaries, but as she glanced over the list she saw that $51,112 was one of the highest figures. “So she was one of the bigwigs in the company,” Kira muttered, thinking out loud. “She earned more than most, but what did she do?”

She wanted to look up her father, but she didn’t even know his last name. Her own last name, Walker, was a nickname she’d earned from the soldiers who’d found her after the Break, walking mile after mile through an empty city, searching for food. “Kira the Walker.” She’d been so young that she couldn’t remember her own last name, or where her father worked, or even what city they’d lived in—

“Denver!” she shouted, the name suddenly coming to her. “We lived in Denver. That was in Colorado, right?” She looked at Nandita’s listing again: Arvada, Colorado. Was that near Denver? She folded the page carefully and stowed it in her pack, vowing to search later for an old bookstore with an atlas. She looked back at the payroll report, searching for her father’s first name, Armin, but the payments were organized by surname, and finding a single Armin among the tens of thousands of people would be more trouble than it was worth. At best, finding his name would confirm what the photo already suggested: that Nandita and her father had worked in the same location at the same company. It still wouldn’t tell her what they did or why.

Another day of research turned up nothing she could use, and in a fit of petulance she snarled and threw the last folder out the broken window; as soon as she threw it she berated herself for doing something to attract the attention of anyone else who might be prowling the city. The odds were against it, of course, but that didn’t make it smart to tempt fate. She stayed back from the window, hoping that whoever saw it would chalk the errant paper up to wind or animal activity, and moved on to her next project: the second floor.

It was really the twenty-second floor, she reminded herself, as she trudged up the stairway to the next door. This one, oddly, was only barely closed, and when she pushed it open she stepped into a sea of cubicles. There was no reception area here, and only a handful of offices; everything else was low partitions and shared workspace. Many of the cubicles had computers, she noticed, or obvious docks where a portable computer could be plugged in—there were no fancy desk-screens on this floor— but what really caught her attention were the cubicles that had empty cables. Places where a computer should be, but wasn’t.

Kira froze, surveying the room carefully. It was windier in here than on the floor below, thanks to a long wall of broken windows and the lack of office walls to break up the airflow. The occasional piece of paper or swirl of dust blew past the cubicle partitions, but Kira ignored them, looking instead at the six desks nearest to her. Four were normal—monitors, keyboards, organizers, family photos—but in two of them the computers were gone. Not just gone, but ransacked; the organizer and photos had been pushed aside or even knocked on the floor, as if whoever took the computers was in too great of a hurry to bother preserving anything else. Kira crouched down to examine the nearest one, where a picture frame had fallen facedown. A layer of dirt had collected over and around it, and with time and moisture mushrooms had taken root in the dirt. It was hardly surprising—after eleven years of open-air access, half the buildings in Manhattan had a layer of soil inside of them—but what stood out to her was a small yellow stem, like a blade of grass, curling out from beneath the photo. She looked up at the windows, gauging the angle, and guessed that yes, for a few hours of the day this spot would get plenty of sunlight, more than enough to nurture a green plant. There were other blades of grass around it as well, but again, that wasn’t the issue. It was the way the grass grew out from underneath the photo. She picked up the photo and tipped it away, exposing a small mass of beetles and mushrooms and short, dead grass. She sat back, mouth open, stunned at the implications.

The photo had been knocked off the table after the grass had already started to grow.

The act hadn’t been recent. The picture frame had enough dirt and muck on top of it, and around the edges, to show that it had lain there for several years. But it hadn’t been lying there the full eleven. The Break had come and gone, the building had been abandoned, the dirt and weeds had collected, and then the cubicle had been raided. Who could have done it? Human, or Partial? Kira examined the space under the desk, finding a handful of other cables but no clear evidence of who had taken the CPU they were connected to. She crawled into the next cube over, the other one that had been looted, and found similar remains. Someone had climbed up to the twenty-second floor, stolen two computers, and lugged them all the way back down again.

Why would someone do it? Kira sat back, puzzling through the possibilities. If somebody wanted information, she supposed it was easier to haul the computers down the stairs rather than haul a generator up. But why these two and none of the others? What was different about them? She looked around again and noted with surprise that these two 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.