by Joan He
Wrong. The only thing Kasey felt was her stomach sinking to the ground. “She agreed?”
“Why, yes, of course.” He tapped the air with a finger and a holograph appeared.
The informed consent form.
The stasis pod sealing, scheduled mere days prior to Celia leaving for sea.
The bottom line, signed.
“Like I said, a shame.” Kasey looked up from Celia’s signature and found herself under Dr. Goldstein sympathetic gaze. “We were all set and ready for her before the accident,” he said, and Kasey wanted to shake him, tell him it was no accident. Not the boat. Not the trip to sea. Celia had lied. She hadn’t signed her life away to a pod, no end date guaranteed. Dr. Goldstein could argue all he wanted that there was no life to sign away, no choice but death in their current day and age, and Kasey would agree with him. She’d have podded herself, if only to convince Celia to do the same, be there for her sister when she reemerged, eighty or a thousand years later.
But Celia’s world was so much more than just Kasey. She lived in color. Lived for love and for friendships. She couldn’t settle for anything less.
So she chose this.
“She chose to die,” Kasey later recounted to Actinium. They were sitting on the rooftop of a unit complex in stratum-25, the copterbot parked beside them. It was programmed to deliver them home from the hospel, but Actinium had hacked it, coding it to take them wherever they wanted to go. That, for Kasey, turned out to be neither the Mizuhara unit nor Actinium’s, both too steeped in Celia’s memories. School had ended for the day, but she couldn’t return there, either. There was the island, but what was the point of seeing the boat? She didn’t know. Didn’t know the point of anything anymore.
“She removed her Intraface so she couldn’t be tracked,” she continued. “She chose to die at sea.”
Chose that instead of life, no matter what the chances of a cure might have been.
“She didn’t choose anything,” said Actinium, and Kasey shook her head. At first, after leaving the hospel, there’d been a vacuum in her chest. But now the ache was back, and it annoyed her almost as much as Actinium confusing the facts.
“She chose to swim in the sea.”
“The sea doesn’t come poisoned,” Actinium said, voice tight, drawing Kasey’s gaze to him. He hadn’t sounded nearly as pained with glass in his hand, said hand now bandaged, when she glanced down at it. She’d assumed the hospel would erase the wound, but what, really, did she know about things like broken hearts, skin, and bones?
“Does it hurt?” she asked.
“No,” said Actinium, and Kasey nodded, taking his word for it, blinking when he added, “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“For scaring you.”
“You didn’t,” Kasey said flatly.
To that, Actinium said nothing.
He didn’t even nod.
Kasey looked away.
Her whole, uninjured hands fisted in her lap.
Down below, crowds moved through stratum-25’s emporium, one of the few places to buy material products (like Actinium’s current shirt, the other one too bloodstained to be worn in public). Vendor stalls encircled the piazza; a holograph of Linscott Horn glowed at its center.
“Here’s the problem, Pete,” he was saying to the pundit in the armchair opposite him. “When you’re all living on the same planet, you’re no cleaner than your dirtiest neighbor. And since the age of apes, mankind’s dirt has always been Territories One, Two, and Four. When the rest of the world moved on to fission, they clung to coal. They dug deeper when they ran out, destabilizing the entire crust, causing the megaquakes that will plague us to the end of our days. Now, as other territories phase out of fission, guess what they do, Pete. Guess what they do. They start phasing in—”
“Can we go?”
To Kasey’s relief, Actinium stood, no questions asked. She wasn’t sure why she’d asked, until the copterbot door closed, muzzling Linscott Horn, and she realized she wanted nothing to do with his words, or him, or with Meridian, Sid, and the other science team members, also here, perhaps in the square or set up on a rooftop like theirs, so preoccupied with exercising their freedom of speech when Celia couldn’t even breathe, and neither could Kasey. The copterbot lifted, removing her from the same plane as her peers, but their actions still affected her. Her rank blipped away, suggesting that their hack was a success. Good for them. Good for everyone in this world, Kasey thought as Linscott Horn also disappeared, ostensibly as part of the hack.
Then the P2C emblem—two Earths linked into an infinity—superseded his holograph.
Simultaneously, a message appeared in Kasey’s Intraface.
MEGAQUAKE WARNING
THE FOLLOWING IS A WORLDWIDE UNION—MANDATED BROADCAST
P2C WOULD LIKE TO REMIND ECO-CITIZENS TO REMAIN CALM
The reminder was unnecessary. As the Worldwide Union broadcast rolled—outside territory towers crumbling like blocks, bridges breaking over highways, residential condos disappearing under landslides, everything happening in real time, in real life—people continued shopping for underwear, protein cubes, and the few essentials still needed outside of holo. Nothing could reach the sky. Not the megaquake shock waves or the tsunamis they stirred up. Air was the only thing they shared with the greater world, and even that was filtered. The eco-cities had been built to protect the planet—and the people from it.
But the difference between asylum and prison was membrane-thin. It could be ruptured by the death of a sister, a treacherous lie.
Or a simple malfunction.
From above, Kasey watched it happen. It started with one person. They got onto the duct. The duct didn’t move for them, for the same reason the copterbot hadn’t responded to Actinium. Ranks were required to activate most of the eco-city’s services, simple as that, but today, in a perfect storm with the news, people assumed the worst. What ensued was a spectacle so illogical and asinine Kasey couldn’t watch it. Couldn’t watch people stampeding for the ducts, so she watched the Worldwide Union broadcast instead. Saw reporters announcing radioaxons were already on the move, released by compromised fission plants. Stared at the graphs, concentric circles representing the radiated areas, blue swatches representing the trajectories of airborne radioaxons, numbers representing the already dead and soon-to-be-dead.
Kasey should have been one of them. Would have, if Celia had worn her antiskin in the water and Kasey hadn’t.
Another P2C alert flashed on her Intraface—requesting P2C officer support on stratum-25 and help in restoring the ranks, something Kasey could have assisted with but she was unreachable, disconnected. Not even the screams of people below, overpowering the drone of the copterbot engine, could get through to her. Just moments ago, everyone had been so assured of their place in the world. Before they became I, no one cared when they died.
They don’t deserve to be safe. I don’t deserve to be safe.
“They’ve found the boat,” she heard herself say.
“Where?” Actinium asked, as she knew he would. This boy who’d bleed for Celia, who didn’t care about his well-being, just as Kasey no longer cared about hers.
“Landmass six-sixty,” she said, and gave him the coordinates to the island.
“AND THIS,” I SAY, CONCLUDING the tour of the island, “is the ridge.”
We stand under its elongating shadow. I make it a rule to never scale the ridge past sundown, and so finding new boat parts will have to wait. My accomplishment for today? Placating the boy beside me.
He’s dressed now, in a sweater of his choice and cargo pants that reveal a little too much ankle. His hair spills back as he cranes his head. “You actually climb this thing?”
“Sometimes every other day.”
“Why?”
He asks it like I’m out of my mind, and I get it. The wall of rock seems impossibly steep in the gathering dark. Just the sight of it causes my shoulders to spasm with phantom memories of pulled tendons and
popped sockets. Once, I fell off about halfway up and saw my life flash through my eyes. I’m not exaggerating—before blacking out, I heard my skull crack and thought, That’s it. I’m dead. I’m still not sure how I woke up sometime later with a killer migraine but no brains on the ground. My brain does die a bit now, at the idea of doing it all over again.
But the alternative—staying on this island, forever separated from Kay—is a fate worse than death.
I turn away from the ridge and its imposing height and start heading back shore side. “I’m looking for my sister,” I say as a breeze snaps in, briny and cold. It sends a rustle through the skimpy shrubs clinging to the rock scape. Ripples flash across the rainwater ponds.
“I thought you said this island was abandoned,” the boy calls after me.
“It is.”
“Then where’s your sister?”
He’s falling behind, the snail. Wait for him—but I won’t let him slow me down.
“Out there.” I nod as I walk, tilting my chin toward the land before us, the shale that will eventually turn into gravel and gravel into sand. The island is small enough that if I concentrate, I can hear the waves, breaking upon the shore. “Somewhere across the sea.”
“And you know this how?” asks the boy.
Turns out he isn’t funny or sarcastic, and now that he’s recovered from being scared out of his wits, he’s starting to annoy me. “Where else can she be, if she’s not here?” I say, splashing through a shallow pool of rainwater.
“She could be dead.”
I stop in my tracks. The breeze stills. The island’s gone quiet, deathly so. I can’t even hear the ocean anymore. “She’s not dead.”
“How do you know?” asks the boy, finally catching up. His voice is even more attractive breathless. His eyes, a limpid gray to me, gleam with some emotion. I think it’s concern.
I’m both indignant and touched. He asks because he cares. His questions are legitimate and important.
I just can’t afford to face them.
How do you know? I have neither the evidence nor the facts Kay would require. Only a conviction in my heart, a hope that thrives more on some days than others, a living thing I must protect at all costs.
I tear my gaze from the boy, point it forward, and walk. “I just do.”
“So this ridge,” he huffs, trying to keep pace. Slow down—but I go faster. Dusk creeps over the island, darkening the rock beneath our feet like rain. “What’s on the other side?” he asks as we reach a shelf of shale, small enough to walk around, unlike the ridge.
I clamber over it. “Supplies for boats.”
“You”—the boy struggles behind me—“build them?”
“No. I rent them from a shop on the beach.”
“Have you ever reached land when you sail?” asks the boy, ignoring my sarcasm. Or not picking up on it. Which? I want to ask. Joules, am I really that out of practice?
“What if there’s nothing out there?” the boy presses when I don’t answer.
His question rushes through me like the wind.
“Why would you say that?” I demand, then inhale sharply. “Do you remember something?”
The rocks have diminished in size as we’ve covered more ground, but now they loom, shadows bleeding out from their bases, and the land, always so flat, appears pockmarked like the surface of some alien planet.
“No,” admits the boy, sounding truthful.
“Look, love,” I say as we finally reach gravel and I can see the back of M.M.’s house, silhouetted against the waterline by the dying light. “I don’t know who you are or where you came from, but I’ve held up just fine these years on my own. I am going to get myself off this island, and I don’t expect you to help. But you’re not ruining my mojo. That’s all I ask of you.”
“Your mojo—”
“Uh-uh.”
“—could kill you,” finishes the boy.
“It wouldn’t be the first thing to try,” I say without breaking stride.
We don’t speak for the rest of the walk.
• • •
For dinner, we have dandelions and eight-pointed-tree leaves. It’s not exactly the best of introductory meals to island cuisine, and the boy pushes it around on his plate, appearing seasick. “You’ve survived on this?”
“No.”
“Then what do you normally eat?” asks the boy.
“Taro.”
“What happened?” asks the boy.
“I lost them to the sea.”
“How?” asks the boy.
I lay down M.M.’s fork. Was talking always this tiring? “I packed all the taro I’d grown when I sailed to find my sister. But we ran into a storm.”
“We,” echoes the boy.
“Hubert and me.”
“Hubert,” echoes the boy.
“He’s not around anymore.”
Silence.
I lift the fork again, but don’t eat. My stomach gurgles—no doubt with indigestion—as I wait. Wait for the boy to start spewing more questions, for his skepticism and incredulity.
“The taros,” he says at last. “Are there any left?”
Finally. A question where the answer is literally in M.M.’s backyard.
I push my chair away from the table. “Let’s find out.”
We emerge onto the porch, into my favorite kind of night. Windless. Calm. The moon is just as white as the sun and the sky is a richer shade of gray than it would be during the day. I love the day too, but at night, when the beach is silver and the ocean obsidian, I feel like I’m missing out on less by not being able to see it in color.
Nights on the island are also cold, though, and I rub my arms as we head down the porch and around to the back of the house, where taros grow in a small plot of dirt. I squat by a row of them. Judging by the size of their leaves, none are ready to be harvested for their starchy tubers.
The boy squats as well. His body radiates heat, warming my right side even though we’re a body-width apart. “The soil looks depleted,” he says, and I glance to him. The moonlight contours his face, bringing out angles I didn’t see before. “You should fertilize it.”
I clear my head. Focus on the plants. “With what?” I don’t exactly have bags of nitrogen compounds lying around.
“What do you think?” says the boy.
Oh.
“Ew.” I shudder. Joules, no.
“Ew?”
“Yes, ew. That’s gross.”
He coughs. Suspiciously.
“What?” I ask.
“Nothing.”
“What?”
“You just seemed so gung-ho about this survival thing,” he says, absentmindedly rubbing at his wrists. “I figured you’d be okay with making your own fertilizer.”
“Nope. Definitely not.”
“No shit?”
“No shit.”
Don’t look at him. Don’t make eye contact. Because it’s over the moment we do.
U-me rolls out to see what’s wrong. What’s wrong is that I’ve regressed to cracking up at potty jokes. But I can’t control it. The laughter keeps on coming, wave after wave.
“Do you remember anything?” I finally gasp, cheeks cramping and chest burning, my body alive with the adrenaline I usually only get from climbing the ridge. “Something from your past?”
The boy falls silent. I immediately miss the sound of his laugh. “Should I?”
“Sometimes I find a memory when I rediscover things I know.” I nod at the taros. “You seem to know gardening.”
“I don’t remember gardening.”
“Where did that stuff about the soil come from, then?” To me, it all looks gray, and I tamp down on my jealousy when the boy acts like it’s no big deal.
“I just do,” he says with a shrug. But something about the gesture seems off, as if there’s more weight on his shoulders than he’s letting on. Seconds later, he rises and heads for the house.
Wait, I almost call after him, before checking my
self. Boys come running to me. But it’s chilly without him here. I rub my arms, the residual heat on my right side already cooling, then head back to the house as well.
• • •
I have to cross the ridge today, no excuses.
I’m up before the sun and head into kitchen for breakfast. The leaves somehow taste worse after watching the boy struggle to eat them. I chew on one as long as I possibly can, then spit the wad of fibers out the sink window.
The boy’s asleep in the bed. I made the right call in insisting he take it. He looks dead, hair splayed over the pillow, eyes still beneath their lids. The only movement to him is the rise and fall of his chest. The rhythm hypnotizes me, and like a creep, I watch him sleep. Then I ease the bedroom door shut. Pad softly through the house, swiping a kitchen knife on my way to the porch, where U-me’s waiting. She knows the routine. Grab M.M.’s fanny pack and go.
But today, I stop on the deck.
Do I trust the boy enough to leave him unsupervised?
He hasn’t tried to kill me again—tall order, I know—but my throat’s still tender. And though we shared a moment in the taro garden last night, this side of the island is my territory. Home. Out there, past the ridge, in the gray meadow with all the little shrines, even I feel like an intruder. I don’t need an uninvited guest creeping around too.
“Stay here,” I say to U-me. “Make sure he doesn’t leave the house.”
“Strongly disagree.”
“Then what do you suggest I do? Tie him up again?”
U-me whirs.
I rephrase my question into a declarative statement. “I should tie him up again.”
“Strongly agree.”
“No, I can’t do that,” I mutter, half to myself. I can still see his panicked face, the whites of his eyes exposed with fear. He’s not an animal, but a person. A person like me. “I can’t do that,” I repeat, this time to U-me.
“Neutral.”
“I’ve made the climb without you before.”
“Agree.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Disagree.”
“Paranoid.”
“Paranoid: unreasonably anxious, suspicious, or mistrustful, adjective.”
Yeah, that’s not me. “Be a darling,” I say to U-me, “and stay here.”