by Joan He
“How do you think of me?” he asks when we’re dragging logs through the meadow on our fourth and likely penultimate outing. For a second I’m not sure what I would say. You’re fine/helpful sounds lukewarm while You’re pretty great would be coming on strong. Luckily the boy clarifies by adding, “Do you have a placeholder name in your head?”
Ah. Nope, just the boy. “Would you like a placeholder name?” I ask, arching a brow.
“Depends.”
“Oh, come now.” I nudge him with an elbow. “I’d pick a good one.”
“It’ll be weird if it’s random.”
“It won’t be random,” I promise.
“Dmitri?” I pop seconds later.
“Sounds pretty random to me,” says the boy.
The grass ripples around us as we slip through it. The blades tickle, and I scratch my ear. “What’s wrong with it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then there’s nothing wrong with it.”
“It’s too . . .” The boy trails off. I wait, and sigh when he remains tight-lipped.
“Fine.” I have other contenders. “What about Tristan?”
“Same issue as Dmitri,” says the boy as the last of the grass parts, the meadow behind us and the ridge towering over us. “They’re both . . .” His forehead wrinkles as he thinks.
“What?” I prompt. I refuse to let him off the hook this time.
“Promise not to laugh.”
“Promise.”
The boy offloads his logs at the ridge base. “Hunky.”
I howl.
“You promised!”
“I know. I’m horrible. I’m sorry.” I think you’re plenty hunky—but the boy looks mortified enough. “Just—hunky.”
The boy is not amused. “What term would you use?”
“‘Smoldering,’ maybe. ‘Dark.’”
“Do I look dark to you?” demands the boy.
“No tragic backstory?”
“Nope. Tragic, right?”
My abs ache as my laughter finally releases me. We’re standing in the shadow of the ridge. Not working. Not moving. Just talking. And I don’t want it to end. “Heath?”
“No.”
“Stop rejecting my names.”
“Stop pulling them all from the same hat.” Then the boy frowns and looks at me closely. “Are these coming off the top of your head?”
“Yes?”
“Maybe names are like faces in dreams,” says the boy. “Maybe you only know the ones of people you’ve met before.”
“You’ll have to write that theory down. Publish it in some peer-reviewed journal when we get off the island.” Be scouted by an innotech firm.
Now where did that come from?
“Am I?” asks the boy, distracting me.
“Am I . . . ?”
“Getting off the island.” He speaks without bitterness or blame, his words as soft as the rain that begins to fall. He faces the ridge. “You don’t have to answer that,” he says, and starts climbing as I stand, speechless at the bottom.
Great. Just great. He’s not allowed to say something like that and leave me agonizing over what he really means, because there’s no way he’s that neutral to the idea of being left behind—
Or is he?
I stare at him over dinner. As we wash the dishes. He gives me nothing to work with. We part for the night, and I’m left tossing and turning on the couch, his question gnawing at me.
Am I getting off the island?
The raft could be big enough for both of us, if I keep building it. Food is the real issue. We haven’t stockpiled enough for two people on a journey of indeterminate length. I could set sail first, I decide, and spare the boy a watery death if I fail. And if I succeed, and find Kay, then I’m sure she’d help me rescue the boy as well. But why do I assume he needs rescuing at all? What if he also has someone he needs to find, someone he doesn’t remember? And even if he doesn’t—if he’s truly alone—does that discredit his desire to go home? Is his life worth less than mine just because he isn’t missed or loved?
“Still up?”
The whirlpool in my head stops at his whisper. I nod, say “Yes” in case it’s too dark for him to see. He comes around to the front of the couch. I sit up and pull my legs in to make room. The cushion beneath my feet flutters as he sits, and something in me flutters too, adjusting to his presence across from me.
I wait for him to address what he said back at the ridge.
I don’t expect him to ask, “Do you ever dream about things you can’t make sense of ?”
“Sometimes.” Sometimes, scenes from my dreams seem too good to be true. Like the blueness of the sea, the crystalline sky, and the white ladder running between the two. “But mostly, I dream about my sister.” Or swimming in the ocean, which usually ends with me waking in the ocean. “What about you?”
For a minute, it’s just the sound of my even breathing and the rain, gentle outside.
“White.” The boy speaks in a whisper. “In my dreams, all I can see is white.”
“What kind of white?”
“Just . . . white.” A measured breath. “A white worse than nothingness. The kind that makes you go blind.”
His voice is hushed, his fear barely audible, but there.
It hurts me to hear it.
I inch over to him as he says, “I don’t know how you did it, living so long here on your—what . . . are you doing?”
“Combing out the dreams,” I say, one hand on his shoulder, the other running through his hair.
The boy is stiff, but doesn’t move away. Doesn’t move at all when I replace the hand on his shoulder with my head. “And this?” he asks, voice airless as if he’s stopped breathing.
“Listening to your fears. Rest your head on mine.”
After a second, he does—very, very carefully, as if our skulls might break. As the weight of his head settles, so does the breath in his chest. He resumes breathing; I’m close enough to feel it, now that we’re sitting arm to arm, in darkness and silence still as water.
Eventually, I break it to whisper, “Can you hear my fears?”
“No,” admits the boy, and just as I’m wondering if he thinks this is too weird and dorky, he says, “I hear the sea.”
I smile. Might still be smiling when I drift off, into a dream where me and Kay are walking along the beach and Kay bends down, picks up a shell. A Fibonacci spiral, she says to me, holding out her palm. Normally, such a dream would have me sleepwalking to the shore but in the morning, I wake to light from M.M.’s good old window and something thumping under my cheek.
A heartbeat.
My own heart, sleep-sluggish, wakes up once I see gravity’s work. Overnight, my head appears to have fallen onto the boy’s chest and we both appear to have fallen flat onto the couch. His one arm dangles to the ground while the other rests over my waist. His head’s angled back, the pale column of his throat exposed.
I touch my own throat. The bruises have finally stopped hurting. That night of thunder and rain feels like a week-old dream. The boy beside me (under me?) is warmer than any carpet-blanket, and I’m tempted to lie back down, but rafts don’t build themselves and at last, I lift his arm, lift myself, and carefully reposition the limb over his stomach.
I grab a taro patty left over from last night’s dinner and eat it on the porch. The tide rises with the sun. The boy doesn’t wake. Let him rest. I don’t need his help today when I’m only three logs short of completing Leona.
Three logs short of setting sail.
I feel none of the joy I did when I finished Hubert. Instead, the taro patty sits like a boulder in my stomach, and I do everything slowly—checking my pack, climbing the ridge, even going through the grayscale meadow and its creepy shrines. I cut my trees with precision, trying to make each stroke count. All the while, the forest keeps on calling my name. Beckoning.
Cee.
Cee.
Cee.
Fuck it. I toss down th
e kitchen knife and rise. It’s just the foggy trees and the Shipyard, deeper in. What do I have to be afraid of ?
I follow the call of my name, venturing into the trees. My steps, loud at first, quiet down as the pine cones underfoot decay. No beetles today. The island isn’t exactly a menagerie, crossing predators off my list of things to worry about. But as the fog thickens, strung between the trees like cobwebs, I’m also reminded of how alone I was before the boy washed up—and how alone he’ll be when I leave.
I shake off the thought. We’ve only known each other for one week. Kay and I have shared—and lost—years together. Nothing can compare, and when I reach the clearing in the forest and see the Shipyard, surrounded by the piles of junk I scavenged through to exhume Hubert, it rushes back. Every ridge crossing. The broken arms and ribs. The pain and joy and hopelessness, to have come so close and lost it all to a storm. But despite my worst fears, it didn’t take three more years to find another way off this island. This really is a best-case scenario. Leaving will hurt, but I’ll survive. Nothing can kill me. Kay is waiting. I hear her. Her voice—it’s coming from the pool.
Cee. An ash-gray leaf lands in the middle of it, quivering the surface. My ribs uncurl in reach, and I stumble to the pool rim, my face perfectly reflected in water still as glass.
It shatters as I step in.
The water closes over me. My thoughts dilute. My eyes open. The pool’s shockingly deep. I part the water before me like a curtain, revealing the bottom. It’s plush with moss and speckled with toadstools, some as small as pebbles, other as big as dinner plates, glazed with light from above. Shadows gather, cloudlike, as I dive deeper. The water goes on forever and ever, and at some point, I begin to see.
In color—just like my memories and dreams—I see Kay. We’re in a shoebox of a room, lying on the same bed and curled like kidneys, knee to knee. My fingers comb through her hair as I talk to her and my words appear on my hands, wrists, arms. They darken into bruises. The walls around us move away. Now I’m alone and speaking to a man in a white suit. Eighty years, he says, but I can’t wait that long, so I walk to the doorway and step out, into the ocean waiting beyond. Water licks my skin; the sun bakes it dry as I’m washed ashore. A woman runs out to greet me; she wears a baby-blue sweater with iron-on pugs. I gave her that sweater, and she gives me a mug of tea and together we go to see a wall of concrete, soaring into the sky.
The images come faster and faster.
And freeze.
I choke as something cuts into my midsection, digging in as it draws me up and up and up.
Turns out it’s the boy’s arm, a vise around my waist when we break the surface, and though it doesn’t feel like he’s trying to kill me, I still panic. “The fuck do you—”
I break off. My eyes widen, absorbing the turquoise water around us and the gem-green trees, hemming in the Shipyard.
Turquoise.
Green.
My vision blurs, unable to process. To focus. When it finally refocuses, it’s on the boy, his face mere centimeters from mine, his breaths ragged on my lips. His are pink. His hair is a dark, dark brown, strands matting his forehead. His eyes are the color of the sky.
Color.
Joules, I can see in color.
A voice worms through my sensory overload. It’s the boy’s, ordering to me swim.
Hard to obey when he’s holding on to me like a floatation device. “What are you doing?” I snap, pushing him before he can answer.
We separate with a splash. The boy sloshes backward, floundering, then regains control of his limbs. “What does it look like?” he snaps right back, treading the water.
“Like you’re trying to drown me.”
“I was saving you.” He spits out a leaf. “You weren’t moving!” he cries when I glare at him in disbelief. “And you were under for at least three minutes.”
Yeah, right. Three minutes, and I’d be blue in the face. I only choked on one mouthful of water, and guess who made me do that?
“I counted,” says the boy, swimming after me as I paddle to the rim. “I waited as long as I reasonably could and only jumped in when I had to.” Blah blah blah. I hoist myself out of the pool, flopping onto the green dandelions. “Because believe it or not—” The boy flops beside me, panting. “—this is not my idea of fun.” He glances to me. “Say something.”
“Sorry to break it to you, love, but I don’t need saving.”
“Got it,” says the boy, adopting my annoyed tone. “Will keep that in mind if you’re ever hanging off the edge of a cliff.” Then he sits upright and wrings out M.M.’s sweater. It’s blue. Brings out the color of his eyes.
“What?” he asks when he catches me staring.
I’m still peeved at his meddling, but also curious. “What color is my hair?”
“Black . . . ?”
“And my eyes?”
“. . . Dark brown.” He looks me over, brow furrowing. “Are you okay?”
I don’t answer.
Black hair.
Dark eyes.
Just like Kay.
Relief trickles through me. I don’t know what I expected. We’re sisters, after all. But I feel closer to her than ever, especially with the new memories.
The memories. They were cut short. There are more, I’m sure of it. My eyes snap to the pool, the source of everything, before I was interrupted—
The boy grabs my hand and pulls me to my feet. “We’re heading back now.”
“Says who?”
“Says whoever didn’t just try to drown themselves.”
Grumbling, I follow him through the forest, too wet and too tired to pick this bone with him. My whole being buzzes. First memories, now color. It’s overwhelming—and probably the reason why I screw up an hour later, after we’ve gathered the trees, lowered them down the ridge, and it’s time to descend ourselves. I go first, barely a meter down when I lose my foothold. My hands shoot out, grappling for a dip in the rock. I miss, and my other foot swings free.
Above me, the boy shouts. My eyes shut on instinct, and I brace myself for the hard bite of the harness up my ass.
It doesn’t come.
The rope goes slack. Untied.
I keep on falling.
SHE WOULD NEVER SEE THE body.
Never know the moment Celia died.
Another sister might not have been able to make peace with that.
Kasey could.
She just couldn’t make peace with her peace.
Beyond the pier, the sea that’d spoken to Celia spoke to Kasey, too. The wind whispered in her ear. Unfeeling. Defective. Deficient. The world had been saying those things to her from the start, from the vandalized locker to the public outcry, when she stomached what others could not. She’d gone numb as Actinium bled, and accepted the fatality of Celia’s prognosis, no questions asked, while he thought to call the copterbot. Even now, the ache lodged in her chest felt like a foreign body that did not belong, and the soreness of her throat, chafed from the scream, was pain she had to resist swallowing. It was human to inflict hurt on yourself and unto others, to let down the levee in the face of the storm, like the literal one currently brewing, dark clouds gathering where the ocean met the sky. Waves churned past her toes, two meters below, and over the churn, his voice reached her.
“Don’t jump.”
In the past, she would have found the warning insulting. Why would she do something so reckless as exposing herself ?
Now Kasey was glad she seemed more emotional than she really was. “I’m not.”
“Good.” Actinium reached her side. Together they stood at the end of the pier, looking out at the sea as the air thickened, heavy between them. “Because the shield doesn’t extend that far.”
“The shield you built.”
She emphasized the you. Actinium didn’t reply. When Kasey glanced to him, he was looking on ahead resolutely, as if he knew she held her preconceptions of him like a deck of cards, and she was reshuffling with his every
word.
I won’t pry. That’s what she’d said before. But Kasey couldn’t stop her curiosity from burgeoning. Usually it annoyed her when people were inconsistent, but the mystery around Actinium felt curated, his contradictions too precise. Was he logical? Emotional? Authoritative, or uncomfortable around people? For someone who modified bodies, his own person was very unadorned, down to his mannerisms and speech, prompting Kasey to ask, “Do you actually work at GRAPHYC?”
The question seemed to catch Actinium off guard. “Yes,” he said, and paused, then added, “part-time, Jinx would say.”
Kasey was with Jinx on this one. Piecing together her sister’s Intraface, valiant as it was, seemed like a misuse of work hours. “What do you do?”
“I design the implants and digi-tattoos.”
“Do you have any yourself ?” SILVERTONGUE claimed the question was intrusive, but it was unrelated to her sister. Actinium shook his head, and she pressed, “Then how do you know if you’re any good?”
“I never said I was.”
To anyone else it’d sound like modesty, but Kasey heard the words he’d left out.
I never said I was. I’m better at other things.
Like coding. Engineering. He was obviously smart. Talented. Had he stayed in school, an innotech firm would’ve scouted him. With a team and resources, he’d be developing projects with even greater impact than an island-wide shield. But then, maybe he wouldn’t have met Celia. Maybe Kasey was just bitter that he’d turned away from a future she would have wanted for herself.
“What are you thinking?” Actinium asked after a minute, and it surprised her that he should care, and for a heartbeat, she entertained a silly notion, that maybe he’d taken the brunt of the sea’s spray for her. The physics of projectile motion checked out. The motives didn’t. Actinium loved Celia.
Loved the things she loved.
Unlike Kasey, who still didn’t see anything magical about the sea when she gazed at it. “That this was Celia’s favorite place on the island. The pier.”