by Joan He
Then I’m being lifted out of the water. Arms wrap around my shoulders and brace under my knees. The cold assault of air is agony. I see his face, his lips, forming a name that looks like mine. I try to say his—Hero—but my mouth won’t move. My scalp is too tight. Any moment now, my skull’s going to burst through, and—
And—
And—
And—
• • •
For a while after I come to, I lie, alone, in the dim of M.M.’s bedroom, remembering everything that happened. Waking up in the ocean. Swimming to the shore. Blacking out from the pain—the worst I’ve ever felt.
There’s no pain now. No feeling at all. My limbs feel like newly set gelatin. My arms won’t support me when I try to sit up, and my head bangs into the headboard on my way back down. A curse rips from my lips, and the door whips back on its hinges. Hero rushes to the bedside. He helps me up. He hands me water I didn’t realize I desperately needed until it’s trembling in my hands. I drain it. He sets the emptied glass on the rocking chair, then sits beside me, the mattress dimpling.
I look at him. He looks at me.
I know what we’re both thinking: I woke up in the ocean today. I warned him last night this could happen, but now that it’s actually happened, it’s scary. Ten times scarier than falling off the ridge. I should address it.
“About today . . .” I look down at the blanket in my lap, suddenly at a loss for words. I feel stripped bare of my usual defenses and when Hero’s arms go around me, I let myself be enfolded. I bury my face into the scratchy knit of his sweater and let myself be cradled. I don’t need saving—but honestly? I wouldn’t mind it, every now and then. Certainly didn’t mind it today. I’m tired. Tired of chopping down trees and wearing ugly sweaters and eating the same three things. I miss Kay. I miss my life of sequined dresses and fancy mashed potatoes and boys—
Scratch that. The boy I have here does just fine.
“So,” I start when I begin to feel more like myself. I push back from Hero’s chest to make myself audible. “Still up for beach yoga?”
He peers at me through his lashes. “Was that what today was?”
“Advanced-advanced. What, scared?”
“Very,” he admits. “But sign me up.”
“Done. We meet at eight a.m.”
Speaking of time . . . I glance toward the window.
“You were out for a day,” supplies Hero.
A day. My gut knots. Even if it was a dream, the fear of finding Kay too late is very real, and now my sleepwalking habit has sent me an ultimatum: Find Kay or drown.
Good thing Leona’s almost built. I just need to tie all the logs together and fashion the oar.
When I’m feeling up to it, and with Hero’s help, I make it onto the porch, down the steps, and to the house side, where—
The sand beside the rocks is empty.
No Leona.
No logs.
No pieces on the beach, when we scour. And we do, for hours, until at last, I go back to the house and stand by the hollow in the sand where Leona should be but she’s not. Not coming back. I have to accept it.
Leona is gone.
• • •
This time around, I don’t even have the heart to despair. I tell Hero I need a moment alone, then head straight for the sunken pier and stare hard at the horizon, mind churning.
Honestly? Leona was just a raft. Losing her doesn’t hurt nearly as much as losing Hubert. But I could explain Hubert; I saw his remains with my own two eyes.
I can’t explain this. Rafts don’t walk.
Unless they do here, where sleep-swimming is also a thing. I’ll blame the island. I have to. Because if I don’t . . .
Again, rafts don’t walk.
But people can.
Me or him. Me. It had to be me; I’ve done some strange shit while unconscious. But when I look down at my hands, I find no marks. No sign that I dragged a raft to the sea before I nearly died in it. I press my palms over my eyes, press harder when I see his face. It fades, but then I remember the heat of his mouth on mine, the sand damp beneath my shoulders, the stars light-years above us, the moment everything went wrong because I was happy. Happy without Kay. Hell, give me a few more nights like that one, I might not even be upset over losing Leona.
Which means I’m done. Done thinking about boys, done with delays. I need to find Kay now. I need to build a boat now.
I can build a boat now.
The solution’s been staring at me this whole time. I just hadn’t been desperate enough to see it.
I dash into the house, tripping around U-me and knocking my bad shoulder into the bedroom door on my way in. Barely wincing, I beeline for the bed, flinging off the comforter and sheets, chucking pillows to the ground until I’ve stripped the mattress down to its hunter-green polyurethane casing.
I step away and dust off my hands.
Meet Genevie the mattress boat, my ticket off this island.
Genevie thwacks onto the floor after I heave her off the bed frame, then thumps sideways as I push her upright to fit her through the narrow doorway.
“Strongly disagree,” says U-me as I’m dragging the mattress through the living room.
“Don’t judge a book by its cover,” I grunt, aiming a kick at the couch. The pathway widens, and Genevie unsticks herself as I tug.
Getting Genevie out onto the porch is the hardest part. The rest is a breeze. Using the kitchen blowtorch, I melt the bottoms of several storage bins and attach them to the head and foot of the mattress, constructing what looks like a backless armchair. I then wrap rope over the tops of the storage bins, forming a makeshift rail that runs lengthwise down either side of the mattress. It’ll be something to grab on to in case it storms, which I dearly hope it won’t.
I fill the bins with my supplies—an extra sweater, mason jars of water, as many taro biscuits as I can afford to take without letting Hero starve—and then drag Genevie out on a test float. The sun is setting by the time I’m done. Hero still hasn’t returned. I sit on the porch in wait while keeping watch over Genevie. When he finally appears, I jump to my feet. “Where have you . . .”
I catch sight of what’s in his hands.
He offers me the oar. I inspect it. The handle’s cut smooth. The paddle is flat and thin. “You made this?”
“No, I rented it from the shop on the beach.”
It’s an echo of what I said to him before, when he asked if I’d built Hubert and I tried testing my sarcasm on him, with no idea if it landed. It did, apparently, and he remembered, and suddenly the oar weighs a ton in my hands.
“You . . .” didn’t have to. But I leave it at you. Hero. The boy who is trying so hard to be someone, someone I don’t want to suspect for Leona’s disappearance, especially when I notice the dirt on his sweater and the scratch running up his forearm and disappearing under his rolled-up sleeve. He must have crossed the ridge for wood.
Slowly, I tie the oar to Genevie. So much for my contrived dilemma. Just nights ago, I was debating the ethics of leaving Hero to set sail first. Now I see my true, self-centered colors. Hero, meanwhile, has seen them all along. Joules, he’s made me an oar to send me off.
“Look,” I start. “If I make it—”
“You will.”
He speaks with a quiet, steadfast conviction I would have craved before. Now it makes me feel like a bad person. My gaze drops to the sand between our feet. “You weren’t nearly as confident two weeks ago,” I mutter. “What happened to doubting my mojo?”
“You happened,” he says simply, and I glance back to him, see our too-short time together in his eyes. We’ve made do, come to know each other the best we can. Imperfectly, incompletely, our conversations like crumbs and yet these are flavors I’ll never forget. I’ll never forget the night we listened to each other’s fears, and the more recent one. As if recalling too, Hero’s cheeks pinken. “Your heart is set.” He shrugs, and like that night in the garden, the gesture reveals the very tension he tries to hi
de. “I don’t see how you could fail.”
Waves crash on the shore nearby. My voice is small in comparison. “I’ll come back for you.”
For a moment, Hero doesn’t reply. “I don’t think you will.”
There it is. That maddening honesty of his. “You don’t know that.” It hurts to hear him say it. A lot. Hurts more when he doesn’t refute me. When he offers me a hand, I don’t take it.
“Walk with me?”
I don’t respond.
“Please, Cee,” and I hear what he leaves unsaid. This might be it. Our last night.
I bite my lip and glance at Genevie. I don’t want to let her out of my sight.
Hero notices. “We can walk it, too.”
I take a breath. “Her.”
And so that’s how we end up strolling the moonlit shore, a mattress in tow between us.
Genevie is not as into the walk as we are, and Hero runs out of breath before I do.
“She’s heavy,” he says when I smirk.
“Not as heavy as a real boat.”
“You’ve carried a boat?”
Carried, pushed, climbed a ridge with a hull tied to my back. “Yeah. And Hubert was made out of metal.”
I say it to sound impressive but Hero actually looks concerned. “Wouldn’t that weigh . . .” A pause. “One-point-five tons?”
I laugh at the specificity of the number. “Want to know what I think?” I take the rope from his hand. “I don’t think I’m strong. I think you’re weak.”
“Am not.”
“Prove it,” I say, and yelp as he sweeps me into the air, only to lose his footing in the sand. We both go down.
“Thanks, love.” I roll myself onto my back beside him, arms spread wide. “Really needed to have my point demonstrated to me.”
“It’s the sand,” he insists, but there’s an undercurrent of laughter to his words and—sure enough—a smile to match on his face when I turn to look at him. The moonlight glosses his brown hair to black, an ink spill on the sand. His upturned right palm is mere millimeters away from mine. I could take it. I could roll over and take from him more than just his hand. But tomorrow, I will travel light, without him or his emotions. I may not know what the standard protocol is for leaving someone behind on an abandoned island, but this, this distance, feels right. This night feels right—clear and crisp, the polar opposite of the night that heralded his arrival.
Perfect departure weather.
“First impressions of me,” I say before my throat can close. “Go.”
“When I found myself tied to your bed?” Hero pauses. “That you were going to eat me.”
“Very funny.”
“Maybe I come from a scary land. A place where people eat people. Maybe I come from there.”
“The stars?” I ask, both our eyes on the night sky overhead.
“Mm-hmm.”
“Which one?” I ask, and look in the direction of the finger he points.
“The thing about stars,” says Hero, voice soft, “is most of them appear close together, but not many actually are. None are meant to pass each other in orbit.”
“That’s not true,” I surprise myself by blurting. “Binary stars.” Then: “My sister.” Hero will know what I mean. I’ve told him about our differences, from our hobbies to our personalities. Kay’s the one who would use terms like binary stars. I, in contrast, hear Hero talk about the stars and can’t help but wonder if he’s making some metaphor about us.
“We’re not stars,” I declare. We’re already in each other’s orbit. Hero’s business is mine, whether he likes it or not. “We get to choose the places we go and the people we find.”
“Do we?” Hero wonders. “I don’t think either of us came here by choice.” Fair enough. “And I think we have even less choice over the ones we’re meant to find.” He lowers his arm and folds it beneath his head. “That first day, I kept trying to put myself in your shoes. Couldn’t. It frustrated me, seeing the way you lived your life. Then I realized it was because I could never do it. I might have survived, but you . . . you kept yourself alive. Kept her alive, too. In here.” He taps two fingers to his chest. “So I know you’ll find your sister. Even if it takes you far away from here.”
I miss Hubert, I decide. I miss the simple emotions he inspired in me, nothing like this hopelessly tangled mess I feel now. “You could sound more sad.”
Hero doesn’t say anything. I peek over at him and see his half-lidded eyes on the moon.
I look to the moon too.
Minutes later, he reaches for my hand.
His fingers say what his voice does not.
More minutes later, his voice drifts through the night. He asks if I plan on staying out.
“Yeah,” I murmur. “I think so.”
I don’t want you to see me go.
My hand goes cold as he releases it. He sits up, gets to his feet, and says, “Be right back.”
I sit up too, twisting around to watch as he jogs across the shore. He disappears inside the house and remerges moments later, stuff piled in his arms. A pillow and blanket, I see once he nears. He props the pillow against Genevie’s side and spreads the blanket on the ground. Then he stands there, for a silent beat, and it takes everything in me to stay sitting, to not run after him when he finally turns and walks back to the house, a solitary figure in the dark.
Swallowing, I lean against the pillow, pull the blanket over my shoulders, and face the sea. Hours pass. The surf recedes. The sky peels back, the horizon gum-pink. I stare at the colors changing, and remember doing something similar from a glass cone of a room, way up high. Watching sunrise. With Kay.
It’s time to go home.
• • •
U-me rolls down to the shore as I’m pushing Genevie into the surf.
“Take care of him, U-me.” Just in case.
U-me’s not programmed to vocalize a response to a direct command, but I know she hears me. She was the first one who did on this island. Before Hubert, and before Hero, she was all I had.
“I’ll be back for you, too,” I say, and to my relief, U-me, unlike Hero, believes in me.
“Strongly agree.”
Overcome, I drop a kiss on her bulky head. Then I seize the oar Hero made for me and row into the sea, toward the rising sun.
THROUGHOUT THE COURSE OF CIVILIZATION, humans had looked to the heavens for answers. In stars, they found maps. In suns, they found gods.
In the sky beyond the sky, they thought they’d find a second home.
But when faced with the question of where to house displaced coastal and island communities, the founding Mizuharas hadn’t looked up, but down.
Ocean deep.
Science backed the decision to build the first eco-city prototypes on the seafloor. Hydraulic-pressure turbines were more efficient than their air counterparts, and the sea was also a natural buffer against erosion. As long as you didn’t (1) build over a tectonic region, or (2) use materials that would react with saltwater electrolytes, the cities could theoretically last a millennium.
But not everyone was married to the idea of a plankton-like existence, and as the beta-testing population grew, so did demands for better conditions. The people, Kasey imagined, likely made the same arguments as Celia. Why should they have to sacrifice access to basics such as sunlight and air while the rest of the world went on with their day-to-day, unaffected lives?
And so the seafloor eco-cites were abandoned. Forgotten. Beta-testers had signed non-disclosure agreements that allowed their memories to be cognicized post-experiment, and knowledge of the first-gen eco-cities died out of the populace, living on only among the world’s governing bodies and the Mizuharas.
As a member of both, Kasey had immediately thought of the underwater cities when presented with the annual science competition challenge: Save the world from an asteroid on course for Earth.
The rest of the team had had their doubts. “Dinner’s on me if this works,” Sid had said.
They’d won.
By proving the first-gen eco-cities could contain the entire human population if everyone were stored in a medical-grade stasis pod, their team modeled a scenario where mankind skipped the worst centuries of hellfire and sooty-darkness by waiting it out in stasis under the sea. It wasn’t glamorous, but it was more realistic than manipulating space time or diverting the asteroid, and less of an upheaval than an extraterrestrial exodus.
“Hibernation,” Meridian had dubbed the solution, which Kasey now posited to the P2C and Worldwide Union officers through the conference room speakers. Asteroid fallout, carbon emissions, and radioaxon releases all had something in common: Time was the best medicine. Climate might change. Oceans might rise. Species might mutate, or vanish. But given enough time, nature would do what nature did best: break down the elements that didn’t belong.
“An advanced barometer will measure outside conditions,” Kasey explained. “When habitable thresholds are reached and verified, stasis-pods will open.”
She finished to a deathly silent room.
“It’s decided,” said Ekaterina, setting off a chorus of protests, Barry’s among them.
“No offense to Kasey—”
“None taken.”
“—but let’s be realistic.”
“Do you have a better idea?” asked Ekaterina. To the room at large: “Well? Do any of you have a solution that can be implemented with available resources, on a universal scale?”
“Universal if all parties can agree,” said Barry. “We can’t speak for the territories or their governments.”
“But we can convince them,” said Ekaterina. “I want PR teams on this, stat. We’ll host conferences in all of the territories. Kasey will lead a portion of the presentations.”
“A student?” said one of the Worldwide Union officers incredulously.
“Her name is rather well known,” another muttered.
“For a scandal!”
“I suppose she’ll be seen as a neutral party, above the geopolity establishments.”
“She’s a P2C officer!”
“Enough,” Ekaterina said, clapping her hands. “Kasey, what do you have to say?”
No reply.
“Kasey?”