by Joan He
Kasey’s vision blurred; she found tears in her eyes. They weren’t for Celia. Kasey didn’t cry for what couldn’t be changed. She cried for the people who were still alive, biologically, physically, alive, but who were casualties, too. They let the dead live inside them. Their actions were not their own. They were bots, albeit flesh and blood, with beliefs and behaviors rewritten into them like code.
As for Kasey? This rage wasn’t hers. She didn’t need revenge to fuel her. Didn’t need fuel at all. Was that such a detriment? There were plenty of full-fledged humans in this world. An overpopulation, if anything, of desperation and elation, of love and the violent ends it drove people to. There was enough pleasure, and enough pain. The planet was a plenty chaotic place. Kasey didn’t have to contribute to it.
She could choose herself.
Choose the cold, clear sensation on her cheeks as her tears dried.
Choose her version of life.
“STILL UP?”
I ask from the doorway. Moonlight slants through the crack I’ve made, illuminating part of the bed, but not Kay’s face. Her “yes” floats through the dark. I wade through it, climbing onto the bed. She’s lying on her side. I mirror her position, facing her, find her open eyes.
“Can’t sleep?”
Kay nods.
“Me neither.” Every time I try, I see the bots she made. My immediate reaction was horror, visceral and primal. Then that horror turned inward. I never knew Kay was working on these. How did we drift so far apart?
Kay is speaking now. Her voice pulls me out of my thoughts. “We can still stay in touch. Through messages, or holo.”
“What are you talking about?”
“My eviction.”
She doesn’t pad the statement. She says it as it is. Without fear. She’s accepted it, and I remember why it was so hard, after Mom’s death, to be around her. Seeing her so self-sufficient only made me feel more broken. I’m used to being the one people rely on and I hated the way Kay exposed me for who I really was: a girl shattered by vaporous things. Like Mom’s love. I hadn’t lost it so much as I’d lost my ability to earn it, to be a daughter worth her notice in a world competing for it.
Still. What I said to Kay in that moment, when I saw her dry, uncrying face, was unforgivable, and if we’ve drifted, that’s on me. It’s easier to lose myself in other people than it is to see Kay and know that even if I apologize again and again, it’d be only to comfort myself. She won’t recognize ever being hurt when she has been—hurt enough, apparently, to linger on my words and build a bot version of Mom. And that makes me feel extra shitty. I’ve taken back what I said, but I wish I could do more. “You’re not going to be evicted,” I say now.
“It’s the law.”
“The law serves the people.” Kay doesn’t reply. “Kay. Listen to me. You belong here, you hear that?” Her eyes shut, and I pull her close. “You belong here,” I say, cupping the back of her skull in my hand. It feels small. There’s so much brilliance in there, but at the end of the day, she’s just an eleven-year-old kid. When she needed me, I wasn’t here for her.
That changes now. From this point onward, I’m going to be a better sister.
I wait until she falls asleep, then shimmy off the bed, careful not to wake her.
Dad’s not in his room. I go into mine, step into my stasis pod, and holo to P2C headquarters. There, I find him still at his desk. Its surface glows with all of Mom’s legislation. I used to think of his determination to finish it as noble. Now I only feel disgust. We, his flesh-and-blood children, were left behind too, and I doubt he’s even aware of the trouble Kay’s in when I grab his chair by the back and spin it around.
“What—Celia?”
“You have to help her,” I say.
“Wake up,” I say.
I grip the arms of his chair and shake it. “Do you want to lose her, too?”
• • •
Sunlight streams past the curtains, burning away the dream like mist over the sea. But it doesn’t burn away the lump in my throat—or the tears on my face. Fresh ones, already cooling as I lie on the floor of M.M.’s bedroom, among the isles of clothing we shed last night. The skin dries tight.
Right. Happiness leads to memories.
At least I’m still in the house. To think I used to be scared of waking up in the ocean. Now I’m scared I’ll find her in my sleep—physically, and figuratively. I’m scared of seeing her eyes whenever I close mine. Scared I made the wrong choice—that despite everything, she is my Kay and I’m not Cee, but Celia. My hand can still feel the curve of Kay’s skull. The silk of her hair. My heart takes to the false memories like a sponge, absorbing them until it feels like I might burst, and I’d bolt to the sea right then and there if not for Hero’s arm, a weight around my waist, and the weave of our legs.
I wiggle around to face him, the boy who anchors me. His bangs cover his right eye. His lips are parted slightly in his sleep. I run a fingertip over the bottom one, smile when I remember the way I judged his face, the first I’d seen in three years. Then my smile fades.
I must have been made to look like Celia. Was Hero modeled after someone too?
So what if he is? If he isn’t? His face belongs to him. He gives it life, not the other way around, and it’s grown on me, becoming as beautiful as his voice. I drink in its sight for a minute, then disentangle myself, grabbing a bathroom towel and wearing it like a strapless dress as I head into the kitchen, where I brew some dandelion-leaf tea. I drink it as if it’s served in a china cup. The hot ceramic against my knuckles borders on painful, but even pain is sensation. I can’t imagine ever being without. To not be able to feel the steam on my face, or the sea wind, brisk when I open the door to a bright blue sky, stitched with white seagulls.
My days of seeing in black-and-white feel like a strange dream. Maybe this unease in my gut will too, along with the guilt of lying to Hero, once it no longer matters if we’re human or not. We’ll be the only ones in the world.
The only ones in the world.
The tea I just swallowed rises back up my throat. I shut the door, brew a new mug, and set it down on the bedroom floor as I kneel by Hero.
“Hey.” I place a hand on his shoulder. “Rise and shine.”
He doesn’t wake. I envy him. No nightmares. No walking to the sea. But that’s the way it should be. The way it will be, if I can hold out three more days. One, really, if it takes me two to swim to the dome.
One.
Day.
Left.
Smart of Hero to sleep off the time. I’ll leave him to it. I start to rise.
A hand closes around my ankle.
Hero lets out a pained oof as I fall backward and onto him.
“Serves you right,” I say, rolling off to see his watering eyes.
“Stay.”
“Make me.”
He cocks his head to the side. Then, before I can do a thing, he rolls me over so that I’m flat on my back and he’s leaning over me on locked elbows.
He undoes my towel. My skin puckers from the sudden onslaught of air, and my arms move to cover myself.
He stops me. Unfolds me, carefully, tenderly, reverently, like I’m an origami bird and he’s learning the sequence of how I came to be. I feel every spot his gaze lands, and flush. Celia’s used to impassioned meetings in the dark, like yesterday’s. But today the sky is clear and the sun is up, rays from the window baring us anew.
Light ripples over Hero’s shoulders as he leans in.
He presses a kiss to the hollow between my collarbones.
He draws the fuse down, from throat to sternum to navel. Past my navel, to a point where his lips linger, and I think he might stop there and come back up for air.
He doesn’t stop.
• • •
The dizziness starts in the morning and worsens by night. Horrible timing. It’s Tabitha’s eighteenth birthday, and I pulled out all the stops to get our party of fourteen into πthons, one of the few clubs that s
till exist outside of holo. Just coming here will cause our ranks to go up by a tenth of a decimal. But you only turn legal once, and when Tabitha insisted on staying with me by the bar, I told her to forget about it.
In the end, it took recruiting Rach as my designated babysitter to get Tabitha out onto the club floor. “Thanks,” I now say to Rach. We’re sitting at the bar as everyone else dances, the antigrav and fog machine making it appear as if they’re floating on clouds. “I owe you one.”
“My shoes were killing me anyway,” Rach says with a shrug, then asks if I want a detox, or if I’m up for more.
They assume I’m drunk. In reality, it’s been almost a year since I overdid the Allegro shots. Ever since repairing my relationship with Kay, I’ve tried not to worry her. She doesn’t like it when I come home wasted, or stay out too late. Which is why I’ve snuck out tonight.
“Detox sounds good,” I say. Can’t hurt. Might even help. I’ve been feeling shitty all week. Night sweats, cold hands, flailing in yoga—you name it. Now, I rub my fingertips. They tingle, numb. Maybe it’s time I reinstall my biomonitor. Reinstall notifications, that is. As annoying as the alerts are, I’m not trying to cancel my eco-city healthcare plan by deleting the app entirely.
“One detox for her, and one galaxy for me,” Rach says to the bartender while I glance to the club floor to see if Tabitha is having fun. I can’t spot her at first. Buzz is talking to Joelle. Zane, Ursa, Denise, and Logan are competing in some sort of dance-off that’s completely off the beat. Aliona has clambered onto the stage and seized the mic, and Rae is busy seducing one of the DJs. Then there’s Lou and Perry and . . . Tristan. With Tabitha.
He’s got an arm around her waist. She giggles at something he says.
“She was going to tell you but kept freaking the fuck out,” Rach murmurs into my ear.
“Yeah?” I rub my hands; they’ve become as numb as my fingertips.
“Yeah. So I told her I’d tell you instead. But then I forgot.”
“Of course you did,” I tease. Rach has a terrible memory. The rest of us are convinced they forget something every time they walk through a doorway.
“Yeah, yeah. But you’re not upset, right?” I shake my head and Rach nods in affirmation. “Who needs Tristan when you can get any fish you want in the sea?”
The bartender slides over our drinks and winks at me. I smile, then glance back to Tabitha and Tristan.
Tristan might look like he’s all brawn and no brains, but he’s actually really passionate about nutrient synthesis. And Tabitha is super into coding virtual culinary experiences. They’ll be a perfect pair. Plus, I was the one who broke up with Tristan amicably. I shouldn’t be upset. I’m not, I tell myself, deciding to order a galaxy as well. Rach grins and raises their matching drink once mine comes. “To graduating.”
“To graduating.” I grin past my anxiety. I still don’t know what I want to do or what I’m good at. Ester once told Mom that I had the compassion to be a doctor, but neither of them lived to see me almost flunk out of chemistry. I’m not as smart as Kay, or as driven as Mom. I don’t have a calling to improve the world, and as much as I like helping people, I don’t think I could handle having lives on the line.
I guess I still have time to figure things out, I think, and down the drink.
The world is spinning minutes later. What a lightweight I’ve become. I tell Rach I have to go to the bathroom, and barely make it into a stall before vomiting into the toilet bowl.
That’s it. Biomonitor, you win. I reinstall notifications. The app’s been off for so long it needs to update. As it does, I rinse out my mouth at the sink, and catch sight of my face in the mirror above it. Frowning, I touch the bruise at the corner of my lip. Not sure how I missed that. I pull out my concealer from my clutch and pause.
The girl in the mirror looks sad. Maybe clubs are no longer my thing. The music tires me out more than it invigorates me. I much prefer the sound of the sea.
“Celia?” Voice, from the bathroom entrance. I look, see that it’s Tabitha.
“Is everything okay?” she asks.
“Never been better.” I untwist my concealer. Swipe, blend, recap. Take that, bruise.
“Is that Zika Tu I hear?” I ask, going to Tabitha, looping my arm through hers, and cajoling her out the doorway.
She hesitates. I get it. She shared a moment with Tristan, then saw me run to the bathroom. Hard not to jump to conclusions there, especially if she was, in Rach’s words, “freaking the fuck out” about liking my ex.
But really, we’re cool. I squeeze her shoulder. “I’m happy for you, Tabby.” I know she’ll understand what’s implied, and after a moment, she smiles, tentative. I smile back; hers grows more confident.
I live for this. Seeing the people around me thrive.
Enough with the moping. Despite my dizziness, I join everyone on the club floor and dance my heart out. Keep on dancing even when my biomonitor finishes updating and floods my mind’s eye with warnings, hospel summons, and a prognosis that answers the question of my after-high-school future. If anything, I dance harder. In two months, my friends will be off at college, innotech firms, and making something out of their lives.
And I’ll be dead.
• • •
We live—shamelessly. We talk, we laugh, we breathe, and we do all the things that steal away speech, laughter, and breath, and when the hour beckons, we dress each other in the most ridiculous of M.M.’s sweaters and put on pants. We tend to the taros, tidy up the house, and sketch out a design for a real boat. Celia, I realize, would have envied us. This is what she craved: purpose and meaning, the simple act of creating something with her hands. It’s the perfect day.
And it doesn’t last.
The tug starts at sunset. I ignore it at first, just like I ignore the stream of memories, and continue to sweep the porch alongside Hero. But the pull in my gut intensifies. Black splotches eat at my vision. My heart feels too big and my lungs too small; there’s not enough space inside me for blood and air and memories to circulate.
I tell Hero I’ll be back, then rush to the pier and empty out my stomach. The waves whisk the worst bits of me out of sight. No one will know that I, Cee, puked up my guts in the sea. And no one will know that somewhere in the deep, a girl named Kay is dying in a pod.
Her stunned gaze rears in my mind again. It’s always this moment I can’t get past. The moment she forgot I wasn’t her sister. The moment I remembered.
You never saw her die, I said. Her, not me. Celia, not Cee.
Because I am Cee. I’m alive, and Celia is dead. I’m Cee, I think fiercely, shedding off the last of my denial. Not Celia. Not . . . human. That’s the paradox: To believe in myself, I must also accept who I am. What I am.
A bot.
As a bot, maybe I don’t deserve to live as much as a human.
No. I won’t think that. The sun will set. The moon will rise. And then it’ll be the sun’s turn to rise, and it’ll be over. It’ll all be over, I think, trembling in equal parts apprehension and anticipation, nauseated at the enormity of what will happen—must happen—and so lost in my thoughts that I don’t hear him approach. Arms slide around my waist, and my heart jumps, then slows, beating in tandem with his.
“You’re shivering.”
“Just cold,” I say, and Hero hugs me tighter. Together we stand, listening to the sea around us and beneath us, licking at the pier planks. The sky ripens, brilliantly orange.
“What are you thinking about?” I murmur.
“You,” he says. I place my hands over his. “And how it feels like I might still lose you.”
To? But the answer lies before us. The pier is a peninsula between two worlds, and I know exactly which one Hero is referring to. My grip tightens over his knuckles. “She’s not out there.”
He doesn’t say anything to that.
“Tell me this is stupid.”
No reply.
“Say it!” I spin around and pound a fist aga
inst his chest. He lets me. “Say it, dammit!”
“She’ll always be out there,” Hero finally says, exactly the opposite of what I needed to hear. “As long as you exist, your hope will, too.”
Hope? I’ve got dread and panic and guilt and fear, but no hope. None whatsoever. Hero wouldn’t know, though. He still thinks I want to find Kay. He doesn’t know that finding Kay would mean losing myself. Now, I don’t think my life is worth a billion, but unlike Celia, I don’t care what the masses think. Don’t need to please my friends. I’ve survived three years marooned on an abandoned island, for fuck’s sake. I have me. U-me.
And him. I lift my fist from Hero’s chest, lift my gaze next. “What do you want?” Hero doesn’t answer. “Do you want me to go?”
He sucks in a breath. “Don’t ask me that.”
“Too late. I already have.”
A shadow passes over his eyes. “I want you to stay,” he finally admits. “I want to make you stay, in every way I can. But—” I wince at the word, even though I saw it coming. “I don’t want to be the thing keeping you on this island.” He takes a step back from me. “I know it’s not much, but principles are all I have.”
And he doesn’t need more. How do I tell him? That he’s no less of a human being than me just because he doesn’t have memories, a past, or other people? “Look, love—”
I break off as Hero suddenly stiffens. His jaw flexes.
His hand shoots for my throat.
I dodge—barely. I retreat and Hero whirls on me, his back to the sea, and I stumble, adrenaline coursing through my veins, but not fear. He’s not actually trying to kill me. And I can’t even die. It’s fine, it’s fine, it’s—
“What—” Hero chokes off as his hand surges again. His nails scratch my neck, and the pain focuses my gaze, fixing it on his face—
His face, misshapen with horror and confusion.
The bottom of my stomach falls out. He’s trying to kill me, just like the other times. But unlike the other times, he’s 100% aware of it.