by Joan He
“What?” Moments later, a person strode into the cubicle. She wore a fuchsia utility jumpsuit, sleeves of equally colorful tattoos, and black gloves that flecked red onto the cement ground as she snapped them off and tossed them into the trash bin. “Who died now?”
“Jinx,” moaned the employee.
“Joules, loosen up, will you?” Then she saw Kasey. Her eyes narrowed. The employee’s stayed wide. Both looked at Kasey as if she was someone important.
She’d better start acting like it. She flashed her e-badge again, fresh sweat forming. “Authorized search warrant for Unit Five.”
It came to mind, somewhat belatedly, that they couldn’t know what she was here for. Maybe they feared her because GRAPHYC was in violation of regulations, or Unit 5 was stashed full of contraband. Kasey didn’t care—not today, not with INTRAFACE LOCATED branded in her brain—but before she could say so, Jinx turned to her employee.
“See?” She sounded more relaxed. “It’s for Act.”
“Who gives me the creeps.”
“Don’t worry. He’s clean.”
“How do you know?”
“I know because he’s my tenant and my hire.”
“Sure that’s it—ow!” cried the employee as Jinx seized his ear.
“Up the back stairwell, first door to the right,” she said, presumably to Kasey, who would have followed the directions anyway just to eject herself. She climbed the stairs to the top landing; it was a jungle gym of obsolete gizmos. Cat litter filled a boxlike apparatus that could have plausibly been a washing machine, from pre-everfiber times, when the fashion industry accounted for 20% of global waste-water production and catchphrases such as sustainable and recycled still fueled consumerism. What a waste of space, Kasey thought, contorting herself around the obstacle and stumbling—as if shoved—before the door. It loomed over her. Unit 5.
The geolocation of Celia’s Intraface.
With nothing left to troubleshoot, her mind dimmed. The stairwell grew quiet. Had always been.
Her heartbeat was the loudest thing here.
What would a normal person feel, potentially moments from reuniting with their sister? Excited, most likely. Nervous would also be acceptable. Not scared, which was Kasey’s physiological response of choice, epinephrine charting on her biomonitor. She wanted to run. Quelling the urge, she knocked and, when no one answered, bypassed the retinal scanner with her badge.
Possibility. Probability. The chances were next to none.
She pushed open the door.
And breathed out.
No Celia.
She ran a body heat scan. Negative. She walked in, looking for evidence of how this person by the name of “Act” might give anyone the creeps. Maybe she wasn’t the best judge; she hardly put people at ease herself. But truly, this unit was the most mundane thing Kasey had encountered so far: boxlike, walls painted gray. Fuel-bar? Check. No bed; not unusual. The stasis pod, bolted upright to the back wall, could have doubled as one.
A more thorough inspection led Kasey to the fuel-bar. The cupboards yielded tins of protein blocks, vitamin cubes, and fiber powders. She studied the stasis pod. An older model, worse for wear and missing chunks of material on its right side.
A lot of chunks, actually, gouged out at fairly regular intervals.
Intervals like the rungs to a ladder.
It was a stretch of the mind—a biased mind, familiar with ladders and primed to detect their patterns. Besides, what ladder went to the bare ceiling? Good question: Kasey looked up. The ceiling was painted the same gray as the walls. Nothing about it stood out.
Except for a speck. A paint bubble. A bead-like object, either attached by adhesive . . .
. . . or resting there, just like Kasey rested on the ground thanks to gravity.
To assume antigravity was at work in a down-stratum rental unit was an even further stretch of the mind than seeing ladders on the sides of stasis pods. The probability was absurdly low.
But Kasey was only here to rule out the near impossible.
She positioned herself under the speck, opened the search warrant app in her Intraface, and keyed CANCEL ALL ACTIVE FORCES into the unit override system.
For a second, nothing happened.
The bead fell.
She caught it in her cupped hands, like a raindrop from the skies. It was nothing so natural. The white kernel, no bigger than a tooth, possessed a smooth, machine-tumbled shape, and when Kasey nudged it onto its narrower side, she found a row of micro-lasered digits.
She could have magnified the numbers through her Intraface and matched them to the fourteen-digit sequence she’d memorized, given to authorities, and entered into her own geolocation tracker. She could have; she did not. She knew, intuitively, what this thing was. To whom it’d belonged. Where it’d once resided: under the skin, at the base of the skull.
Might your sister not want to be found?
The kernel slipped through Kasey’s fingers. She couldn’t feel it fall.
Might this be deliberate?
Couldn’t hear it bounce against the ground.
Beep-beep-beep. Sound, from inside her head. Text, flashing across her mind’s eye:
BODY HEAT DETECTED
Behind her.
Like a cambot, she rotated and aimed.
He stood in the doorway. A boy. Face a blur to Kasey; she could only see in swatches. The white of his button-down shirt, sleeves rolled up. The gray of his waist apron, pockets swollen—
“Hands out.” Voice too harsh, syntax too basic, but to Kasey’s relief, the boy complied, slipping out one hand, then the other. He made no extraneous gestures. His movements were measured. Precise.
Slowly, she lowered the REM.
And fired when something furry brushed her ankle.
Whatever it was, it was gone when Kasey twisted around. Probably the cat, fled. The boy, in contrast, stood right where he was. Was he frozen in fear? Kasey couldn’t tell, could tell that his eyes were black, as was his hair, parted sharply to the right, but couldn’t read his gaze through the smoke rising from the scorch mark on the floor.
Say something. Apologize. “I mean no harm,” SILVERTONGUE suggested. Kasey hadn’t realized the app was on. She closed it. She disliked stating the obvious, and as callous as it was, she didn’t care about this boy’s emotional state when hers couldn’t be much better off. She nodded at the white kernel on the ground. “Tell me how you got this.”
“Why should I?”
Quiet, but commanding. He wasn’t cowed in the slightest. Why should I?—a challenge, cold and logical. Kasey found herself agreeing. Why, indeed, should he? What gave her the right?
“Because I’m a P2C officer.” So much for not stating the obvious. Kasey drew a breath. “And that”—she nodded toward the ground—“belongs to a missing person.”
Saying it made it real. That thing on the ground was Celia’s Intraface, and Kasey’s legs went weak. What was it doing here, with him? The REM rose yet again; she eyed the boy down its length.
“May I?” he asked, unfazed. He crouched when Kasey didn’t object, scooped up the kernel, and straightened, graceful. He held out his closed fist, and Kasey reluctantly released one hand from the REM. The Intraface dropped into her palm. She brought it close, magnifying the lasered numbers.
1930-123193-2315. Her sister’s. To cross-check, Kasey held the kernel in front of her right eye. A green ring appeared in her field of vision.
OBJECT IDENTIFICATION LOADING . . .
LOADING . . .
RESULTS: 18.2 / 23 grams Intraface, gen 4.5.
18.2 out of 23 grams. Kasey’s gaze cut to the boy. “Where’s the rest?”
Without asking for permission this time, the boy went to the fuel-bar and returned with a tin.
He handed it to Kasey. “She requested that I destroy it, after I extracted it.”
Requested. Kasey focused on the word—requested, implying consent—to overcome her vertigo. Extracted. Blood and skin, slice
d open. By him. What had Jinx said about him? My tenant. My hire. Kasey reexamined the boy. Sixteen like her, or older—the lean geometry of his face made his age difficult to pin. She was certain about two things, though: He was younger than most of the GRAPHYC employees she’d seen downstairs, and the exactitude of his person actually seemed befitting of his trade.
But who he was didn’t change what he’d done, and with acid in her throat, Kasey glanced down at the tin in her hand. It contained a fingernail’s worth of white powdery substance.
RESULTS: 4.8 / 23 grams Intraface.
“When?” she demanded, balling her toes as if she could grip the ground.
“A week before she left.”
Overlapping with Celia’s tech detox. Semiregularly, she would shut down her Intraface and give people no choice but to connect with her in person. Kasey hadn’t thought much of it.
“And you carried out her request?” Her voice sounded too high-pitched and accusatory, as if the boy had killed her sister even though it was becoming clearer by the second that Celia had voluntarily come here, in her final days, and asked for this—and for him.
Second mistake: thinking her sister would rely on Kasey over a stranger.
If he was a stranger at all. “I did. She was a client,” the boy explained, calm. “But to me, she was more than that.” There was an intensity in his expression, emotions Kasey couldn’t name but had seen before, somewhere. “So I saved it.” He took the Intraface back from her; she let him, unable to stop him. “Even before I heard the news, I planned on reconstructing it. I wanted to understand what had happened to make her think she had no way out. After all, people who remove their Intrafaces tend to fall into one of two camps.”
“Which are?” Kasey heard herself ask.
“Criminals, or victims.”
Criminals. The word zapped Kasey out of her trance. “Which do you think she was?”
“Celia? Committing a crime?” The boy’s gaze narrowed. “If she had any fault, it was for loving too much.”
Definitely not a stranger, then. He’d obviously known Celia. Known her well. The look in his eyes—the intoxication, the all-consuming determination—matched what Kasey had seen in the eyes of people like Tristan/Dmitri. They loved Celia so much that they couldn’t move on. They reacted with equal and opposite force to the force that loss exerted on them.
They were the normal humans.
And Kasey wasn’t. Swallowing, she glanced again to the powder in the tin. One misplaced grain, and the Intraface would never turn on again. It must have taken months to come as far as the boy had, and during this time, what had Kasey done? Dodged reporters. Accepted the tragedy. Thrown a party.
In the eyes of the world, she was more of a clown than a ghost.
She returned the REM to its holster and faced the boy, who’d answered everything he’d been asked. At a minimum, she owed him an explanation.
“I’m Kasey.” As if that meant anything to him. “Mizuhara.” She couldn’t remember the last time she’d introduced herself by her full name—wouldn’t have been able to, outside, without tripping up a tapped bot and giving her location away to reporters. But here, in a private domain, she was safe. Physically.
Mentally, she felt more out of her element than at her party.
“Celia’s younger sister,” she added for good measure, at the same time the boy said, “I know who you are.”
That threw Kasey for a loop. Then she recovered. The sound bite had gone viral.
If the boy judged her for dispassionately proclaiming her sister dead, he didn’t reveal it. “Come back when it’s ready.”
Kasey’s Intraface pinged with a new contact request.
ACTINIUM
Rank: 0
A normal person would’ve been grateful. He’d known her sister. He was someone who understood.
But that would have been Kasey’s third mistake: assuming anyone would really understand her.
She left the room without a word, left the boy and her sister’s Intraface with him, left the door open behind her, and took only the weight in her chest.
THE DOOR SWINGS SHUT BEHIND me, and I face the storm beyond the porch.
I’ve had plenty of terrible ideas, but this one takes the taro biscuit. With each step into the hailing rain, I wonder if I should wait. By tomorrow, the skies will be clear.
Then lightning flashes again, illuminating the body, and I remember this is a person. They might already be dead, but on the off chance they’re not, I can’t leave them to the mercy of the elements. So I keep on, toward the waterline and through the downpour, until after a light-year and then some, I reach them.
A boy—and not a bad-looking one, I decide at the next crack of lightning and thunder, if you ignore (or consider) the fact he’s unapologetically naked.
Admire later. I’m trying to figure out how to transport him when the surf crashes into me and nearly knocks me over. Shit, that’s cold. More waves are surging—I can hear them, roaring closer—and I was already drenched but now I’m inhaling rainwater.
Time to get out of here.
I heave my cargo up by the armpits and start hauling. The slick makes everything harder. The sand’s become a swamp and twice, I almost slip.
Third time’s the charm.
I land hard on my back while the naked boy lands on me, and maybe it’d be comical if he didn’t weigh as much as Hubert. With a guttural cry, I push him half off. The effort leaves me winded, and I lie there, trying to catch my breath, while the sky waterboards me.
That’s when his other half lifts.
He’s awake.
I mean, he must be. Lightning—his hair’s in his eyes and I can’t see if they’re open or not but—blackness—he’s leaning over me and no longer crushing me and that’s an improvement even if I’m still trapped. Beneath him.
A human.
The rain emits a faint sheen where it lands, creating the illusion it’s evaporating off him. In reality, it’s streaming down his hair, his face, and onto mine. I blink the water out of my eyes. My brain feels sodden. What do I do? What do I say?
“Hey.” It registers, in the back of my brain, that this is my first time talking to another person in three years—a monumental moment, not that the storm cares. “Mind getting—”
The request dies in my throat.
My throat, twist-tied off in his chokehold.
What—why? My eyes burn. My skull balloons. Just a bad dream. A bad dream. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned since arriving on this island, it’s that nothing is a bad dream and thinking so is what gets you killed from starvation, dehydration, or—in this case—boys on the beach.
I scrabble at his hands. His grip is iron. I knee him in the balls. He doesn’t flinch. Maybe he isn’t a boy after all.
My tongue is meat in my mouth. My chest is lead. Lightning—a phantom ringing—blackness—a void.
The thunder goes quiet.
Then a blue light. A room, dimly lit, dream-hazy. A man in a white suit. A casket. My voice—I won’t let her follow me—like a thought in my head, and I see myself, standing apart from myself, I reach to touch other-me but I can’t feel her and am I . . . dead?
Find me, Cee.
No, not dead. Dead-me wouldn’t be able to hear Kay’s voice. The sound of it returns sensation to my limbs and skin—just in time for me to feel the boy’s fingers loosen. His hands fall from my throat. His body thuds to the side. I hear U-me’s voice, reliably monotone. “Strongly disagree.” Then the rain drowns everything out like applause. It batters me, no-holds-barred now that the boy is gone. My gasps turn to gurgles and I choke again—on spit and air. I gulp it down, then finally roll. Onto my side. Onto my elbows. I lift my head, and through the rain, I see the gleam of U-me’s metal body.
She’s by the boy, who’s now lying facedown on the sand. I don’t know what she did—bot headbutt?—but it was effective. He’s out, and I’m not strangled.
“Thanks, love,” I croak, my voice
a stranger’s. “I owe you one.”
“Agree.”
Together, we consider the boy.
“Now, what are we going to do with him?”
“SO HOW DID IT GO?”
Where to even begin? Her sister’s Intraface, or the boy who had extracted it?
“The party?” prompted Meridian, and Kasey cleared her mind. Right.
She shut the door to her gym locker. It stuck out even more now, as the only freshly painted one in the row, than it had with BITCH sprayed across it. Remarkable, Kasey had thought, that some people still had aerosols. Meridian hadn’t been nearly as impressed. “Which one of you did this?” she’d demanded, causing a scene that Kasey found more irksome than the vandalism. She hadn’t told Meridian, of course. She didn’t tell Meridian a lot of things to avoid said-things becoming events (see Kasey’s party, concocted by Meridian to flip off Kasey’s detractors).
“Party was fine,” Kasey said. “Crowded,” she added as girls filled the locker room, clogging the air with chlorine and chatter and enveloping Kasey in déjà vu. If it weren’t for swim class, the easiest way to fulfill the biomonitor’s exercise requirement, she’d have holo-ed to school today. The trip to stratum-22 yesterday had drained her. She’d slept badly, checking her Intraface first thing this morning. Zero messages from Actinium. Cue relief. She wanted answers, but the idea of going through Celia’s memories left her queasy.
And right now, the locker room humidity wasn’t helping.
“That’s it? That’s all I get?” Meridian complained, following Kasey as she made for the exit—only to run into a familiar face.
Déjà vu round two.
“Oh, hey!” Yvone’s hair was blond in person, not blue. Kasey, unfortunately, appeared exactly as she did in holo. Her name and rank were disclosed overhead per school rules, and as luck would have it, she was standing next to none other than the one true LAN, MERIDIAN, rank 18,154. The scene was just begging to be remarked on, and Kasey held her breath as Yvone smiled.
