by Joan He
Instead, for the first time in her life, Kasey had to read the numbers twice. She looked to Actinium, saw his eyes glazing over as he digested the data.
Not ready to do the same, Kasey stood, distancing herself. Blood rushed to her brain, as if gravity had been restored and she might fall and break. She wanted to, for a frightening second. Break and join Celia in her senseless world. Because Celia was still dead. The sea had killed her.
It’d been killing her for a long time now.
THE SEA’S ALWAYS PRETTIEST AFTER a storm. This morning, it shimmers beyond the sunken pier, sequined by the sun. The sky, I reckon, must be a cloudless blue. If only I could see it in color.
Then again, if only I didn’t have boats to build and stranglers to neutralize.
I touch a hand to my neck. My windpipe’s bruised, and swallowing kills. Turns out there are more ways to die on this island than I’d previously thought, like at the literal hands of a boy.
I could have left him on the shore. The storm might have drowned him. The ocean might have lapped him up and returned him to Joules-knows-where he came from. I could have disposed of him without lifting a finger, and it’d serve him right.
Instead, I kept him. Bound to M.M.’s bed, still naked—I refuse to dress my would-be murderer—but alive.
Because he’s just like me. We both washed up ashore, bare as babies. If he remembers anything, anything at all, about what’s out there—other islands or the cities from my dreams—I don’t care if he’s the devil himself. He could be the answer to my past and my future. He could better my chances of finding Kay.
We’ll see once he wakes.
Beneath my feet, the tide rises, slurping through the pier planks. The sea breeze tastes divine, especially after last night’s events.
One last inhale, and I leave the pier. The nape of my neck prickles as I trek across the beach. It’s strange, knowing there’s another soul on this island. The house, when I return, looks different somehow. A floorboard creaks, and I jump, but it’s just U-me.
The heebie-jeebies settle once I enter M.M.’s bedroom. It’s bright at this hour, its eastward window aglow. The walls are papered with tiny flowers. The air is iridescent with dust, and sweet, too, the scent of yarn coming through the slatted doors of the closet, where M.M.’s sweaters hang in a row. I’d sleep here more often if doing so didn’t make the rest of the house feel too empty. On the couch, I can convince myself I’m one of many guests, only passing through.
The boy, though, has made himself right at home under the blanket I spared to cover him. I sink into the sun-warmed rocking chair by the bed and watch him sleep—rather deeply, I think enviously, for someone restrained to the bedposts. I bet it’s a dreamless slumber. I bet—I know—he didn’t wake once last night. He was out like a light while I had to fight to keep my eyes open after my near-death experience just to avoid death-by-sleepwalking-into-storm.
If I’m awake, surely he can be too.
My patience drying up, I prod him. Poke him. I check that he’s still breathing, and as I’m holding a finger under his nose, it hits me all over again.
A living. Breathing. Human.
The first in three years.
Will he be funny? Sarcastic? Charming? Or will he wake up still a murderer?
As if I might find the answers written on his face, I scoot closer and study him. He appears to be around my age, whatever that is. As for his looks, he’s pretty, but plain. Nothing about him sticks out. Nothing is striking. His cheekbones, while high, could be more defined, and his jaw, refined, could be more chiseled. His hair is wishy-washy wavy and too short to be long, but long enough to fan out over the pillow, curling around his ears and neck, a dark gray mop over his brow, eyes interrupted only by the slope of his nose—a nice enough nose, but still boyish. Boyish—that’s the word. Missing angles and gentle shadows, like the half-moon dwelling above his lip.
Which brings me to his lips.
Not too full, not too thin. Average, but here, it works. His lips are probably his nicest feature, and I run a finger over the bottom one before I can help myself, surprised by its softness. Do murderers have soft lips? I pick at my chapped ones, suddenly self-conscious. Then I chuckle. Me? Upped by a boy? Impossible.
Hold up.
Where did that thought come from?
I don’t have memories of any boys. In fact, when I try to remember them, I end up with images of ice pops that melt too fast and sky-cities hovering over oceans. And Kay. Black coffee eyes. Bobbed hair. The rare slice of a smile.
But then, like some levee has broken, it all comes flooding back. Boys upon boys upon boys. Boys who talk more than they listen, who aren’t as funny as they think they are but who need me like air, whose smiles are easily earned.
Only one boy is unsmiling. Black hair, swept to one side. Coal-dark eyes. When our gazes meet, it’s like he sees me, not the version of myself I try to be to make others like me, but the parts I’m hiding, the secrets I keep from Kay, out of fear that they’ll hurt her. I never want to hurt her or anyone or him.
A boy whose name I can’t remember.
When I resurface, I’m out of breath. I glance back down at the boy to find my finger still on his lip and his eyes wide open, gray irises pinned on mine.
I withdraw my hand. “Finally,” I say with feigned cool, folding my arms over my ribs. My heart pounds behind them. “You’ve wasted my entire morning.”
Two seconds. That’s all the prep time I get before the torrent.
“Where am I? How did I get here?” His gaze darts—left, right, left again, then finally up, to the bedposts. “What—” He tugs on his arms; the nylon rope holds. “The hell? Why am I tied up?”
So many questions. Do I even remember how to answer questions?
Where am I? “In my bed.” How did I get here? “I carried you.” Why am I tied up? “I like it kinky.”
Maybe not.
“I’m kidding,” I say when the boy’s face pales at least three shades of gray.
First impressions, take two: He doesn’t look like a murderer, nor is he acting like one. But his voice is what sways me the most. Even panicked, it’s . . . music. The sound of the sea as it sighs across the sand. It almost doesn’t match his face, but as I’m thinking this, I find his face, paired with his voice, growing more beautiful before my eyes.
My takeaway? Voice-deprivation is real and could be the death of me if I’m not careful.
“Untie me,” says the boy. The bed creaks as he tugs on his wrists. I resist the urge to jump to his aid. How I lived before is not how I live now. The shiny things in my dreams—the glass elevators and the boys with their white smiles—don’t exist here. It’s just me and my body’s natural healing abilities. A beating heart trumps a soft one.
One wrong call is all it takes.
“Not until you prove your trustworthiness,” I say, sitting back down in the rocking chair.
“My trustworthiness?” More thrashing and jerking.
“Stop fighting and listen.” I wait for him. For several minutes, his breathing only ratchets up in speed. His distress rubs off on me, and I grip the arms of the rocking chair. The wood is slick under my palms by the time he finally calms down.
“We’ll begin with the question of why you’re tied up.” I start rocking at a grandmotherly pace, in hopes that it’ll put him more at ease. “Last night, you tried to strangle me.”
“I did not.”
“You did.”
“I did n—”
I yank down the turtleneck of M.M.’s sweater. That shuts the boy up. “You did, even if you don’t remember. It was storming, too. You’re lucky I bothered bringing you into the house.” I tug the turtleneck back over the marks. “You’re welcome.”
I watch as the info sinks in. He’s trying to reconcile it in his brain—what he’s seeing versus what he believes. My truth versus his. I don’t think he’s acting forgetful, and I don’t rule out the possibility that his behavior on the beach was
a one-off thing, triggered by whatever he endured at sea. It’s also worth noting that he seems scrawnier in the sunlight, and not nearly strong enough to choke me, and—no, I won’t make excuses for him. He can explain himself.
“Where did this happen?” the boy finally asks.
“Out there.” I nod toward the window. “This is an abandoned island. You’re currently staying in M.M.’s humble abode. No, she’s not around. No, I’m not sure where she is. It has been three years, though, so make of that what you will. For now, it’s just us. You and me.”
“Disagree,” says U-me from the doorway of the bedroom.
“And U-me, the bot.”
I wait for a reaction. Receive none. The boy says nothing for a long time. Then:
“How, exactly, did I get here?”
“I was going to ask you the same thing.” I stop rocking and lean forward. “How did you get here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Think harder.”
“I said, I don’t know!” As quickly as his voice rises, it also ebbs. “Please—can I just be untied?”
My heart steels itself against his plea. Remember your agenda. “You really can’t remember anything?” Naked and without memories—of last night and of his past. The boy and I may be more similar than I’d thought, which would be comforting—I’m not the only one—if I weren’t relying on him for answers to help me find Kay.
“Try,” I order. “Try to remember something. An image. A person. A place.”
The boy’s response is to tug on his wrists so hard that dark gray liquid wells at the rope.
Shit. I shoot up from the rocking chair as the liquid runs down to his elbows. “Stop that. Stop.”
I grab him by the forearms, only to be startled by the warmth of his bare skin. A fellow human. Who’s now bleeding because of me. I thought washing ashore alone was bad, but how would I feel if I woke to some stranger interrogating me under duress?
I let go of him, my palms tingling where we touched. He tried to kill me. That still stands. But I’m alive. So is he. We’re the only two people on this island. Coexisting in peace would be better than our current setup. Maybe this is a mistake, but—
“I’m going to untie you,” I say, enunciating each syllable to buy time to think. Lay down the ground rules. “On the condition you don’t try to kill me again.”
Joules, save me—that’s the best I can do? I have no way of enforcing this, and certainly no way of punishing him from the grave if he breaks his word.
Thankfully, the boy doesn’t ridicule me. If anything, he’s taking this too seriously. “‘Again’?” he challenges. “How can it be ‘again’ if I don’t remember the first time?”
I don’t know. The semantics are beyond me. “Do you want to be untied or not?”
He nods. I wait. He catches on. “Fine. I promise.”
“Sincerity, please.”
“It’s not sincere if I can’t remember,” he protests.
“Picture this: you, me, on the beach. Your hands on my neck.”
The boy closes his eyes, a pleat between his brows. He’s earnest, I’ll give him that, and I take pity on him when he reopens his eyes and says, “I’ve never wanted to kill you, and I don’t think I’ll ever want to kill you, but I swear I won’t act on those urges if they ever seize me.” A pause. “Again.”
“Swear on your life.”
“On my life.”
Future-me had better not regret this.
I untie him—then realize I probably should’ve warned him that he’s got nothing on beneath the blanket.
“What . . . fuck!”
“Fuck,” repeats U-me. “To engage in sexual intercourse, verb; to mess with, verb; to deal with unfairly or harshly, verb.”
“Curse at your own risk,” I say as the boy scrambles back into bed, drawing the blanket around him.
“What did you do to my clothes?”
Ripped them off you. The words come reflexively. Maybe I’ve said them to the boys in my past, but I know better than to repeat them to the boy in front of me right now, his eyes stretched to the whites. “You woke up like this, love,” I say as gently as I can.
He shakes his head. “You did something to them!” He points a trembling finger at me, cheeks darkening—reddening, I assume. “You said so yourself ! That y-you—you like it—”
“Joules, that was a joke.”
“My name isn’t Jules!” Emotions break over his face. I can’t decipher them as easily as I used to, but I think I see fear. Disbelief. Anger.
“That wasn’t what I was trying to say.” My head’s starting to swim. Just when I thought I’d pacified him, too. “Look, love. I’m sorry about your clothes. I know you don’t trust me, and you don’t have to, but you really did wake up like this. It’s okay, though.” I go to the closet, fling open the doors, and grab as many sweaters as I can carry. “We can dress you right now.” I pile the sweaters over his lap, then sit at the edge of the bed. “Have at it.”
The boy says nothing. Does nothing. Doesn’t move.
His silence scares me. I reach out to him; he flinches away.
Been awhile since I’ve faced any sort of rejection. “Why don’t you tell me your name?” I ask, hiding the sting of it. “Mine is Cee,” I offer, to pave the way.
“I don’t know my name.” Horror fills his eyes. “I don’t know . . .” His gaze drops to his hands, upturned in his lap. His voice hushes to a whisper. “. . . my name.”
He stares at his empty palms as if he was holding on to his name a second ago. I, on the other hand, stare at his wrists. The crisscross of dark gray lines. The crusted zigzag down his arm. I did that to him. My own wrists ache. I rub at them, and hear myself say, “I couldn’t remember mine, either.”
Slowly, the boy looks up. “Really?”
“Mm-hmm.” I don’t like revisiting that time, but for the boy, I do. First week here, I had a roof over my head, and clothes, but I didn’t know who I was or who I was living for. No one, it seemed, would miss me if I drowned, and so I almost did. In the tub. I fell asleep, and woke up with water in my nose and mouth but also a name like a heartbeat in my head.
“It took a while,” I say, not wanting to give the boy a definitive timeline to compare his own progress to. “But it came back.”
Cee. My name is Cee, and when the boy intones it—“Cee . . . you said it was?”—something in me stirs. It’s the first time I’ve heard my name on another’s lips since washing up on the shore.
“Yeah,” I breathe. “C-E-E, pronounced like the sea outside that window.”
I want him to say it again.
He doesn’t. He looks at me, as if accepting this is reality, and I look at him, too. He is real. I have to hold my own hands to keep from touching him, because, apparently, as I’m learning, that’s how I connect to people. I want to feel their emotions. To share them and to shield them. I wish you were here, I suddenly think to Kay. I’d hold her and never let her go. But for now, as incomplete as I may be, I’m not alone.
I’m not alone.
“—red on your face.” The boy’s voice draws me out of my head. I’ve missed part of what he’s said, but I’m already catching on quicker, and when he taps the corner of his lip, I swipe at mine. A gray smear on my knuckles. I lick it, just to be sure. Iron blooms over my tongue.
Blood.
His or mine, I don’t know. Doesn’t matter. Red, the boy said.
He sees in color.
My stomach sinks. Still alone, in some ways. He has something I don’t. Should I tell him? I decide against it. He has his own missing pieces to worry about, evident when he asks me, “What if I never remember my name?” His throat bobs as he swallows. A lump grows in my own. I know what he’s looking for—the reassurance that can only be found outside of yourself. The squeeze of a hand, or a promise.
“You will,” I say, giving him both.
This time, he doesn’t flinch from my touch.
THE MEMORY RUSHED BACK IN
like the tide.
Saturday, six months ago. Temperatures set to an agreeable 26°C, when Kasey emerged from P2C headquarters on stratum-50 to find Celia waiting outside. She wore a baby-blue yoga set. Kasey was still in her school blazer. “My clothes—” she started as Celia took her hand.
“You won’t need them.”
A place where she didn’t need clothes, albeit borrowed from Celia? “Where are we going?” Kasey asked, rightfully concerned as they made their way to the nearest duct. They hadn’t always spent weekends together. For almost two years after Genevie’s death, they’d barely spoken to each other. Then the incident had happened, tearing science out of Kasey’s life. Celia had tried to fill the gap by reducing the time Kasey spent alone, in the company of her thoughts, as if they might be dangerous. Maybe they were. Kasey certainly wasn’t breaking laws while watching soaps, shopping, or doing whatever it was Celia planned, which, by her sister’s answer of “someplace special,” could mean anything from a mud spa to rock climbing. Just last week Kasey had been roasted alive in something called a “sauna.”
To make matters inconvenient on top of uncomfortable, the experiences, rarely ever virtual, predominantly took place in the lower stratums. But today, Celia didn’t get off at stratum-50 or -40. Stratum-30 came and passed, then stratum-25. Six passengers remained as the duct continued downward, stratums blurring beyond the polyglass cylinder until Kasey deduced their destination.
“We shouldn’t.” Stratum-0 was off-limits; David Mizuhara had said so himself in one of his once-a-month messages.
“You’ve got to see it, love,” said Celia as three more people got off at the next stop.
“I’ve seen the stratum.” Kasey had holo-ed there on a class field trip.
“No, the ocean. Up close,” Celia insisted before Kasey could argue they’d also seen the ocean from the Cole’s unit while watching the sun set—another one of Celia’s favorite pastimes. “It makes a world of difference.”
“All right,” Kasey conceded, as if they hadn’t already arrived. “Just this once.”
As the bottommost layer to the eco-city, stratum-0 functioned as part shipping dock, part observation deck. The lowest point of its bowl-like belly was formed completely out of polyglass, creating the illusion that the sea was beneath one’s feet, and an unfortunate greenhouse effect. Perspiring, Kasey watched as Celia stared at the ocean. “Why do you like it so much?” she asked. Try as she might, she couldn’t see what was so special about water, salt, and heavy metals.
