Chapter 14

14

SHE WOULD NEVER SEE THEbody.

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.”

“A place in between land and water, where there is power in a single step.”

“You disagree.” She made it a statement; she didn’t pretend at uncertainty when she was certain. “Why?” she asked, less certain about how she could infer so much from his tone alone.

“I think most choices are made before you reach the edge.”

Kasey agreed with him. She’d tried to jump. To expose herself. To bleed. But she was only fooling herself; she’d never choose self-destruction. Her brain was too solution-driven.

Or should have been. Because at this very moment, her Intraface pinged with a reminder from P2C headquarters that the emergency meeting was about to start and she was faced with the other choice she’d made: the choice not to help. Kasey swiped the message away; others took its place, namely unread ones from Meridian.

Where are you? Have you seen the news? Are you home?

Home. The nature of it—bubble-wrapped and safe—felt as alien to Kasey as it had to Celia.

“Actinium.” His name burned her lips. She looked to him just as he looked to her, and for a heartbeat, she saw something in his gaze. A wavering. His lips parted.

But Kasey spoke first. “I have something to confess.”

Celia had loved the sea. Loved the whitecaps that foamed like milk, the waltz of sunlight atop the peaks. Kasey did not. The sea was a trillion strands of hair, infinitely tangled on the surface and infinitely dense beneath. It distorted time: Minutes passed like hours and hours passed like minutes out there. It distorted space, made the horizon seem within reach.

And it was the perfect place for hiding secrets.

I killed Celia. I knew visiting the sea in person was a bad idea. I didn’t stop her.But as much as guilt would have substantiated her humanity, she couldn’t summon it. Anger was the easier emotion to access. Celia had been foolish to swim in the ocean, but she shouldn’t have had to die for it. Someone—a person, a company, or multiples of each—had polluted the sea. In secret. It’d gone unreported. Unremedied. Kasey had been punished when she’d broken international law; had they? If not, why should she help them? Why better a world when better for Celia had meant choosing where and when to die?

A barrier in Kasey fell. The solution spilled out of her. All of it, including the final piece she’d told no one of. She waited for Actinium’s disgust, his horror. Receiving neither, she barreled on.

“I can help,” she finished, breathless. “But I don’t want to.”

Her confession. Science was impartial to everything and everyone. It either worked or didn’t. It didn’t say who deserved to benefit. The solution existed; therefore, it had to be shared.

“I don’t want to help,” she repeated, more quietly, as lightning flashed in the distance. The storm rumbled in. The rain thundered down.

Actinium was right; the shield ended where they stood. Kasey could almost see the arc of it before her eyes, where the rain passed through less forcefully, misting over them. Nervous, she looked to him, this boy who’d used science for the people’s good. What would he think of her now?

As she waited for a response, a gale swooped in from the sea. Filtered by the shield or not, it felt real. It tugged at Kasey’s clothes, dampened her face. It swept Actinium’s carefully parted hair into his eyes, obscuring his expression. But his voice rang as clear as it had since day one.

“Who said anything about helping?”