Chapter 47

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I THOUGHT I’D FACE MYend at sea.

But it’s here, on the ridge, staring at the spot Hero stood heartbeats ago, that I realize no matter what I choose, I will lose a part of me. There is no winning.

Fuck everything, then. Fuck my tears, which blind me, and my lungs, spasming as I try to make the climb down. The rocks hurt my knees even though the pain is just part of my programming, and I curse, curse Hero, who, considerate to the end, even thought to jump off on the meadow side, as if to give me the option of bypassing his body completely on my way home.

Well, too bad. Whatever I decide, I’m not leaving him. I grit my teeth and continue my descent. The fog thins, and I start to make out the rubble meters below me, and—

Blood.

Blood on skin. Blood on bone.

Blood on something white but decidedly not bone.

Spindly tubules tear out from his torso, where his rib cage should be. They flex and dance like spider legs across his body, a body already on the mend.

I fling my gaze skyward, suddenly weak in the limbs. The denial surges again, and I think, That can’t be him. We ache and cry and gasp with so much life. But when I try to continue my descent, I find that I can’t. Death should be silent, but Hero’s body clicks and clacks as it puts itself back together. The uncanny sounds nauseate me. Bile sears my throat.

I wanted to give you the space to decide. The time.

“Stupid stupid stupid.” And yet, so well-thought-out. He can’t come after me while he’s dead. He can’t hold me and tell me that he wants me to stay, either. From now until he’s revived, it’s truly just me and my decision.

The rope bites into my hands as I hang, unmoving. Minutes pass. Or hours. Time always seemed distorted on this island. Now it vanishes all together as a dimension.

Numbly, I begin the climb back up.

I reach the top. I’m sorry. Without giving my muscles the chance to recover, I descend down the other side, hardly able to see through my tears.

I’m sorry.

I hope my arms will give out. I hope to fall, break, and wake with Hero.

I decided, I’d lie to him. I decided to stay.

But I don’t fall. Don’t break down. My legs bring me all the way back to the house before they give. I clutch to the kitchen countertop for support, sobs spuming from my chest.

I can’t do this alone.

“What do I do, U-me?” I gasp as U-me rolls into the kitchen, drawn by the sounds. “What do I do?”

U-me doesn’t answer. She’s not programmed to process questions, or make life-and-death decisions.

But I am.

I’m not alone. A team of people built my brain—built the memories in it, and even built the ability for me to generate my own. So go on, then, I think, stumbling into the bathroom. Give me your best shot. Convince me. I climb into the tub, fully clothed, and run the tap. Water bulges against the rim, then spills over onto the tiled floor. I let it submerge me.

I choose to drown.

The boy stands in the doorway of the operating room. An employee, by the looks of his apron. His voice, more precise than any of the scalpels laid out, sends a shiver down my spine.

For a second, the bodyworker with the puffer fish tattoo doesn’t speak. Then she shrugs. “Less work for me. Though I have to say, I didn’t take you for the type.”

The type of boy, I know she means, who’d be drawn to a pretty girl. But he should know I won’t be much for conversation. I can already feel the effects of whatever was in the flask, making everything hazy.

The bodyworker leaves, and the boy sits down before me, and through the haze I see that he’s not really someone I’d be attractedto. His hair is dark, yes, as are his eyes, which I like, but there’s a laser-sharp focus to them and an energy radiating off him that feels … intense.

“An Intraface extraction,” he says, and I nod, mouth dry, and that’s all I remember before the drug takes over, the world fades to dark, and when the lights come back on, I’m still sitting in the chair but the clip-on sheet around my neck is gone, and on a tray table before me is my Intraface. Extracted.

“You don’t have to die.”

I crane my neck to see the boy standing behind my chair. “There may not be a treatment in this lifetime,” he continues, “but they can pod you and save you in another.”

It’s obvious once I process it. “You looked.”

“I did.” He doesn’t even sound the least bit contrite. If he looked, then he knows—“Celia Mizuhara.”

My teeth click. So much for anonymity. “What do you want?” I demand.

“To protect your sister.”

That throws me for a loop and for a second, I forget to be angry. I blink twice at him, and receive an error message when his rank refuses to display. Of course—anonymity is GRAPHYC’s very selling point. But then he must do something on his end because his ID appears over his head.

ACTINIUM

Rank: 0

Yeah, right. Kay, incident with the bots aside, is the most law-abiding person I know. She’d see a hacked ID and stay six feet away from the boy.

But then he says, “I know we weren’t close, despite the machinations of our moms.”

Moms? He doesn’t offer any other words, just his gaze. His unsmiling, dark gaze, something familiar about the shape of his eyes. Then I see it—and can’t stop seeing it even though it doesn’t make any sense. The resemblance to Ester Cole has to be a coincidence. Even when the boy introduces himself as Andre Cole, I’m thinking,Impossible. I must still be recovering from the neuron-damper.

“You died,” I say.

“I should have,” says the boy calmly. “But I sent a bot in my place. A prank, you could call it.” He comes around to the front of my chair. “So now you understand.” Pulls up a stool. “How I know what your sister’s been through.” He sits down, and faces me. “For her, live.”

The info is rapid-fire. Bots. Kay. A dead boy—Andre Cole—who understands her. My brain struggles to piece it all together, then gives up. It focuses on what really matters.

For her, live.

He makes it sound simple. It’s not. To start, it’s not exactly “living” if you’re unconscious in a pod, frozen for who knows how long, basically dead in any era previous to ours. Plus, Kay doesn’t even know. Doesn’t know I was sneaking out to swim in the sea because I didn’t want to worry her. Clearlythat’s backfired. It’s my fault, and my fault only. Kay was always reminding me of the risks, and I didn’t listen to her. I chose to live the way I wanted to live. And now I alone should bear the consequences.

“Is there something so wrong about choosing a natural death?”I ask the boy. His eyes say yes. The option to freeze myself is there, so why not take it? It’s the rational choice, and it’s what Kay would tell me to do. “She’d convince me to change my mind,” I now say to the boy. “She’d even offer to pod herself with me.” And be twice as hurt if I stood by my choice, without knowing the truth: that I would pod myself in a heartbeat if I could wake up with Kay still beside me. But, as I explain to the boy, “She belongs here, in the now. If you care for her, you’d agree with me. So let me go out the way I want. It’s one of the few freedoms I have left.”

The boy—Andre—doesn’t reply. In silence, he stares at me, until I’m convinced he’s seen everything. How I shake at night. How I almost lost the courage, before coming here, to go through with this on my own. I want to tell Kay. Want her to tell me it’s okay, that the world will be still waiting for us—me and her—when we return eighty, a hundred, or a million years later.

I want to, but more than anything, I want her to make her choices independently of mine.

“Destroy it,” I say, nodding at the Intraface. “I’m not leaving until you do.”

Slowly, the boy stands. He retrieves a glass boxlike machine, and drops the Intraface into it. I’ve never used mine much, compared to other people, but there’s still something about seeing the kernel turn into a white powder that feels painful. All those memories, gone.

But Kay will always be with me, in my mind.

“Thank you,” I say to the boy when it’s done.

He nods once. Then, quietly: “I’m sorry.”

He says it so sincerely, like he’s personally sorry the ocean poisoned me, that I can’t help but laugh. And once I laugh, I suddenly feel lighter. “If you run into her,” I tell him, “remind her for me, will you? Tell her if there’s anyone who can move the world, it’s her.”

Then Celia rises out of the chair. Celia—not me. I’m still sitting as she stands, cleaving from me like an exorcised soul. I rise behind her, and watch as she walks, hair longer than mine, swishing with every stride out of the operating room, through the body shop. Even terminally ill, her brain jacked up on pills, she walks with a confidence that causes the conscious clientele to turn and look at her.

It’s the walk of someone who knows their place in the world.

And for once, she really does. I know, as Celia leaves GRAPHYC, that the last of her fear has vanished. This is her choice—to spend her final days under the open sky, breathing the air billions before her and billions after her will breathe, carried away by the amniotic blue. Living this lifetime to the fullest, even at the very end, in hopes Kay can live hers.

All this time, I thought it was about Kay. Her life versus mine. But now, with this final memory—one so clearly manufactured by my brain, nonexistent on Celia’s original Intraface—I realize Kay is not my choice.

I step out of the tub, and peer into the mirror upon the sink. I see her face. The girl I was built to look like. She stole my freedom of mind. I should hate her. But I can’t hate someone I understand. And I understand her, better than anyone. Better than even her sister.

I wish I could speak to her. I know she thinks she’s shallow, growing up with a mom like Genevie and a sibling like Kay, one a leader in the outside world, the other able to think up entire universes. Compared to them, Celia thinks of her seemingly outsized life as frivolous. I wish I could tell her she’s wrong. She’s brave. Strong. Her empathy is a well so deep it knows no bottom. Her grit is inexhaustible. Before I had a part of her name, I had her strength to crawl out of the water. I have her capacity for love, and I haven’t wasted it. I love U-me. I love Hubert. I love M.M. I’d love Hero too, given more time. I love the tang of sea wind on my face and the damp of the sand between my toes. I even love this island, believe it or not, and I love the idea someone else did too, a thousand years ago.

I’d love my sister, if I had one.

I don’t.

I may never know if Kay deserves to live more than me.

But I know this: No one enters this world by choice. If we’re lucky, we can choose how we leave.

I saw how Celia chose. I bore witness to how she used her final moments to be true to herself. A protector. She protected her sister, and now she’s not here to do it again, and it’s my turn, and I choose her. The one person who didn’t receive all of Celia’s unconditional love, who was here for me, through these last three years, before U-me and before Hero. A girl dead to the world, but she lives on in my brain and heart. She was looking for meaning. For something bigger than her. I can give that to her. I can find her. A girl lost at sea.

Not anymore.