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, sliced 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.”