“Sit down,” she ordered. He sat; she inserted the Intraface into the projector before she could second-guess herself. A vertical beam rose from the top of the machine, fanning open to form a gray screen.
WELCOME, CELIA
The wrongness of being inside Celia’s brain coiled like a snake around Kasey’s own. Then Actinium opened a report of Celia’s Intraface activity, and Kasey freed her mind.
Data. Facts. These were things she deserved to look at.
The data: Celia holo-ed 20.5 fewer hours per week than the average person. Her only apps were the standard downloads. The bulk of her Intraface storage was devoted to captured memories, tens of thousands of them, sorted by topic and date. A hundred thousand hours’ worth of footage. They’d be here for years if they reviewed them all, so when Actinium suggested six months, Kasey nodded. Six months before Celia’s disappearance it was.
She opened the appropriate folder, took a deep breath, and hit play.
It all came crashing in. Memory after memory after memory, the good the bad the damning. The first time they visited the sea together in person, and then—as Kasey learned reviewing the rest of the footage labeled SEA—all the other times Celia had returned by herself, at night, without Kasey knowing. Other secret nights spent at clubs. Sleepovers. Yoga and brunches with friends—so many friends; laughter and faces endless, people and places coming alive under the rays of Celia’s attention.
Two weeks of memories reviewed, five and a half months more to go.
At four months to go, Actinium got up, went down, came back up. Kasey found a protein cube pressed into her hand. Later, she descended herself to use the ground floor restroom, and was startled to see that GRAPHYC had closed for the day. Time did not pass in Actinium’s windowless unit—only Celia’s life did—but outside day became night then day again. The morning news alert popped up on Kasey’s Intraface. Tremors, detected off the coast of Territory 4. Pundit Linscott Horn’s speech postponed. Meridian, messaging to ask Kasey where she was. No messages from David; safe to assume he’d spent the night at P2C headquarters.
Two months to go. Kasey looked up and met Actinium’s gaze. His eyes were bloodshot; she imagined hers were too. But neither offered to take over for the other. An agreement existed between them, made at some point during the wordless night.
They were both in this to the end.
One month. One week. One day.
Then blackness. The final memory played. The tsunami of Celia’s life pulled back, taking Kasey’s with it. She felt like a corpse, deposited on the sand. Ears flooded, eyes brined. If senses were a nonrenewable resource, she’d just spent her entire allocation on a fraction of her sister’s life. It was so much more saturated than hers. So much more. The world would have lost a lot less without Kasey, whose brain was already rebooting, compiling conclusions. They’d found no red flags. Nothing of surprise, secret nighttime sojourns aside （their absence would have been more surprising）。 Nothing, as Actinium had said before, that would have left Celia feeling cornered. The only victims were the ones she’d left behind.
Like Tristan/Dmitri.
I need to know if it was my fault.
Wait.
Where were the boy-specific memories?
Stored in a separate place, Kasey discovered. A folder labeled XXX. She opened a preview of it. A mistake. She closed it; this was where she drew the line. “You do it,” she said to Actinium.
“There’s another way.” Actinium opened Celia’s biomonitor data, and Kasey berated herself. Right. Emotions could be elucidated through numbers. She pulled up a monthly health report round-up. She knew what she was looking for: empirical evidence of heartbreak or trauma. Irregularities in neurotransmitter levels. Imbalances in mood. Data and charts, all of which she found.
None of which illustrated the picture she thought she was searching for.
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.