Kasey, quite content where she was, tossed a float over the side for Celia. “Stay close.” She didn’t trust the waves to be as gentle as they appeared.
“Yes, Mom.” Celia splashed Kasey. Kasey wiped the droplets off her goggles. “Join me. It’ll be easier for you to save me from the sea monsters.”
“Sea monsters don’t exist.” But neither did something called willpower around Celia, and eventually, Kasey followed Celia into the ocean. She could barely feel the water through her antiskin.
“This is how life should be,” Celia said as the sun broke through the clouds.
The rays appeared gray through Kasey’s goggles, the lens so scratched they’d gone cloudy. “Should be like what?”
“Like how it was before. No one living in a casket or in the shadow of the stratum above them. Just sun and sky.” Too much sun and sky is lethal, Kasey wanted to say, but Celia went on. “It’s like what Ester used to say to Mom. We need to remember what makes us us.”
Emotions. Spontaneity. Self-awareness. Empathy. Kasey recited the Cole Humanness traits and Celia shook her head. “It’s something more immeasurable.” She floated onto her back, eyes squinting against the sun. “You know this thing called SPF? People used to cover themselves with it, for protection, and sure, it wasn’t great if you forgot, but no one let it stop them from going outside. I wish we lived in that time. I hate knowing our home is trying to kill us.”
Our home protects us. But Kasey knew Celia was referring to the world beyond the eco-cities, even if she struggled to grasp why. Celia was a star in their stratified society. She had no reason to look to the poisoned outside. It was Kasey who didn’t belong—here or anywhere.
“It’s just the way things are,” she said to Celia.
“It doesn’t have to be. You could change them for the better.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“Confidence, Kay. You’ll save the world someday.”
“The world doesn’t need saving.” Not by Kasey, who barely understood the people inhabiting it.
“Trust me,” said Celia. “It will.”
* * *
They’d ended up checking out the island. Even gone back. Just never into the water—not when Kasey had been there to stop it. The sea was an unregulated territory, a fluctuating variable. The toximeter had cleared a portion of it as safe that day, but who knew if it would stay that way?
It hadn’t. Each time Celia had swum in secret, she’d poisoned herself. It said so in her biomonitor report.
The blood charts: elevated levels of microcinogens most commonly found in deep-sea waste pipes.
The diagnosis: advanced organ failure and malignant cranial nerve sheath tumors.
The prognosis: one month to live without intervention.
And finally, a mandatory hospel summons, issued when ailments surpassed the biomonitor’s capabilities. Celia had paid her in-person visit two weeks before disappearing at sea. The Mizuharas’ designated family doctor had signed off on it.
Like everything else, Kasey hadn’t known.
Her body cooled. Her blood pressure stabilized. Her mind overrode her heart. It’d never actually let her fall and break. Homeostasis had to be maintained. It was rational to let go of the irreversible. One month to live without intervention was the prognosis.
Celia had been at sea for three.
In one piece, Kasey descended from the ceiling. Actinium, too. He went to the fuel-bar and picked up a mug, the tea gone cold. Kasey faced him, the silence between them different now, devastated, vast, a wasteland of skulls.
The crunch sounding like the cracking of bones.
Kasey blinked, not trusting her sleep-deprived eyes. Actinium didn’t blink; he simply watched as his blood dribbled onto the countertop, the flow quickening as he squeezed the mug—or what was left of it, glass shards driven deeper into his fist.
Have you lost it? Celia would shout; Kasey swore she heard her sister’s voice. She’d seize Actinium’s wrist and pry the broken glass from his grip. But Celia wasn’t here. Celia was dead, and maybe that’s why he’d broken it, Kasey thought, as if analyzing some case study around the P2C conference table, before the smell hit her. Iron.
Blood. More than she’d ever seen.
She started to approach Actinium like one might a wild beast. She couldn’t fathom what he was thinking, could imagine his mind’s eye—an eruption of biomonitor alerts—but not his mind. Are you okay? a better person would have asked, but instead, Kasey wanted to know how? How could glass yield to flesh? How could pain beget more pain? How could he be this calm?