How could she?
If they plotted their reactions, which one of them would be further from the mean?
As she struggled to compute, Actinium released the mug. The shards fell onto the countertop; the crimson puddle looked awfully like red ice pop melt. With his good hand, he opened the unit’s door. “Come.” His voice betrayed nothing. “It should be here.”
Kasey, not sure what was happening anymore, came.
Down the stairs they went. GRAPHYC was busy this morning. Sedated clientele filled the operating rooms. None of them noticed the boy, bleeding, or the girl following him. They exited the body shop and ascended to street level. The alleyway bobbed into view—as did the copterbot parked in the middle of it, painted white and green.
Hospel colors.
Like lightning, it struck Kasey. Why Actinium had done what he’d done. Hospels, unlike GRAPHYC, admitted people based on need. Now they had a need—a biomonitor validated reason, a chance to confront the doctor who’d discharged Celia—and it was no thanks to Kasey.
A funny pressure mounted in her throat. Swallowing it, she climbed into a copterbot she should have summoned with her own blood. Actinium joined her, prompting the bot to chime INVALID: USER UNRANKED. A timely reminder. Out in the public domain, with both their IDs on auto-display overhead, it was impossible to ignore that [ACTINIUM, rank: 0] was a hacked account. Kasey was sitting thigh to thigh with a stranger.
But that was the thing about Celia. She brought people together despite their differences. And how different they were, Kasey thought, too shaken by Actinium’s actions, calculated or not, to appreciate the way he reprogrammed the copterbot to register Kasey’s ID even though it wasn’t Kasey’s emergency.
MIZUHARA, KASEY, intoned the copterbot as they lifted off the ground. HOME LOCATION, CONFIRMED. YOU WILL BE TAKEN TO THE HOSPEL ON STRATUM-10.
The unit complexes diminished beneath them, hedge-maze-like as they rose to the undersky of the overhead stratum. An aperture opened—in that stratum and every subsequent one. The copterbot shot through the eco-city like a bullet. Celia would’ve loved the thrill—had before the crash that claimed their mom and the Coles’ lives. Kasey, less traumatized but also less accident prone, hadn’t seen the appeal then and couldn’t see it now. The ache in her throat spread, gripping her chest. She was out of the copterbot the second it landed, already walking toward the hospel before remembering Actinium.
“Go,” he said when she turned back to him in painfully obvious afterthought.
“Your hand—”
“Needs to be seen in Emergency.” He tilted his head to the side entrance labeled URGENT. “We can reconvene outside.”
Fine by Kasey. Moral support didn’t stitch wounds. He’d live without her. But was it too reptilian of her to accept his plan on the spot? She should at least pretend to care, to ask him—
“I’ll be fine.” Actinium cleared his throat, looking away as Kasey stared. “If that helps.”
Yes, it did. She nodded at Actinium, and strode on. The automatic polyglass doors parted for her. The hospel lobby, with its parquet floors and hanging ferns, was styled much like the Coles’ own unit. They were its founders, in case one couldn’t tell from the wall banner commemorating the upcoming anniversary of their passing, or the sign-in bots stationed along the lobby perimeter. Designed in compliance with the Ester Act, the bots were clunky, their faces featureless and therefore impossible to confuse with any of the human nurses, who attracted incoming patients with their smiles. Not Kasey. She approached the bots first, only to learn that walk-in-appointment scheduling required personalized communication beyond the bots’ authorization levels, forcing her to turn to the reception desk, where three human nurses sat. The air above their heads was unranked. Kasey’s rank was gone too, when she checked. Puzzling—her Intraface labeled the lobby as public domain—until Kasey saw the brass plaque atop the reception desk.
PATIENT CONFIDENTIALITY IS A HUMAN RIGHT
YOUR PRIVACY MATTERS TO US
Patient confidentiality, for all intents and purposes, had killed Celia. Anger flared, hot in Kasey’s throat. It must’ve scorched her voice when she requested to see Dr. Goldstein, because the smile dimmed from the middle nurse’s face. “Reason for visiting?”
“My sister.”
The nurse waited, then sighed when Kasey didn’t elaborate. “Confirm your ID by looking at the red dot please,” she said, swiping a holograph across the reception desk.