P2C WOULD LIKE TO REMIND ECO-CITIZENS TO REMAIN CALM
The reminder was unnecessary. As the Worldwide Union broadcast rolled—outside territory towers crumbling like blocks, bridges breaking over highways, residential condos disappearing under landslides, everything happening in real time, in real life—people continued shopping for underwear, protein cubes, and the few essentials still needed outside of holo. Nothing could reach the sky. Not the megaquake shock waves or the tsunamis they stirred up. Air was the only thing they shared with the greater world, and even that was filtered. The eco-cities had been built to protect the planet—and the people from it.
But the difference between asylum and prison was membrane-thin. It could be ruptured by the death of a sister, a treacherous lie.
Or a simple malfunction.
From above, Kasey watched it happen. It started with one person. They got onto the duct. The duct didn’t move for them, for the same reason the copterbot hadn’t responded to Actinium. Ranks were required to activate most of the eco-city’s services, simple as that, but today, in a perfect storm with the news, people assumed the worst. What ensued was a spectacle so illogical and asinine Kasey couldn’t watch it. Couldn’t watch people stampeding for the ducts, so she watched the Worldwide Union broadcast instead. Saw reporters announcing radioaxons were already on the move, released by compromised fission plants. Stared at the graphs, concentric circles representing the radiated areas, blue swatches representing the trajectories of airborne radioaxons, numbers representing the already dead and soon-to-be-dead.
Kasey should have been one of them. Would have, if Celia had worn her antiskin in the water and Kasey hadn’t.
Another P2C alert flashed on her Intraface—requesting P2C officer support on stratum-25 and help in restoring the ranks, something Kasey could have assisted with but she was unreachable, disconnected. Not even the screams of people below, overpowering the drone of the copterbot engine, could get through to her. Just moments ago, everyone had been so assured of their place in the world. Before they became I, no one cared when they died.
They don’t deserve to be safe. I don’t deserve to be safe.
“They’ve found the boat,” she heard herself say.
“Where?” Actinium asked, as she knew he would. This boy who’d bleed for Celia, who didn’t care about his well-being, just as Kasey no longer cared about hers.
“Landmass six-sixty,” she said, and gave him the coordinates to the island.
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“AND THIS,” I SAY, CONCLUDING the tour of the island, “is the ridge.”
We stand under its elongating shadow. I make it a rule to never scale the ridge past sundown, and so finding new boat parts will have to wait. My accomplishment for today? Placating the boy beside me.
He’s dressed now, in a sweater of his choice and cargo pants that reveal a little too much ankle. His hair spills back as he cranes his head. “You actually climb this thing?”
“Sometimes every other day.”
“Why?”
He asks it like I’m out of my mind, and I get it. The wall of rock seems impossibly steep in the gathering dark. Just the sight of it causes my shoulders to spasm with phantom memories of pulled tendons and popped sockets. Once, I fell off about halfway up and saw my life flash through my eyes. I’m not exaggerating—before blacking out, I heard my skull crack and thought, That’s it. I’m dead. I’m still not sure how I woke up sometime later with a killer migraine but no brains on the ground. My brain does die a bit now, at the idea of doing it all over again.
But the alternative—staying on this island, forever separated from Kay—is a fate worse than death.
I turn away from the ridge and its imposing height and start heading back shore side. “I’m looking for my sister,” I say as a breeze snaps in, briny and cold. It sends a rustle through the skimpy shrubs clinging to the rock scape. Ripples flash across the rainwater ponds.
“I thought you said this island was abandoned,” the boy calls after me.
“It is.”
“Then where’s your sister?”
He’s falling behind, the snail. Wait for him—but I won’t let him slow me down.
“Out there.” I nod as I walk, tilting my chin toward the land before us, the shale that will eventually turn into gravel and gravel into sand. The island is small enough that if I concentrate, I can hear the waves, breaking upon the shore. “Somewhere across the sea.”
“And you know this how?” asks the boy.