“Mm-hmm?”
“I didn’t want to wake you,” says the boy, still whispering. I open my eyes fully. He stands at the other end of the couch, in a slant of moonlight coming from the window behind my head. His face is pale. Tired, but not upset.
I’m tired too, and too relieved for pretenses. “I wasn’t actually asleep,” I admit, sitting up. “I was waiting for you.”
A beat of silence, slightly awkward. Too honest? Maybe. Well, better say what I’ve been waiting all night to say. “I’m—”
“Sorry.” The boy steals the apology from my mouth. “For making you wait. And for earlier. I may not understand your way of life, but I can respect it. As for the taros…” He begins to explain how the tubers multiply as they grow.
I cut him off. “I trust you.”
The words feel right, even if they surprise me. They seem to surprise the boy more. His lips stay parted for a second. Then they close. He looks away. “You know nothing about me.”
His silence says the rest. I know nothing about me.
If only I could take back my words from before or give him some of my memories. But all I can offer is, “I know you’re good at cooking and cleaning and gardening, and probably a whole lot else. And I’m sorry too.” My throat grows thorny and I look to the window, the glass reflecting my face. “I say things I don’t mean sometimes, when I’m scared.”
“Do I scare you?”
“No.” His questions only watered the uncertainties already seeded within me.
“Even though I tried to kill you?” asks the boy. “Supposedly,” he adds, grudgingly as ever.
That makes me smile. “What can I say?” I turn away from the window. “I enjoy living on the edge.” I lay myself back down, stretched out like how I was before except I feel more vulnerable now, less like part of the couch and more like a flesh-and-blood body as our gazes meet.
“I’m glad you’re here,” I murmur. Not that I’d wish this island life upon my worst enemy, but I think he knows what I mean.
I wonder if he’s glad I’m here, too.
If he is, he doesn’t say so. Only, “You should take the bed.”
“I like it better here.”
Silence.
Stay with me, I think as the boy takes a breath.
And says, “Good night, Cee.”
“Night.” I watch as he goes, something yawning open in my chest. It hurts like a wound, even though I’m used to being alone.
Except I’m not alone. Alone is an island. It’s an uncrossable sea, being too far from another soul, whereas lonely is being too close, in the same house yet separated by walls because we choose to be, and when I fall asleep, the pain of loneliness follows me as I dream of more walls—this time between me and Kay. I can feel her in my mind, but I can’t feel her, and so I break the wall, tear it apart with my bare hands, to find nothing on the other side but whiteness, blindingly bright, and the cry of gulls.
12
THE COPTERBOT LANDED ON THE gray sands of the shore.
This was it. The island. There was the house up on the rocks, looking no different than it had since the sisters’ last visit four months ago. It just felt like a lifetime, and Kasey a changed person.
Or so she thought. Her vision of how this would go—starting with having the grief-stricken courage to expose herself—vanished like the fantasy it was when the copterbot door opened on Actinium’s side and her brain defaulted to logic mode. She caught his arm. “The radioaxons—”
“It’s safe.”
Safe. You’re safe with me, Celia had said, her expression harrowingly similar to Actinium’s as he went on to say, “I wouldn’t put you in danger,” before his gaze fell to Kasey’s hand, still on his arm.
She knew what he had to be thinking: She hadn’t reached for him when he’d cut himself. Hadn’t seemed nearly as concerned. But that damage was visible. Repairable. Radioaxon poisoning was neither and all the more dangerous for it.
Still, she forced herself to release him. Watched, helpless, as Actinium stepped into the open air in nothing more than the black button-down and jeans they’d purchased on stratum-25. He turned back to her, offering a hand. She didn’t take it. She told herself it was because of his bandages but in reality, she was afraid he’d feel her fingers shaking in fear for her own life despite losing one so much more vibrant than hers.
By herself, she climbed down, disoriented, as always, to enter a new world. That’s what Landmass-660 felt like to her. It didn’t technically belong to any outside territory, but it was as far “outside” as Kasey had ever gone, and nothing like the eco-city. The ground here was alive, sand shifting under her feet. The sky above was mold-gray and far deeper than the ninety meters allotted per stratum, and wind existed, exploding in erratic, sneeze-like bursts. Was it spreading radioaxons? Suppressing the thought and the panic it sprung, Kasey looked to the house on the beach as a figure emerged on its porch, waving at them. Actinium waved back, leaving Kasey no choice but to lift an arm too, trying to wave but not quite able to because this wasn’t right. She should have been here with Celia.