The air above her head shifted; she glanced up to see Actinium, leaned in beside her. He took one look at the living room and sighed. An odd sound, coming from him. Even odder was his mutter, something about “going outside.”
Before Kasey could ask what was wrong with inside, a scream bounded toward them.
“Act!” Roma, one of the nine-year-old twins, burst into the kitchen and ran for Actinium, skidding to a stop upon seeing Kasey. “Who’s that?”
They’d met before, but Kasey didn’t blame Roma for forgetting. Celia was the one who’d spent hours making mud-patty cakes with the twins, while Kasey stood off to the side, not very good with children. She was worse at introductions, so she left the honors to Actinium.
“A friend,” he said. Not quite true, but Kasey supposed friend was easier for kids to understand. Simple, clear-cut—
“A girl friend?”
“No,” Kasey said as Mrs. O’Shea’s voice floated in from the living room.
“Actinium? Is that you?”
The next thing Kasey knew, islanders were piling into the fuel-bar. She edged out of the way as they beelined for Actinium, shaking his hand, hugging him. Actinium reciprocated far more woodenly than Kasey would have expected from him. “You told them,” he said to Leona, sounding aggrieved, and Kasey sent him her sympathies as the mob swept him into the living room.
“They were all rushing to evacuate!” Leona called after them. “I had to explain!”
“Explain what?” Kasey asked Leona as the kitchen emptied. “Why doesn’t anyone have to evacuate?”
Leona lifted the kettle from the stove. “Because the air is filtered. Act built a shield around the island.”
Kasey blinked.
She knew perfectly well what Leona meant by shield, as an eco-city denizen protected by one. A filtration and force-field system, invisible yet impenetrable, sieving out toxins and shielding city infrastructure from the effects of elemental erosion. Before the science ban, Kasey had spent an entire summer deciphering shield mechanics and equations. She could recreate a miniature model if she tried. But around the whole of this island?
“That’s…” Kasey trailed off as the pieces fell into place. Leona not wearing a mask. The people’s warm reception. And Actinium. Come to think of it, he’d reprogrammed the hospel copterbot like it was nothing, with all the cool-headedness Kasey had witnessed during their first meeting, but those impressions had been erased, like recessive genes, by the episode with the mug. Even now, Kasey could smell the blood, but maybe she’d been too quick to judge.
“… a big project,” she finished, the words feeling inadequate.
“It’s my fault,” said Leona, smiling sheepishly as she filled the mugs on the table. Kasey set more out. “Thank you, dear. It’s like what I told you girls: I just can’t bear to abandon Maisie’s home.” Yes, Kasey remembered Leona saying so one time after Kasey pronounced the house structurally unsound. “But with all the talk of worsening storms, Act wouldn’t put up with me staying on the wrong side of the levee.”
“So he built a shield for you.”
“For everyone,” said Leona, and Kasey nodded. It wasn’t the first over-the-top thing a boy had done to woo her sister. The son of an illusion-tech CEO had inscribed every undersky in the eco-city with love poems dedicated to her. In Kasey’s unsolicited opinion, Actinium’s grand gesture was superior. Impressive, actually. Amazing—the word that’d eluded Kasey.
“He only got around to checking the shield on my side of the levee this month, though,” Leona continued. “So I invited them over for my peace of mind.” She gestured at the living room and Kasey looked to it for a second time, gaze pinpointing Actinium. He was facing away from her, talking to Mr. Reddy.
The back of his shirt was soaked through.
How—when—where? It took Kasey a second to figure it out. On the rocks. He’d been standing behind her. The sea must have sprayed him then. Strange, that he hadn’t moved away.
Then her attention was drawn to the center of everyone else’s, to the holographs of tsunamis and landslides befalling ten out of the twelve outside territories, the rest left to contend with microcinogen and radioaxon fallout far more pernicious than the initial megaquake.
It was the moment people had failed to prepare for, as if preparing too well made an event inevitable. A logical fallacy. So was human exceptionalism; 99.9% of species went extinct. The end of their road was not an if, but a when. The world would end.