I miss Hubert, I decide. I miss the simple emotions he inspired in me, nothing like this hopelessly tangled mess I feel now. “You could sound more sad.”
Hero doesn’t say anything. I peek over at him and see his half-lidded eyes on the moon.
I look to the moon too.
Minutes later, he reaches for my hand.
His fingers say what his voice does not.
More minutes later, his voice drifts through the night. He asks if I plan on staying out.
“Yeah,” I murmur. “I think so.”
I don’t want you to see me go.
My hand goes cold as he releases it. He sits up, gets to his feet, and says, “Be right back.”
I sit up too, twisting around to watch as he jogs across the shore. He disappears inside the house and remerges moments later, stuff piled in his arms. A pillow and blanket, I see once he nears. He props the pillow against Genevie’s side and spreads the blanket on the ground. Then he stands there, for a silent beat, and it takes everything in me to stay sitting, to not run after him when he finally turns and walks back to the house, a solitary figure in the dark.
Swallowing, I lean against the pillow, pull the blanket over my shoulders, and face the sea. Hours pass. The surf recedes. The sky peels back, the horizon gum-pink. I stare at the colors changing, and remember doing something similar from a glass cone of a room, way up high. Watching sunrise. With Kay.
It’s time to go home.
* * *
U-me rolls down to the shore as I’m pushing Genevie into the surf.
“Take care of him, U-me.” Just in case.
U-me’s not programmed to vocalize a response to a direct command, but I know she hears me. She was the first one who did on this island. Before Hubert, and before Hero, she was all I had.
“I’ll be back for you, too,” I say, and to my relief, U-me, unlike Hero, believes in me.
“Strongly agree.”
Overcome, I drop a kiss on her bulky head. Then I seize the oar Hero made for me and row into the sea, toward the rising sun.
18
THROUGHOUT THE COURSE OF CIVILIZATION, humans had looked to the heavens for answers. In stars, they found maps. In suns, they found gods.
In the sky beyond the sky, they thought they’d find a second home.
But when faced with the question of where to house displaced coastal and island communities, the founding Mizuharas hadn’t looked up, but down.
Ocean deep.
Science backed the decision to build the first eco-city prototypes on the seafloor. Hydraulic-pressure turbines were more efficient than their air counterparts, and the sea was also a natural buffer against erosion. As long as you didn’t （1） build over a tectonic region, or （2） use materials that would react with saltwater electrolytes, the cities could theoretically last a millennium.
But not everyone was married to the idea of a plankton-like existence, and as the beta-testing population grew, so did demands for better conditions. The people, Kasey imagined, likely made the same arguments as Celia. Why should they have to sacrifice access to basics such as sunlight and air while the rest of the world went on with their day-to-day, unaffected lives?
And so the seafloor eco-cites were abandoned. Forgotten. Beta-testers had signed non-disclosure agreements that allowed their memories to be cognicized post-experiment, and knowledge of the first-gen eco-cities died out of the populace, living on only among the world’s governing bodies and the Mizuharas.
As a member of both, Kasey had immediately thought of the underwater cities when presented with the annual science competition challenge: Save the world from an asteroid on course for Earth.
The rest of the team had had their doubts. “Dinner’s on me if this works,” Sid had said.
They’d won.
By proving the first-gen eco-cities could contain the entire human population if everyone were stored in a medical-grade stasis pod, their team modeled a scenario where mankind skipped the worst centuries of hellfire and sooty-darkness by waiting it out in stasis under the sea. It wasn’t glamorous, but it was more realistic than manipulating space time or diverting the asteroid, and less of an upheaval than an extraterrestrial exodus.
“Hibernation,” Meridian had dubbed the solution, which Kasey now posited to the P2C and Worldwide Union officers through the conference room speakers. Asteroid fallout, carbon emissions, and radioaxon releases all had something in common: Time was the best medicine. Climate might change. Oceans might rise. Species might mutate, or vanish. But given enough time, nature would do what nature did best: break down the elements that didn’t belong.
“An advanced barometer will measure outside conditions,” Kasey explained. “When habitable thresholds are reached and verified, stasis-pods will open.”