“Meiran! Meiran!”
Meridian waved back. Her relatives, Kasey realized, tensing at the sight of their unmasked faces—right before all the faces in the crowd glitched into Celia’s, eyes blacked out by block letters.
IF PREMIER DU COULDN’T SAVE 1.5MIL LIVES
DON’T EXPECT THE ALIENS TO SAVE YOU
The image overlays vanished by the next blink. Meridian’s relatives became Meridian’s relatives again, but their smiles were gone.
Meridian appeared just as stricken. “What was that?”
“An Intraface hack,” Actinium answered.
Kasey checked her files. Everything was still there, including her few stored memories of Celia. The hackers must have accessed them to generate the faces.
The ache in her chest reawakened, and as the premier greeted them inside the embassy, a marble room with tall windows, her second heart pulsed. Who Actinium was didn’t change what’d happened to Celia. Didn’t change the amount of energy being used to warm this room, and how much more people had to pollute just to solve problems produced by pollution. “Aliens,” the protestors called them. Was it because they lived in the sky? Because they’d come down to subjugate them to another way of life? Would people ever willingly give up their freedoms for the good of others? Kasey wondered as attendants led them to the auditorium, in which they were to present the solution. Or did their family members first have to die?
Ding. A message from Actinium. Are you okay? he asked, and Kasey almost flinched. As if he could claim to care.
And as if she should care. Who did you see? she wanted to ask him. Your parents?
A moment alone, without Meridian, was all she needed.
But for now:
Yes, she replied, before stepping onto the stage to tell more lies.
* * *
A moment alone, Kasey quickly learned, was as scarce as clean air on this trip. P2C, with their trademark efficiency, had scheduled back-to-back events. After their presentation, they were to visit a hard-hit midland Territory 4 hospel. They would be delivered by fueled plane; the 2,000 km flight would be the equivalent of Kasey’s carbon emissions for the last five years.
Whatever it took to appear accessible.
As they crossed into the countryside, Kasey snuck a sideways glance at Actinium. Territory 4 was where the crash had happened. What was he thinking? Feeling? His mind grew more unknowable to her by the minute, like the terrain below as night crept over it. Then the plane dropped in altitude, bringing the land into grotesque focus. The midland basin, a natural fortress since antiquity, had been transformed into a death trap. Mountains had bulldozed over villages, trees torn out of the ground like bones through skin, and in places, the crust itself had fissured. Scars of hardened lava wormed through the land—more than Kasey had ever beheld. Celia might have seen beauty. Kasey only saw only a brutal reminder of a world untamed by its human owners, if they even deserved the title. For all their innovations, they were microscopic, a fact that became painfully apparent when they landed outside the hospel.
Another misleading term.
Eco-city hospels were all like the one Kasey had stormed into: calming sanctuaries built to maximize the human experience. This hospel, constructed to treat victims of radioaxon poisoning from a compromised fission plant, 20 km north, was as flimsy as a pop-up market and loud as a factory, its only product being death. Trucks emblazoned with the Worldwide Union symbol rumbled through the dirt. Personnel—including members of the Territory 4 defense force—rushed down barely set tar walkways. In the eco-cities, there was one doctor for every hundred citizens. Here, whatever the ratio was, it didn’t seem like enough. Medics certainly couldn’t be spared for PR, and the one assigned to them was red in the face and arguing with the P2C camera crew when Meridian, Actinium, and Kasey reached her. She looked to be around Celia’s age.
Like Celia, she wore no antiskin.
This wasn’t the island. Wasn’t shielded. A gurney rattled by them, bearing a body covered by a sheet, and Kasey’s mouth dried. “Where’s your antiskin?” she asked the medic.
“Ran out.” Then the medic turned her attention back to the crew—“One tour, that’s it”—but the crew’s attention had swiveled to Actinium. Everyone stared as he unzipped and stepped out of his antiskin.
He placed the protective gear into the medic’s hands.
The cam swung back to Kasey before she could recover. The unspoken cue lingered.
I’d never put you in danger, Actinium had promised. So had Ekaterina. You won’t be exposed. But vows were human constructs. They died out here, in the wilderness.