Kasey should have been prepared.
She took off her antiskin, flesh crawling as it came into contact with air. Her biomonitor warned her of the toxins entering her system. Only for a little while, she told herself.
Just this once.
Meridian started to unzip hers.
Just one swim.
Her fingers, Kasey noticed, were shaking.
One more trip—
“Don’t.”
The boom and camera swung Kasey’s way.
“We’re being filmed,” Meridian muttered beneath her breath. Kasey didn’t care. She was well aware of the price she and Actinium would have to pay to make others do the same. But Meridian didn’t have to be caught in the crosshairs, and Kasey was relieved when the medic interrupted them.
“We done here?” The medic strode down the tar walkway and shouted “Come on!” when they lagged. “I don’t have all day!”
They followed the medic into the arm of a ward, the narrow path tiled with cardboard and deconstructed crates. PVC strips, held together with duct tape, formed the walls around them, rippling as they walked. The air grew acrid with the smell of waste, human and chemical, and Kasey, who’d barely survived stratum-22, was woozy by the time they reached a series of plasterboard doors set into the walls, leading presumably to patient rooms. In the back of her mind, she understood she couldn’t face other humans like this. If she vomited on camera, it’d completely undo the point of the visit.
“Wait—” she started to say to the medic, and broke off at the bang. It came from one of the plasterboard doors as it fell down and a man burst out, a bundle in his arms.
He ran straight into the wall.
The PVC rippled, absorbing the impact. But Kasey couldn’t absorb what she was seeing. She stared as the man rammed into the PVC again, as if expecting it to yield. The duct tape held.
And so he turned, and charged toward them instead.
“Don’t engage!” shouted the medic.
Meridian flattened against the wall. Kasey stumbled to the side.
Actinium didn’t move. His head snapped up when the man was almost upon him.
His fist cocked back.
Later, Kasey would try to sequence the memory. The initiation. The escalation. What came first—the punch that slammed into the man’s face, causing the bundle to tumble from his arms, or the knife, flashing in the man’s hand? But this moment, like everything else about the trip, would resist her. It followed no order but nature’s disorder.
Meridian screamed. The medic cursed, and called for guards. Two ran in and tackled the man as Kasey ran to Actinium and tried to hold him back. He wrestled in her grip. She wasn’t prepared for his resistance—or his elbow, the bony end bucking free and swinging into her nose.
The gush was immediate. Warm. Kasey let go. Her attention fractured to the bundle on the floor—antiskins, scattered and now splattered with red—then to the cowering crew, cameras still rolling, and through the blood pooling in her mouth, she managed to shout, “Cut!”
* * *
The medic wouldn’t even look her in the eye when she handed Kasey gauze for her nose.
Meridian had been hysterical. “Are you sick?” she’d screamed at Actinium. “He was stealing some antiskins! Big deal!”
Actinium hadn’t said anything. He looked as he did now: head bowed as he sat on the crated-bench, hair fallen out of its carefully combed style, a visor around his eyes, each hand a fist over his knees, knuckles blanched while Meridian railed.
“Meridian … please,” Kasey had said, which provoked Meridian more.
“Oh, so I’m the problem now?”
She’d stormed off. Maybe Kasey should have followed her, and left Actinium alone, but something compelled her to sit beside him on the bench. She’d stayed until her nose stopped gushing five minutes later, though the silence didn’t break, and she couldn’t find a way to wipe the blood from his shirt so it, too, stayed. Red against white, like when he’d smashed the glass, except then, Actinium had been in perfect control. This time, she’d seen something rabid in his eyes. Had the chaos of their surroundings infected him? Or was this who he really was?
“You need to tell me the truth,” she finally said. A message came from Ekaterina. She ignored it. She’d tried to be as motionless as Actinium, as if sharing his stillness could allow her to share his state of mind, but he was a black box to her. “Who are you?” she pressed when he didn’t reply.
Why is it that I can trust you one moment, and be hurt by you the next?