Silence. Then, in a voice that rasped: “I think you already know. Say it,” he ordered, when she did not.
Kasey swallowed. The sound boomed in her ears. “Andre Cole.”
“A dead person.”
“You never got on the copterbot.” Kasey adopted the same pose as Actinium, her hands on her knees and eyes to the ground. Her voice dropped. “You built a bot.”
The departure footage had given it away. When Ester dropped her purse before boarding the copterbot, Andre Cole hadn’t moved. Not even to blink. Reactions to novel situations. The hardest bit of programming to get right. No wonder Actinium hadn’t been repulsed by her violation of the Ester Act; he’d beaten her to it. Constructed his model with a degree of finesse that was admirable, even if his deception was not.
“A dead person who violated his parents’ act,” Actinium revised. His gaze was still hidden from her when Kasey glanced over. “Doesn’t that disturb you?”
“No,” she admitted. “Not as much as you not appearing in any of my sister’s memories.” She drew in a sharp breath. Her nose throbbed. “Why?”
Why did you lie?
For a long time, Actinium did not answer. “My intentions shouldn’t matter.”
Logically, they shouldn’t have. Intentions, good or bad, didn’t impact people. Consequences did. It was the consequences of someone’s actions, well-intentioned or not, that’d killed Celia.
But Kasey wanted to know. It defied logic. Caring for Actinium, despite the high probability he’d lied to her in other ways too, defied logic. “How did this world wrong you?”
“In the same way it wronged your sister.”
“The crash was an accident.”
They’d shared silences before. Comfortable ones. Pained ones.
This silence was humid, a calm before the storm.
“An accident.” Actinium’s shoulders began to shake. Kasey tensed; she wasn’t good with tears. Then he lifted his head, and she realized he hadn’t been crying at all.
“That’s what my parents would have wanted you to think.” His lips were slashed between a laugh and a wince, his black eyes aglow with pain. “No, Mizuhara. Call it for what it was: murder.”
||||?||||?||||?||||?||||?||||?||||?||
DISBELIEF. GRIEF. ANGER. SHOCK. BY the time I run every emotion programmed into me, the timer on the pod is down to 191 HR 07 MIN 31 S.
How many days is that? I do the math. Easily. Mentally. My vision swims as I notice these things that make me … not me.
In 7.96355 days, the pod will stop functioning. Everyone will be doomed, trapped forever in stasis, but first to die will be the person I pushed. Not my sister, I tell myself, when I finally get to my feet and back away. Not Kay. Kay wouldn’t want me to die for her. Wouldn’t want to kill me, like Hero, except it’s incomparable, because Hero had no awareness over his actions. No control. Kay is in perfect control—of herself, and of me. She designed me so that I would have no choice over my own life, no dignity in my own death.
Realizing that is what ultimately gives me the strength to walk away.
I leave the facility, determined and undaunted by the prospect of surfacing from the bottom of the ocean and swimming back to the island. Or so I tell myself. Because I swim too fast, like I’m scared that I might regret my decision, and the more I try to escape, the more my body numbs and the line between my consciousness and my … programming blurs and the memories slip back in even though they aren’t mine; I don’t want—
* * *
Back at the dome.
* * *
Back at the surface.
* * *
Back at the dome, in the dome, standing before the stasis pod, the timer glowing on its door.
164 HR 18 MIN 59 S
6.84651, my mind thinks, before I wrench it—and my body—away, run before both are overtaken again.
* * *
Back at the surface.
This time I go slow. Every stroke hurts. It feels like I’m swimming through stone.
Sunrise, sunset, sunrise.
Five days left now.
I’m so tired.
So weak.
Am I hallucinating when I see land? Or—worse—am I’m really back at the dome and I can’t trust the optics of my mind?
No, I’m on the shore. This grittiness—it’s sand.
I collapse on it, boneless. Brainless. I could pass out. But I didn’t come this far just to let my unconscious regain command.
I make myself stand.
I’m back on the island, and I’ve never been happier. I spot the house—and energize when I remember who’s in it.