That energy curdles to unease when I enter the kitchen. Dust coats the countertops. How long has it been? I recall my excruciating swim. Two days to return to the island on my final attempt, but factor in all the time I lost in between and the time it took reach the dome in the first place and that means—
“I’ve been gone for five days.”
“Agree,” says U-me, rolling out from the living room.
Five days, Hero’s been tied up.
He’s conscious when I enter M.M.’s bedroom. A recent development, I pray. Even if he doesn’t need food or water to survive, he doesn’t know that, and it’s not even worth asking if he’s okay. Who would be, after being bound to a bed for five days? Unable to meet his eye, I focus on untying him, the task made harder because his wrists and ankles have swelled around the rope, and as I struggle, he poses the question on me instead.
“Are you okay?”
His voice is soft as ever. My fingers stop, and I make the mistake of looking at him. Under his sky-colored gaze, I feel translucent. I wonder if he can see the murderer under my skin—the girl who killed him and the girl who, in the coming days, will also kill her so-called sister.
I wonder if he would flinch away from my touch if he knew what these hands could do.
But when Hero says, “I’m guessing I tried to kill you again,” I remember I’m all alone in knowing our place in the universe has forever changed. This boy is no longer the biggest threat to my existence. The truth is so much more sinister.
And my first instinct is to shield Hero from it. “No, love. You didn’t do anything like that.”
The lie comes easily. Have I done it before? Lied to protect someone I care about? Or would that be Celia? Who am I? Celia, or Cee?
“Then…” Hero trails off, trying to make sense of his circumstances.
“What did I say?” I attack the knots with newfound resolve. “I like it kinky.”
I undo the final knot. The ropes fall, and Hero grimaces as he flexes his wrists. His pain pains me, and to my alarm, I find I still have tears left to cry. At my sniff, Hero glances up. “Cee?” Before he can ask me what’s wrong, I silence him with a kiss. I swallow his questions, my tears, and relish the way he said my name—not as a letter, or the third iteration of some experiment. C-E-E, I remember spelling out for him. Pronounced like the sea outside that window. From the start, he said it as if I were real. I am real, I decide. I’m Cee. Not Celia, as much a stranger to me as Kay. I don’t need either of them. I can be happy with myself. Live for myself, in service of no one else.
Or, at least, live for the people who actually care about me.
“Are you okay?” Hero asks again, breaking the kiss first—breaking it, I think, just to ask. Concern shines upon his face, held between my hands. His rise to cover mine. “What happened?”
He doesn’t ask, Why are you back? But I hear the question anyway, and suddenly feel like I’ve let him down. He was rooting for me, the only one of us with memories, to succeed. Get off this island. Find my sister. Fulfill my cosmic destiny. He doesn’t know, of course, that humans manufactured our fates. And he never has to know. I won’t hurt him the way not-Kay hurt me. We are as real as we believe ourselves to be.
“You were right.” I draw his right hand, still wrapped around mine, to me and kiss his knuckles. “There’s nothing to find out there.”
38
THAT COULDN’T BE RIGHT.
Murder. The copterbot had been autopiloted, its only passengers Genevie and the Coles. The destination coordinates had glitched midway through the flight. It was a malfunction—“a technical error,” Kasey said to Actinium. His frigid laughter died.
He got to his feet.
Walked down the makeshift hall.
However crude, the PVC walls still offered some protection from microcinogens and radioaxons, levels of which rose as Kasey followed Actinium outside. Her biomonitor beeped, its warning consumed by the cacophony of trauma and triage around them, but even that faded as they walked onward.
They stopped at a drop-off at the edge of the hospel clearing. A silt sink suctioned away the land below.
“Human.” Actinium’s voice was as dark as the surrounding night. “A human error, not technical.”
Kasey waited for him to explain. “What happened?” she asked when he didn’t.
“More or less what happened here. A megaquake. Victims, desperate for relief.” He pocketed his hands. “They mistook the copterbot for a supply plane. Their hackers tried to redirect it to their village.” A shrug-like pause. “Failed, evidently.”