She freed the pressure mounting in her chest. Carbon dioxide bubbled from her nose, drifting to the surface where it belonged. Where she did, too. With or without a team behind her, she’d make good on her final promise to Celia. It’d start here, with emerging into a world that needed her every bit as much as it’d needed her sister.
SIX YEARS LATER
“I THOUGHT I MIGHT FIND you here.”
Over the waves. Over the wind. A ghostlike voice that, for a nanosecond, made Kasey forget who she was and where.
Then she remembered.
* * *
TWENTY MINUTES EARLIER
“You’re certain?”
Kasey asked from Leona’s porch, where she stood after turning down tea inside. In T-minus twenty-nine hours, Operation Reset would go into effect en masse. Before then, she had thirty-some things to do, and double-checking that Leona didn’t want reconstruction bots installed on this island wasn’t one of them.
“I have the shield,” Leona said, and Kasey felt her face harden.
“It won’t last.” Her voice, over the years, had deepened. People didn’t listen to reason but rather authority, even if that authority was as superficial as putting on a steely persona and a white coat. “It might self-maintain for a century.” Two, maximum. “But then it’ll deteriorate.” And though the island wouldn’t disappear, like so many others during the arctic melt, it wouldn’t be spared by the elements. “Nothing will look the same,” Kasey insisted, doing her best to drive the point home for Leona.
“We’ll rebuild.”
“It’ll be difficult.” A ding from her Intraface, notifying her of an impending meeting. Kasey blinked it away. “You might not have any aid.”
“I’m not afraid,” Leona said with her own hint of steel.
Kasey’s mouth opened. And shut.
They were no longer talking about this island, but the person who haunted it.
Actinium was gone by the time Kasey returned to GRAPHYC, six months after her last visit. The unit at the top of the stairs had been stripped bare, like his brain with regard to memories of Kasey and their solution. But he did not forget his ways. A year and a half later, he would assassinate the premier of Territory 2, coincidentally （or not） the territory that’d pledged the fewest number of delegates during their PR circuit. Since then, a string of murders—from CEOs in unsustainable industries to average citizens with below-average ranks—had all been linked to him. The Worldwide Union had assembled a task force to catch him, and when intel traced Actinium visiting the island, the whole of it and its residents had fallen under surveillance.
Through it all, Leona’s brown hair seemed to gray before Kasey’s eyes. Still, the woman refused to heed Kasey’s warnings—that Actinium wasn’t just a menace to society, but to Leona as well. If she believed she could rehabilitate him, just like this island, then she was gravely mistaken.
But what use was logic? It ended where love began.
“Any contact with him must be reported,” Kasey now reminded Leona, the words made trite by repetition.
Leona replied by taking a hold of Kasey’s hand. Kasey stiffened. She was surrounded by people at any given moment, but everyone—her lab included—was held at a respectable arm’s length.
“You’ve worked hard, Kasey.”
As a servant of science, she’d only done what it had asked of her.
“We’re all very grateful.”
She was as numb to gratitude as she was to death threats. It came with the job.
“Without you,” Leona continued, “so many wouldn’t have this second chance.”
“Too many already won’t.” After dropping out of school, it’d taken Kasey nearly a year to find an innotech company willing to sponsor her, then another year to convince the Worldwide Union and P2C to trust her once more. Three years to secure global commitment to Operation Reset, one to devise a system to enforce universal participation. Total time elapsed: six years. Disasters suffered: two more megaquakes, three tsunamis, and countless category five hurricanes. Dead: 760 million. Eco-cities had opened their doors to refugees on a rank-blind basis, but the corrective action came too late, and at a cost. Physiological illnesses, once eradicated by the Coles, spiked again with population density, and mental health declined when holo requirements exceeded the recommended maximum in an effort to reduce overcrowding.
If only consensus had been reached sooner; opportunity cost calculations performed faster. But Kasey had come to accept inefficiency as a symptom of the human condition, and the frustration in her chest was an ember of its former self, dying out as Leona squeezed her hand.