The Ones We're Meant to Find(14)

“See?” She sounded more relaxed. “It’s for Act.”

“Who gives me the creeps.”

“Don’t worry. He’s clean.”

“How do you know?”

“I know because he’s my tenant and my hire.”

“Sure that’s it—ow!” cried the employee as Jinx seized his ear.

“Up the back stairwell, first door to the right,” she said, presumably to Kasey, who would have followed the directions anyway just to eject herself. She climbed the stairs to the top landing; it was a jungle gym of obsolete gizmos. Cat litter filled a boxlike apparatus that could have plausibly been a washing machine, from pre-everfiber times, when the fashion industry accounted for 20% of global wastewater production and catchphrases such as sustainable and recycled still fueled consumerism. What a waste of space, Kasey thought, contorting herself around the obstacle and stumbling—as if shoved—before the door. It loomed over her. Unit 5.

The geolocation of Celia’s Intraface.

With nothing left to troubleshoot, her mind dimmed. The stairwell grew quiet. Had always been.

Her heartbeat was the loudest thing here.

What would a normal person feel, potentially moments from reuniting with their sister? Excited, most likely. Nervous would also be acceptable. Not scared, which was Kasey’s physiological response of choice, epinephrine charting on her biomonitor. She wanted to run. Quelling the urge, she knocked and, when no one answered, bypassed the retinal scanner with her badge.

Possibility. Probability. The chances were next to none.

She pushed open the door.

And breathed out.

No Celia.

She ran a body heat scan. Negative. She walked in, looking for evidence of how this person by the name of “Act” might give anyone the creeps. Maybe she wasn’t the best judge; she hardly put people at ease herself. But truly, this unit was the most mundane thing Kasey had encountered so far: boxlike, walls painted gray. Fuel-bar? Check. No bed; not unusual. The stasis pod, bolted upright to the back wall, could have doubled as one.

A more thorough inspection led Kasey to the fuel-bar. The cupboards yielded tins of protein blocks, vitamin cubes, and fiber powders. She studied the stasis pod. An older model, worse for wear and missing chunks of material on its right side.

A lot of chunks, actually, gouged out at fairly regular intervals.

Intervals like the rungs to a ladder.

It was a stretch of the mind—a biased mind, familiar with ladders and primed to detect their patterns. Besides, what ladder went to the bare ceiling? Good question: Kasey looked up. The ceiling was painted the same gray as the walls. Nothing about it stood out.

Except for a speck. A paint bubble. A bead-like object, either attached by adhesive …

… or resting there, just like Kasey rested on the ground thanks to gravity.

To assume antigravity was at work in a down-stratum rental unit was an even further stretch of the mind than seeing ladders on the sides of stasis pods. The probability was absurdly low.

But Kasey was only here to rule out the near impossible.

She positioned herself under the speck, opened the search warrant app in her Intraface, and keyed CANCEL ALL ACTIVE FORCES into the unit override system.

For a second, nothing happened.

The bead fell.

She caught it in her cupped hands, like a raindrop from the skies. It was nothing so natural. The white kernel, no bigger than a tooth, possessed a smooth, machine-tumbled shape, and when Kasey nudged it onto its narrower side, she found a row of micro-lasered digits.

She could have magnified the numbers through her Intraface and matched them to the fourteen-digit sequence she’d memorized, given to authorities, and entered into her own geolocation tracker. She could have; she did not. She knew, intuitively, what this thing was. To whom it’d belonged. Where it’d once resided: under the skin, at the base of the skull.

Might your sister not want to be found?

The kernel slipped through Kasey’s fingers. She couldn’t feel it fall.

Might this be deliberate?

Couldn’t hear it bounce against the ground.

Beep-beep-beep. Sound, from inside her head. Text, flashing across her mind’s eye:

BODY HEAT DETECTED

Behind her.

Like a cambot, she rotated and aimed.

He stood in the doorway. A boy. Face a blur to Kasey; she could only see in swatches. The white of his button-down shirt, sleeves rolled up. The gray of his waist apron, pockets swollen—

“Hands out.” Voice too harsh, syntax too basic, but to Kasey’s relief, the boy complied, slipping out one hand, then the other. He made no extraneous gestures. His movements were measured. Precise.

Slowly, she lowered the REM.

And fired when something furry brushed her ankle.

Whatever it was, it was gone when Kasey twisted around. Probably the cat, fled. The boy, in contrast, stood right where he was. Was he frozen in fear? Kasey couldn’t tell, could tell that his eyes were black, as was his hair, parted sharply to the right, but couldn’t read his gaze through the smoke rising from the scorch mark on the floor.

Say something. Apologize. “I mean no harm,” SILVERTONGUE suggested. Kasey hadn’t realized the app was on. She closed it. She disliked stating the obvious, and as callous as it was, she didn’t care about this boy’s emotional state when hers couldn’t be much better off. She nodded at the white kernel on the ground. “Tell me how you got this.”