The Ones We're Meant to Find(27)

And Kasey was afraid she didn’t care. “The Coles cured all cancers,” she blurted, then stared at Dr. Goldstein, daring him to ask her how she knew.

“Not the new ones,” Dr. Goldstein finally said. And then because Kasey must have appeared on the verge of hacking into the medical records herself, he went the extra kilometer. “Let me show you something.”

They took the elevator all the way down to G3, the floor pitch-black before the motion-sensing lights flickered on, illuminating a room filled with stasis pods.

“All medical grade,” Dr. Goldstein said as Kasey ventured in.

She knew without him saying so. She’d used them in her final science team competition, which was how she also knew what Dr. Goldstein would say next.

“What Celia had … it’s rare. But what disease haven’t we conquered? In fifty years, we might be able to transplant brains. In a century, we may reverse aging. All we need is time. And this”—Dr. Goldstein patted a stasis pod—“gives us just that. Time.”

Foreboding settled in Kasey’s belly. “How many years did you tell her?”

“Now, you must understand, there’s no exact—”

“How many?”

“A forecasted eighty, should the rate of innovation continue as is.”

Eighty. The number passed through Kasey like a shock wave, immobilizing her.

Dr. Goldstein took it upon himself to fill her silence. “She came at a terminal stage.” He assumed Kasey was in denial about the disease’s severity. “Hid the decline well, I’ll say.” He assumed she felt guilt for failing to detect it herself.

Wrong. The only thing Kasey felt was her stomach sinking to the ground. “She agreed?”

“Why, yes, of course.” He tapped the air with a finger and a holograph appeared.

The informed consent form.

The stasis pod sealing, scheduled mere days prior to Celia leaving for sea.

The bottom line, signed.

“Like I said, a shame.” Kasey looked up from Celia’s signature and found herself under Dr. Goldstein sympathetic gaze. “We were all set and ready for her before the accident,” he said, and Kasey wanted to shake him, tell him it was no accident. Not the boat. Not the trip to sea. Celia had lied. She hadn’t signed her life away to a pod, no end date guaranteed. Dr. Goldstein could argue all he wanted that there was no life to sign away, no choice but death in their current day and age, and Kasey would agree with him. She’d have podded herself, if only to convince Celia to do the same, be there for her sister when she reemerged, eighty or a thousand years later.

But Celia’s world was so much more than just Kasey. She lived in color. Lived for love and for friendships. She couldn’t settle for anything less.

So she chose this.

“She chose to die,” Kasey later recounted to Actinium. They were sitting on the rooftop of a unit complex in stratum-25, the copterbot parked beside them. It was programmed to deliver them home from the hospel, but Actinium had hacked it, coding it to take them wherever they wanted to go. That, for Kasey, turned out to be neither the Mizuhara unit nor Actinium’s, both too steeped in Celia’s memories. School had ended for the day, but she couldn’t return there, either. There was the island, but what was the point of seeing the boat? She didn’t know. Didn’t know the point of anything anymore.

“She removed her Intraface so she couldn’t be tracked,” she continued. “She chose to die at sea.”

Chose that instead of life, no matter what the chances of a cure might have been.

“She didn’t choose anything,” said Actinium, and Kasey shook her head. At first, after leaving the hospel, there’d been a vacuum in her chest. But now the ache was back, and it annoyed her almost as much as Actinium confusing the facts.

“She chose to swim in the sea.”

“The sea doesn’t come poisoned,” Actinium said, voice tight, drawing Kasey’s gaze to him. He hadn’t sounded nearly as pained with glass in his hand, said hand now bandaged, when she glanced down at it. She’d assumed the hospel would erase the wound, but what, really, did she know about things like broken hearts, skin, and bones?

“Does it hurt?” she asked.

“No,” said Actinium, and Kasey nodded, taking his word for it, blinking when he added, “I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“For scaring you.”

“You didn’t,” Kasey said flatly.

To that, Actinium said nothing.

He didn’t even nod.

Kasey looked away.

Her whole, uninjured hands fisted in her lap.

Down below, crowds moved through stratum-25’s emporium, one of the few places to buy material products (like Actinium’s current shirt, the other one too bloodstained to be worn in public). Vendor stalls encircled the piazza; a holograph of Linscott Horn glowed at its center.

“Here’s the problem, Pete,” he was saying to the pundit in the armchair opposite him. “When you’re all living on the same planet, you’re no cleaner than your dirtiest neighbor. And since the age of apes, mankind’s dirt has always been Territories One, Two, and Four. When the rest of the world moved on to fission, they clung to coal. They dug deeper when they ran out, destabilizing the entire crust, causing the megaquakes that will plague us to the end of our days. Now, as other territories phase out of fission, guess what they do, Pete. Guess what they do. They start phasing in—”