The Ones We're Meant to Find(34)
“I can wait at the house too.”
Kasey shook her head. Last time, she’d said Celia would have wanted him here, but the truth was, Kasey did too, needed Actinium here to remind her that love was pain, and pain was approaching the boat when all she really wanted to do was retreat from it. With every step over the brine-slick rocks, she realized she was no better than the people at her party. She half expected Celia to spring up from the hull and say “Surprise!” until the very end, when Kasey was practically upon the boat, the unequivocally, indisputably empty boat.
She crouched beside it. She refused to think of it by its painted name. To her, this was a thing, the hearse that’d delivered Celia to her watery grave. If it were sentient, she’d want to hurt it, but it wasn’t, and it was already damaged, bow dented and gunwale half gone, evidence of the abuse it’d suffered at sea. Had Celia suffered? Had she known hunger? Thirst? Or had it been quick? Kasey hoped it was. Hoped it was the death Celia had wanted, as foreign as the concept seemed. As the waves shattered on the rocks around her, she felt Actinium’s presence at her back. He remained standing. Kasey appreciated that. If he knelt too, and contributed his grief to the space, she’d actually drown.
Rising, she wiped the sea spray off her otherwise dry face.
As promised, Leona was waiting back in the house. “We’ll have it transported to the eco-city,” she said as Actinium and Kasey came through the door and into the fuel-bar, where two kettles were going on the stove.
“Keep the boat here,” said Kasey. The island was classified as private domain, prohibiting non-residents from holoing in. That, along with Leona’s lack of an Intraface, would offer her ample protection from the press.
“Then we’ll send it over to Francis,” said Leona. “He’ll patch it up, make it good as new.”
He could destroy it, for all Kasey cared, but she nodded for Leona’s sake—then stiffened.
Voices. Inside the house.
Peeking into the living room, she was taken aback to see the Wangs, Reddys, Zielińskis, and O’Sheas with their twins. It was literally the island’s entire population, minus the temporary vacationers and old Francis John Jr., the handyman who lived in the woods. The couch was crammed, the overflow sitting on the floor, spread with grandmother Maisie Moore’s monogrammed towels, everyone huddled around Leona’s small holograph projector and none, to Kasey’s growing dismay, wearing masks.
The air above her head shifted; she glanced up to see Actinium, leaned in beside her. He took one look at the living room and sighed. An odd sound, coming from him. Even odder was his mutter, something about “going outside.”
Before Kasey could ask what was wrong with inside, a scream bounded toward them.
“Act!” Roma, one of the nine-year-old twins, burst into the kitchen and ran for Actinium, skidding to a stop upon seeing Kasey. “Who’s that?”
They’d met before, but Kasey didn’t blame Roma for forgetting. Celia was the one who’d spent hours making mud-patty cakes with the twins, while Kasey stood off to the side, not very good with children. She was worse at introductions, so she left the honors to Actinium.
“A friend,” he said. Not quite true, but Kasey supposed friend was easier for kids to understand. Simple, clear-cut—
“A girl friend?”
“No,” Kasey said as Mrs. O’Shea’s voice floated in from the living room.
“Actinium? Is that you?”
The next thing Kasey knew, islanders were piling into the fuel-bar. She edged out of the way as they beelined for Actinium, shaking his hand, hugging him. Actinium reciprocated far more woodenly than Kasey would have expected from him. “You told them,” he said to Leona, sounding aggrieved, and Kasey sent him her sympathies as the mob swept him into the living room.
“They were all rushing to evacuate!” Leona called after them. “I had to explain!”
“Explain what?” Kasey asked Leona as the kitchen emptied. “Why doesn’t anyone have to evacuate?”
Leona lifted the kettle from the stove. “Because the air is filtered. Act built a shield around the island.”
Kasey blinked.
She knew perfectly well what Leona meant by shield, as an eco-city denizen protected by one. A filtration and force-field system, invisible yet impenetrable, sieving out toxins and shielding city infrastructure from the effects of elemental erosion. Before the science ban, Kasey had spent an entire summer deciphering shield mechanics and equations. She could recreate a miniature model if she tried. But around the whole of this island?
“That’s…” Kasey trailed off as the pieces fell into place. Leona not wearing a mask. The people’s warm reception. And Actinium. Come to think of it, he’d reprogrammed the hospel copterbot like it was nothing, with all the cool-headedness Kasey had witnessed during their first meeting, but those impressions had been erased, like recessive genes, by the episode with the mug. Even now, Kasey could smell the blood, but maybe she’d been too quick to judge.
“… a big project,” she finished, the words feeling inadequate.
“It’s my fault,” said Leona, smiling sheepishly as she filled the mugs on the table. Kasey set more out. “Thank you, dear. It’s like what I told you girls: I just can’t bear to abandon Maisie’s home.” Yes, Kasey remembered Leona saying so one time after Kasey pronounced the house structurally unsound. “But with all the talk of worsening storms, Act wouldn’t put up with me staying on the wrong side of the levee.”