The Ones We're Meant to Find(40)

“And my eyes?”

“… Dark brown.” He looks me over, brow furrowing. “Are you okay?”

I don’t answer.

Black hair.

Dark eyes.

Just like Kay.

Relief trickles through me. I don’t know what I expected. We’re sisters, after all. But I feel closer to her than ever, especially with the new memories.

The memories. They were cut short. There are more, I’m sure of it. My eyes snap to the pool, the source of everything, before I was interrupted— The boy grabs my hand and pulls me to my feet. “We’re heading back now.”

“Says who?”

“Says whoever didn’t just try to drown themselves.”

Grumbling, I follow him through the forest, too wet and too tired to pick this bone with him. My whole being buzzes. First memories, now color. It’s overwhelming—and probably the reason why I screw up an hour later, after we’ve gathered the trees, lowered them down the ridge, and it’s time to descend ourselves. I go first, barely a meter down when I lose my foothold. My hands shoot out, grappling for a dip in the rock. I miss, and my other foot swings free.

Above me, the boy shouts. My eyes shut on instinct, and I brace myself for the hard bite of the harness up my ass.

It doesn’t come.

The rope goes slack. Untied.

I keep on falling.





14


SHE WOULD NEVER SEE THE body.

Never know the moment Celia died.

Another sister might not have been able to make peace with that.

Kasey could.

She just couldn’t make peace with her peace.

Beyond the pier, the sea that’d spoken to Celia spoke to Kasey, too. The wind whispered in her ear. Unfeeling. Defective. Deficient. The world had been saying those things to her from the start, from the vandalized locker to the public outcry, when she stomached what others could not. She’d gone numb as Actinium bled, and accepted the fatality of Celia’s prognosis, no questions asked, while he thought to call the copterbot. Even now, the ache lodged in her chest felt like a foreign body that did not belong, and the soreness of her throat, chafed from the scream, was pain she had to resist swallowing. It was human to inflict hurt on yourself and unto others, to let down the levee in the face of the storm, like the literal one currently brewing, dark clouds gathering where the ocean met the sky. Waves churned past her toes, two meters below, and over the churn, his voice reached her.

“Don’t jump.”

In the past, she would have found the warning insulting. Why would she do something so reckless as exposing herself?

Now Kasey was glad she seemed more emotional than she really was. “I’m not.”

“Good.” Actinium reached her side. Together they stood at the end of the pier, looking out at the sea as the air thickened, heavy between them. “Because the shield doesn’t extend that far.”

“The shield you built.”

She emphasized the you. Actinium didn’t reply. When Kasey glanced to him, he was looking on ahead resolutely, as if he knew she held her preconceptions of him like a deck of cards, and she was reshuffling with his every word.

I won’t pry. That’s what she’d said before. But Kasey couldn’t stop her curiosity from burgeoning. Usually it annoyed her when people were inconsistent, but the mystery around Actinium felt curated, his contradictions too precise. Was he logical? Emotional? Authoritative, or uncomfortable around people? For someone who modified bodies, his own person was very unadorned, down to his mannerisms and speech, prompting Kasey to ask, “Do you actually work at GRAPHYC?”

The question seemed to catch Actinium off guard. “Yes,” he said, and paused, then added, “part-time, Jinx would say.”

Kasey was with Jinx on this one. Piecing together her sister’s Intraface, valiant as it was, seemed like a misuse of work hours. “What do you do?”

“I design the implants and digi-tattoos.”

“Do you have any yourself?” SILVERTONGUE claimed the question was intrusive, but it was unrelated to her sister. Actinium shook his head, and she pressed, “Then how do you know if you’re any good?”

“I never said I was.”

To anyone else it’d sound like modesty, but Kasey heard the words he’d left out.

I never said I was. I’m better at other things.

Like coding. Engineering. He was obviously smart. Talented. Had he stayed in school, an innotech firm would’ve scouted him. With a team and resources, he’d be developing projects with even greater impact than an island-wide shield. But then, maybe he wouldn’t have met Celia. Maybe Kasey was just bitter that he’d turned away from a future she would have wanted for herself.

“What are you thinking?” Actinium asked after a minute, and it surprised her that he should care, and for a heartbeat, she entertained a silly notion, that maybe he’d taken the brunt of the sea’s spray for her. The physics of projectile motion checked out. The motives didn’t. Actinium loved Celia.

Loved the things she loved.

Unlike Kasey, who still didn’t see anything magical about the sea when she gazed at it. “That this was Celia’s favorite place on the island. The pier.”

“A place in between land and water, where there is power in a single step.”