The Ones We're Meant to Find(60)
* * *
Ekaterina sent the itinerary at midnight. By then, Kasey was far too deep down the rabbit hole to reply.
She reviewed everything she could get her hands on. The media coverage of the copterbot crash. The report from the forensics lab. The cambot footage of the departure: Genevie, Ester, Frain, and the Coles’ son, a ten-year-old boy, waving at the crowds on stratum-100 before they boarded the copterbot. Kasey studied the clip again and again, until she found it.
Actinium’s secret to surviving the accident that’d killed everyone else.
Her brain, kicked into overdrive, began to shut down nonessential functions. First to go were emotions. She could get upset, or she could get answers to her questions, too many of which relied on Actinium’s cooperation. Back in the Mizuhara unit, Kasey drafted several messages, deliberating over her tone. Sent none come afternoon. Departure time. She set off for P2C headquarters. She’d confront him in person. A perfectly logical plan—assuming they’d be on this trip alone.
“Meridian?” Of all the things Kasey had prepared for, this was not one. “Why are you here?” she asked, brain ejected out of autopilot mode and forced to assess this new confounding variable standing outside of P2C headquarters.
I could ask you the same, said the sour look on Meridian’s face. She was clearly prepped to travel, a duffel bag slung over her shoulder. “Officer Trukhin invited me.”
Ekaterina. Kasey opened the itinerary she’d been sent and read it in detail—down to the note about adding personnel that could be viewed as grassroots support by the Territory 4 locals.
“She asked if I’d be interested in presenting a variation of my solution.” Meridian went on, right as the copterbot descended. “Yes, you heard right. Mine. I submitted it.” At that moment, Actinium arrived. Meridian pointedly refused to look at him, reserving her glare for Kasey. Then, with a turn of her heel, she proceeded to climb into the copterbot.
You don’t know what you’re getting into, Kasey wished she could say. Could not, of course, or confront Actinium. Could only take the seat between the two of them. To her right was a boy who knew her, knew their true agenda, but who had hidden himself. And to her left was a girl who thought Kasey’s worst crime was hogging the solution when it was so much worse. Yes, with Meridian here, Kasey finally confronted how her and Actinium’s vision for the world would be viewed by outsiders—as a crime. Immoral and unforgivable.
And now she couldn’t even trust the person who was supposed to be her partner.
The 3,000 km flight was too silent and too long, then too short after they touched the ground. From the copterbot they were ferried to a car—an antique driven by a live chauffeur. Heat roared from the vents to combat the outside freeze. A polar vortex had taken up permanent residence over the northeastern territories after the arctic melt, and beyond the car windows laid a world stark and bleak, sun radiating in a barren sky, clouds dispatched by high concentrations of atmospheric carbon. The roadside crowds were the only sign of life, and the throngs densified as they neared the embassy.
The car pulled into park.
“Good luck,” Ekaterina messaged as Kasey secured her breathing mask. It couldn’t protect her from the dry-ice air, an assault on her lungs the second she stepped outside, into the blinding flash of cameras. Behind an orange barricade, reporters in the flesh pushed and shoved for the best angle. Citizens, some with masks and some without, held up signs criticizing the government’s megaquake response. The expressions on their faces were somber—save for one group of men, women, and children, waving at them.
“Meiran! Meiran!”
Meridian waved back. Her relatives, Kasey realized, tensing at the sight of their unmasked faces—right before all the faces in the crowd glitched into Celia’s, eyes blacked out by block letters.
IF PREMIER DU COULDN’T SAVE 1.5MIL LIVES
DON’T EXPECT THE ALIENS TO SAVE YOU
The image overlays vanished by the next blink. Meridian’s relatives became Meridian’s relatives again, but their smiles were gone.
Meridian appeared just as stricken. “What was that?”
“An Intraface hack,” Actinium answered.
Kasey checked her files. Everything was still there, including her few stored memories of Celia. The hackers must have accessed them to generate the faces.
The ache in her chest reawakened, and as the premier greeted them inside the embassy, a marble room with tall windows, her second heart pulsed. Who Actinium was didn’t change what’d happened to Celia. Didn’t change the amount of energy being used to warm this room, and how much more people had to pollute just to solve problems produced by pollution. “Aliens,” the protestors called them. Was it because they lived in the sky? Because they’d come down to subjugate them to another way of life? Would people ever willingly give up their freedoms for the good of others? Kasey wondered as attendants led them to the auditorium, in which they were to present the solution. Or did their family members first have to die?
Ding. A message from Actinium. Are you okay? he asked, and Kasey almost flinched. As if he could claim to care.
And as if she should care. Who did you see? she wanted to ask him. Your parents?
A moment alone, without Meridian, was all she needed.
But for now:
Yes, she replied, before stepping onto the stage to tell more lies.