The Ones We're Meant to Find(61)
* * *
A moment alone, Kasey quickly learned, was as scarce as clean air on this trip. P2C, with their trademark efficiency, had scheduled back-to-back events. After their presentation, they were to visit a hard-hit midland Territory 4 hospel. They would be delivered by fueled plane; the 2,000 km flight would be the equivalent of Kasey’s carbon emissions for the last five years.
Whatever it took to appear accessible.
As they crossed into the countryside, Kasey snuck a sideways glance at Actinium. Territory 4 was where the crash had happened. What was he thinking? Feeling? His mind grew more unknowable to her by the minute, like the terrain below as night crept over it. Then the plane dropped in altitude, bringing the land into grotesque focus. The midland basin, a natural fortress since antiquity, had been transformed into a death trap. Mountains had bulldozed over villages, trees torn out of the ground like bones through skin, and in places, the crust itself had fissured. Scars of hardened lava wormed through the land—more than Kasey had ever beheld. Celia might have seen beauty. Kasey only saw only a brutal reminder of a world untamed by its human owners, if they even deserved the title. For all their innovations, they were microscopic, a fact that became painfully apparent when they landed outside the hospel.
Another misleading term.
Eco-city hospels were all like the one Kasey had stormed into: calming sanctuaries built to maximize the human experience. This hospel, constructed to treat victims of radioaxon poisoning from a compromised fission plant, 20 km north, was as flimsy as a pop-up market and loud as a factory, its only product being death. Trucks emblazoned with the Worldwide Union symbol rumbled through the dirt. Personnel—including members of the Territory 4 defense force—rushed down barely set tar walkways. In the eco-cities, there was one doctor for every hundred citizens. Here, whatever the ratio was, it didn’t seem like enough. Medics certainly couldn’t be spared for PR, and the one assigned to them was red in the face and arguing with the P2C camera crew when Meridian, Actinium, and Kasey reached her. She looked to be around Celia’s age.
Like Celia, she wore no antiskin.
This wasn’t the island. Wasn’t shielded. A gurney rattled by them, bearing a body covered by a sheet, and Kasey’s mouth dried. “Where’s your antiskin?” she asked the medic.
“Ran out.” Then the medic turned her attention back to the crew—“One tour, that’s it”—but the crew’s attention had swiveled to Actinium. Everyone stared as he unzipped and stepped out of his antiskin.
He placed the protective gear into the medic’s hands.
The cam swung back to Kasey before she could recover. The unspoken cue lingered.
I’d never put you in danger, Actinium had promised. So had Ekaterina. You won’t be exposed. But vows were human constructs. They died out here, in the wilderness.
Kasey should have been prepared.
She took off her antiskin, flesh crawling as it came into contact with air. Her biomonitor warned her of the toxins entering her system. Only for a little while, she told herself.
Just this once.
Meridian started to unzip hers.
Just one swim.
Her fingers, Kasey noticed, were shaking.
One more trip—
“Don’t.”
The boom and camera swung Kasey’s way.
“We’re being filmed,” Meridian muttered beneath her breath. Kasey didn’t care. She was well aware of the price she and Actinium would have to pay to make others do the same. But Meridian didn’t have to be caught in the crosshairs, and Kasey was relieved when the medic interrupted them.
“We done here?” The medic strode down the tar walkway and shouted “Come on!” when they lagged. “I don’t have all day!”
They followed the medic into the arm of a ward, the narrow path tiled with cardboard and deconstructed crates. PVC strips, held together with duct tape, formed the walls around them, rippling as they walked. The air grew acrid with the smell of waste, human and chemical, and Kasey, who’d barely survived stratum-22, was woozy by the time they reached a series of plasterboard doors set into the walls, leading presumably to patient rooms. In the back of her mind, she understood she couldn’t face other humans like this. If she vomited on camera, it’d completely undo the point of the visit.
“Wait—” she started to say to the medic, and broke off at the bang. It came from one of the plasterboard doors as it fell down and a man burst out, a bundle in his arms.
He ran straight into the wall.
The PVC rippled, absorbing the impact. But Kasey couldn’t absorb what she was seeing. She stared as the man rammed into the PVC again, as if expecting it to yield. The duct tape held.
And so he turned, and charged toward them instead.
“Don’t engage!” shouted the medic.
Meridian flattened against the wall. Kasey stumbled to the side.
Actinium didn’t move. His head snapped up when the man was almost upon him.
His fist cocked back.
Later, Kasey would try to sequence the memory. The initiation. The escalation. What came first—the punch that slammed into the man’s face, causing the bundle to tumble from his arms, or the knife, flashing in the man’s hand? But this moment, like everything else about the trip, would resist her. It followed no order but nature’s disorder.
Meridian screamed. The medic cursed, and called for guards. Two ran in and tackled the man as Kasey ran to Actinium and tried to hold him back. He wrestled in her grip. She wasn’t prepared for his resistance—or his elbow, the bony end bucking free and swinging into her nose.