The Ones We're Meant to Find(64)

“Human.” Actinium’s voice was as dark as the surrounding night. “A human error, not technical.”

Kasey waited for him to explain. “What happened?” she asked when he didn’t.

“More or less what happened here. A megaquake. Victims, desperate for relief.” He pocketed his hands. “They mistook the copterbot for a supply plane. Their hackers tried to redirect it to their village.” A shrug-like pause. “Failed, evidently.”

His nonchalance belied the weight of the disclosure.

How do you know? another person might have asked, but Kasey trusted his ability to hack any info he so desired, even if she couldn’t trust him. The real question was: “Why doesn’t the rest of the world know?”

“The event was cognicized from the minds of involved parties.”

“That’s not—”

“It was in their wills. My parents’. Your mother’s. They knew the risks accompanying their line of work.” Off his tongue, their line of work sounded like a euphemism for something awful instead of the philanthropy it was. “They understood any outside-territory accident, so to speak, would be used to impede humanitarian progress and give ammunition to political opponents of HOME.”

“And the bot?” Was that a preventative measure, too? Had the principled Ester Cole flouted her own beliefs about the separation of humans and bots to protect her son from these relief trips?

“My doing,” Actinium said simply. “I was trying to make a point. After the trip.”

The sentence ended there. He made it sound deliberate. But Kasey heard the catch to his voice. He’d meant to go on, but couldn’t. After the trip— He would have shown his mother that bots were no different than humans.

Kasey didn’t know what to say. She was bad at comforting people—so rarely did she understand their pain—but now she understood. Intimately. An innocent experiment, he’d conducted, with ramifications beyond his imagination. It was like Kasey’s own story, except eviction didn’t come close to being left, in the span of one night, as the only Cole alive. The confusion he must have felt. The paranoia and, worst of all, the helplessness.

Helplessness crushed Kasey now. “Actinium—”

He cut her off. “I don’t need your pity. Just you.”

You. As in Kasey.

As in, he needed Kasey.

Kasey, and not Celia.

Impossible. Unthinkable, more so than Actinium not appearing in Celia’s memories, which reminded Kasey—“Celia—”

“Came to me. Asked for her Intraface to be destroyed. I never lied to you.”

It couldn’t be. Celia—Kasey—but—the island—the shield. “Leona?” Kasey sputtered, brain short-circuiting.

“What about her?”

“How do you know her, if not through Celia?”

An intake of breath. “Leona’s my aunt, Mizuhara.”

Aunt. It took Kasey a second to see. Not the resemblance—they looked nothing alike—but the pieces. How they fit into this new equation. The shield, from Actinium. The teachbot—a gift, Leona had said, from my sister. Ester Cole, whose unit Celia liked for the same reasons she liked house on the shore. The furniture was degradable. Impermanent. The floor bore scuff marks like scars. It was loved, Celia would’ve said.

Love. A funny emotion. Surely it’d have driven Leona to insist that Actinium live with her. If she knew he was alive, that was. Had he modified his face like his ID? Had he grown close to Leona under a guise, like he had with Kasey? Why? Kasey crossed her arms, hugging herself. Why me? To go through such lengths, just to approach her. The thought agitated her, felt like more of a betrayal than Actinium concealing his true identity.

“What did you tell Leona?” she demanded before her mind could spiral deeper.

“That I’d escaped an attempt on my life.”

An accident. Not an attempt. Unintentional.

But the same could have been said for so many man-made mistakes. A pipe leak: an accident. A landfill leaching into the groundwater: unintentional. Human, Actinium had pegged as the root of the accident, and Kasey knew he could prove it like a theorem. Earthquake × humans mining the earth to its limits = megaquake; megaquake × human-built fission and chemical plants = public health disaster; public health disaster × human desperation = 1 copterbot hijacking. Extract the common factor.

Human.

“I convinced her it was safer for me to stay undercover,” Actinium continued, and Kasey heard everything he compressed into one word. Undercover: an orphaned ten-year-old deciding to act incognito. “I knew what I wanted to accomplish.” Not eye-for-an-eye revenge, but wide-scale change. Disasters weren’t caused by individuals. “However long it took, I was resolved to walk this path alone.

“Then I came across the P2C report. On you. Your bots. You knew my secret untold,” Actinium said, voice softening, and Kasey’s spine tingled as she was transported back to the pier, standing beside Actinium like she did now, the storm around them inside them, too, her darkest truth shared without a spoken word.

“I wondered: What else in my mind also existed in yours? What could we achieve, if we worked together?” He glanced up to the sky even though there was nothing to see, the stars long-lost to the omnipresent smog. “Seventy-seven stratums between us, yet I felt closer to you than I had when we were but one floor apart. I hoped, if the circumstances allowed, we’d meet again. Now we have, and now you know.” Actinium finally looked to her. His gaze was solemn. “All my secrets, untold and told.”