The Ones We're Meant to Find(79)

He kisses me, featherlight, and I’m the one who presses in. He lets me, before backing toward the edge. Rocks tumble down the ridge.

I start to tell him to be careful, before I realize he has been this entire time. This walk was carefully planned. This climb. This kiss, as carefully planted as a first.

Or a last.

“I wanted to give you the space to decide,” Hero says, and my mind pinwheels. What did he just ask me to confirm? So I died. Came back hours later. “The time. Without my interference, mental or physical. And this”—he glances over the edge—“is the only way I know how.”

No—

I scramble for him, and almost reach him, but falter when he says, “Don’t, Cee.” His voice is soft. Fearless. His eyes, though—I think I see fear there, but the wind covers them with his hair, and his lips smile. “Don’t choose me, or her. Choose yourself.”

Then he jumps.





46


THE DEATH OF OPERATION RESET came quietly on deadline day. Only 29% of delegates had pledged. The world had failed to come together. Behind the scenes, the solution’s two masterminds had suffered their own bitter break. But unlike a megaquake, there were no reverberations to be felt. Not in the eco-cities, at least; business as usual on this Sunday afternoon. In eco-city 3, residents milled through stratum-25’s emporium, going from vendor to vendor as they did their shopping for the odd essential. Few noticed the P2C symbol materialize in midair, at the center of the piazza.

But they did notice the girl that appeared moments later.

Her holograph spawned like a game avatar in the middle of not just stratum-25, but of every stratum, in every eco-city. She wore a black school blazer. Her hair was bobbed, her bangs combed straight. Her face had last been seen blurred and bloodied in a viral clip. Now it was clean and fresh, as far as the crowds could tell.

Only her mind was obscured from them.

It was better that way, for a tempest still raged in Kasey’s brain. Everyone lived at the expense of someone else. Those who refused to admit that, who’d rejected the solution because they could afford to, because it inconvenienced them … well, maybe Actinium was right and they didn’t deserve saving in this finite, material world, where more for someone meant less for someone else.

But science was infinite. Science knew no revenge. No emotion. It was above the gnarly questions of who ought to live and who ought to die for infringing on another’s right to life. Science was what made Kasey feel alive.

And after a five-year ban, it was hers again.

Kasey breathed in. In another timeline, she read the lines scripted for her by P2C. It’d be wise to; they almost hadn’t permitted her this postmortem speech after the Territory 4 debacle.

In yet another timeline, she condemned the territories that’d rejected Operation Reset, and revealed the name of the company that’d killed Celia while she was at it. She stoked the fire.

In this timeline, Kasey chose neither. “This is for my sister.”

In a house on Landmass-660, her face was a projection in Leona’s living room.

“Four months ago, you died.”

In a Territory 4 relief shelter, she glowed from an old-school monitor.

“Everyone has their own theory about what happened.”

In units all around the eight eco-cities, her words echoed directly in people’s heads, brought to them by their Intrafaces.

In a body shop on stratum-22, a dark-eyed, dark-haired boy paused his work to listen.

“The truth is you died to this world. You were poisoned by it. Like so many are being poisoned now.”

Kasey didn’t reveal their visits to the boat rental, or to the island. Some secrets were best left at sea, between sisters.

She brought a hand to her chest and felt her simulated heartbeat. Would the people behind the pipe leak have been evicted if David Mizuhara hadn’t covered up their tracks? Did they deserve that, and what ripple effects might their eviction have had on others relying on HOME as their one means of admission to the eco-cities, such as Meridian’s extended family? Again, Kasey didn’t know. She wasn’t Genevie or the Coles, wasn’t well-versed enough in human to forecast people’s irrational prejudices or discriminations. But she did know this:

“None of us live without consequence. Our personal preferences are not truly personal. One person’s needs will deny another’s. Our privileges can harm ourselves and others.”

When she looked to the faces staring at her from stratum-25’s emporium, she saw Celia’s among them. This wasn’t the side effect of secondhand, virtually rendered hallucinogenic smoke, or a hacker messing with her visual overlays, but a mirage of the mind, as real as Kasey wanted it to be real.

And in this moment, she wanted it with her whole heart. “You were a victim of someone else’s livelihood,” she said to her sister. “Your life paid for their living. Yet you shared their belief, and the belief of so many others in this world, that the freedom to live as we choose is a right.”

Kasey’s hand fisted over her heart, until she could no longer feel its beat. “I disagree,” she said directly to Celia’s face, and despite the fear that her sister would react with horror, she went on. “In our time, freedom is a privilege. Life is a right. We must protect life, first and foremost. Together, we pay this price.

“But down the line, we may be able to create the world you dreamed of. Where neither life nor freedom has to be rationed. You always believed it was possible.” At that, Celia smiled, and Kasey’s throat fogged. “I will, too.”