What would a normal person feel, potentially moments
from reuniting with their sister? Excited, most likely. Nervous
would also be acceptable. Not scared, which was Kasey’s physiological
response of choice, epinephrine charting on her biomonitor.
She wanted to run. Quelling the urge, she knocked
and, when no one answered, bypassed the retinal scanner with
her badge.
Possibility. Probability. The chances were next to none.
She pushed open the door.
And breathed out.
No Celia.
She ran a body heat scan. Negative. She walked in, looking
for evidence of how this person by the name of “Act”
might give anyone the creeps. Maybe she wasn’t the best
judge; she hardly put people at ease herself. But truly, this
unit was the most mundane thing Kasey had encountered
so far: boxlike, walls painted gray. Fuel-bar?
Check. No bed;
not unusual. The stasis pod, bolted upright to the back wall,
could have doubled as one.
A more thorough inspection led Kasey to the fuel-bar.
The cupboards yielded tins of protein blocks, vitamin cubes,
and fiber powders. She studied the stasis pod. An older
model, worse for wear and missing chunks of material on its
right side.
A lot of chunks, actually, gouged out at fairly regular intervals.
Intervals like the rungs to a ladder.
It was a stretch of the mind—a
biased mind, familiar with
58 • JOAN HE
ladders and primed to detect their patterns. Besides, what ladder
went to the bare ceiling? Good question: Kasey looked up.
The ceiling was painted the same gray as the walls. Nothing
about it stood out.
Except for a speck. A paint bubble. A bead-like
object, either
attached by adhesive . . .
. . . or resting there, just like Kasey rested on the ground
thanks to gravity.
To assume antigravity was at work in a down-stratum
rental unit was an even further stretch of the mind than seeing
ladders on the sides of stasis pods. The probability was
absurdly low.
But Kasey was only here to rule out the near impossible.
She positioned herself under the speck, opened the search
warrant app in her Intraface, and keyed CANCEL ALL ACTIVE
FORCES into the unit override system.
For a second, nothing happened.
The bead fell.
She caught it in her cupped hands, like a raindrop from
the skies. It was nothing so natural. The white kernel, no bigger
than a tooth, possessed a smooth, machine-tumbled
shape,
and when Kasey nudged it onto its narrower side, she found a
row of micro-lasered
digits.
She could have magnified the numbers through her Intraface
and matched them to the fourteen-digit
sequence she’d
memorized, given to authorities, and entered into her own
geolocation tracker. She could have; she did not. She knew,
intuitively, what this thing was. To whom it’d belonged.
THE ONES WE’RE MEANT TO FIND • 59
Where it’d once resided: under the skin, at the base of the
skull.
Might your sister not want to be found?