Water by KJ Kabza

Author:KJ Kabza
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

* * *

I talk about it at length with Sadie’s nonexistent ghost that night, before we fall asleep. I’m troubled. For over a decade, we had it all planned out: assuming it was cancer, I’d go outside for one final walk, lie down by Sadie’s tallest rock tower (and her chloride), and die a fitting and deliciously romantic death.

But lovestruck notions, while heady, are delicate. The littlest whiff of reality pops them. In my mind, Sadie’s voice points out that, as soon as my wrist alarm went off and failed to show me moving on a homeward trajectory, the Office of Exodus would dispatch a rescue team, and that would be the end of my dramatic gesture.

And then there’s the matter of my nutrient-rich biomass. I’m not as sentimental as I once was, and if I went outside to die, I’d be depriving a number of living people (whom I might not like very much—but that’s beside the point) of my body’s minerals. I’m no heroic ice-miner-to-be, like Lian, and if I’m honest with myself, I haven’t done very much for Isla, either. When I worked, I was a clerk in the city records department; now that I don’t, I tell lies about a planet we cannot return to. The least I can do is not rob my brethren of my literal pound of flesh.

Sadie says it doesn’t matter how I die, because she’ll be with me wherever I go.

I tell her I’m glad.

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