Page 48 of Skyn
He cuts me off. “I can’t change anything without my tools.” His shoulders sag. “If they take all my research, they will decimate your sector with or without me. Help me figure this thing out.”
I guffaw. “Help you figure out how to kill twenty thousand people?”
“Help mefixthis. I don’t want to murder anyone. But our sector cannot sustain overpopulation. Every sector is allowed only so many resources. We keep detailed population data, and if we do not cull, we will all die of famine. In sixty years’ time.”
Something sharp twists in my chest. I want to hate him.
But I know he’s not lying. Sectors all around us rise and fall in violent uprisings, while mysterious peace reigns in Sector Two. We have been an outlier. And now I know why.
I clench my fists, force my breath to steady. “You have to have a hearing.”
Ben’s brows knit. He can’t follow my thinking. “What?”
“If they want to declare you non compos mentis, you must have a hearing. The full board.”
Ben exhales and shakes his head. “That’s weeks away. That’s?—”
“No.”
I touch his console and flip to a specific date. “The council meets at the end-of-year Council Gala,” I say. I think of our little dinner with Josh. He can finally be good for something. I’m cooking up a plan. But it’ll take time. When it’s time for the gala, we’ll give them a show.
Chapter22
War Machine
I’m standing outside Iku House in a short, backless shimmery dress, waiting on Ben. We’re supposed to meet Josh and Dru for drinks, dinner, and maybe a little light statecraft—because nothing saysdiplomacylike sharing small plates with your ex and your stepsister.
Every time a railcar passes, its light hits the sequins on my dress and turns the whole street into a disco. I never noticed before how many black iroko trees line the walkway to Iku House. The family motto—Rest with the Ancestors—is carved into the stone like a benediction. It hits me now, harder than it should: this family is obsessed with death.
It was always there.
The trees. The seal. The way Ben speaks in variables and necessary losses.
He’s always running the numbers.
We worked all day to save thirty thousand people. Ben and I were a team. I fed him questions, and he fed me formulas. I hunted data, and he ran simulations. It was elegant.
I wasn’t sure why people had to die. Not at first. But Ben’s calculations were airtight—cold, precise, and merciless in their logic.
I kept scouring the IS, desperate to find another solution. Some hidden corridor of possibility. Some string of code that unraveled the certainty. But it all came back the same.
The same equation. The same answer.
Too many people.
Too few resources.
To keep the balance, somehadto go.
One family—calm, moral, mathematically gifted—had to decide who and how.
And now, I’m standing here and realizing, with a clarity that scrapes the inside of my ribs, I’m now an Iku.
My plan isn’t fully formed. It’s not mathematically sound. It doesn’t glide across a console in neat lines of code or satisfy Ben’s need for equilibrium.
But I want something fairer. Something where the poor don’t always pay the debt of the rich.
And Joshcouldbe part of that. He made it out after all, and he still remembers what it cost.
