Utopia

Chapter Seventeen - Wide World

Kira flew towards waking, but the room was still dark. She slapped frenetically around her pillow until she found the singing device in her pocket.

"Hello?" she asked irritably.

"Kira!" came the responding chirrup.

She squinted at her screen. "Hank, it's two in the morning. Why are you calling?"

"Check out our video channel."

"It's two in the morning," she repeated reproachfully.

"Check!" he insisted.

Tired—and somewhat sore between her shoulders—Kira groaned but acquiesced. She pulled the phone from her ear, put Hank on speaker, and opened the video app. Her fingers fumbled as she searched for their channel, but then she found the reason he had called.

"Holy—" she swore.

"Right!"

Kira tried to calculate how long it had been since she last checked their views. Several months at least.

In that time, their count had climbed from a measly ten thousand to over half a million.

She swore again.

"Refresh the page."

She closed the app and reopened it, navigating back to their channel. Their account had already climbed another thousand.

"This is unbelievable," she murmured.

"Unbelievable?" Hank scoffed. "This is what we've been working for. We've had our interviews, we've been in the papers and on TV, and now we're getting our dues."

Their dues. Bile rose in her throat.

What was Kira due?

"It's late," she said abruptly, "or early. I'm going back to bed."

She hung up before she even understood his response.

Kira had already been given what she was due, and it had left her with a deficit. This was only reparations.

But reparations in which direction? Suffering, struggling, sometimes sober, perhaps this was her reparation for earlier joy. Or perhaps Hank was nearly right, and this was reparation to her for such suffering.

And yet, even as she wondered, she dismissed her wondering as a waste. It was happening whether it was a reward or a punishment.

She closed her eyes and laid her head back on her pillow. She knew she wouldn't sleep.

Kira groped along the floor by her bed for the bottle.

She frowned.

Its absence only compounded her desire for it, and the flush was enough to drive her from her bed. She knelt and peered below, but the only thing she found were her bins of clothing for different seasons and the dust that covered them.

This triggered a slightly more desperate search which tore off her bedding, slammed a few drawers, and left her heaving in the solitary light of her room against the dark.

Suspiciously, wildly, a little ridiculously, she began to imagine the different ways it might've disappeared. Where it might have rolled. Where the pieces might be if it had shattered. Where it might have simply been overlooked.

Still imagining, she left her room, left the spilling path of light into the rest of their apartment, and went to her desk. But when she pulled out the bottom drawer, the space was empty. Her grasping hand closed around and around open air.