Reached

by Ally Condie

  “I have treatment and patient data for the regular Plague and for the mutation,” I tell the group. “I’ve been working inside the medical center since the night the Pilot came over the ports to announce the Plague.”

  “And when did you leave?” someone else asks.

  “Early this morning,” I say.

  They all lean forward at once. “Really,” one says. “You’ve been working on the mutation that recently?”

  I nod.

  “Perfect,” says another, and Leyna smiles.

  The medics want to know everything I can remember about each patient: the way they looked, their ages, the rate of infection, how long it took until they went still, which people’s illnesses progressed more rapidly than others.

  I’m careful to tell them when I’m not certain.

  But for the most part, I remember. So, I talk and they listen, but I wish it were Lei here working with me on the cure. She always knew the right questions to ask.

  I talk for hours. They all take notes, except for Oker, and I realize that he can’t manage the datapod with his hands the way they are. I expect him to interrupt like he did when he came into the infirmary, but he remains perfectly quiet. At one point, he leans his head back against the wall and appears to fall asleep. My voice starts to wear out right when I’m explaining about the mutation and the small red mark.

  “Now this,” Leyna says, “we already know. The Pilot told us.” She stands up. “Let’s give Xander a rest for a few minutes.”

  The room clears out. Some of the people look back over their shoulders like they’re worried I’m going to vanish. “Don’t worry,” Leyna says. “He’s not going anywhere. Will one of you bring back something for him to eat? And more water.” I finished the pitcher they’d brought in for me long ago.

  Oker is still asleep at the back of the room. “It’s hard for him to rest,” Leyna says. “He catches a catnap when he can. So we’ll leave him alone.”

  “Are you a medic?” I ask Leyna.

  “Oh no,” Leyna says. “I can’t take care of sick people. But I’m good at managing the live ones. That’s why I’m in charge of finding the cure.” She pushes her chair back a little and then leans closer to me. I’m reminded again of an opponent at one of the game tables back in the Society. She’s drawing me in, getting ready to make some kind of move. “I have to admit,” she says, smiling, “that this is all rather humorous.”

  “What is?” I ask, leaning forward so that there’s not much space between us.

  Her smile widens. “This whole situation. The Plague. Its mutation. You being here now.”

  “Tell me,” I say. “I’d like to be in on the joke.” I keep my voice easy, conversational, but I’ve seen too many still to think that anything about what’s happened to them is funny.

  “You all called us Anomalies,” Leyna says. “Not good enough to live among you. Not good enough to marry you. And now you need us to save you.”

  I smile back at her. “True,” I say. I lower my voice. I’m not entirely sure that Oker is asleep. “So,” I say to Leyna, “you’ve asked me plenty of questions. Let me ask you one or two.”

  “Of course,” she says, her eyes flickering. She’s enjoying this.

  “Is there any chance at all you can find a cure?”

  “Of course,” she says again, perfectly confident. “It’s only a matter of time. You’ll be helpful to us. I won’t lie. But we’d have found the cure without you. You’ll just help us speed up the process, which is valuable, of course. The Pilot’s not going to take us to the Otherlands if too many people die before we can save them.”

  “What if your immunity provides no clues?” I ask. “What if it turns out to be a matter of genetics?”

  “It’s not,” she says. “We know that. The people in the village come from many different places. Some came generations ago, some more recently. The Pilot doesn’t want us to include the recent arrivals in the data, so we don’t, but we’re all immune. It must be environmental.”

  “Still,” I say, “an immunity and a cure aren’t the same thing. You might not figure out how to bring people back. Maybe you’ll only find out how to keep them from getting the virus in the first place.”

  “If so,” Leyna says, “that’s still an extremely valuable discovery.”

  “But only if you make it in time,” I say. “You can’t immunize people if they’ve already gotten the virus. So we’re very useful to you, actually.”

  I hear a snort from the corner. Oker stands up and walks over toward us.

  “Congratulations,” Oker says to me. “You’re not just a Society boy after all. I’d been wondering.”

  “Thank you,” I say.

  “You were a physic in the Society, weren’t you?” Oker asks.

  “I was,” I say.

  He waves one knotted hand in my direction. “Assign him to my lab when you’re done,” he tells Leyna.

  She doesn’t like it, I can tell, but she nods. “All right,” she says. It’s a sign of a good leader when they know the most important player in their game, and if Oker is it, she should make sure he has what he needs to try to win.

  It takes them almost all night to finish questioning me. “You should get some rest,” Leyna says. “I’ll show you where you’ll sleep.”

  She walks with me through the village and I hear the crickets singing. Their music sounds different up here than it did in the Borough, like it matters more. There aren’t many other sounds to cover it up, so you have to listen.

  “Did you grow up in this village?” I ask her. “It’s beautiful.”

  “No,” Leyna says. “I used to live in Camas. Those of us in the Border Provinces were the last to go. They used to let us work at the Army base sometimes. We left for the mountains when the Society tried to gather in the last of the Anomalies and Aberrations.”

  She looks off in the distance. “The Pilot was the one who warned us that we should go,” she says. “The Society wanted us all dead. Those who didn’t come along were picked up by the Society and sent out to the Outer Provinces to die.”

  “So that’s why you trust the Pilot,” I say. “He warned you.”

  “Yes,” she says. “And he’d been part of the vanishings. I don’t know if you’ve heard about them.”

  “I have,” I say. “People who escaped from the Society and ended up either here or in the Otherlands.”

  She nods.

  “And no one has ever returned from the Otherlands?”

  “Not yet,” she says. She stops at a building with bars on the windows. A guard stands at the door and nods to her. “I’m afraid this is the prison,” she says. “We don’t know you well enough to trust you on your own without supervision, so there are times when we will need to keep you here, especially at night. Some of the other people the Pilot brought have been less cooperative than you have. They’re here full-time.”

  It makes sense. I’d do the same thing, if I were in charge of this situation. “And Cassia?” I ask. “Where will she stay?”

  “She’ll have to sleep here, too,” Leyna says. “But we’ll come for you soon.” She gestures for the guard to take me inside.

  “Wait,” I say. “I’m trying to understand.”

  “I thought it was clear,” she says. “We don’t know you. We can’t trust you alone.”

  “It’s not that,” I say. “It’s about the Otherlands, and why you want to go there. You’re not even sure that they exist.”

  “They do,” she says.

  Does she know something I don’t? It’s possible that she might not be telling me everything. Why would she? As she’s pointed out, she doesn’t know me and she can’t trust me yet. “But no one ever came back,” I say.

  “People like you see that as evidence that the Otherlands aren’
t real,” Leyna tells me. “People like me see it is evidence that it’s a place so wonderful no one would ever want to come back.”

  CHAPTER 28

  CASSIA

  Where are you, Ky?

  This is it, my greatest fear. What I’ve been afraid of ever since the Carving when I saw those people, dead, out under the sky. Someone I love is leaving me.

  The lead sorter, Rebecca, is about my mother’s age. She has me complete a few test sorts. After she goes through my work, she smiles at me and tells me that I can start right away.

  “You’ll find that the way we work here is different from what you’re used to,” she says. “In the Society, you sort alone. Here, you will need to talk to Oker and the medics about everything.” She puts the datapod down on the table. “If we make an error and leave something out, miss some pattern, then it could be critical.”

  This will be different from any sorting I’ve done before. In the Society, we were not supposed to know what the data was attached to, what it really looked like; everything remained encoded.

  “I’ve made a data set with the people in our village and those from the Carving who have lived outside of the Society their entire lives.”

  I want to tell her that I know some of those who lived in the Carving—I want to find out how Eli and Hunter are doing. But right now I have to focus on the cure and on Ky and my family.

  “We have information about diet, age, recreational habits, occupations, family histories,” Rebecca says. “Some of the data is corroborated by other sources, but most of it is self-reported.”

  “So it’s not the most reliable data set,” I observe.

  “No,” she says. “But it’s all we have. Commonalities are everywhere in the data, of course. But we’ve been able to narrow certain things down by extrapolating from what we have. For example, our data indicates an environmental or dietary exposure.”

  “Do you want me to work on sorting the elements for the cure now?” I ask hopefully.

  “I will,” Rebecca says, “but I have another project for you first. I need you to solve a constrained optimization problem.”

  I think I already know what she means. It’s the problem that’s been on my mind since I realized there was no cure for the mutation. “You want me to find out how long it will be before the Rising starts unhooking people,” I say. “We need to know how much time we have.”

  “Yes,” she says. “The Pilot won’t fly us out if there’s no one left to save. I want you to work on that while I continue sorting for the cure. Then you can help me.” She pushes a datapod across the table. “Here are the notes from Xander’s interview. They include information regarding rate of infection, rate at which the resources were being expended, and patient attributes. We have additional data from the Pilot about these same things.”

  “I’m still missing some information,” I say. “I don’t know the initial quantity of the resources or the population of the Society as a whole.”

  “You’ll have to extrapolate the initial quantity of resources from the rate of expenditure,” she says. “As for the population of the Provinces as a whole, the Pilot was able to give us an estimate of twenty-point-two million.”

  “That’s all?” I ask, stunned. I thought the Society was much larger than that.

  “Yes,” she says.

  The Rising will be trying to figure out how to best allocate resources and personnel. People have to take care of the still, obviously. Others have to work to keep food coming through, to make sure the buildings in the Cities and Boroughs have power and water. And even if a small pocket of people is safe due to contracting the initial Plague, there are only so many of them, and they’re the ones who are going to have to care for everyone else.

  I need to know how many of them are out there—how many people are likely to be immune. I will have to figure out how many people are likely to go still, what percentage of those sick the immune can reasonably keep alive, and how quickly that percentage will decrease.

  “Oker’s estimate is that five to ten percent of the population is generally immune to any plague,” Rebecca says. “So there will be that group, as well as the very small group of people like your friend Xander, who were initially immune and then contracted the live virus at precisely the right time. You’ll need to take both of those groups into account.”

  “All right,” I say. And, as I have had to do so often before, when I sort the data I must put Ky out of my mind. For a faltering, fragile moment, I want to leave this impossible task behind, let the numbers fall where they might, and walk over to the little room where Ky is and hold him, the two of us together in the mountains now after having come through the canyons.

  That can happen, I tell myself. Only a little farther now. Like the journey in the I did not reach Thee poem:

  We step like plush, we stand like snow—

  The waters murmur now,

  Three rivers and the hill are passed,

  Two deserts and the sea!

  Now Death usurps my premium

  And gets the look at Thee.

  But I will rewrite the last two lines. Death will not take the people I love. Our journey will end differently.

  It takes me a long time, because I want to get it right.

  “Are you finished?” Rebecca asks quietly.

  For a moment I can’t look up from my result. Back in the Carving, I wished for a time like this, a collaboration with people who have lived out on the edges. Instead we found an empty village in a beautiful place, peopled only by papers and pages left in a cave, things treasured up and left behind.

  We are always fighting against going quiet, going gentle.

  “Yes,” I say to Rebecca.

  “And?” she asks. “How long before they start letting people go?”

  “They will have already begun,” I say.

  CHAPTER 29

  KY

  Someone comes inside. I hear the door open and then footsteps crossing the floor.

  Could it be Cassia?

  Not this time. Whoever this is doesn’t smell like Cassia’s flowers-and-paper scent. This person smells like sweat and smoke. And they breathe differently than she does. Lower. Louder, like they’ve been running and they’re trying to hold it in.

  I hear the person reach for the bag.

  But I don’t need new fluid. Someone just changed it. Where are they now? Do they know what’s happening?

  I feel a tug on my arm. They’ve unhooked the bag from my line and started to drain it. The liquid drips into some kind of bucket instead of into me.

  I’m turned toward the window so the wind rattling the panes is even louder now.

  Is this happening to everyone? Or only to me? Is someone trying to make sure I don’t come back?

  I can hear my own heart slowing down.

  I’m going deeper.

  The pain is less.

  It’s harder to remember to breathe. I repeat Cassia’s poem to myself, breathing with the beats.

  New. Rose. Old. Rose. Queen. Anne’s. Lace.

  In. Out. In. Out. In. Out. In.

  Out.

  CHAPTER 30

  XANDER

  I must have fallen asleep, because I jump when the prison door opens. “Get him out,” someone says to the guard, and then Oker appears in front of my cell, watching the guard unlock the door. “You,” Oker says. “Time to get back to work.”

  I glance at the cell across from me. Cassia hasn’t come in. Did she spend the whole night watching over Ky? Or have they made her work all this time? All the other prisoners are quiet. I can hear them breathing, but no one else seems to be awake.

  When we get outside, I see that it’s dark: not even early morning yet. “You’re working for me,” Oker says, “so you keep the same hours I do.” He points to
the research lab across the way. “That’s mine,” he says. “Do what I say, and you can spend most of your day in there instead of locked up.”

  If Leyna’s the physic of this village, then I think Oker is the pilot.

  “Follow my instructions exactly,” he tells me. “All I need are your hands since mine don’t work right.”

  “Oker isn’t much for introductions,” one of the assistants says after Oker’s left. “I’m Noah. I’ve worked with Oker since he came here.” Noah looks to be somewhere in his mid-thirties. “This is Tess.”

  Tess nods to me. She’s a little younger than Noah and has a kind smile.

  “I’m Xander,” I say. “What’s all this?” One of the walls of the lab is covered with pictures of people I don’t know. Some are old photos and pages torn from books, but most look like they might have been drawn by hand. Did Oker do that before his hands stopped working right? I’m impressed, and it makes me think of that nurse back in the medical center. Maybe I am the only one who can’t make things—pictures, poems—without any training.

  “Oker calls them the heroes of the past,” Noah says. “He believes we should know the work of those who came before us.”

  “He trained in the Society, didn’t he,” I say.

  “Yes,” Tess says. “He came here ten years ago, right before his Final Banquet.”

  “He’s ninety?” I ask. I’ve never known anyone so old.

  “Yes,” Noah says. “The oldest person in the world, as far as we know.”

  The office door slams open and we all get back to work.

  A few hours later, Oker tells the assistants to take a break. “Not you,” he says to me. “I need to make something and you can stay and help me with it.”

  Noah and Tess send me sympathetic looks.