by Ally Condie
My mind is whirling. Matthew Markham. Patrick and Aida’s son. He isn’t dead?
“Sione performed that trade with no fee, because it was a family member who wanted it. It was his wife’s sister. Her husband knew something was rotten in the Society. He wanted his child out. It was an extremely delicate, dangerous trade.”
She looks past me, remembering Ky’s father, a man I never met. What was he like? I wonder. It’s impossible not to picture him as an older, more reckless version of Ky: bright, daring. “But,” Anna says, “Sione managed it. He thought that the Society would prefer word of a death getting around to news of an escape, and he was right. The Society made up a story to explain the boy’s disappearance. They didn’t want rumors to spread about the vanishings, as they were called. They didn’t want people to think they could escape.”
“He risked a great deal for his nephew,” I say.
“No,” Anna says. “He did it for his son.”
“For Ky?”
“Sione couldn’t change who he was. He couldn’t Reclassify himself. But he wanted a better life for his son than he could provide.”
“But Ky’s father was a rebel,” I say. “He believed in the Rising.”
“And in the end, I think he was also a realist,” Anna says. “He knew the chances of a rebellion succeeding were slim. What he did for Ky was an insurance policy. If something went wrong and Sione died, then Ky would have a place in the Society. He could go back to live with his aunt and uncle.”
“And he did,” I say.
“Yes,” Anna says. “Ky was safe.”
“No,” I say. “They sent him out to the work camps eventually.” I sent him out to the work camps.
“But much later than they would have,” she says. “He likely lived longer where he was in the Society than he would have if he’d been trapped in the Outer Provinces.”
“Where is that boy now?” I ask. “Matthew Markham?”
“I have no idea,” Anna says. “I never met him, you understand. I only knew of him from Sione.”
“I knew Ky’s uncle,” I say. “Patrick. I can’t believe he would send his son out here to live where he knew nothing and no one.”
“Parents will do strange things when they see a clear danger to their children,” she says.
“But Patrick didn’t do the same for Ky,” I say, angry.
“I suspect,” Anna says, “that he wanted to honor Ky’s parents’ request for their child, which was that he have a chance to leave the Outer Provinces. And eventually, I’m sure Ky’s aunt and uncle didn’t want to give him up. Sending one son out would have almost killed them. And then, when nothing terrible happened for years, they would have wondered if they’d done the right thing in sending him away.” Anna takes a deep breath. “Hunter may have told you that I left him behind, along with his daughter. My granddaughter. Sarah.”
“Yes,” I say. I saw Hunter bury Sarah. I saw the line on her grave—Suddenly across the June a wind with fingers goes.
“Hunter never blamed me,” Anna says. “He knew I had to take the people across. Time was short. The ones who stayed did die. I was right about that.”
She looks up at me. Her eyes are very dark. “But I blame myself,” she says. Then she holds out her hand, flexing her fingers, and I think I see traces of blue marked on her skin, or perhaps it’s her veins underneath. In the dim light of the infirmary, it’s hard to tell.
She stands up. “When is your next break?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” I say.
“I’ll try to find out and bring Eli and Hunter to see you.” Anna bends down and touches Ky’s shoulder. “And you,” she says.
After she leaves, I lean down to Ky. “Did you hear all that?” I ask him. “Did you hear how much your parents loved you?”
He doesn’t answer.
“And I love you,” I tell him. “We are still looking for your cure.”
He doesn’t stir. I tell him poems, and I tell him that I love him. Over and over again. As I watch, I think the liquid dripping into his veins helps; there is a warming to his face, like sun on stone, when the light comes up.
CHAPTER 32
KY
Her voice comes back first. Beautiful and gentle. She’s still telling me poetry.
Then the pain comes back, but it’s different now. My muscles and bones used to hurt. But now I ache even deeper than that. Has the infection spread?
Cassia wants me to know that she loves me.
The pain wants to eat me away.
I wish I could have one without the other, but that’s the problem with being alive.
You don’t usually get to choose the measure of suffering or the degree of joy you have.
I don’t deserve either her love or this illness.
That’s a stupid thought. Things happen whether you deserve them or not.
For now, I’ll ride out the pain on the song of her voice. I won’t think about what will happen when she has to leave.
Right now, she’s here and she loves me. She says it over and over again.
CHAPTER 33
CASSIA
Xander finds me there next to Ky. “Leyna sent me to bring you back,” he says. “It’s time to get to work again.”
“Ky’s drip was out,” I say. “I wanted to stay until he looked better.”
“That shouldn’t have happened,” Xander says. “I’ll let Oker know.”
“Good,” I say. Oker’s anger will carry much more weight with the village leaders than mine will.
“I’ll be back,” I tell Ky, in case he can hear. “As soon as I can.”
Outside of the infirmary, the trees grow right up to the edge of the village buildings. Branches scrape and sing along one another when the wind comes through them. So much life here. Grasses, flowers, leaves, and people walking, talking, living.
“I’m sorry about the blue tablets,” Xander says. “I—you could have died. It would have been my fault.”
“No,” I say. “You didn’t know.”
“You never took one, did you?”
“Yes,” I say. “But I’m fine. I kept going.”
“How?” he asks.
I kept going by thinking of Ky. But how can I tell Xander that? “I just did,” I say. “And the scraps in the tablets helped.”
Xander smiles.
“The secret you mentioned on one of the scraps,” I say. “What was it?”
“I’m a part of the Rising,” Xander says.
“I thought that might be what you meant,” I say. “You told me on the port. Didn’t you? Not in words, I know, but I thought that’s what you were trying to say. . . .”
“You’re right,” Xander says. “I did tell you. It wasn’t much of a secret.” He grins, and then his expression sobers. “I’ve been meaning to ask you about the red tablet.”
“I’m not immune,” I say. “It works on me.”
“Are you sure?”
“They gave it to me in Central,” I say. “I’m certain of it.”
“The Rising promised me that you were immune to the red tablet, and to the Plague,” Xander says.
“Then they either lied to you or made a mistake,” I say.
“That means you would have been vulnerable to the original version of the Plague,” Xander says. “Did you go down with it? Did they give you a cure?”
“No.” I understand what’s puzzling him. “If the red tablet works on me, then I was never given the initial immunization when I was a baby. So I should have gone down sick with the original Plague. But I didn’t. I just got the mark.”
Xander shakes his head, trying to figure it out. I am sorting through, too. “The red tablet works on me,” I say. “I’ve never taken the green. And I walked through the blue.”
“Has anyone else ever walked through the blue?” Xander asks.
“Not that I know of,” I say. “I had Indie with me, and she helped me keep going. That might have made a difference.”
“What else happened in the canyons?” Xander asks.
“For a long time, I wasn’t with Ky at all,” I say. “We started in a village full of other Aberrations. Then three of us ran to the Carving; me, the boy who died, and Indie.”
“Indie is in love with Ky,” Xander says.
“Yes,” I say. “I think she is, now. But first it was you. She used to steal things. She took my microcard and someone else’s miniport and she used to look at your face whenever she could.”
“And in the end, it was Ky she wanted,” Xander says. I detect a note of bitterness in his voice; it’s not something I’ve heard often before.
“They flew in the same Rising camp,” I say. “She saw him all the time.”
“You don’t seem angry at her,” Xander says.
And I’m not. There was the moment of shock and hurt when Ky said that she’d kissed him, but it vanished when Ky went still. “She makes her own way,” I say. “She does what she wants.” I shake my head. “It’s hard to stay upset with her.”
“I don’t understand,” Xander says.
And I don’t think he can. He doesn’t really know Indie; has never seen her lie and cheat to get what she wants, or realized how among all of that is a strange inexplicable honesty that is only hers. He didn’t see her push through the silver water and bring us to safety against the odds. He never knew how she felt about the sea or how badly she wanted a dress made of blue silk.
Some things cannot be shared. I could tell him everything that happened in the Carving and he still won’t have been there with me.
And it’s the same for him. He could tell me all about the Plague and the mutation that followed and what he saw, but I still wasn’t there.
Watching Xander’s face, I see him realize this. He swallows. He’s about to ask me something. When he does, it’s not what I expect. “Have you ever written anything for me? Besides that message, I mean.”
“You did get it,” I say.
“All except for the end,” he says. “It got ruined.”
My heart sinks. So he doesn’t know what I said, that I told him not to think of me anymore in that way.
“I wondered,” Xander says, “if you’d ever written a poem for me.”
“Wait,” I say. There is no paper here, but there is a stick and dark dirt on the ground and it is, after all, how I learned to write. I hesitate for a moment, glancing back at the infirmary, but then I realize The time for keeping this to ourselves is long past. And if I tried to share it with everyone out in Central, why would I keep it from Xander?
All the same, it feels intimate to write for Xander. It means more.
I close my eyes for a moment, trying to think of something, and then it comes to me, an extension of the poem with a word that made me think of Xander. I begin to write. “Xander,” I say, pausing.
“What?” he asks. He doesn’t lift his eyes from my hands, as if they’re capable of a miracle and he can finally witness what it is.
“I thought about you in the Carving, too,” I say. “I dreamed of you.”
Now he does look at me and I find I can’t hold his gaze; something deep I feel makes me look down, and I write:
Dark, dark, dark it was
But the Physic’s hand was light.
He knew the cure, he held the balm
To heal our wings for flight.
Xander reads it over. His lips move. “Physic,” he says softly. His expression looks pained. “You think I can heal people,” he says.
“I do.”
Just then, some of the children from the village come down the path across from us. As if we’re one person, Xander and I stand up at the same time to watch them go by.
They are playing a game I’ve never seen before, one where they pretend to be something else. Each child is dressed as an animal. Some used grass to make fur, others used leaves for feathers, and there are still more with wings lashed together, made of branches and of blankets that will be used again to warm at night. The repurposing of nature and scraps for creation reminds me of the Gallery, and I wonder if the people back in Central have found another place to gather and share, or if they don’t have time at all for this anymore, with a mutation on the loose and no cure in sight.
“What would it have been like if we could do that?” Xander asks.
“What?” I ask.
“Be whatever we wanted,” he says. “What if they’d let us do that when we were younger?”
I’ve thought about this, especially when I was in the Carving. Who am I? What am I meant to be? I think how lucky I am, in spite of the Society, to have dreamed so many, such wild things. Part of that is, of course, because of Grandfather, who always challenged me.
“Remember Oria?” Xander asks.
Yes. Yes. I remember. All of it. It’s all clear and close again; the two of us, Matched, holding hands on the air train on the way home from the Banquet. My hand on the nape of his neck as I dropped the compass down his shirt so he could save Ky’s artifact from the Officials. Even then, the three of us were doing our best to keep faith with one another.
“Remember that day planting newroses?” he asks.
“I do,” I say, thinking of that kiss, the only one we’ve had, and my heart aches for us both. The air here in the mountains is sharp even in the summer. It bites at us, twists our hair, puts tears in our eyes. Standing here with Xander among the mountains is everything and nothing like standing with Ky out at the edge of the Carving.
I reach out my hand to take Xander’s. My palm is streaked with dirt from writing with the stick, and as I look at it and think of Xander and newrose roots hanging down, the wind moves and the children dance toward the village stone, and light as air another cottonwood seed of memory comes to me:
My mother’s hands are printed black with dirt, but I can see the white lines crossing her palms when she lifts up the seedlings. We stand in the plant nursery at the Arboretum; the glass roof overhead and the steamy mists inside belie the cool of the spring morning out.
“Bram made it to school on time,” I say.
“Thank you for letting me know,” she says, smiling at me. On the rare days when both she and my father have to go to work early, it is my responsibility to get Bram to his early train for First School. “Where are you going now? You have a few minutes left before work.”
“I might stop by to see Grandfather,” I say. It’s all right to deviate from the usual routine this way, because Grandfather’s Banquet is coming soon. So is mine. We have so many things to discuss.
“Of course,” she says. She’s transferring the seedlings from the tubes where they started, rowed in a tray, to their new homes, little pots filled with soil. She lifts one of the seedlings out.
“It doesn’t have many roots,” I say.
“Not yet,” she says. “That will come.”
I give her a quick kiss and start off again. I’m not supposed to linger at her workplace, and I have an air train to catch. Getting up early with Bram has given me a little extra time, but not much.
The spring wind is playful, pushing me one way, pulling me another. It spins some of last fall’s leaves up into the air, and I wonder, if I climbed up on the air-train platform and jumped, if the spiral of wind would catch me and take me up twirling.
I cannot think of falling without thinking of flying.
I could do it, I think, if I found a way to make wings.
Someone comes up next to me as I pass by the tangled world of the Hill on my way to the air-train stop. “Cassia Reyes?” the worker asks. The knees of her plainclothes are dark
ened with soil, like my mother’s when she’s been working. The woman is young, a few years older than me, and she has something in her hand, more roots dangling down. Pulling up or planting? I wonder.
“Yes?” I say.
“I need to speak with you,” she says. A man emerges from the Hill behind her. He is the same age as she is, and something about them makes me think, They would be a good Match. I’ve never had permission to go on the Hill, and I look back up at the riot of plants and forest behind the workers. What is it like in a place so wild?
“We need you to sort something for us,” the man says.
“I’m sorry,” I say, moving again. “I only sort at work.” They are not Officials, nor are they my superiors or supervisors. This isn’t protocol, and I don’t bend rules for strangers.
“It’s to help your grandfather,” the girl says.
I stop.
“Cassia?” Xander asks. “Are you all right?”
“Yes,” I say. I’m still staring down at my hand, wishing I could close it tight around the rest of the memory. I know it belongs with the lost red garden day. I’m certain of this, though I can’t say why.
Xander looks like he’s about to say something more, but the children are coming back again in their game, having circled all the way around the village stone. They are loud and laughing, as children should be. A little girl smiles at Xander and he smiles back, reaching out to touch her wing as she passes, but she turns at the wrong moment and he catches nothing.
CHAPTER 34
XANDER
Oker’s so driven, it’s almost inhuman. I feel the same way—we have to find the cure—but his focus is something else. It doesn’t take many days before I’m accustomed to the routine in the research lab, which is: we work when Oker says to work and we rest when Oker says to take a break. Sometimes I catch a glimpse of Cassia in the sorting rooms, but for the most part I spend my time compounding formulas according to Oker’s instructions.
Oker eats his meals right here in the lab. He doesn’t even sit down. So that’s what the rest of us do, too: we stand around and watch each other chew our food. It’s probably the stress of the situation and the late hours, but something about it always makes me want to laugh. The mealtime conversations are a measure of how well things are going with the cure trials. Oker’s different from most people because when things are going well he won’t talk. When things are going badly, he’ll say more.