Reached

by Ally Condie

  “You’re not,” I say. “The group they’re using had to fall still within a certain time frame. She was just outside of it.” I finish emptying the syringe and turn to look at him. “But I had a few extra.” I hold several of the vials. “I might not be able to come here for a little while. I’m supposed to get back to work on making more of this.”

  The medic slips the vials into the pocket of his uniform. “I’ll give them to her,” he says.

  “Every two hours,” I say. I can’t seem to leave her alone like this. I know how Cassia felt in the infirmary. Can I trust the medic? I’m sure there’s someone else he’d like to cure if he could.

  “I’m not going to try to sneak it to someone else,” he says. “I want to see if it works first.”

  “Thank you,” I tell him.

  “Does it work?”

  “On one hundred percent of the first trial group,” I say. I leave out the fact that the trial group only included a single person.

  “I have to ask,” he says. “Are you the Pilot?”

  “No,” I say. I stop at the door for a second and look back at Lei. You’re not supposed to do what we’ve done with this cure and Ky and let one patient take on so much significance. It’s just one person. Of course, one person can be the world.

  We get the first set of data: They’re coming back. They look better.

  According to the numbers, fifty-seven of the hundred can now track movement with their eyes. Three have spoken. Eighty-three patients total exhibit some kind of improvement: if not speech or sight, then better color, increased heart rate, and breathing that comes closer to normal levels. It’s taken them twice as long as it took Ky to exhibit these initial improvements, but at least the cure is working.

  “Seventeen aren’t responding at all,” the head medic tells me. “We think they may have been still longer than we previously thought. There might have been a mistake in the record keeping.”

  “Keep trying to get them back,” I say. “Give them the full two days of medication.”

  The medic nods. I pick up the miniport and relay the information to the Pilot. “What do you think?” he asks me.

  “I don’t think we should wait any longer,” I say. “I’ve trained the others here to make the cure. They can oversee their own labs in other Cities if we set them up. But we haven’t figured out how to synthesize it yet. Do you have enough bulbs?”

  “We’ve found enough to begin,” he says. “We need more.”

  “You’ve seen the data we’re getting,” I say. “Time matters.”

  “What do you think we should do first?” he asks. “Send it out to the other Cities now, or start here and then work outward?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Ask Cassia. She can sort it out best. I’m going back to the medical center to see the patients for myself.”

  “Good,” the Pilot says.

  I walk over to the medical center. There’s another patient I need to see whose data wasn’t included in the initial report. They haven’t been tracking her because they don’t know about her. The other medics nod to me when I come in but they leave me alone, and I’m glad.

  The painting above her is the same one, that picture of the girl fishing. Lei stares up at the water, and I smile just in case. “Lei,” I say. That’s all I can get out before her eyes move the slightest bit and focus on me.

  She’s here.

  She sees me.

  CHAPTER 56

  CASSIA

  Don’t ask your mother about your father or the flowers right away,” Xander told me. “Give her a little time. I know everyone says we don’t have any time, but she’s been under much longer than Ky. We’ve got to be careful.”

  So I take his advice. I ask her no questions, I am only there, with Bram, holding her hands and telling her we love her. And the cure works on my mother. She seems glad that I am here, and to see Bram, but she is in and out, a different return than Ky’s. She was longer gone.

  But she is strong. After a few days, she speaks, her voice a whisper, a little seed. “You’re both all right,” she says, and Bram puts his head down next to her on the bed and closes his eyes.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “We sent something to you,” she tells me. “Did you get it?” She looks at the medic who has come to change her line, and I can tell that she doesn’t want to speak too openly in front of him. And she doesn’t mention my father. Is she afraid to ask because she doesn’t want to know?

  “It’s all right,” I tell her. “We can talk here. And I did get it. Thank you for sending the microcard. And the flower—” I pause for a moment, not wanting to rush her, but the time seems right. She brought up the gift. “It’s a sego lily, isn’t it?”

  She smiles. “Yes,” she says. “You remembered.”

  “I’ve seen them growing in the wild,” I say. “They’re as beautiful as you said they would be.”

  She is holding on tight to this talk of flowers, as I did before, when I was afraid and alone. If you sing and speak of blooms and petals that come back after a long time of being winter-still, you don’t have to think about things that don’t.

  “You were in Sonoma?” she asks. “When?”

  “I wasn’t there,” I say. “I saw it growing someplace else. Was it in Sonoma that you saw the flowers?”

  “Yes,” she says, no hesitation, no uncertainty. “In Sonoma’s Farmlands, just outside of a small city called Vale.”

  I look back at the medic and he nods to me before he slips out of the room to relay the information. The crop was in Sonoma. My mother remembered.

  There is so much I want to ask her, but that is enough for now. “I’m glad you’re back,” I say, and I put my head on her shoulder, and the three of us are together without him.

  “Do you still have the microcard?” she asks later. “Could I see it again?”

  “Yes,” I say. I pull my chair closer to the bed and hold up the datapod so that she can see the screen.

  There they are again, the pictures: Grandfather with his parents, with my grandmother, my father.

  “In parting, as is customary, Samuel Reyes made a list of his favorite memory of each of his surviving family members,” the historian says.

  “The one he chose of his daughter-in-law, Molly, was the day they first met.” The historian’s voice sounds full and proud, as if this is a confirmation of the validity of Matching, which I suppose in a way it is. But it is also a confirmation of love. Of my grandfather letting go of my father and letting him choose what he wanted.

  Tears stream down my mother’s cheeks. They are all gone now, the others from that meeting. My grandmother, who said that my mother still had the sun on her face. My grandfather. My father.

  “His favorite memory of his son, Abran, was the day they had their first real argument.”

  This time, I find the button to pause the microcard. Why would Grandfather choose a memory like that? I have so many memories of my father—his laugh, his eyes brightening as he talked about his work, the way he loved my mother, the games he taught us. My father was, first and foremost, a gentle man, and in spite of the poem advising otherwise, I hope that is the way that he went into the night.

  “Why?” I ask softly. “Why would Grandfather say that about Papa?”

  “It seems strange, doesn’t it,” my mother says, and I look over to see her watching me with tears slipping down her cheeks. She knows he’s gone, even though she hasn’t asked and I haven’t told.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “That memory happened before I knew your father,” my mother says. “But he told me about it.” She pauses, puts her hand flat against her chest. She finds it hard to breathe without him, I think, something in her is still drowning a little from loss. “Your father told me that your grandfather gave the poems to you, Cas
sia,” she says. “He tried to give them to your father, too.”

  Now I cannot breathe. “He did?” I whisper. “Did Papa read them?”

  “Just once,” my mother says. “Then he gave them back. He didn’t want them.”

  “Why?”

  My mother shakes her head. “He always told me that it was because he was happy in the Society. He wanted everything to be safe. He wanted what the Society could offer. That was his choice.”

  “What did Grandfather do?” I ask. I imagine giving someone such a gift and then having it returned. Parents are always giving things that are not taken. Grandfather tried to give my father the poems and to tell him about the rebellion. My mother and father tried to give me safety.

  “That was when they argued,” my mother says. “Your great-grandmother had saved the poems. And there was a certain legacy of rebellion attached to them. But Abran thought it was too dangerous, that your grandfather took too many risks. Eventually, Grandfather accepted your father’s decision.” She brings her hand down from her chest and breathes in more deeply.

  “Did you know Grandfather would give the poems to me?” I ask.

  “We thought he might,” my mother says.

  “Why didn’t you stop him?”

  “We didn’t want to take away your choices,” my mother says.

  “But Grandfather never did tell me about the Rising,” I say.

  “I think he wanted you to find your own way,” my mother says. She smiles. “In that way, he was a true rebel. I think that’s why he chose that argument with your father as his favorite memory. Though he was upset when the fight happened, later he came to see that your father was strong in choosing his own path, and he admired him for it.”

  I see why my father had to honor Grandfather’s last request—to destroy his sample—even though my father didn’t agree with the choice. It was his turn to give that back; to be the one to respect and honor a decision made. And my father also extended that gift to me. I remember what he said in his note: Cassia, I want you to know that I’m proud of you for seeing things through, and for being braver than I was.

  “That’s why the Rising didn’t make us immune to the red tablet,” Bram says to me. “Because they thought our father was weak. They thought he was a traitor.”

  “Bram,” I say.

  “I didn’t say I believe them,” Bram says. “The Rising was wrong.”

  I look at my mother. Her eyes are closed. “Please,” she says. “Play the rest.”

  I press the button on the datapod and the historian speaks again.

  “His favorite memory of his grandson, Bram, was his first word,” the historian says. “It was ‘more.’”

  Bram smiles a little.

  “His favorite memory of his granddaughter, Cassia,” the historian says, and I lean forward to listen, “was of the red garden day.”

  That’s all. The datapod goes blank.

  My mother opens her eyes. “Your father is gone,” she says, her lips trembling.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “He died while you were still,” Bram says to my mother. His smile is gone, and his voice sounds heavy and sad, weary with telling this terrible news.

  “I know,” my mother says, smiling through her tears. “He came to say good-bye.”

  “How?” Bram asks.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “But he did. When I was still, I saw him. He was there, and then he went away.”

  “I saw him dead, but not the way you saw him,” Bram says. “I found his body.”

  “Oh, Bram, no,” my mother says, her voice a whisper of agony. “No, no,” she says, and she gathers my brother close. “I’m sorry,” she tells him. “I’m so sorry.”

  My mother holds Bram tightly. I draw in a ragged breath, the kind you take when the pain is too deep to cry, when you can’t cry because all you are is pain, and if you let some of it out, you might cease to exist. I want to do something to make this better, even though I know that nothing can change the fact of my father gone and under ground.

  My mother looks at me and her gaze is pleading. “Can you bring me something,” she says, “anything, that is growing?”

  “Of course,” I say.

  I don’t know plants the way my mother does, so I’m not even sure what it is I dig up in the little courtyard of the medical center. It could be a weed, it could be a flower. But I think she’ll be happy with either—she just wants, needs, something to combat the sterility of her room and the emptiness of a world without my father.

  I fold the foilware container I brought with me into a kind of cup, scoop the soil inside, and pull out the plant.

  The roots dangle down, some thick, others so thin that the breeze goes through them as easily as it does the leaves. When I stand up, my knees are dusty, my hands are dark with dirt. I am bringing my mother a plant because there is no way I can bring my father back for her. I understand why people wanted the tubes; I am also desperate for something to hold on to.

  And then, standing there with roots dripping dirt on my feet, the middle of the red garden day memory comes back to me. My mother, my father, Grandfather, his tissue sample, cottonwood seeds, flowers growing wild and made of paper, red buds folded up tight, the green tablet, Ky’s blue eyes, and suddenly I can follow Grandfather’s red garden day clue, I can take it and follow it up to leaves and branches and all the way down to the roots.

  And I catch my breath with remembering . . .

  Everything.

  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 darkened 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 wor
kers. 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 woman says.

  I stop.

  “There’s been a problem,” she says. “He may not be a candidate for tissue preservation after all.”

  “That can’t be true,” I say.

  “I’m afraid that it is,” the man says. “There’s evidence that he’s been stealing from the Society.”

  I laugh. “Stealing what?” I ask. Grandfather has almost nothing in his apartment.

  “The thefts occurred long ago,” the woman says, “when he worked at Restoration sites.”

  The man holds out a datapod. It’s old, but the pictures on the screen are clear. Grandfather, younger, holding artifacts. Grandfather, burying the artifacts in a forested area. “Where is this?” I say.

  “Here,” they say. “On the Hill.”

  The pictures cover a span of many years. Grandfather ages as I scroll through them. He did this for a very, very long time.

  “And the Society has only now found these pictures?” I ask.

  “The Society doesn’t know,” the woman says. “We’d like to keep it that way, so he can still have his Banquet and his sample taken. We need you to help us in return. If you don’t, we’ll turn him in.”

  I shake my head. “I don’t believe you,” I say. “These pictures—they could have been altered. You could have made all of this up.” But my heart pounds a little more quickly. I do not want Grandfather to get into trouble. And the thought of his sample is the only thing that makes the pain of the upcoming Banquet manageable.

  “Ask your grandfather,” the man says. “He’ll tell you the truth. But you don’t have much time. The sort we need help with happens today.”