by Ally Condie
I shake my head and look up at the sky, but I’m not looking for anything. I only look to see the blue. I hold my hand up and block out the sun so I can see the sky around it better. No clouds.
“Sorry,” Vick says, “but it’s true.”
I glance over at Vick. I think I see concern on his stone-hard face. It’s so ludicrous, all of it, that I start to laugh, and Vick laughs too. “I should have known,” I say. “If something happened to the Society, they wouldn’t want anyone to live on without them.”
A few hours later we hear a beep from the miniport Vick carries. He pulls it from his belt loop and checks the screen. Vick’s the only decoy who has a miniport — a device roughly the same size as a datapod. Miniports, however, can be used for communication. A datapod only stores information. Vick keeps the miniport with him most of the time, but now and then — like when he tells new decoys the truth about the village and the guns — he hides the port somewhere for a little while.
We’re pretty sure that the Society tracks our location by the miniport. We don’t know if they can listen in on us too, the way they can on the larger ports. Vick thinks so. He thinks the Society listens all the time. I don’t think they care.
“What do they want?” I ask Vick as he reads the message on his screen.
“We’re moving,” he says.
Others fall in line with us as we walk to meet the ships that land silently outside of the village. The Officers act hurried, as usual. They don’t like to spend much time out here. I’m not sure if it’s because of us or because of the Enemy. I wonder who they think is the bigger threat.
He’s young, but the Officer in charge of this transfer reminds me of the one who used to be in charge of us on the Hill back in Oria. His expression says How did I end up here? What am I supposed to do with these people?
“So,” he says, looking out at us. “Up on the plateau. What was that? What happened there? The casualties wouldn’t have been nearly so bad if you’d all stayed down in the village.”
“There was snow up there this morning and they went up to get it,” I say. “We’re always thirsty.”
“You’re sure that’s the only reason they were up there?”
“There aren’t many reasons to do anything,” Vick says. “Hunger. Thirst. Not dying. That’s all there is. So if you don’t believe us, take your pick from the other two.”
“Maybe they hiked up there for the view,” the Officer suggests.
Vick laughs, and it’s not a good sound. “Where are the replacements?”
“They’re on the ship,” the Officer says. “We’re going to take you all to a new village, and we’ll give you more supplies.”
“And more water,” Vick says. Though he’s unarmed and at the mercy of the Officer he sounds like he’s the one giving the orders. The Officer smiles. The Society isn’t human but the people who work for it sometimes are.
“And more water,” the Officer says.
Vick and I both curse under our breath when we see the replacements on the air ship. They are young, much younger than us. They look to be fourteen, thirteen. Their eyes are wide. Frightened. One of them, the youngest-looking kid, looks a little like Cassia’s brother, Bram. He’s darker-skinned than Bram, darker than me, even, but his eyes are bright like Bram’s. Before it was cut, his hair must have been curly like Bram’s.
“The Society must be running out of bodies,” I say to Vick, keeping my voice low.
“Maybe that’s the plan,” he says.
We both know the Society wants the Aberrations dead. It explains why we’re dumped out here. Why we don’t get to fight. But there’s another question, one I can’t answer:
Why do they hate us so much?
We fly blind. The air ship is windowless except for the pilot’s compartment.
So it’s not until we step outside that I know where we are.
I don’t know the village itself but I know the area. The field we walk is orange-sanded and black-rocked, yellow-grassed with plants that grew green this summer. There are fields like this one all over the Outer Provinces. But I still know exactly where I am because of what I see in front of me.
I’m home.
It hurts.
There it is on the horizon — the landmark of my childhood.
The Carving.
From where we are now, I can’t see all of it — just pieces of red or orange sandstone jutting up here and there. But when you get closer — when you reach the edge and look into the Carving — you realize that the stones aren’t small at all. They’re the tips of formations as large as mountains.
The Carving isn’t one canyon, one mountain, but many — a network of interlocking formations that goes on for miles. The land rises and falls like water, its high jagged peaks and deep slot canyons striped with the colors of the Outer Provinces — gradations of orange, red, white. In the faraway stretches of the Carving the fire colors of the sandstone grow shadowed with blue from distant clouds.
I know all of this because I’ve been to the edge several times.
But I’ve never been inside.
“What are you grinning about?” Vick asks me, but before I can answer, the Bram kid comes up to us and gets right in Vick’s face.
“I’m Eli,” the kid says.
“All right,” Vick says, and then turns away in irritation, back to the row of faces who have selected him as their leader even when he never wanted to be one. Some people can’t help being leaders. It’s in their blood and bones and brains, and there’s no getting around it.
And some people follow.
You have a better chance of surviving if you follow, I remind myself. Your father thought he was a leader. Couldn’t get enough of being a leader, and look what happened to him. I stand one step behind Vick.
“Aren’t you going to give us a speech or anything?” Eli asks. “We just got here.”
“I’m not in charge of this mess,” Vick says. And there it is. The anger that he spends most of his energy keeping in check shows a little. “I’m not the Society’s spokesman.”
“But you’re the only one with one of those,” Eli says, pointing at the port clipped to Vick’s belt.
“You want a speech?” Vick asks, and all the new kids nod and stare at him. They’ll have heard the same lecture we did when we came in on the air ships about how the Society needs us to act like villagers and civilians to draw out the Enemy. How it’s only a six-month job, and once we go back to Society our Aberration status will be wiped clean.
It will take exactly one day of firing for them to realize that no one has lasted six months. Not even Vick comes close to having that many notches on his boots.
“Watch the rest of us,” Vick says. “Act like a villager. That’s what we’re supposed to do here.” He pauses. Then he pulls the port from his belt and tosses it to a decoy who has been around a couple of weeks. “Take this for a run,” he says. “Make sure it still works out by the end of the town.”
The kid takes off. As soon as the port is out of earshot, Vick says, “The ammunition is all blanks. So don’t bother trying to defend yourselves.”
Eli interrupts. “But we practiced firing with them back in training camp,” he protests. I start grinning, in spite of myself and the fact that I should and do feel sick that someone so young ended up out here. This kid is like Bram.
“Doesn’t matter,” Vick says. “They’re all blanks now.”
Eli digests this, but then he has another question. “If this is a village, where are all the women and kids?”
“You’re a kid,” Vick says.
“Am not,” Eli says. “And I’m not a girl. Where are they?”
“No girls,” Vick says. “No women here.”
“But the Enemy must know we’re not real villagers, then,” Eli says. “They must have figured it out.”
“Right,” Vick says. “They’re killing us anyway. No one cares. And now we’ve got work to do. We’re supposed to be a village full of farmers. So l
et’s get farming.”
We start toward the fields. The sun shines hot overhead. I can feel Eli’s angry gaze even after we turn away from him.
“At least we have enough water to drink,” I say to Vick, gesturing to the full canteen. “Thanks to you.”
“Don’t thank me,” Vick says. He lowers his voice. “There’s not even enough to drown in.”
The crop here is cotton — nearly impossible to grow. The poor-quality wisps inside the cotton bolls come apart easily.
“No wonder we don’t worry about there being no girls or kids,” Eli says behind me. “The Enemy must know this isn’t a real village just from looking at it. No one would be stupid enough to farm cotton out here.”
At first I don’t answer him. I haven’t fallen into the trap of talking to anyone while we work, except for Vick. I’ve stayed away from all the others.
But I’m weak right now. The cotton today and the snow yesterday have made me think again of Cassia’s story of the cottonwood seeds snowing in June. The Society hated the cottonwood trees, but they are exactly the kind of trees that are right in the Outer Provinces. The wood is good for carving. If I could find one, I would cover the bark with her name the way I used to cover her hand with mine on the Hill.
I start talking to Eli to keep from wanting what’s too hard to have.
“It’s stupid,” I tell Eli, “but it’s more realistic than some of the stuff the Society has done. A few of the villages around here started as farming communities for Aberrations. Cotton was one of the crops the Society had them try to grow. This was back when there was more water. So it’s not completely impossible that someone would be farming here.”
“Oh,” Eli says. And then he falls silent. I don’t know why I’m trying to give him hope. Maybe it was remembering the cottonwood seeds.
Or remembering her.
When I look over later, I see that Eli is crying, but it’s not enough to drown in so I don’t do anything yet.
On our walk back into the village from the field, I jerk my head at Vick, our signal that I want to talk without the port. “Here,” he says, tossing the port to Eli, who has stopped crying. “Take this for a run.” Eli nods and takes off.
“What is it?” Vick asks.
“I used to live near here,” I say, trying to keep any emotion from my voice. This part of the world used to be my home. I hate what the Society has done to it. “My village was only a few miles away. I know the area.”
“So are you going to run?” Vick asks.
There it is. The real question. The one we all ask ourselves all the time. Am I going to run? I’ve thought about it every day, every hour.
“Are you thinking about going back to your village?” Vick asks. “Can someone there help you?”
“No,” I say. “It’s gone.”
Vick shakes his head. “Then there’s no point in running. We can’t go far without someone seeing us.”
“And the closest river is too far away,” I say. “We can’t escape that way.”
“Then how?” Vick asks.
“We’re not going to go across or down. We’re going to go through.”
Vick turns. “Through what?”
“The canyons,” I tell him, pointing to the Carving near us, miles long and cut with little openings impossible to see from here. “If you hike in far enough there’s fresh water.”
“The Officers always tell us that the canyons in the Outer Provinces are crawling with Anomalies,” Vick says.
“I’ve heard that, too,” I admit. “But some of them have built a settlement and they help travelers. I heard that from people who’d been inside.”
“Wait. You know people who’ve gone into the canyons?” Vick asks.
“I knew people who had been there,” I say.
“People you could trust?”
“My father,” I say, as if that ends the conversation and Vick nods.
We walk a few steps more. “So when do we leave?” Vick asks.
“That’s the problem,” I say, trying not to let him see how relieved I am that he’ll come. Facing those canyons is something I’d rather not do alone. “To keep the Society from hunting us down and making an example of us, the best time to go is during a firing when there’s chaos. Like a night firing. But with a full moon, so that we can see. They might think we died instead of escaped.”
Vick laughs. “Both the Society and the Enemy have infrared. Whoever’s above will see us run.”
“I know, but they might miss three little bodies when there’s plenty more right here.”
“Three?” Vick asks.
“Eli’s coming with us.” I hadn’t known until I said it.
Silence.
“You’re crazy,” Vick says. “There’s no way that kid will last until then.”
“I know,” I tell Vick. He’s right. It’s only a matter of time before Eli goes down. He’s small. He’s impulsive. He asks too many questions. Then again, it’s only a matter of time for all of us.
“So why keep him around? Why bring him along?”
“There’s a girl I know back in Oria,” I say. “He reminds me of her brother.”
“That’s not reason enough.”
“It is for me,” I say.
Silence stretches between us.
“You’re getting weak,” Vick says finally. “And that might kill you. Might mean you never see her again.”
“If I don’t look out for him,” I tell Vick, “I’d be someone she didn’t know, even if she did see me again.”
CHAPTER 6
CASSIA
Once I’m sure the others sleep, their breathing heavy in the room, I roll over onto my side and slip the Archivist’s paper from my pocket.
The page feels pulpy and cheap, not like the thick cream-colored sheet with Grandfather’s poems. It’s old, but not as old as Grandfather’s paper. My father might be able to tell me the age; but he’s not here, he let me go. As I unfold the page carefully it makes small sounds that seem loud, and I hope the other girls will think it is the rustling of blankets or an insect singing its wings.
It took a long time for everyone to fall asleep tonight. When I came back from my outing they told me that none of us have received our transfer assignments yet; that the Officer said they would tell us our destinations in the morning. I understood the girls’ uneasiness — I feel it, too. We’ve always known the night before where we’d be sent the next day. Why the change? With the Society, there’s always a reason.
I slide the paper into a square of spilled-white light from the moon outside. My heart pounds quickly, a running beat though I am still. Please let this be worth the cost, I think to nothing and no one, and then I look at the page.
No.
I push my fist against my mouth to keep from saying the word out loud into the sleeping room.
It’s not a map, or even a set of directions.
It’s a story, and I know the moment I read the first line that it’s not one of the Hundred:
A man pushed a rock up the hill. When he reached the top, the stone rolled down to the bottom of the hill and he began again. In the village nearby, the people took note. “A judgment,” they said. They never joined him or tried to help because they feared those who issued the punishment. He pushed. They watched.
Years later, a new generation noticed that the man and his stone were sinking into the hill, like the setting of the sun and moon. They could only see part of the rock and part of the man as he rolled the stone along to the top of the hill.
One of the children became curious. So, one day, the child walked up the hill. As she drew closer, she was surprised to see that the stone was carved with names and dates and places.
“What are all these words?” the child asked.
“The sorrows of the world,” the man told her. “I pilot them up the hill over and over again.”
“You are using them to wear out the hill,” the child said, noticing the long deep groove worn where the stone ha
d turned.
“I am making something,” the man said. “When I am finished, it will be your turn to take my place.”
The child was not afraid. “What are you making?”
“A river,” the man said.
The child went back down the hill, puzzling at how one could make a river. But not long after, when the rains came and the flood flashed through the long trough and washed the man somewhere far away, the child saw that the man had been right, and she took her place pushing the stone and piloting the sorrows of the world.
This is how the Pilot came to be.
The Pilot is a man who pushed a stone and washed away in the water. It is a woman who crossed the river and looked to the sky. The Pilot is old and young and has eyes of every color and hair of every shade; lives in deserts, islands, forests, mountains, and plains.
The Pilot leads the Rising — the rebellion against the Society — and the Pilot never dies. When one Pilot’s time has finished, another comes to lead.
And so it goes on, over and over like a stone rolling.
Someone in the room turns and stirs and I freeze, waiting for the girl’s breathing to even back into sleep. When it does, I look down at the last line on the page:
In a place past the edge of the Society’s map, the Pilot will always live and move.
The hot pain of hope shoots unexpectedly through me as I realize what this truly says, what I’ve been given.
There’s a rebellion. Something real and organized and longstanding, with a leader.
Ky and I are not alone.
The word Pilot was the link. Did Grandfather know this? Is that why he gave me the paper before he died? Have I been wrong all along about the poem he meant me to follow?
I can’t sit still.
“Wake up,” I whisper so softly that I can barely hear myself. “We’re not alone.” I put one foot over the edge of my bed. I could climb down and wake the other girls and tell them about the Rising. Maybe they already know. I don’t think so. They seem so hopeless. Except for Indie. But, though she has more fire to her than the others, she also doesn’t have purpose. I don’t think she knows either.