by Ally Condie
“Here,” I say, holding out half of the tablets. He looks down at them, sealed away in their little compartments, the backing of each tablet labeled neatly. Blue. Blue. Blue. Blue.
And then he laughs.
“Blue,” he says, laughing harder. “All blue.” And then, as if he’s brought the color into being by saying it, we all notice that the sky has turned to morning.
“Take some,” I say, moving closer to him. I see sweat frozen on the ends of his too-short hair; frost on his eyelashes. He shudders. He should put on his coat. “Take some,” I say again.
“No,” he says, pushing my hand away. The tablets fall to the ground. I cry out, dropping to my knees to pick them up.
The boy pauses. “Maybe one or two,” he says, and I see his hand dart down. He snatches the packet and breaks away two little squares. Before I can stop him, he throws the rest back at me and turns to run.
“But I have others,” I call after him. He helped us get here. I could give him the green to calm. Or the red, and then he could forget that long awful run and the scent of his friends’ deaths as we passed by the burned village. I should give him both. I open my mouth to call out again but we never even knew his name.
Indie has not moved.
“We have to go after him,” I say, urging her. “Come on.”
“Number nineteen,” she says softly. What she says doesn’t make sense to me until I follow her gaze and see past the boulders. What’s beyond them is now visible: the Carving up close and with light for the first time.
“Oh,” I whisper. “Oh.”
The world changes here.
Before me is a land of canyons, of chasms, of gashes and gorges. A land of shadows and shades, of rises and falls. Of red and blue and very little green. Indie’s right. As the sky lightens and I see the jagged stones and gaping canyons, the Carving does remind me a little of the painting Xander gave me.
But the Carving is real.
The world is so much bigger than I thought it was.
If we descend into that Carving with its miles of mountains and acres of valleys, with its cliffs and its coves, we will vanish almost entirely. We will become almost nothing.
I think suddenly of a time in Second School, back before we began to specialize, when they showed us diagrams of our bones and our bodies and told us how fragile we were, how easily we could break or become ill without the Society. I remember seeing in the pictures that our white bones were actually filled with red blood and marrow, and thinking I didn’t know I had this inside of me.
I didn’t know the earth had this inside of it. The Carving seems as wide as the sky it stands under.
It is the perfect place for someone like Ky to hide. An entire rebellion could take cover in a place like this. I begin to smile.
“Wait,” I say as Indie moves to climb down the boulders and into the Carving. “It will be sunrise in a few minutes.” I’m greedy. I want to see more.
She shakes her head. “We have to be inside before it gets light.”
Indie’s right. I take one final look back at the boy growing smaller, moving faster than I thought he could. I wish I had thanked him before he left.
I climb down behind Indie, scrambling into the canyon where I hope Ky went only two days ago. Away from the Society, from Xander, from my family, from the life I knew. Away from the boy who led us here, from the light that creeps across this land, turning the sky blue and the stone red, the light that could get us killed.
CHAPTER 11
KY
There should be patrols in the canyon. I thought we’d have to barter and beg our way past checkpoints like my father did the first time he came. But no one comes. At first the stillness is unsettling. Then I begin to realize that the Carving still teems with life. Black ravens wheel in the sky above and send sharp calls down into the canyons. There’s scat from coyotes, jackrabbits, and deer on the ground, and a tiny gray fox slips away from the stream when we come to drink. A small bird seeks shelter in a tree that has a long dark wound down the middle. It looks as though the tree were struck once by lightning but then grew around the burn.
But still nothing human.
Has something happened to the Anomalies?
The stream grows larger the farther into the canyon we go. I keep us walking on the rounded, smoothed-out rocks next to it. If we step on them we don’t leave as many footprints for someone to find. In the summer, I use a walking stick and go right in the river itself, my father told me.
But the water’s too cold to walk in now. Sheets of ice edge the banks. I look around and wonder what my father would have seen in the summertime. Scrubby small trees that are barren now would be full-leaved, or as full-leaved as anything gets in the desert. The sun would beat down hot, and the cool water would feel good on his feet. Fish would swim away when they felt him coming.
On the third morning we find the ground covered in frost. I haven’t seen any chert to start a fire with. We’d have frozen without our coats.
Eli speaks, echoing my thoughts. “At least the Society gave us these,” he says. “I’ve never had a coat that works this well.”
Vick agrees. “They’re almost military grade,” he says. “I wonder why the Society wasted them on us?”
Hearing them talk makes me realize what’s been bothering me at the back of my mind: Something’s wrong with this, too.
I pull my coat from my back and the wind makes me want to shudder, but I keep my hands steady as I pull out a sharp piece of agate.
“What are you doing?” Vick asks.
“Cutting up my coat.”
“You going to tell me why?”
“I’ll show you.” I spread out the coat like the carcass of an animal and make an incision. “The Society doesn’t like to waste things,” I say. “So there’s a reason we have these.” I peel back the upper layer of material.
Waterproof wires — some blue, some red — wind like veins through the padding inside.
Vick swears and moves to rip off his coat. I put up my hand to stop him. “Wait a minute. We don’t know what they do yet.”
“They’re probably tracking us,” Vick says. “The Society could know where we are.”
“That’s true, but you might as well stay warm while I look.” I pull the wires, remembering how my father used to do this. “There’s a warming mechanism inside the coats,” I say. “I recognize the wiring. That’s why they work so well.”
“And what else?” Vick asks. “Why’d they want to keep us warm?”
“So we’ll keep the coats on,” I say. I look at a neat web of blue wiring that traces along with the red wiring of the warming mechanism. The blue threads from the collar of the coat down the arms to the wrists. The web covers the back and front and sides and underneath the arms. In a place near the heart there’s a tiny silver disk about the size of a microcard.
“Why?” Eli asks.
I start to laugh. I reach inside and unhook the blue wires from the disk, carefully weaving them in and out of the red ones. I don’t want to alter the warming mechanism. It works fine as it is. “Because,” I tell Eli, “they don’t care about us, but they love data.” Once the silver disk is free, I hold it up. “I bet this records things like our pulse rates, our hydration levels, our moment of death. And anything else they’ve thought up that they want to know about while we’re out in the villages. They’re not using these to track us constantly. But they gather our data after we die.”
“The coats don’t always burn,” Vick says.
“And even if they do, the disks are fireproof,” I say. Then I start to grin. “We’ve been making it hard for them,” I tell Vick. “All those people we buried.” My grin fades as I think of the Officers dragging the bodies back out of the dirt just to strip them of their coats.
“That first boy in the water,” Vick remembers. “They made us take off his coat before we got rid of him.”
“But if they don’t care about us, why would they care about our data?” Eli
asks.
“Death,” I say. “It’s the one thing they haven’t fully conquered. They want to know more about it.”
“We die, they learn how not to,” Eli says. His voice sounds distant, as though he isn’t only thinking of the coats but of something else too.
“I wonder why they didn’t stop us,” Vick says. “We’ve been burying for weeks.”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe they wondered how long we could keep it up.”
None of us speak for a moment. I wind the blue wires and leave them — the Society’s entrails — under a rock. “Do either of you want me to fix yours?” I ask. “It won’t take long.”
Vick hands his over. Now that I know where the blue wires are, I can be more careful with my incisions. I make only a few small holes and pull the blue wires out. One of the holes is in the spot over his heart so I can extract the disk.
“How are you going to get yours back together?” Vick asks, shrugging into his coat.
“I’ll have to wear it like this and find a way to fix it later,” I say. One of the trees near us is pinyon pine and it weeps sap. I pull some off and use it to stick the cut edges of my coat back together in a few places. The sap’s smell, sharp and earthy, makes me think of the taller pines on the Hill. “I’ll probably still be warm enough as long as I’m careful about the red wires.”
I reach for Eli’s coat but he holds it back. “No,” he says. “It’s all right. I don’t mind.”
“All right,” I say, surprised, and then I think I understand. The tiny disk is the closest any of us might come to immortality. It’s not as good as the stored tissue samples that ideal Citizens get — a chance at living again someday when the Society has the technology.
I don’t think they’ll ever figure out how to do it. Even the Society can’t bring people back. But it is true that in the Society our data lives on forever, rolling over and over to become whatever numbers the Society needs. It’s like what the Rising has done with the legend of the Pilot.
I’ve known about the rebellion and its leader for as long as I can remember.
But I never told Cassia.
The closest I came was the day on the Hill when I told her the story of Sisyphus. Not the Rising’s adaptation of it, but the version that I like best. Cassia and I stood in that dark green forest. Both of us had red flags in our hands. I finished the story and was about to say more. Then she asked me the color of my eyes. In that moment I realized that loving each other felt more dangerous — more like a rebellion — than anything else ever could.
I’d heard parts of the Tennyson poem all my life. But in Oria, after I saw Tennyson’s words on Cassia’s lips, I realized that the poem didn’t belong to the Rising. The poet didn’t write it for them — he wrote it long before the Society even existed. It was the same with the story of Sisyphus. It existed long before the Rising or the Society or my father claimed it as their own.
When I spent my days in the Borough doing the same tasks over and over, I changed the story too. I decided that it was the thoughts in your own mind that mattered more than anything else.
So I never talked to her about how I’d heard the other poem before, or about the rebellion. Why? We had the Society trying to find its way into our relationship. We didn’t need anyone else there, too. The poems and stories we shared with each other could mean what we wanted them to mean. We could choose our own path together.
We finally see a sign of the Anomalies: a place where they used to climb. The ground at the base of the cliff is spotted with blue fragments. I bend down to look more closely. For a moment they look like the broken casings of some kind of beautiful insects. Blue and bruised purple underneath. Broken and mixed with red mud.
Then I realize they’re the juniper fruit from the tree growing near the wall. They’ve fallen to the ground and been crushed by someone’s boots, and the rain has blurred the footprints so that they are only vague indentations. I run my hand along the cuts in the rock and the metal bores where the Anomalies ran their climbing gear through. The ropes are gone.
CHAPTER 12
CASSIA
As we walk, I look for something to mark Ky’s passage through this place. But I find nothing. We see no footprints, no signs of human life. Even the trees are small and stunted, and one of them bears a distinct dark scar right through its center. I feel stricken, too. Although the boy who ran to the Carving with us talked about the recent rains, I still hoped to find some of Ky’s tracks.
And I hope to find evidence of the Rising. I open my mouth to ask Indie if she’s heard of it but something holds me back and I don’t. I’m not sure what I expect a sign of a rebellion to look like, anyway.
There is a tiny stream, so small that it almost disappears when Indie and I both put our canteens in at the same time. The stream dries up or sinks underground entirely by the time it reaches the edge of the Carving. In staggering through the dark I did not notice when the stream began, only that it suddenly was. Pieces of driftwood wait on small sandy beaches, bone-dry, having floated in on a bigger river in a different time. I can’t stop wondering what this might look like from above: a shiny silver thread, pulled from one of the choices I saw in the Hundred Dresses, winding through the vastness of red rock that is the Carving.
From above, Indie and I would be too small to see at all.
“I think we’re in the wrong canyon,” I tell Indie.
Indie doesn’t answer at first; she’s bending to pick up something fragile and gray from the ground. She holds it carefully in her hands and shows it to me.
“An old wasp nest,” I say, looking at the thin, tissue-paper circles turning within and without each other.
“It looks like a seashell.” Indie opens her pack and tucks the abandoned nest safely inside. “Do you want to try and go back out?” she asks. “Go to another canyon?”
I pause. We’ve been moving for almost twenty-four hours now, and we are out of food. We have eaten most of our two days’ ration to give us strength after our long run to the Carving. I don’t want to waste tablets on going back out, especially since I don’t know what might be following, or waiting.
“I guess we should keep going,” I say. “Maybe we’ll see some sign of him soon.”
Indie nods, hoists her pack, and picks up the two knife-sharp stones she always carries while we walk. I do the same. We’ve seen the prints of animals here, though we haven’t seen a trace of an Anomaly yet.
We haven’t seen a trace of any person — alive or dead, Aberration or Anomaly, Official or rebel.
In the dark that night, I sit and work on my poem. It helps me keep from thinking about all I’ve left behind.
I write another first line.
I couldn’t find a way to fly to you so I walked every step on this stone.
So many beginnings. I tell myself that in a way it’s good that I haven’t found Ky yet, because I still don’t know what to whisper to him when I see him, which words would be the very best ones to give.
Indie finally speaks. “I’m hungry,” she says. Her voice sounds as hollow as the empty wasp’s nest.
“I’ll give you a blue tablet if you want,” I tell her. I don’t know why I’m so averse to taking them, since this is precisely the type of situation Xander wanted to help me through. Maybe it’s because the boy who ran with us didn’t seem to want them. Or because I hope to have something to give Ky when I see him, since I gave away the compass. Or because Grandfather’s voice echoes in my mind from when he talked about a different tablet, the green one: You are strong enough to go without.
Indie gives me a sharp, puzzled look.
A thought comes to my mind and I pull out my flashlight. I shine it around, noticing again something I saw earlier and stored away in my memory: a plant. My mother didn’t teach me specific names of many plants, but she did tell me the general signs of poison. This plant shows none of those signs, and the very presence of the spikes seem to indicate that it has something within to protect. It�
��s fleshy and green, edged with purple. It isn’t lush like the vegetation in the Borough but it’s certainly better than the tired tumbles of sticks and leaves that many of the plants here have turned into for the winter. Some of them have small gray cocoons strung along their bare branches, memories of butterflies.
Indie watches for a moment as I gingerly pull off one of the broad, spiked leaves. Then she crouches next to me and does the same, and we both carefully use our rock knives to scrape away the spikes. It takes a little while, but then we each have a small, skinned-looking gray-green piece of plant in front of us.
“Do you think it’s poisonous?” Indie asks me.
“I’m not sure,” I say. “I don’t think so. But I’ll go first.”
“No,” Indie says. “We’ll both try a little and see what happens.”
For a minute we do nothing but chew, and while it’s not the same as the food I’ve eaten all my life, Society food, it’s still enough to take the edge off and dampen the hunger. Cut me open, and you might find a girl held together not by bone, but by stringy dry sinews, ones that look like the bark that hangs off the trees here in strips.
When nothing happens after a few moments, we both take another bite. I think of another word that might rhyme and write it down, then scratch it back out. It doesn’t work.
“What are you doing?” Indie asks.
“I’m trying to write a poem.”
“One of the Hundred Poems?”
“No. This one is new. It’s my own words.”
“How did you learn to write?” Indie moves a little closer, looks curiously at the letters in the sand.
“He taught me,” I say. “The boy I’m looking for.”
She falls silent again and I think of another line.
Your hand around mine, showing me shapes.
“Why are you an Aberration?” Indie asks. “Are you first-generation?”