Crossed (10 page)

“I don’t either,” I say, and in the sand I write a beginning line and for the first time, a second line too:

I climb into the dark for you

Are you waiting in the stars for me?

CHAPTER 13

KY

T
he sides of the canyon are black and orange. Like a fire caught burning and turned to rock. “It’s so deep,” Eli says, looking up in wonder. In this spot the walls rise higher than any building I’ve ever seen, higher than the Hill. “It’s like someone huge made cuts in the earth and dropped us inside.”

“I know,” I say. In the Carving, you see rivers and caves and stones that you’d never see from above. It’s as though suddenly you are down close looking at the workings of your own body, watching your own blood run and listening to the sound of your heart beating it through.

“It’s nothing like this in Central,” Eli says.

“You’re from Central?” Vick and I ask at the same time.

“I grew up there,” Eli tells us. “I’ve never lived anywhere else.”

“It must seem lonely to you out here,” I say, remembering how when I was Eli’s age I moved to Oria and felt a different kind of loneliness—the loneliness of what seemed like too
many
people.

“How did the Anomalies get stuck in here, anyway?” Eli asks.

“The original Anomalies
chose
to be Anomalies, back when the Society came to be,” I tell Eli. I remember something else, too. “And the ones who live in the Carving don’t call themselves Anomalies. They prefer to be known as the farmers.”

“But how could they choose?” Eli asks, fascinated.

“Before the Society took control, there were people who saw it coming and didn’t want any part of it. They started storing things inside the Carving.” I point at some of the curves and bends in the sandstone walls. “There are caves hidden everywhere in here. The farmers had enough food to see them through until some of the seeds they brought could be planted and harvested. They called their settlement a township, because they didn’t want to use the Society’s words for that, either.”

“But didn’t the Society track them down?”

“Eventually. But the farmers had the advantage because they came in first. They could cut down anyone who tried to follow. And the Society thought the farmers would all die off sooner or later. It’s not an easy place to live.” Part of my coat has come unsealed and I stop at a pinyon for more sap. “They also served another purpose for the Society. Many of the people in the Outer Provinces were too afraid to try to escape to the Carving because the Society started spreading rumors about how savage the farmers are.”

“You think they’ll really try to kill us?” Eli asks, sounding worried.

“They used to be merciless to any one Society,” I say. “But we’re not Society anymore. We’re Aberrations. They didn’t kill Aberrations or other Anomalies outright unless attacked.”

“How will they know what we are?” Eli asks.

“Look at us,” I say. “We don’t look like Citizens or Officials.” The three of us are young and dirty and disheveled, clearly on the run.

“So why didn’t your father bring your family in here to live?” Vick asks.

“The Society’s right about some things,” I say. “You die free out here but you die faster. The farmers don’t have the medicine or technology in the canyons that the Society has outside. My mother didn’t want that for me and my father respected it.”

Vick nods. “So we’re going to find these people and ask them to help us. Since they helped your father.”

“Yes,” I say. “And I’m hoping to trade with them. They have maps and old books. At least, they did before.”

“And what do
you
have to trade?” Vick asks sharply.

“The same things that you and Eli have,” I say. “Information about the Society. We’ve lived on the inside. It’s been a while since there have been any real villages in the Outer Provinces, which means the people in the canyon might not have been able to trade or talk with anyone for a long time.”

“So, if they
do
want to trade with us,” Eli asks, sounding unconvinced, “what are we going to do with all those papers and old books once we get them?”

“You can do whatever you want,” I say. “You don’t even have to trade for them. Get something else. I don’t care. But I’m going to get a map and try to reach one of the Border Provinces.”

“Wait,” Eli says. “You want to go back into the Society? Why?”

“I wouldn’t go
back
,” I say. “I’d go a different way than the one we came. And I’d only go back far enough to send a message to her. So she’ll know where I am.”

“How can you do that?” Eli asks. “Even if you did make it to the Border Provinces, the Society watches the ports. They’d see it if you sent anything to her.”

“That’s why I want the papers from the township,” I say. “I’ll trade them with an Archivist. They have ways to send messages that don’t involve the ports. But it’s expensive.”

“An Archivist?” Eli asks, puzzled.

“They’re people who trade on the black market,” I say. “They’ve been around since before the Society. My father used to trade with them, too.”

“So this is your plan,” Vick says. “There’s nothing more to it than what you’ve told us.”

“Not right now,” I say.

“Do you think it will work?” Eli asks.

“I don’t know,” I say. Above us a bird starts to sing: a canyon wren. The notes are haunting and distinct. They descend like a waterfall down the rock canyon walls. I can identify the call because my father used to mimic it for me. He told me it was the sound of the Carving.

He loved it here.

When my father told stories, he blurred the line between truth and tale. “They’re all true on some level,” he’d say when my mother teased him about it.

“But the township in the canyon is real,” I’d always ask, to make sure. “The stories you tell about that are true.”

“Yes,” he’d say. “I’ll take you there someday. You’ll see.”

So when it appears before us around the next bend in the canyon, I stop short in disbelief. There it is, exactly as he said,
a settlement in a wider part of the gorge
.

A feeling of unreality settles over me like the light of late afternoon that spills over the canyon walls. The township looks almost exactly the way I remember my father describing his first visit:

The sun came down and made it all golden: bridge, buildings, people, even me. I couldn’t believe the place was real, though I’d heard about it for years. Later when the farmers there taught me to write, I had that same feeling. Like the sun was always at my back.

The winter sunlight sets an orange-gold glow on the buildings and bridge in front of us.

“It’s here,” I say.

“It’s real,” Vick says.

Eli beams.

The buildings before us cluster together, then split apart around rockfall or river. Houses. Bigger buildings. Tiny fields carved out where the canyon opens wider.

But something is missing. The people. The stillness is absolute. Vick glances over at me. He feels it too.

“We’re too late,” I say. “They’re gone.”

It hasn’t been long. I can still see their tracks here and there.

I also see signs that they prepared to leave. This wasn’t a rushed departure, but one taken with care. The twisted black apple trees have been harvested; only a few golden apples still shine on the branches. Most of the farming equipment is gone—taken apart and carried away by the farmers, I’d guess. A few rusted pieces remain.

“Where did they go?” Eli asks.

“I don’t know,” I say.

Is anyone left outside of the Society?

We pass a stand of cottonwood trees on the bank of the stream. A small wiry tree grows alone at the edge.

“Hold on,” I tell the other two. “This won’t take long.”

I don’t cut deep—I don’t want to kill the tree. I carve her name carefully on the trunk, thinking, as I always do, of when I held her hand in mine to teach her to write. Vick and Eli don’t say anything while I carve. They wait.

When I finish I step back to look at the tree.

Shallow roots. Sandy soil. The bark is gray and rough. The leaves are long gone but her name still looks beautiful to me.

We’re all drawn to the houses. It feels so long since we’ve seen a place built by real people with the intent to stay. The houses are weathered and made of pieced-together sandstone or worn gray wood. Eli climbs the steps to one of them. Vick and I follow.

“Ky,” Eli says, once we’re inside.
“Look.”

What I see inside makes me reconsider. Maybe there
was
an element of haste in their departure. Otherwise, would they have left their houses like this?

It’s the walls that speak of hurry. Of not quite enough time. They are covered in pictures and if the farmers had had more time, they would have washed the walls clean. They say and show too much.

In this house there is a boat painted in the sky, marooned on a pillow of white clouds. The artist signed his name in the corner of the room. Those letters claim the painting—the ideas—as his own. And although this is the place I’ve been looking for all this time, I still catch my breath.

This township is where he learned.

About writing.

And painting.

“Let’s stop here,” Eli says. “They have bunks. We could stay forever.”

“Aren’t you forgetting something?” Vick asks him. “The people who used to live here left for a reason.”

I nod. “We have to find a map and some food and get out. Let’s check the caves.”

We look in all of the caves along the sides of the canyon. Some of them have painted walls, like the houses, but we don’t find a single scrap of paper.

They taught him to write. They knew how.
Where
would they have left their words? They couldn’t have taken all of them. It’s almost night and the colors in the paintings shift to grays in the fading light. I look up at the walls of the cave we’re searching.

“This one is weird,” Eli says, looking at the painting, too. “Some of it is missing.” He shines his flashlight up. The walls have been damaged by water and only the top of the painting remains—part of a woman’s head. All you can see are her eyes and forehead. “She looks like my mother,” Eli says softly.

I turn in surprise to look at him. Because that’s the word that’s repeating over and over in my mind right now, even though my mother never came here. And I wonder if that word,
mother
, is as dangerous to Eli as it is to me. It might be even more dangerous than
father
. Because I feel no anger toward my mother. Only loss, and loss is a feeling you can’t fight your way out of as easily.

“I know where they must have hidden the maps,” Eli says suddenly. There’s a glint of cunning in his eyes that I haven’t seen before and I wonder if I like Eli so much not because he reminds me of Bram, but because he reminds me of myself. I was about his age when I stole the red tablets from the Carrows.

When I was new in Oria, it was strange to watch the people flood out of their houses and workplaces and air trains all at once. It made me nervous the way they moved at the same times to the same places. So I pretended the streets were dry gulches from home, and the people were the water after rain that turned the dry beds into streams. I told myself the people in their gray and blue plainclothes were nothing but another force of nature moving along.

But it didn’t do me any good. I got lost in one of the Boroughs, of all places.

And Xander saw me using the compass to try to find my way home. He threatened to turn in Patrick for letting me keep it unless I stole some red tablets.

Xander must have known then that I was an Aberration. I don’t know how he could tell so quickly, and we never talked about it after. But it doesn’t matter. The lesson was a good one to learn. Do not pretend one place is like another or look for similarities. Only look for what
is
.

“Where, Eli?” I ask him.

He waits for a moment, still grinning, and I remember this, too—the moment of the reveal.

I held out my hand to show Xander the two red tablets I’d stolen. He didn’t think I could do it. I wanted him to know that I was his equal even though I was an Aberration. Just once, I wanted someone to know that before I started a life pretending to be less than everyone around me. For a moment, I felt powerful. I felt like my father.

“Where the water can’t reach,” Eli says now, looking at the painting of the woman who has been washed away. “The caves aren’t down here. They have to be up high.”

“I should have known,” I say as the three of us hurry out of the cave and look up at the cliffs. My father told me about the floods. Sometimes the farmers saw the river rising and knew it would happen. Other times, during the flash floods, they had almost no warning at all. They had to build and farm on the canyon floor where there was space, but when the water rose, they took to the higher caves.

The line of survival is thin in the Carving,
my father said.
You hope you’re on the right side of it.

Now that we look for them, the signs of old floods are everywhere—marks of sediment up on the canyon walls, dead trees wedged high in crevices from the violence and speed of the flash floods. The force it would take to do these things is one that could bring even the Society to its knees.