Reached (17 page)

“No.”

“He
is
right about the Pilot, though,” Indie says.

“So you do believe Caleb,” I say. “About the Pilot, at least.”

“I believe
myself
about the Pilot,” Indie says. “I know that he’s real.” She leans closer to me and for a minute I think she might kiss me again, like she did all those weeks ago. “The villages are real, too,” she says, “and the Otherlands. All of it.”

Her voice is every bit as impassioned as Caleb’s was. And I understand her. Indie loves me, but she’s a survivor. When I told her I wouldn’t run with her, she turned to something else to keep going. I believe in Cassia. Indie believes in the Rising and the Pilot. We’ve both found something to pull us through.

“It could have been different,” I say, almost under my breath. If I’d kissed Indie again after she kissed me. If I hadn’t known Cassia before I met Indie.

“But it’s not,” Indie says, and she’s right.

CHAPTER 20

CASSIA

T
he world is not well.

I look out the window of my apartment and put my hand on the glass. It’s dark. Crowds gather at the barricade, the way they do often now at night, and soon the Rising officers will come in black and disperse them all, petals to the wind, leaves on the water.

The Rising hasn’t told us exactly what’s happened, but, for the past few weeks, we’ve all been confined to our apartments. Those of us who can, send in our work over the ports. All communication with other Provinces has ceased. The Rising says that is temporary. The Pilot himself promises that everything will be fine soon.

It has begun to rain.

I wonder what it would have been like to see a flash flood in the Carving from up high like this. I’d like to have stood at the edge of the canyon and felt the rumble; closed my eyes to better hear the water; opened them again to see the world laid to waste, the rocks and trees torn and tumbling down. It would have been something to watch what looked like the end of the world.

Perhaps I am witnessing that now.

A chime sounds from my kitchen. Dinner has arrived, but I am not hungry. I know what the food will be—emergency rations. We have only two meals each day now. Someday they will run out of the rations, too. And then I don’t know what they’ll do.

If we start to feel sick and tired, we’re supposed to send a message on the port. Then they’ll come and help us.
But what if you go still while you sleep?
I wonder. The thought makes me lie awake at night. It’s become difficult to find any rest.

I pull the meal from the delivery slot. There it is, cold and bland and blank, the Society’s stores served to us by the Rising.

I have learned a few things from the Archivists. Food is running out; therefore, it is valuable. So I’ve used it to trade my way out of my confinement in my apartment. I take the meal out to the Rising guard at the entrance of our building. He’s young and hungry, so he understands.

“Be careful,” he says, and he holds open the door for me as I slip into the night.

I feel my way down the stones and steps, my hands brushing against the sides and coming away with the familiar green smell and feel of moss. The recent rain has made things slippery, and I have to concentrate, keeping the beam of my flashlight steady.

When I reach the end of the hallway, I’m not blinded, the way I usually am. No flashlights flicker onto me, no beams swing in my direction as people notice me coming through the door.

The Archivists are gone.

A chill runs up my spine as I remember how this place reminded me of the crypt from the Hundred History Lessons. I close my eyes, imagining the Archivists lying down on the shelves, folding their hands on their chests, holding perfectly still as they wait for death to come.

Slowly I shine my light on the shelves.

They are empty. Of course. No matter what, the Archivists will survive. But they didn’t tell me that they were leaving, and I have no idea where they might have gone. Did they leave anything back in the Archives?

I’m about to go look when I hear feet on the stairs and I spin around, swinging up my flashlight to blind whoever has entered.

“Cassia?” the voice asks. It’s her. The head Archivist. She came back. I lower the light so she can see.

“I was hoping to find you,” she says. “Central is no longer safe.”

“What has happened?” I ask.

“The rumors about a mutated Plague,” she says, “have been proven to be true. And we’ve confirmed that the mutation has spread here to Central.”

“So you’ve all run away,” I say.

“We have all decided to stay alive,” she says. “I have something for you.” She reaches into the pack she carries and pulls out a slip of paper. “This came in at last.”

The paper is real and old, printed with dark letters pressed deep into the page, not the slick surface blackness of printing from a port. There are two stanzas; the ones I don’t have. Even though time is short and the world is wrong, I can’t help but glance down, greedy, to read a bite, a bit of the poem:

The Sun goes crooked—that is night—

Before he makes the bend

We must have passed the middle sea,

Almost we wish the end

Were further off—too great it seems

So near the Whole to stand.

I want to read the rest but I feel the head Archivist’s gaze on me, and I look back up. Something has gone crooked here; night is coming. Am I drawing close to the end? It almost feels like it—that there can’t be much farther to go, having come so far already—and yet nothing feels finished.

“Thank you,” I say.

“I’m glad it came in time,” she says. “I’ve never left a trade unfinished.”

I fold the poem back up and put it in my sleeve. I keep my expression neutral, but I know she’ll hear the challenge in what I’m about to say. “I’m grateful for the poem, but you’ve still left a trade unfinished. My microcard never came in.”

She laughs a little, the sound echoing through the empty Archives. “That one has come through, too,” she says. “You’ll receive the microcard in Camas.”

“I don’t have enough to pay for passage to Camas,” I say.
How did she find out that’s where I want to go?
Does she really have a way for me to get to Camas, or is she playing a cruel joke on me? My heartbeat quickens.

“There’s no fee for your journey,” the head Archivist says. “If you go to your Gallery and wait, someone from the Rising will arrive to bring you out.”

The Gallery. I’ve never kept it hidden, but something about it being used like this feels wrong. “I don’t understand,” I say.

The Archivist pauses. “What you’ve traded,” she says, very carefully, “has been interesting to some of us.”

It’s like my Official, again. I was not interesting to her, but my data was.

When my Official said that the Society had put Ky into the Matching pool, I saw the flicker of a lie in her eyes. She wasn’t sure who had put him in.

I think the head Archivist is keeping something from me, too.

I have so many questions.

Who put Ky in the pool?

Who paid for my passage to Camas?

Who stole my poems?

This, I think I know.
Everyone has a currency.
The Archivist told me that herself. Sometimes, we might not even know what our price is until we are confronted with it, face to face. The Archivist could resist everything else in that treasure trove of the Archives, but my papers, smelling of sandstone and water and just out of reach, were irresistible to her.

“I’ve already paid my passage,” I say. “Haven’t I? With my pages from the lake.”

It’s so quiet, here underneath the ground.

Will she admit to it? I’m certain I’m right. The impassive stone of the Archivist’s face looks entirely different from the flicker I saw on the Official’s face when she lied to me. But both times, I feel the truth. The Official didn’t know. The Archivist took my papers.

“My obligation to you is finished now,” she says, turning to leave. “You’re aware of the chance for passage to Camas. It is yours to keep or refuse.” She moves away from the beam of my flashlight into the dark. “Good-bye, Cassia,” she says.

And then she’s gone.

Who will be waiting for me at the Gallery? Is the passage to Camas real, or is it one final betrayal? Did she arrange it for me, perhaps out of guilt for taking my papers? I don’t know. I can’t trust her anymore. I pull off the red bracelet that marked me as one of the Archivists’ traders and put it on the shelf. I have no need of it, because it does not mean what I thought it did.

I find my case sitting alone on its shelf. When I open it and see the contents inside, I find I want none of them. They are part of other people’s lives, and it feels that they no longer have place in my own.

But I will keep the poem the Archivist gave me.
Because this,
I think,
is real
. The Archivist might have stolen from me, but I cannot believe she would forge something. This poem is true. I can tell.

We step like plush, we stand like snow—

I stop at that line and remember when I stood at the edge of the Carving, in the snow looking out for Ky. And I remember when we said good-bye at the edge of the stream—

The waters murmur now,

Three rivers and the hill are passed,

Two deserts and the sea!

Now Death usurps my premium

And gets the look at Thee.

No.

That can’t be right. I read the last two lines again.

Now Death usurps my premium

And gets the look at Thee.

I switch off my light and tell myself that the poem doesn’t matter after all. Words mean what you want them to mean. Don’t I know that by now?

For a moment, I’m tempted to stay here, hidden among the warren of shelves and rooms. I could go above ground now and then to gather food and paper, and isn’t that enough to live on? I could write stories; I could hide from the world and make my own instead of trying to change it or live in it. I could write paper people and I would love them too; I could make them almost real.

In a story, you can turn to the front and begin again and everyone lives once more.

That doesn’t work in real life. And I love my real people the most. Bram. My mother. My father. Ky. Xander.

Can I trust anyone?

Yes. My family, of course.

Ky.

Xander.

None of us would ever betray the other.

Before I came here, Indie and I ran a river, and we didn’t know if it would poison us or deliver us to where we wanted to go. We took a dangerous, black-water risk; even now, I think I can feel the spray as we went down, the swell as we were swept under.

It was worth it then.

I remember again the Cavern in the Carving. It and the Archives mingle together in my mind—those muddy fossiled bones and clean little tubes, these empty shelves and vacant rooms. And I realize that I can never stay in these hollowed-out places in the earth for long before I have to come up for air.

This passage to Camas,
I tell myself,
is a risk I am willing to run.
You cannot change your journey if you are unwilling to move at all.

I hide in alleys, behind trees. When I wrap my hand around the bark of a small willow in a greenspace, I feel fresh letters carved into it, and they don’t spell my name. The tree is sticky with its own blood. It makes me sad. Ky never cut deeply like this when he carved on something living. I wipe my hand on my black plainclothes and wish there were a way to leave a mark without taking.

I’m not even halfway to the lake when I hear and see the air ships.

They soar in overhead, carrying pieces of the barricade back toward the City.

No,
I think,
not the Gallery.

I run through the streets, darting away from lights and people, trying not to count how many times the ships come overhead. Someone calls out to me but I don’t recognize the voice, so I keep going. It’s too dangerous to stop. There’s a reason we are supposed to stay inside—people are angry, and afraid, and the Rising is finding it increasingly difficult to cure and keep peace.

I run out into the dark of the marsh. Rising officers in black climb up to secure cables to the barricade walls while the ships hover over, their blades chopping through the air. I can just make out what’s happening from the lights of the ships above and from the steadier beacons of those that have landed in the marsh.

The Gallery is still there, ahead of me, if I can just reach it in time.

I press up against a wall, breathing hard. I’m getting closer. The lake smell of water hits me.

One of the Gallery walls lifts into the sky and I stifle a cry. So much will be lost if the Gallery is gone. All those papers, everything we made, and how will I ever find the person who was supposed to take me to Camas if the meeting place no longer exists?

I am running, running, as hard as I ran into the Carving to find Ky.