Reached (18 page)

They lift the second piece of the Gallery from the ground.

No. No. No.

Within moments I’m standing there, staring down at the deep grooves in the earth, where papers float in puddles, like sails without boats. Paintings, poems, stories, all drowned. The people who used to meet here—who still have words and songs inside—what will happen to them? And how will I get to Camas
now
?

“Cassia,” someone says. “You were almost too late.”

I know her instantly, even though I haven’t heard her speak in months; I could never forget the voice of the person who piloted me down the river.
“Indie,”
I say, and there she is, wearing black and standing up from her hiding spot among the marsh plants and bracken.

“They sent
you
to bring me to Camas,” I say, and I laugh, because now I know I will get there, whatever else happens. Indie and I ran to the Carving, we came down the river, and now—

“We’re going to fly,” Indie tells me. “But we have to
go
.”

I follow her, running, to her ship on the ground.

“You don’t have to worry about any other Rising being on the ship,” she says over her shoulder. “I’m the only one who flies alone. But we can’t talk on board. The other ships might be listening in. And you have to ride in the hold.”

“All right,” I say, breathless. I’m glad I have no case to hinder me; it’s enough to keep up with Indie as it is, carrying nothing but the lightness of paper.

We reach the ship and Indie scrambles up. I follow, and stand for just a moment in surprise at all the lights in the cockpit that Indie must manage. Our eyes meet and we both smile. Then I hurry and climb down into the hold. Indie shuts the door and I’m alone.

The ship is smaller and lighter than the ones we flew in to the camps. A few tiny lights line the floor, but the hold is largely dark and there are no windows. I am so tired of flying blind.

I run my hands along the walls of the ship, trying to distract myself by discovering all that I can about my surroundings.

There. I think I’ve found something. A tiny line, scratched into the wall near the floor:

l

An
L
, lowercase?

I smile a little to myself, at how I want to find letters in everything. It could be a scratch, the haphazard scarring and scraping that comes with the loading and shifting of cargo. But the more time I spend running my fingers over it, the more I’m convinced it was carved with intent. I try to feel for more but I can’t stretch any farther while I’m still strapped in.

Glancing up at the door to the hold, I unbuckle the strap and move quietly so that I can feel farther down.

There are many of them, carved in a row.

llllll

This letter must mean something,
I think,
to write it so many times
, and then I realize; not letters. Notches. Like the ones Ky told me about the decoys cutting into their boots to mark time survived out in the work camps.

I remember what Ky told me about his friend Vick, how every day he marked was a day without the girl he loved.

Ky and I have been marking, too, with flags on the Hill. With the poetry of others and with words of our own. Whoever carved here was keeping time and holding on.

I do the same, running my fingers across each tiny groove in the metal over and over again, thinking about the pieces of the Gallery lifted up into the sky. I wonder if, when the Rising sets them down again to make a wall, some of the papers will have survived the flight.

The door to the hatch opens and Indie beckons for me to come up.

The ship is flying itself, somehow. Indie sits back down at the controls. She gestures for me to take the seat next to her and I do, my heart pounding. Until now, I’ve never been able to see while I fly, and I feel a dizzying lightness as I look out at the land below us.

Is
this
what I’ve missed?

The stars have come to the earth, and the ocean has turned over the ground; dark waves meet the sky. They are unmoving, barely visible but for the light of the sun rising behind them.

Mountains,
I realize. That’s what the ocean is. Those waves are peaks. The stars are lights in houses and on streets. The earth reflects the sky and the sky meets the earth and, every now and then, if we’re lucky, we have a moment to see how small we are.

Thank you,
I want to tell Indie.
Thank you for letting me see while I fly. I have wanted it for so long.

CHAPTER 21

XANDER

P
atient number 73 exhibits little to no improvement.

Patient number 74 exhibits little to no improvement.

Wait, that’s a mistake. I haven’t examined Patient 74 yet. I delete the notation and hook the vital-stats machine up to Patient 74. The display lights up with numbers. Her spleen is enlarged, so I turn her very carefully when I perform my exam. When I shine a light into her eyes, she doesn’t respond.

Patient number 74 exhibits little to no improvement.

I move on to the next patient. “I’m checking your stats again,” I tell him. “Nothing to worry about.”

It’s been weeks and none of the patients is getting better. The rashes along the infected nerves turn into boils, which would be extremely painful if the still could feel anything. We don’t think they can. But we’re not certain.

Only a few of us are left who haven’t gotten sick. I’m still a physic but because we’re so shorthanded I spend most of my time changing the patients’ nutrition bags and catheter bags, monitoring their stats, and performing physical exams. Then I sleep for a few hours and do it all again.

They don’t bring in new patients very often anymore, except for those who are already here working when they get sick. We don’t have room for anyone else because the still don’t go home. I used to pride myself on how fast we got patients into recovery. Now my satisfaction comes from keeping as many of them here as long as possible because these days, if a patient leaves, it means they’ve died.

Once I’m finished with this round, I’ll get to rest. I think I’ll be able to fall asleep quickly. I’m exhausted. If I didn’t know better, I’d think I was coming down with the mutated Plague myself. But this is the same old weariness I’ve felt for days.

Most of the workers at the medical center have figured out by now that those who have the small red mark are the exceptions among those of us who the Rising initially made immune. The virologist’s theory appears to be right. If someone was lucky enough to get exposed to the earlier Plague—the live virus—they’re now immune and carry the red mark on their backs. The Rising hasn’t told the general public about the mark because our leaders are worried about what will happen. And they’ve been trying to figure out a cure for the mutation.

It’s too much for one Pilot to handle.

Once again, I’ve been lucky. The least I can do is stick around. It’s the people like Lei whom I really admire. They know they’re not immune but they stay anyway so they can help the patients.

I move through the rest of the patients, all the way to the last bed, where Patient 100 draws in ragged, wet breaths. I try not to think too much about how the cure might have caused the mutation, or about where my family or Cassia might be. I’ve already failed them. But I can’t fail these hundred.

I don’t see Lei in the courtyard when I’m finished, so I break protocol and look in the sleeproom. She’s not there either.

She wouldn’t have run away. So where is she?

As I pass the darkened cafeteria, I see a flicker of light. The port is on. Who could be inside? Is the Pilot speaking to us? Usually, when he does, they have us watch on one of the larger screens. I open the door to the cafeteria and see Lei silhouetted against the port. When I get a little closer I see that she’s going through the Hundred Paintings.

I’m about to say something but then I stop myself and watch her for a second. I’ve never seen anyone look at the paintings the way she does. She leans forward. She takes a few steps back.

Then she pulls up a painting, and I hear her draw in her breath as she puts her hand right on the screen. She stays there looking at it so long that I clear my throat. Lei whirls around. I can barely see her face in the reflected light from the port.

“Still having trouble sleeping?” I ask.

“Yes,” she says. “This is the best remedy I’ve found. I try to picture the scenes again in my mind when I’m lying down.”

“You’re taking your time with them,” I say, trying to joke with her. “You’d think you hadn’t seen the paintings before.”

For a moment, I feel like she’s about to tell me something. Then: “Not this one,” she says, moving aside so I can see the screen.

“It’s number Ninety-Seven,” I say. The painting shows a girl in a white dress and a lot of light and water.

“I suppose I didn’t notice it until now,” Lei says, and her voice sounds final, like a door shutting tight. I don’t know what I said wrong. For some reason I’m desperate to open that door back up. I talk to everyone here, all the time, patient and medic and nurse, but Lei’s different. She and I worked together before we came in.

“What do you like about it?” I ask, trying to get her to keep talking. “I like how you can’t tell if she’s in the water or on the shore. But what’s she doing? I’ve never been able to figure it out.”

“She’s fishing,” Lei says. “That’s a net she’s holding.”

“Has she caught anything?” I ask, looking closer.

“It’s hard to say,” Lei tells me.

“So that’s why you like it,” I say, remembering Lei’s story about the fish that come back to the river in Camas. “Because of the fish.”

“Yes,” Lei says. “And because of this.” She touches a little patch of white at the top of the picture. “Is it a boat? The reflection of the sun? And here,” she says, pointing to darker spots on the painting. “We don’t know what’s casting these shadows. There are things going on outside the edges. It leaves you with a sense of something you can’t see.”

I think I understand. “Like the Pilot,” I say.

“No,” she says.

In the distance, we hear screaming and calling out. A fighter ship whirs overhead.

“What’s going on out there?” Lei asks.

“I think it’s the same as usual,” I tell her. “People outside the barricade wanting to come in.” The orange light of bonfires on the other side of the walls looks eerie, but it isn’t new. “I don’t know how much longer the officers can hold them.”

“They wouldn’t want in if they knew what it looked like,” she says.

Now that my eyes have adjusted to the light, I can see that Lei’s fatigue is actual pain. Her face has a drawn look, and her words, usually so light, sound heavy.

She’s getting sick.

“Lei,” I say. I almost reach out and take her by the elbow to guide her from the cafeteria, but I’m not sure how she’d feel about the gesture. She holds my gaze for a moment. Then, slowly, she turns away from me and lifts up her shirt. Red lines run around her back.

“You don’t have to say it,” she says. She tucks her shirt back in and turns around. “I already know.”

“We should get you hooked up to one of the nutrient bags,” I say. “Right now.” Thoughts race through my mind.
You shouldn’t have stayed, you should have left like the others did until we
knew
we had something that worked—

“I don’t want to lie down,” Lei says.

“Come with me,” I tell her, and this time I do take her arm. I feel the warmth of her skin through her sleeve.

“Where are we going?” she asks me.

“To the courtyard,” I say. “You can sit on a bench while I go get a line and a nutrient bag.” This way, she won’t have to be inside when she goes down. She can stay outside as long as possible.

She looks at me with her exhausted, beautiful eyes. “Hurry,” she says. “I don’t want to be alone when it happens.”

When I return with the equipment, Lei waits in the courtyard with her shoulders slumped in exhaustion. It’s strange to see her with less-than-perfect posture. She holds out her arm and I slide the needle in.

The fluid begins to drip. I sit down next to her, holding the bag higher than her arm so that the line keeps running.

“Tell me a story,” she says. “I need to hear something.”

“Which one of the Hundred would you like?” I ask. “I remember most of them.”

I hear a faint trace of surprise in her voice under the fatigue. “Don’t you know anything else?”

I pause. Not really. The Rising hasn’t had time to give us new stories, and it’s not like I know how to create. I just work with what I have.

“Yes,” I say, trying to think of something. Then I borrow from my own life. “About a year ago, back in the Society, there was a boy who was in love with a girl. He’d watched her for a long time. He hoped she’d be his Match. Then she was. He was happy.”

“That’s all?” Lei asks.

“That’s all,” I say. “Too short?”

Lei begins to laugh and for a moment she sounds like herself. “It’s you,” she says. “It’s obvious. That’s no story.”

I laugh, too. “Sorry,” I say. “I’m not very good at this.”

“But you love your Match,” Lei says, no longer laughing. “I know that about you. You know it about me.”

“Yes,” I say.

She looks at me. The liquid drips into the line.

“I know an old story about people who
couldn’t
be Matched,” she says. “He was an Aberration. She was a citizen and a pilot. It was the first of the vanishings.”

“The vanishings?” I ask.

“Some people inside the Society wanted to get out,” Lei says. “Or wanted to get their children out. There were pilots who would fly people away in exchange for other things.”

“I’ve never heard of anything like this,” I say.

“It happened,” Lei says. “I saw it. Some of those parents would trade anything—risk everything—because they thought sending their children away was the best way to keep them safe.”

“But where would they take them?” I ask. “Into Enemy territory? That doesn’t make any sense.”

“They’d take them to the edge of Enemy territory,” Lei says. “To places called the stone villages. After that, it was up to people to decide whether they’d stay in the villages, or try to cross Enemy territory to find a place known as the Otherlands. No one who went on to the Otherlands ever came back.”

“I don’t understand it,” I say. “How would sending your children out to the middle of nowhere—closer to the Enemy—be safer than staying in the Society?”

“Perhaps they knew about the Plague,” Lei says. “But obviously your parents didn’t feel that way. Neither did mine.” She looks at me. “You almost sound like you’re defending the Society.”

“I’m not,” I say.

“I know,” she says. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to tell you history. I meant to tell you a story.”

“I’m ready,” I say. “I’m listening.”

“The story, then.” She lifts her arm and looks at the liquid running in. “This pilot loved the man but she had obligations at home, ones that she couldn’t break, and obligations to her leaders, too. If she left, too many people would suffer. She flew the man she loved all the way to the Otherlands, which no one had done before.”

“What happened after that?” I ask.

“She was shot down by the Enemy on her way back,” Lei says. “She never got to tell people what she had seen in the Otherlands. But she had saved the one she loved. She knew that, no matter what else happened.”

In the silence that follows her story, she leans against me. I don’t think she even knows she’s doing it. She’s going down.

“Do you think you could do that?” she asks.

“Fly?” I say. “Maybe.”

“No,” she says. “Do you think you could let someone go if you thought it was best for them?”

“No,” I say. “I’d have to
know
it was best for them.”

She nods, as if she expected my answer. “Almost anyone could do that,” she says. “But what if you didn’t know and you only
believed
?”

She doesn’t know if it’s true. But she wants it to be.

“That story would never be one of the Hundred,” she says. “It’s a Border story. The kind of thing that can only happen out here.”

Was she a pilot once? Is that where her husband is? Did she fly him out and now she’s going down? Is this story true? Any of it?

“I’ve never heard of the Otherlands,” I say.

“You have,” she says, and I shake my head.

“Yes,”
she says, challenging me. “Even if you never heard the name, you had to know they existed. The world can’t only be the Provinces. And it isn’t flat like the Society’s maps. How would the sun work? And the moon? And the stars? Didn’t you look up? Didn’t you notice that they changed?”