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“Greenspace, green tablet,” he says, quoting himself from that long ago day. “Green eyes on a green girl.”

“I’ll always remember that day,” I tell him.

“But you’re having a hard time remembering this one,” he says. His eyes are knowing, sympathetic.

“Yes,” I say. “Why?”

Grandfather doesn’t answer me, at least not outright. “They used to have a phrase for a truly memorable day,” he says instead. “A red-letter day. Can you remember that?”

“I’m not sure,” I say. I press my hands to my head. I feel foggy, not quite right. Grandfather’s face is sad, but determined. It makes me feel determined, too.

I look around again at the red buds, the flowers. “Or,” I say, something sharpening in me, “you could call it a red garden day.”

“Yes,” Grandfather says. “A red garden day. A day to remember.”

He leans closer. “It’s going to be hard to remember,” he says. “Even this, right now, won’t be clear later. But you’re strong. I know you can get it all back.”

And I have. Because of Grandfather. He tied the red garden day like a flag to my memory, the way Ky and I used to tie red strips of cloth to mark obstacles on the Hill.

Grandfather couldn’t give me back all of the memory, because I’d never told him what I’d done, but he could give me a part of it, could help me to know what I’d lost. A clue.
The red garden day.
I can build the rest back like stepping-stones to take me to the other side of forgetfulness, to find the memory on the other bank.

Grandfather believed in me, and he thought I could rebel. And I did, always, do little things, even though I believed in the Society, too. I think of how I made a game for Bram on his scribe when we were small. How angry I was when I swallowed that bite of cake at the Banquet. How Xander and I didn’t tell the Officials about his tablet container that day he lost it at the pool. How we broke the rules for Em when we gave her the green tablet.

From what I know now, I think it must have been the Rising who approached me. I did what they asked because they threatened Grandfather. I added people to the Matching pool. Back then, I didn’t know who those people were. I didn’t know they were Aberrations.

The Rising and the Society both used me, because they knew that I would forget. The Society knew I’d forget the sort and its proximity to the Match Banquet, and the Rising knew I could not betray them if I didn’t remember what I’d done. The Pilot even made mention of that when he was flying us to Endstone. “You’ve helped us before,” he said, “though you don’t remember it.”

But I remember
now
.

Why did the Rising have me add the Aberrations to the pool? Did the Rising hope that it would function as a kind of Reclassification for those who made it through? Or were they simply trying to disrupt the Society?

And why did the Society use me, and the other sorters, that day? Were the sorters in Central already beginning to fall ill with the Plague?

Another memory comes to the surface, tugged by this one.

I Matched another time, in Central.

That’s what happened that day when I found the paper where I’d written a single word—
remember—
in my sleeve. The Society was having trouble because of the Plague; they couldn’t keep up with the people going still
.
How long did the Society use people like me to sort for the Banquets and then give us the red tablets so that we’d forget the rush, the eleventh-hour aspect of it all?

My Official didn’t know who put Ky into the Matching pool.

But I do know that part of it. At least, I can sort through the data and guess.

It was me.

I put him in without knowing what I was doing. And then someone—myself, or one of the others in the room—paired him, and Xander, with me.

Did my Official ever find out? Could she have predicted this as the final outcome? Did she even survive the Plague and the mutation?

Out of all the people in the Society, were Ky and Xander really the two I fit best with? Wouldn’t the Society have noticed that I had two Matches, or have some fail-safe to catch such an occurrence? Or did the Society not even have a procedure in place for something like that, believing that it would never happen, trusting in their own data and their belief that there could be only
one
perfect Match for each person?

So many questions, and I may never have the answers.

I don’t want to ask too much of my mother, now that she’s just come back, but she is strong. So was my father. I realize now how much courage it takes to choose the life you want, whatever it might be.

“Grandfather,” I say. “He was a member of the Rising. He stole from the Society.”

My mother takes the plant from me and nods. “Yes,” she says. “He took artifacts from the Restoration sites where he worked. But he didn’t steal from the Society on behalf of the Rising. That was his own personal mission.”

“Was he an Archivist?” I ask, my heart sinking.

“No,” my mother says, “but he did trade with them.”

“Why?” I ask. “What did he want?”

“Nothing for himself,” my mother says. “He traded to arrange for passage for Anomalies and Aberrations out of the Provinces.”

No wonder Grandfather seemed so surprised when I told him about the microcard and how I’d been Matched with an Aberration. He hoped they’d all been saved.

The irony is impossible to ignore. Grandfather was trying to help those people by getting them
out
of the Society; I sorted them
in
to the Matching pool
.
We both thought we were doing the right thing.

The Society and the Rising used me when they needed me, dropped me when they didn’t. But Grandfather
always
knew I was strong, always believed in me. He believed I could go without the green tablet, that I could get my memories back from the red. I wonder what he’d think if he knew that I also walked through the blue.

CHAPTER 57

KY

W
e have a lead,” the Pilot says.

I don’t need to ask
On what?
The lead is always for the same thing—a potential location for the flower that provides the cure.

“Where?” I ask.

“I’m sending you the coordinates now,” the Pilot says. The printer on my control panel begins spitting out information. “It’s a small town in Sonoma.”

That’s the Province where Indie was from. “Is it near the sea?” I ask.

“No,” the Pilot says, “the desert. But our source was sure of the location. She remembered the name of the town.”

“And the source of the information . . .” I say, though I think I already know.

“Cassia’s mother,” the Pilot says. “She came back.”

As I fly in from the east, I see a long stretch of fields, away from the city, where the earth is all turned over. It’s morning. There is dew on the dirt of the fields, so they shine a little like a sea when the sun hits just right.

Don’t get your hopes up,
I tell myself.
We’ve thought we had curefields before, and then there were only a few flowers.

The lines from the Thomas poem come to my mind:

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

This might be the last wave by, the last chance we have to cure a significant amount of people before they go too far under. These deeds—our flying, Cassia’s sorting, Xander’s curing—will either be frail or bright.

Two ships sit near the field.

On the outside, I don’t hesitate—I start to bring the ship down. But inside I always have a catch when I see other ships waiting. Who’s piloting them? Right now the Society seems dormant, and the Pilot and
his
rebellion securely in charge, thanks to the cure he brought back from the mountains. His people keep order; under their supervision, workers distribute the last of the food stockpiles. People who aren’t sick stay in their homes, the immune help tend the still, and a tenuous and impermanent order exists. For now, the Pilot has enough respect from all the pilots and the officers to keep control, and the Society has drawn back from the Rising, allowing them to proceed in finding more flowers for the cure. But someday they’ll be back. And someday, the people are going to have to decide what it is that they want.

We just have to cure enough of them first.

I bring my ship down on the long deserted road where the others landed.

The Pilot comes to meet me, and in the distance I see an air car hovering in from the direction of the city.

“The officers think they’ve found someone who can help us,” the Pilot says. “A man who knew the person who planted these fields and is willing to talk about it.”

The two of us cross the grassy ditch between the field and the dusty road. Spirals of barbed wire fence in the area. But I can already see the lilies.

They stick out at awkward angles from the little hills and valleys of turned-over dirt, but there they are—white flowers waving banners over the cure. I reach through the wire and turn one toward us; its shape is perfect. Three curved petals make up the bloom, with a trace of red on the inside.

“The Society plowed them under last year,” the man from the town says, coming up behind us. “But this spring, they all came up.” He shakes his head. “I don’t know how many of us even noticed or thought to come out here, with the Plague.”

“You can eat the bulb for food,” the Pilot says. “Did you know that?”

“No,” the man says.

“Who planted the fields before the Society bulldozed them over?” the Pilot asks.

“A man named Jacob Childs,” the man says. “I’m not supposed to remember that the fields were plowed under, but I do. And I’m not supposed to remember that they took Jacob away. But they did.”

“We need to arrange a careful harvest of these bulbs,” the Pilot says. “Can you help us with that? Do you know people who would be willing to work?”

“Yes,” says the man. “Not many. Most are sick or hiding.”

“We’ll bring our own people in, too,” the Pilot says. “But we need to get started immediately.”

A slight wind ruffles the flowers. They’re little waves dancing in their green bay of grass.

Days later, I’m on my way back from taking another round of cures to Central when the Pilot’s voice comes over the speaker again. His voice startles me and so does the timing of his communication—does he know what I have planned? My flying shouldn’t have given him any indication yet. The path he assigned me was perfect, close enough to where I need to be that I can do what I have to do.

“There’s no record of the man named Jacob Childs,” the Pilot says. “He’s vanished.”

“That’s not surprising,” I say. “I’m sure the Society didn’t waste any time Reclassifying him and sending him out to die.”

“I also had them run a search for Patrick and Aida Markham,” the Pilot tells me. “They are nowhere in the databases, Society or Rising.”

“Thank you for taking the time to look,” I say. There are plenty of us who want to know about family, but we have limited resources for searching, even through the data.

“I can’t have you looking for them now,” the Pilot says. “We still need you and your ship for the cure.”

“I understand,” I say. “I’ll look for them on my own time.”

“You don’t have any of your own time right now,” the Pilot says. “Your rest hours are intended to be exactly that. We can’t have you flying exhausted.”

“I have to find them,” I tell him. I owe them everything. Through Anna, I learned what Patrick and Aida traded and sacrificed—even more than I’d originally thought. I ask the Pilot something that I could never have questioned him about before. “Isn’t there anyone,” I say, “that
you
still have to find?”

I’ve gone too far. The Pilot doesn’t answer.

I look down at the dark land below and the bright lights coming into view, right where they should be.

In the weeks that I’ve been flying out the cure, I’ve stopped in every Province in the Society several times over.

Except Oria.

The Pilot won’t let any of us land in the Provinces where we’re from, because we’ll know too many people there and we’ll be tempted to change the pattern of the cure.

“There were people I had to find,” the Pilot says finally, “but I knew where I needed to look. This is like trying to find a stone in the Sisyphus River. You don’t even know where to begin. It would take too long. Now. But later, you can.”

I don’t answer him. We both know that
later
often means
too late.

The cure works, and so does Cassia’s sorting, telling us where to go next. We’re saving the optimal amount of people. She tells us what she thinks we should do, the computers and other sorters corroborate it—her mind is as fine and clear as anything in this world.

But we’re not saving everyone. Of the still who go down, about eleven percent do not come back at all. And other patients succumb to infections.

I bring the ship in lower.

“I thought I made it clear that you couldn’t look for them now,” the Pilot says.

“You did,” I say. “I’m not going to make people die while I hunt for something I might not find.”

“Then what are you doing?” the Pilot asks me.

“I need to land here,” I say.

“They’re not in Oria,” the Pilot says. “Cassia found it extremely unlikely that they would be anywhere in that Province.”

“She put the highest likelihood that they died out in the Outer Provinces,” I say. “Didn’t she?”

The Pilot pauses for a moment. “Yes,” he says.

I circle until I see a good place for a landing. Over the Hill I go, and I wonder where the green silk from Cassia’s dress is now—a little tattered banner under the sky buried in the ground. Or bleaching out in the sun. Bleeding away in the rain. Blowing away on the wind.

“Oria’s still volatile, and you’re a resource,” the Pilot says. “You need to come in.”

“It won’t take long,” I repeat, and then I bring the ship around and drop down. This ship isn’t like the one the Pilot flies. Mine can’t switch over to propellers and a tighter landing the way his can.

The street will barely be long enough but I know every bit of it. I walked it for all those years. With Patrick and Aida, and they were usually holding hands.

The wheels hit the ground and the metal sails of the ship shift, creating drag and slowing me down. Houses rush past, and at the end of the street I stop the ship right in time. Through my window, I could see into the ones of the house in front of me if the people inside didn’t have their shutters drawn tight.

I climb out of the ship and move as fast as I can. I only have a few houses to go. The flowers in the gardens haven’t been weeded. They grow thick and untended. I pause at the door of the house where Em used to live. The windows are broken. I look inside, but it’s empty, and has been for a long enough time that there are leaves on the floor. They must have blown in from another Borough, since ours no longer has trees.

I keep going.

When I was still, I heard what Anna said about my parents and about Patrick and Aida and Matthew. My mother and father couldn’t get me out. So, when they died, they sent me in as close as they could and hoped that would work. And Patrick and Aida welcomed me and loved me like their own.

I’ll never forget Aida’s screams and Patrick’s face when the Officials took me away, or how they kept reaching for me and for each other.

The Society knew what they were doing when they Matched Patrick and Aida.

If I’d been the one Matched with Cassia, if I’d known I could have eighty years of a good life and most of it spent with her, I wonder if I would have had the strength to try to take the Society down.

Xander did.

I walk up the pathway and knock on the door of the house where he used to live.