“What?” he asks. He doesn’t lift his eyes from my hands, as if they’re capable of a miracle and he can finally witness what it is.
“I thought about you in the Carving, too,” I say. “I dreamed of you.”
Now he does look at me and I find I can’t hold his gaze; something deep I feel makes me look down, and I write:
Dark, dark, dark it was
But the Physic’s hand was light.
He knew the cure, he held the balm
To heal our wings for flight.
Xander reads it over. His lips move. “Physic,” he says softly. His expression looks pained. “You think I can heal people,” he says.
“I do.”
Just then, some of the children from the village come down the path across from us. As if we’re one person, Xander and I stand up at the same time to watch them go by.
They are playing a game I’ve never seen before, one where they pretend to be something else. Each child is dressed as an animal. Some used grass to make fur, others used leaves for feathers, and there are still more with wings lashed together, made of branches and of blankets that will be used again to warm at night. The repurposing of nature and scraps for creation reminds me of the Gallery, and I wonder if the people back in Central have found another place to gather and share, or if they don’t have time at all for this anymore, with a mutation on the loose and no cure in sight.
“What would it have been like if we could do that?” Xander asks.
“What?” I ask.
“Be whatever we wanted,” he says. “What if they’d let us do that when we were younger?”
I’ve thought about this, especially when I was in the Carving. Who am I? What am I meant to be? I think how lucky I am, in spite of the Society, to have dreamed so many, such wild things. Part of that is, of course, because of Grandfather, who always challenged me.
“Remember Oria?” Xander asks.
Yes. Yes. I remember. All of it. It’s all clear and close again; the two of us, Matched, holding hands on the air train on the way home from the Banquet. My hand on the nape of his neck as I dropped the compass down his shirt so he could save Ky’s artifact from the Officials. Even then, the three of us were doing our best to keep faith with one another.
“Remember that day planting newroses?” he asks.
“I do,” I say, thinking of that kiss, the only one we’ve had, and my heart aches for us both. The air here in the mountains is sharp even in the summer. It bites at us, twists our hair, puts tears in our eyes. Standing here with Xander among the mountains is everything and nothing like standing with Ky out at the edge of the Carving.
I reach out my hand to take Xander’s. My palm is streaked with dirt from writing with the stick, and as I look at it and think of Xander and newrose roots hanging down, the wind moves and the children dance toward the village stone, and light as air another cottonwood seed of memory comes to me:
My mother’s hands are printed black with dirt, but I can see the white lines crossing her palms when she lifts up the seedlings. We stand in the plant nursery at the Arboretum; the glass roof overhead and the steamy mists inside belie the cool of the spring morning out.
“Bram made it to school on time,” I say.
“Thank you for letting me know,” she says, smiling at me. On the rare days when both she and my father have to go to work early, it is my responsibility to get Bram to his early train for First School. “Where are you going now? You have a few minutes left before work.”
“I might stop by to see Grandfather,” I say. It’s all right to deviate from the usual routine this way, because Grandfather’s Banquet is coming soon. So is mine. We have so many things to discuss.
“Of course,” she says. She’s transferring the seedlings from the tubes where they started, rowed in a tray, to their new homes, little pots filled with soil. She lifts one of the seedlings out.
“It doesn’t have many roots,” I say.
“Not yet,” she says. “That will come.”
I give her a quick kiss and start off again. I’m not supposed to linger at her workplace, and I have an air train to catch. Getting up early with Bram has given me a little extra time, but not much.
The spring wind is playful, pushing me one way, pulling me another. It spins some of last fall’s leaves up into the air, and I wonder, if I climbed up on the air-train platform and jumped, if the spiral of wind would catch me and take me up twirling.
I cannot think of falling without thinking of flying.
I could do it, I think, if I found a way to make wings.
Someone comes up next to me as I pass by the tangled world of the Hill on my way to the air-train stop. “Cassia Reyes?” the worker asks. The knees of her plainclothes are darkened with soil, like my mother’s when she’s been working. The woman is young, a few years older than me, and she has something in her hand, more roots dangling down. Pulling up or planting? I wonder.
“Yes?” I say.
“I need to speak with you,” she says. A man emerges from the Hill behind her. He is the same age as she is, and something about them makes me think, They would be a good Match. I’ve never had permission to go on the Hill, and I look back up at the riot of plants and forest behind the workers. What is it like in a place so wild?
“We need you to sort something for us,” the man says.
“I’m sorry,” I say, moving again. “I only sort at work.” They are not Officials, nor are they my superiors or supervisors. This isn’t protocol, and I don’t bend rules for strangers.
“It’s to help your grandfather,” the girl says.
I stop.
“Cassia?” Xander asks. “Are you all right?”
“Yes,” I say. I’m still staring down at my hand, wishing I could close it tight around the rest of the memory. I know it belongs with the lost red garden day. I’m certain of this, though I can’t say why.
Xander looks like he’s about to say something more, but the children are coming back again in their game, having circled all the way around the village stone. They are loud and laughing, as children should be. A little girl smiles at Xander and he smiles back, reaching out to touch her wing as she passes, but she turns at the wrong moment and he catches nothing.
CHAPTER 34
XANDER
Oker’s so driven, it’s almost inhuman. I feel the same way—we have to find the cure—but his focus is something else. It doesn’t take many days before I’m accustomed to the routine in the research lab, which is: we work when Oker says to work and we rest when Oker says to take a break. Sometimes I catch a glimpse of Cassia in the sorting rooms, but for the most part I spend my time compounding formulas according to Oker’s instructions.
Oker eats his meals right here in the lab. He doesn’t even sit down. So that’s what the rest of us do, too: we stand around and watch each other chew our food. It’s probably the stress of the situation and the late hours, but something about it always makes me want to laugh. The mealtime conversations are a measure of how well things are going with the cure trials. Oker’s different from most people because when things are going well he won’t talk. When things are going badly, he’ll say more.
“What is it about the Otherlands,” I ask him today, “that makes all of you want to go there so much?”
Oker snorts. “Nothing,” he says. “I’m too old to start over. I’ll be staying right here. And I’m not the only one.”
“Then why work on the cure if you’re not sharing the reward?” I ask.
“Because of my inherent altruism,” Oker says.
I can’t help but laugh at that and he glares at me. “I want to beat the Society,” Oker says. “I want to find the cure first.”
“It’s not the Society anymore,” I remind him.
“Of course it is,” he says, tipping back his canteen to drink. He wipes off his mouth with the back of his hand and glares at me. “Only fools think that anything has changed. The Rising and the Society have infiltrated each other so thoroughly that they don’t even know who’s who anymore. It’s like a snake eating its own damn tail. This—out here—is the only true rebellion.”
“The Pilot believes in the Rising,” I say. “He’s not a fraud.”
Oker looks at me. “Maybe not,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean you should follow him.” Then his gaze turns sharp. “Or me.”
I don’t say anything because we both know I’m already following the two of them. I think the Pilot’s the way to revolution, and that Oker’s the way to the cure.
The patients here still look much better than the ones back in the Provinces. Oker’s cured all the secondary symptoms from the mutated Plague, like the platelet accumulation and the lung secretions. But he keeps muttering about proteins and the brain, and I know he hasn’t figured out how to prevent or reverse the mutation’s effect on the nervous system. But he’ll get there.
Oker swears. He’s spilled some of the water from the canteen onto his shirt. “The Society was right about one thing,” Oker says. “Damn hands stopped working a year or two after eighty. Of course, my mind still functions better than most.”
Cassia’s already in her cell when I get there, but she’s waited up for me. I can’t see her very well because it’s night, but I can hear her when she talks to me. Someone down the hall shouts out at us to be quiet but everyone else seems to have fallen asleep.
“Rebecca says all the research medics like you,” Cassia says. “She also says that you’re the only one who talks back to Oker.”
“Maybe I should stop,” I say. I don’t want to alienate any of the workers. I’ve got to stay inside the research lab working on that cure.
“Rebecca says it’s good,” Cassia says. “She thinks Oker likes you because you remind him of himself.”
Is that true? I don’t think I’m as proud as Oker is, or as smart. Of course, I have always wondered if I could be the Pilot someday. I like people. I want to be around them and make things better for them.
“We’re getting closer,” Cassia says. “We have to be.” Her voice sounds a little bit farther away. She must have moved back to sit on her bed instead of standing right at the front of the cell. “Good night, Xander,” Cassia says.
“Good night,” I tell her.
CHAPTER 35
CASSIA
Sometimes, when I am tired, it seems that I have never lived anywhere else. I have never done anything but this. Ky has always been still, and Xander and I have always been working on a cure. My parents and Bram are lost to me, and I have to find them, and the task at hand seems very large, too large for any one person or any group of people.
“What are you doing?” one of the other sorters asks. She gestures to the datapod, and to the tiny scraps of paper and the charcoaled stick I’ve been using for notes. I’ve found that sometimes I have to write things down by hand to understand the data I see on the datapod’s screen. Writing clears my mind. And lately, I’ve been trying to draw by hand from the descriptions recorded in the datapod, because I can’t picture the things they’ve described as being possible components for the cure. The sorter’s eyes crinkle with laughter as she looks at my attempt at drawing a flower, and I pull the paper closer to me.
