DUTTON BOOKS 18 страница

I’m so tired.

Once, I wanted to watch the floods coming into a canyon, to stand on the edge and see it happen, on ground that was safe but shaking. I’d like to hear the trees snap away and see the water come higher, I thought, but only from a place where it couldn’t reach me.

Now I think it might be a terrifying, bright relief to stand on the canyon floor and see the wall of water coming down, and to know this is it, I am finished, and before you could even complete the thought, you would be swallowed, and whole.

As evening falls, Anna comes to sit beside me in the infirmary. “I’m sorry,” she says, looking at Ky. “I never thought that Hunter—”

“I know,” I say. “Neither did I.”

“The vote will be tomorrow,” she tells me. For the first time, Anna sounds old.

“What will they do?” I ask.

“Xander will likely be exiled,” she says. “He could also be found innocent, but I don’t think that will happen. The people are angry. They don’t believe Oker told Xander to destroy the cure.”

“Xander’s from the Provinces,” I say. “How is he supposed to survive in exile?” Xander’s smart, but he’s never lived out in the wild before, and he will have nothing when they send him away. I had Indie.

“I don’t think,” Anna says, “that he is supposed to survive.”

If Xander is exiled, what will I do? I’d go with him, but I can’t leave Ky. And we need Xander for the cure. Even if I do find the right plant, I don’t know how to make a cure, or the best way to give it to Ky. If this is to work, it will take all three of us. Ky, Xander, me.

“And Hunter?” I ask Anna, very softly.

“The best we can hope for Hunter,” she says, “is exile.” Though I know she has other children who came with her from the Carving, her voice sounds as sad as if Hunter were her own child, the very last of her blood.

And then she hands me something. A piece of paper, real paper, the kind she must have carried with her all the way from the cave in the Carving. It smells like the canyons, here in the mountains, and it makes me ache a little and wonder how Anna could stand to leave her home.

“These are pictures of the flowers you wanted,” she says. “I’m sorry it took me so long. I had to make the colors. I just finished them now, so you’ll have to be careful not to smear the paints.”

I’m stunned that she did this, with everything else that must have been on her mind tonight, and I’m touched that she still believes me capable of sorting for the cure. “Thank you,” I say.

Under the flowers she has written their names.

Ephedra, paintbrush, mariposa lily.

And others, of course. Plants and flowers.

I’m crying, and I wish I weren’t. I wrote that lullaby for so many people. And now we may lose almost all of them. Hunter. Sarah. Ky. My mother. Xander. Bram. My father.

Ephedra, Anna wrote. Underneath she drew a spiky-looking bush with small, cone-like flowers. She painted it yellow and green.

Paintbrush. Red. This one I’ve seen, in the canyons.

Mariposa lily. It’s a beautiful white flower with red and yellow coloring deep down inside its three petals.

My hands know what I’ve seen before my mind does; I’m reaching into my pocket and pulling out the paper my mother sent, recognizing the meaning in its shape. I remember Indie’s wasp nest, how it had space inside, and I pull the edges of the paper out and then I know.

I hold a paper flower in my hand. My mother made this. She cut or tore the paper carefully so that three pieces fan out from the middle, like petals.

It is the same as the flower in the picture; white, three-petaled, the edges crimped in and pointed like a star. I realize that I also saw it printed in the earth.

This is what Oker was trying to find.

He saw me take out the paper flower when I put the voting stone inside.

Anna’s picture tells me that the name of this flower is mariposa lily. But I never heard my mother speak that name. And it’s not a newrose or an oldrose or a sprig of Queen Anne’s lace. What other flowers did she tell me about?

I’m back in the room in our house in Oria, where she showed me the blue satin square from the dress she wore to her Banquet. She’s recently returned from traveling out into different Provinces to investigate rogue crops for the Society. “The second grower had a crop I’d never seen before, of white flowers even more beautiful than the first,” she says. “Sego lilies, they called them. You can eat the bulb.”

“Anna,” I say, my heart racing, “does mariposa lily have another name?” If it does, that might account for the problem in the data. We’ve been counting this flower as two separate data points, but it was, in fact, a single variable.

“Yes,” Anna says, after a pause. “Some people call it the sego lily.”

I pick up the datapod and search for the name. There it is. The properties are all the same. One flower, reported under two different names. Now, with its names combined, it rises right to the top of potential ingredients. It was a critical, elemental mistake made by those gathering the data, but we should have noticed it earlier. How did I miss it before? How could I fail to recognize the name, when my mother had told it to me? You only heard it once, I remind myself, and that was long ago. “Where does it grow?” I ask.

“We should be able to find some not far from here,” Anna says. “It’s early in the season, but it could be in bloom.” She looks at the paper flower in my hand. “Did you make that?”

“No,” I say. “My mother did.”

It’s almost dark when we finally find them, in a little field away from the village and the path.

I drop down to my knees to look closer. I’ve never seen a flower so beautiful. It’s a simple white bloom, three curved petals coming out from a sparsely leaved stalk. It’s a little white banner, like my writing, not of surrender but of survival. I pull out the crumpled paper flower.

Though my hands shake, I can tell that it’s a match. This flower growing in the ground is the one my mother made before she went still.

The real thing is much more beautiful. But that doesn’t matter. I think of Ky’s mother, who painted water on stone, who believed the important thing was to create, not capture. Even though the paper lily isn’t a perfect rendering, it’s still a tribute to its beauty that my mother tried.

I don’t know whether she intended the flower as art or message, but I choose to take it as both.

“I think,” I say, “that this might be the cure.”

CHAPTER 46

XANDER

I can’t see Cassia herself, but the solar-cell lamps cast her shadow on the prison wall. Her voice carries from the entryway to my cell. “We think we have found a possible cure,” she tells the guards. “We need Xander to make something for us.”

The guard laughs. “I don’t think so,” he says.

“I’m not asking you to release Xander,” Cassia says. “We just need to give him the equipment and have him prepare the cure.”

“And then what are you going to do with it?” another guard asks.

“We’re going to give it to one patient,” she says. “Our patient. Ky.”

“We can’t go against Colin,” one of the guards says. “He’s our leader. And we’d lose our chance at the Otherlands.”

“This is your chance at the Otherlands,” Cassia says. Her voice is low, quiet, full of conviction. “This is what Oker was going to find.” She pulls something out of her bag. “Mariposa lily.” I can see from her shadow that she’s holding a flower. “You eat the bulb, don’t you? You eat it when it blooms in the summer, and store it for the winter.”

“Are they already in bloom?” one of them asks. “How many did you pull up?”

“Only a few,” Cassia says.

Another shadow moves into view and I hear Anna’s voice. “We had these flowers in the Carving, too,” Anna says. “We also used them for food. I know how to gather them so that they’ll come back again next year.”

“What does it matter if they take all the plants, anyway?” one of the guards says to the other. “If we’re gone to the Otherlands, we won’t need to harvest.”

“No,” Anna says. “Even if everyone is gone, the flower must come back. We cannot take it all and leave nothing.”

“The bulbs are so small,” another guard says dubiously. “I don’t see how it could be a cure.”

Cassia comes into view, and I see that she holds the real flower and the paper that her mother sent her. They’re a perfect match. “Oker saw me take out this flower—the paper one—during the vote. I believe this is the flower he was going to find.” She sounds confident that she’s sorted everything. She could be right: Oker did change his mind right after he saw her take out the paper.

“Please,” Cassia says to the guards. “Let us try.” Her voice is gentle, persuasive. “You can feel it, can’t you?” she asks, and now she sounds wistful. “The Otherlands are getting farther and farther away.”

Everything goes quiet as we realize that Cassia’s right. I do feel the Otherlands receding for me, like the real world probably did for Lei and Ky when they went still. I feel everything slipping out of my grasp. I’ve followed the Pilot, Oker, and Cassia, but things didn’t go as I’d hoped. I thought I’d see a rebellion, find a cure, and have someone love me back.

What if they all left? What if everyone else flew to the Otherlands or went still and I was here alone? Would I keep going? I would. I can’t seem to treat this life I have as anything but the only thing.

“All right,” one of the guards says. “But hurry.”

Anna has thought of everything. She’s brought equipment from the lab: a syringe, a mortar and pestle, clean water that’s been boiled and treated, and some of Oker’s base mixtures, with a list of the ingredients in each. “How did you know what we’d need?” I ask her.

“I didn’t,” she says. “Tess and Noah did. They think it’s possible that Oker changed his mind. They’re not sure they believe you, but they’re not sure that they don’t, either.”

“They gave all of this to you?” I ask.

She nods. “But if anyone asks, we stole it. We don’t want to get them in trouble.”

Cassia holds the flashlight for me while I scrub my hands with the sterilizing solution. I use the edge of the pestle to split the bulb in half. “It’s beautiful,” Cassia says.

The inside of the bulb looks white and luminescent like the camassia bulbs. I grind it down, pulverizing the bulb until it’s a paste. Then Anna hands me a tube. Cassia watches and I find myself hesitating. Maybe it’s the memory of the night back in Oria when I traded for the blue tablets. I took blood when I shouldn’t have, and when I did, I implied promises that no one was in a position to keep. I did exactly what the Society and the Rising have done—I took advantage of people’s fears so that I could have something I wanted.

Am I doing that again by making this cure? I look at Cassia. She trusts me. And she shouldn’t. I killed that boy in the Carving with the blue tablets. I didn’t do it on purpose, but if it wasn’t for me, he would never have had the tablets in the first place.

I haven’t let myself think about this, even though I’ve known about it since we came in on the ship. Panic and bile rise together in my throat and I want to run away from what I’ve been asked to do. I can’t make a cure: I’ve made the wrong call too many times.

“You know that I can’t guarantee that this will work,” I tell Cassia. “I’m not a pharmic. I might not put in the right amount, or there might be a reacting agent in the base that I don’t know about—”

“There are a lot of ways it could go wrong,” she agrees. “I might not have found the right ingredient. But I think that I have. And I know you can make the cure.”

“Why?” I ask.

“You always come through for the people who need you,” she says, and her voice sounds sad. Like she knows this is going to cost me but she’s asking me to do it anyway and it breaks her heart.

“Please,” she says. “One more time.”

CHAPTER 47

CASSIA

Inside the infirmary, Anna distracts the medics while I inject the cure into Ky’s line. It doesn’t take long; Xander told me how to do this. Before, I might have been afraid to try, but after seeing Xander compound a cure in a prison cell and Ky labor to breathe on through the stillness, there is no room left for my own fears.

I cover the needle back up and slide it and the empty vial that held the cure into my sleeve, next to the poems I always carry. As I sit down next to Ky, I pick up the datapod. I pretend to keep sorting, though my eyes are really on Ky, watching, waiting. He is taking the biggest risk; it’s his veins the cure runs through. But we all have so much to lose.

I have sometimes seen the three of us as separate, discrete points, and of course we are that, each individuals. But Ky and Xander and I all have to believe in one another to keep each other safe. In the end, I had to trust Xander to make a cure for Ky, and Ky trusted us to bring him back, and Xander trusted my sorting, and around and around we go, a circle, the three of us, connected, always, in the turning of days and the keeping of promises over and over again.

CHAPTER 48

KY

not in the water anymore

why not

where is Indie

tiny lights come in and out of the darkness.

I hear Cassia’s voice.

She’s been waiting in the stars for me.

CHAPTER 49

CASSIA

Ky,” I say. I’ve seen a lightening like this on his face before, but this time it keeps coming, growing brighter, as he returns to us.

I did not reach Thee,

But my feet slip nearer every day;

Three Rivers and a Hill to cross,

One Desert and a Sea—

I shall not count the journey one

When I am telling thee.

Ky and I took the journey in our own order. We began with the Hill, together. We crossed a desert to get to the Carving and streams and rivers inside the canyons and again when we came out. There has been no sea, no ocean, but there has been a great expanse for both of us to navigate without the other. I think that counts.

And I think, looking at him, that the poem is wrong. He will count this journey, and so will I.

Anna comes in later and hands me several more cures from Xander. “He says it will take more than one dose,” she whispers. “This is all he could manage for now. He says to give the next dose as soon as possible.”

I nod. “Thank you,” I say, and she slips back out the door, nodding to the medics as she goes.

They’re conducting their morning rounds. One of the village medics turns Ky from his side to his back to change the areas of pressure on Ky’s body. “He’s looking better,” the medic says, sounding surprised.

“I think so, too,” I say, and right then we hear something outside. I turn to the window, and through it I see that the guards are bringing Hunter and Xander out to the village circle.

Hunter.

Xander.

They both walk on their own to stand in front of the voting troughs, but their hands are tied and they’re flanked by guards. I wish I could see Xander’s eyes from here, but all I can see is the way he walks and how tired he seems. He’s been up all night making cures.

“It’s time for the vote,” says one of the medics.

“Open the window,” the other says, “so we can hear.”

For a split second they are both engaged with pushing open the window and that’s when I empty the syringe into Ky’s line. When I finish slipping the evidence into my sleeve, I glance up to find one of the medics watching me. I can’t tell what he saw, but I don’t miss a beat. Xander would be proud. “Why are they having the trial so soon?” I ask.

“Colin and Leyna must feel that they’ve gathered enough evidence,” the medic says. He looks at me for a second longer and, as the morning smell and fresh air from the window rush in, Ky takes a deep breath. His lungs sound better. He’s not all the way back yet, but he’s coming, I can tell. I feel him, more than I did before; I know he listens even if he can’t yet speak.

People fill the village circle. I’m not close enough to see the stones in their hands, but I hear Colin call out, “Is there anyone here who will stand with Hunter?”

“I will,” Anna says.

“The rules are that you may only stand with one person,” the medic tells me. And I understand what he’s saying: if Anna stands with Hunter, she can’t stand with Xander.

Anna nods. She walks up to the front and faces out to the crowd. As she speaks, I notice them drawing closer to her. “What Hunter did was wrong,” Anna says, “but he didn’t mean to kill. If that was his intent, he could have done it easily and escaped. What Hunter wanted was to make things fair. He felt that since the Provinces denied Anomalies access to any of their medications for years, we should do the same for their patients.”

Anna doesn’t play on the crowd. She says the facts and lets the crowd weigh them. Of course, we all know that the world isn’t fair. But we all understand how it feels to wish that it were. Many of these people know too well what it’s like to be tossed aside—or worse, sent out to die—by the Society. Anna says nothing of all the losses Hunter has suffered that would lead him to this point. She doesn’t have to. They’re written on his arms and in his eyes.

“I know you can require more,” Anna says, “but I ask for exile for Hunter.”

The lesser of the two sentences. Will the crowd give it?

They do.

They drop their stones in the trough near Anna’s feet instead of the one near Colin’s. The farmers come with the buckets and pour the water. The decision holds.

“Hunter,” Colin says, “you must leave now.”

Hunter nods. I can’t tell if he feels anything. Someone hands him a pack and there’s a disturbance as Eli comes running for Hunter, wrapping his arms around Hunter to say good-bye. Anna embraces them both, and for a moment they are a little family, three generations, connected not by blood but by journeys and farewells.

Then Eli steps back. He will stay with Anna, who must remain with the rest of her people. Hunter walks straight into the forest, not taking the path, not looking back. Where will he go? To the Carving?

And now the crowd murmurs and Xander comes forward. In that moment, I realize that the people have spent their mercy on Hunter. They lived and worked with him for the past few months. They knew his story.

But they don’t know Xander.

He stands in front of the village stone, alone.

Xander will do anything for those he loves, whatever the cost. But, looking at Xander now, I think the cost has become too high. He looks like Hunter, I realize. Like someone who has been driven too far and seen too much. Hunter kept himself together long enough to deliver Eli safely to the mountains. For a long time, he did what he had to do to help others, but then he broke.

I can’t let that happen to Xander.

CHAPTER 50

XANDER

Who will stand with Xander?” Colin asks.

No one answers.

Anna looks at me. I can tell that she’s sorry, but I understand. Of course she had to use everything she had for Hunter. He’s like a son to her, and it was right for her to have spent everything on him.

But there is no one else. Cassia has to stay in the infirmary with Ky, to give him the cure and make sure he wakes up. Ky would stand with me: but he’s still.

People shuffle their feet and look in Colin’s direction. They’re impatient with him for letting the moment go on so long. I’d like it to be over, too. I close my eyes and listen to my heart, my breathing, and the wind high up in the trees.

Someone calls out: a voice I know. “I will.” I open my eyes to see Cassia pushing her way through the crowd. She came after all. Her face is all lit up. The cure must be working.

Something’s wrong with me. I should be glad that Cassia’s here and that the cure could be viable. But all I can think about are the patients in the Provinces, and Lei when she went down, and I worry that it’s too late. Will we be able to bring enough people back? Will the cure work again? How will we find enough bulbs? Who will decide which people get the cure first? There are a lot of questions and I’m not sure we can find the answers fast enough.

I’ve never felt this worn out before.

CHAPTER 51

CASSIA

People come up to take their stones back from the vote they cast for Hunter. The stones are still wet and they drip a little onto the villagers’ clothes, leaving small, dark spots. Some of the people roll the rocks in their hands as they wait.

“This trough,” Colin says, pointing to the one nearest him, “is for the maximum penalty. The other,” the one closer to Xander’s feet, “is for the lesser penalty.”

He doesn’t specify what the penalties are. Does everyone already know? Anna guessed that the worst sentence Xander would receive would be exile, because his crime wasn’t as great as Hunter’s. No one died.

But for Xander, exile would mean death. He has nowhere to go. He can’t live out here alone, and it’s a long journey through rough terrain back to Camas. Perhaps he could find Hunter.

But then what?

I look up at Xander. The sun has crept through the trees and shines gold on his hair. I’ve never had to wonder what color his eyes are, the way I did with Ky; I’ve always known that Xander’s are blue, that he would look at you from a place of kindness and clarity. But now, though the color hasn’t changed, I know that Xander has.

“I’m lonely with you sometimes,” he told me in the infirmary earlier. “I didn’t think it could ever be that way.”

Are you lonely now, Xander?

I don’t even have to ask.

There are birds in the trees; there are stirrings in the crowd, and wind in the grasses and coming down the path, and yet all I feel is his silence—and his strength.

He turns to the crowd, straightening his shoulders and clearing his throat. He can do this, I think. He’ll smile that smile and his voice will ring out over the crowd like the Pilot he could be someday, and they’ll see how good he is and they won’t want to destroy him anymore—they’ll want to circle around and gather close to smile back up at him. That’s how it’s always been with Xander. Girls in the Borough loved him; Officials wanted him for their departments; people who became ill wanted him to heal them.

“I promise,” Xander says, “that I only did what Oker asked me to do. He wanted the cures destroyed because he realized he’d made a mistake.”

Please, I think. Please believe him. He’s telling the truth.

But I hear how hollow his voice sounds, and when he glances back at me, I see how his smile isn’t quite the same. It’s not because he’s lying. It’s because he has nothing left right now. He took care of the still for months without relief. He saw his friend Lei go down. He believed in the Pilot, then he believed in Oker, and they asked him to do impossible things. Find a cure, the Pilot said. Destroy the cure, Oker ordered.

And I’m no less guilty. Make another cure, I told him. Try again. I wanted a cure as much as anyone else, whatever the cost. We all asked and Xander gave. In the canyons, I saw Ky get healed. Here in the mountains, I see Xander broken.

A stone clatters into the trough next to Colin’s feet.

“Wait,” Colin says, bending down to pick it up. “He hasn’t had a chance to finish speaking yet.”

“Doesn’t matter,” someone says. “Oker’s dead.”

They loved Oker and now he’s gone. They want someone to blame. When the stones settle, it might not be exile Xander receives. It might be something worse. I glance over at the guards who brought Xander here and who let him make the cures. They won’t meet my gaze.

Suddenly, I see the other side of choice. Of all of us having it.

Sometimes we will choose wrong.

“No,” I say. I reach into my sleeve to pull out one of the cures Xander made. If I show them this, and the flower that my mother sent and Oker saw, they have to understand. We should have done this first, before the trial even began. “Please,” I begin, “listen—”

Another stone rattles into the trough, and at the same time, something enormous passes across the sun.

It’s a ship.

“The Pilot!” someone calls out.

But instead of moving down the mountain to the landing meadow, the ship hovers over us, the blades rotating so that it can stay suspended in the air. Eli flinches, and some in the crowd duck instinctively. They’re remembering firings in the Outer Provinces. Someone else moans, far back in the crowd.

The ship dips down slightly and then comes back up. The intent is clear, even to me. He wants us to move so that he can land in the village circle.

“He said he’d never try to land here,” Colin says, his face pale. “He promised.”

“Is the circle large enough?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” Colin says.

And then everyone moves. Xander and I turn to each other and he grabs my hand. We race away from the circle, our feet flying over the grass and ground, the air whipping above us. The Pilot is coming down. He might not survive the landing, and we might not either.

What would drive the Pilot to do this? It’s only a short walk from the landing meadow up to the village. Why can’t he spare the time? What is happening back in the Provinces?

The ship dips and tilts; the air is always moving in the mountains. The ship’s blades churn and the wind whips around us, so we hear nothing but a howl and a scream as the Pilot comes down, down, down, crashing through the trees, ship turning to the side.

He’s not going to be able to land it, I think, and I turn to look at Xander. We’re pressed up against the wall of a building for shelter and Xander’s eyes are closed, as if he can’t bear to see what comes next.

“Xander,” I say, but he can’t hear me.

Again the ship tips, turns, shudders down closer and closer to us, too near the edge of the circle. There’s nowhere else to run. There’s not enough time or space to go around the building. These thoughts flash fast through my mind.

I close my eyes, too, and I press against Xander as if either of us can keep the other safe. He puts his arms around me and his body feels warm and sound, a good place to be at the finish. I wait for scraping metal, for breaking stone and cracking wood, for fire and heat and an end as sudden as a flood.

CHAPTER 52

KY

Cassia’s not here anymore,” I say. My voice is a whisper. Weak and dry.

I don’t feel like I do when I’ve been asleep. I know time has passed. I know I’ve been here and that there was a time when I was gone. I try to move my hand. Do I succeed?

“Cassia,” I say. “Can someone find Cassia?”

No one answers me.

Maybe Indie will do it, I think, and then I remember.

Indie’s gone.

But I’ve come back.

CHAPTER 53

XANDER

When I open my eyes, the air ship fills the village circle. Cassia is tucked into my arms, holding on tight. Neither of us moves as the Pilot climbs out of his ship and stands almost exactly where I stood moments ago, over by the troughs.

Colin strides forward into the circle. “What do you think you’re doing?” he asks, furious. “You almost destroyed part of the village. Why didn’t you go to the landing meadow?”

“There’s not enough time for that,” the Pilot says. “The Provinces are falling apart and I need every minute I can get. Do you have a cure?”

Colin doesn’t answer. The Pilot looks past Colin in the direction of the research lab. “Find Oker,” he says. “Let me talk to him.”

“You can’t,” Leyna says. “He’s dead.”

The Pilot swears. “How?”

“We think it was a heart attack,” Colin says.

Everyone looks over at me. They still think I’m responsible for what happened to Oker.

“Then there’s no cure,” the Pilot says, his voice flat. “And no chance for one.” He starts back to the ship.

“Oker left us a cure,” Leyna says. “We’re about to try it on the patients—”

“I need a cure that works now,” the Pilot says, turning around. “I don’t know if I’m going to be able to come back here again. This is the end. Do you understand?”