by Ally Condie
How much does she know? “No,” I say.
“That’s too bad,” she says.
“What would people trade for the tubes?” I ask.
“Everyone has something,” the Archivist says. “Of course, we don’t guarantee anything except that the sample belongs to the right person. We don’t promise that there’s a way to bring anyone back.”
“But it’s implied,” I say.
“It would only require a few tubes to take you anywhere you wanted to go,” the Archivist says. “Like Keya Province.” She waits, to see if I rise to the bait. She knows where my family is. “Or home to Oria.”
“What about,” I say, thinking of Camas, “someplace else entirely?”
We both look at each other, waiting.
To my surprise, she speaks first, and it is then that I know how badly she wants those samples.
“If you are asking for passage to the Otherlands,” she says, very softly, “that is no longer possible.”
I’ve never heard of the Otherlands—only the Other Countries, marked on a map back in Oria, places synonymous with Enemy territory. From the way the Archivist speaks of the Otherlands, though, I can tell she means someplace entirely different and distant, and a little thrill goes through me. Even Ky, who lived in the Outer Provinces, has never mentioned the Otherlands. Where are they? For a moment, I’m tempted to tell the Archivist yes, to try and find out more about places so remote they appear on no map I’ve ever seen, even the ones belonging to the villagers who once lived in the Carving.
“No,” I say. “I don’t have any tubes.”
For a moment, we’re both silent. Then the Archivist speaks. “I’ve noticed that lately your focus has shifted away from trading,” she says. “I’ve seen the Gallery. It’s quite an accomplishment.”
“Yes,” I say. “Everyone has something worth sharing.”
The Archivist looks at me with pity and astonishment in her eyes. “No,” she says. “Everything done in the Gallery has been done before, and better. But it’s still a remarkable achievement, in its own way.”
She is not the Pilot. I know it now. She reminds me of my Official, back in Oria. They both have in common their conviction that they are still learning, still growing, when in fact they have long ago lost that ability.
It’s a relief to leave the Archives and go to the Gallery, which is alive and above ground. As I draw closer to the Gallery, I hear something.
Singing.
I don’t know the song; it’s not one of the Hundred. I can’t really understand the words, I’m too far away, but I hear the melody. A woman’s voice rises and falls, aches and heals, and then, in the chorus, a man joins in.
I wonder if she knew he was going to sing, too, if it was something they planned, or if she was surprised to suddenly find that she was not alone in her song.
When they stop, at first there is silence. Then a cheer from someone up at the front, and soon we all join in. I press closer through the crowd, trying to see the faces of those who are the music.
“Another?” the woman asks, and we cry out our answer. Yes.
This time she sings something else, something short and clear. The tune is full of movement but easy to follow:
I, a stone, am rolling,
Up the highest hill
You, my love, are calling
Though the winter chills
We must keep on going
Now and then and still.
Could this song be one from the Outer Provinces? It reminds me of the story of Sisyphus, and Ky said they kept their songs longer in the Outer Provinces. But all those people are gone now. That makes it seem like the words should be sad, but with the music behind them, they don’t sound that way.
I catch myself humming along, and before I know it, I’m singing and so are the people around me. Over and over we go through the song, until we have the words and the melody right. At first I’m embarrassed when I catch myself moving, and then I don’t care anymore, I don’t mind, all I wish is that Ky were here and that he could see me now, singing too and dancing in front of the world.
Or Xander. I wish he were here. Ky already knows how to sing. Does Xander?
Our feet thump on the ground, and we can no longer smell even a trace of the fishes’ bodies that once bumped up against the shore because they’re decayed now, gone to bone, the smell of them lost in the scent of our living, our flesh, the salt of our tears and sweat, the sharpness of green grass and plants trampled underfoot. We’re breathing the same air, singing the same song.
CHAPTER 18
XANDER
Over the course of the night, fifty-three new patients come in. Not all of them have the rash and bleeding, but some do. The head physic orders them all quarantined to our wing and assigns me to be the physic over the mutation. I’ll be in charge of managing the patients’ care from the floor while he watches from the port.
“Doesn’t want to risk his own skin,” one of the nurses mutters to me.
“It’s all right,” I tell her. “I want to see it through. But that doesn’t mean you have to risk it. I can ask him to reassign you someplace else.”
She shakes her head. “I’ll be all right.” She smiles at me. “After all, you talked him into including the courtyard as part of the quarantine area. That makes a difference.”
“We’ve got the cafeteria, too,” I say, and she laughs. None of us spend much time there anymore, except to take delivery of our meals.
The virologist comes in to examine the patients himself. He’s intrigued, too. “The bleeding occurs because the virus is destroying platelets,” he tells me. “Which means the spleen is likely to become enlarged in the affected patients.”
A female medic near us nods. She’s conducting a follow-up physical exam of one of the first patients. “His spleen is enlarged,” she says. “It’s protruding beneath the costal margin.”
“And the patients are losing the ability to clear the secretions in their lungs and respiratory tracts,” another medic says. “We’re going to run into trouble with pneumonia and infection if we can’t get them better soon.”
Farther down the row of patients, we hear a shout. “We’ve had a rupture!” a medic calls. “I think he’s bleeding internally.”
I call out over the miniport for a surgic. We all gather around the patient, who has gone pale. The vital-stats machine screams at us as the patient’s blood pressure drops and his heart rate speeds up. The medics and surgics yell out instructions.
This patient, and all the rest, lie completely still.
We can’t save him. We don’t even have time to get him to a surgical room before he dies. I glance around at the patients nearby. I hope they haven’t seen too much. What can they see? The weight of the patient’s death settles over me as I pick up my miniport, which beeps insistently with a private message from the head physic. He’s watched the whole thing from the main port.
Sending patient data now. Review immediately.
He wants me to look at data now? When we’ve just had a death? The entire team looks rattled. The point of the medical center, and the Rising, is that we save people. We don’t lose them like this.
I walk over to the side of the room to check the data. At first I don’t understand the urgency. It’s data from the patients who’ve come in sick, and the information looks like basic medical workups. I’m not sure what it’s supposed to tell me.
Then I get it. The workups are all recent, from when the patients were immunized. The patients were immunized, and they still got the mutation, which means a huge segment of the population is at risk.
“I’m going to have to lock down your wing completely,” the head physic says from the miniport.
“I understand,” I tell him. There’s nothing else they can do. “We’re going into l
ockdown,” I tell the team.
They nod, exhausted. They understand. We’ve all been through this in drills a million times. We’re here to save people.
Then I hear footsteps behind me, running. I spin around.
The virologist is heading for the main doors to the wing. Have they had time to lock it down yet? Or is he going to expose an entire new cluster of people to the mutated plague?
I take off, running back down the rows of patients, as fast as I can. He’s older than me. It’s short work to catch up and I tackle him, throwing us both to the ground. “You don’t run,” I say, not bothering to keep the disgust out of my voice. “You stay to help when people are sick. That’s part of your job.”
“Listen,” he says, struggling to sit up. I let him but I hold on to his arm. “We may not be safe from this mutation. Our immunizations may mean nothing.”
“That’s exactly why you can’t risk exposing anyone else,” I say. “You know that better than anyone.” I haul him up by the back of his uniform and walk him toward one of the wing’s storage closets. I don’t want to lock him up, but I’m not sure how else to deal with him right now.
“Unless,” the virologist says, sounding either crazy or inspired, “the people with scars are safe. The small scars.”
I know what he means. “The people who had the first round of the Plague,” I say. The Rising told us to look for the marks, and Lei and I talked about them—those small red scars between their shoulder blades.
“Yes,” he says eagerly. “They could have had a slightly mutated version of the earlier virus, and their variant is close enough to the mutant form that they’re not getting it. But the immunization you and I were given—it was just chopped-up pieces of the original virus. It won’t be close enough to this new mutant form to protect us.”
I keep hold of him but nod to show that I’m listening.
“We didn’t go down with the earlier version of the Plague,” he says. “But we were still exposed. Our initial immunity protected us from the worst symptoms, but we could still contract that earlier version of the Plague. That’s how an immunization works. It teaches your body how to react to a virus so your system recognizes the virus when it comes again. It’s not that you don’t get sick at all. But your body knows how to handle it.”
“I know,” I say. I’ve figured out this much already.
“Listen to what I’m telling you,” the virologist says. “If that happened, if we actually contracted the first version of the Plague, the one going around when the Pilot first spoke—then we have the red mark, too, and we’re safe. We didn’t go down, but we still had the virus. Our bodies just dealt with it. But if we didn’t catch the earlier virus during that window”—he spreads out his hands—“we can still get the mutation. And we may not have a cure that works for this version.”
For a minute he sounds crazy, like he’s speaking gibberish, and then it all comes together and I think he might be right.
He twists his arm free from my grasp and starts unbuttoning the top of his plainclothes. Then he pulls down the collar of his black uniform. “Look,” he says. “I don’t have the small mark. Do I?”
He doesn’t.
“No,” I say. I resist the urge to pull down my own collar and try to see if the mark is there. I’ve never thought to look for it on myself. “You’re needed here. And if you go out there, you could infect other people. You’ve been exposed to the mutation already, like the rest of us.”
“I’ll go out into the woods. People in the Borders have always known how to survive. There are places I can go.”
“Like where?” I ask.
“Like the stone villages,” he says.
I raise my eyebrows. Is he confused? I don’t know what those places are. I’ve never heard of them before. “And do they have fluid and nutrient bags there?” I ask. “Do they have what you need to stay alive until there’s a cure? And don’t you care about exposing them to illness?”
He stares up at me with wild-eyed panic. “Didn’t you see him?” he asks. “That patient? He died. I can’t stay here.”
“Was that the first time you’ve seen anyone die in real life?” I ask.
“People didn’t die in the Society,” he says.
“They did,” I say. “They were just better at hiding it.” And I understand why the virologist is afraid. I think about running away too, but only for a second.
The head physic decides to relax the lockdown long enough to send us more patients and more personnel. He’s heard everything the virologist told me over the miniport, so he’ll decide how to report it all to the Pilot. I’m glad that’s not my job.
But I do have one request for the head physic. “When you send in the new personnel,” I say, “make sure they know this new form of the virus hasn’t responded yet to the cure. We don’t need anyone else trying to run. We want them to know what they’re getting into.”
It’s not long before several Rising officers, armed and wearing hazmat suits, escort the new personnel to our wing. The officers take the virologist away with them. I’m not sure where they’ll quarantine him—in an empty room on his own, perhaps—but he’s become a liability, and we can’t keep him here when he’s so volatile. I’m so focused on making sure he’s taken care of that it takes me a moment to realize that one of the new staff is Lei.
As soon as I can, I find her in the courtyard. “You shouldn’t be here,” I tell her quietly. “We can’t guarantee that it’s safe.”
“I know,” she says. “They told me. They’re not sure the cure works on the mutation.”
“It’s more than that,” I say. “Remember when you and I were talking about the small red mark on the people who had the earlier virus?”
“Yes.”
“The virologist they took out had a theory about that.”
“What was it?”
“He thought that if someone had the red mark, it meant they’d had the virus, like we thought—and he also thought that it meant that they were protected from the new mutation.”
“How could that be?” Lei asks.
“The virus changes,” I say. “Like those fish you were talking about. It was one thing, now it’s different.”
She shakes her head.
I try again. “People who had the immunizations had been exposed to one form of the virus, a dead one. Then the first round of the Plague came along. Some of us might have contracted the virus, but we didn’t get really sick because we’d already been exposed to it in its weakened form. The immunization did its job and our bodies fought off the illness. Still, we had exposure to the live virus itself, which means we might be safe from this mutation. The dead virus wasn’t close enough to the mutation to protect us, but our exposure to the original live version of the Plague might be, as long as we actually contracted it.”
“I still don’t understand,” she says.
I try again. “According to his theory, those who have the red mark are lucky,” I say. “They’ve been exposed to the right versions of the virus at the right times. And that means they’re safe from this mutation.”
“Like stones in the river,” she says, understanding crossing her face. “Going across. You need to step on them in the right order to get safely to the other side.”
“I guess so,” I say. “Or like the fish you were talking about. They change.”
“No,” she says, “The fish remain themselves. They adapt; they look completely different, but they’re not fundamentally altered or gone.”
“All right,” I say, though now I’m the one who’s confused.
She can tell. “I suppose,” she says, “that you have to see them.”
“Do you have the mark?” I ask Lei.
“I don’t know,” she says. “Do you?”
I shake my head. “I’m not sur
e either,” I say. “It’s not exactly in an easy place to see.”
“I’ll look for you,” she tells me, and before I can say anything else, she steps around behind me, slides her finger under my collar, and pulls it down. I feel her breath on my neck.
“If the virologist is right, then you’re safe,” she says, and I can hear the smile in her voice. “You have the mark.”
“Are you sure?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says. “I am. It’s right there.” After she takes her hand away I can still feel the spot where her finger pressed against my skin.
She knows what I’m about to ask.
“No,” she says. “Don’t look. I don’t want it to change what I do.”
Later, as we leave the courtyard, Lei stops and looks at me. As she does, I realize that not very many people have eyes that are the color of hers: true black. “I changed my mind,” she says.
At first I’m not sure what she means but then she sweeps her long hair to the side and says, “I think I want to know.” There’s a faint tremor in her voice.
The mark. She wants to know if she has it.
“All right,” I say, and suddenly I feel awkward. Which is ridiculous, because I’ve looked at plenty of bodies that are just bodies. I know they’re people, and I want to help them, but to some extent they’re anonymous all the same.
But her body—will be hers.
She turns her back to me and unbuttons her uniform, waiting. For a moment I hesitate, my fingers hovering. Then I take a deep breath and pull her collar down. I’m careful not to brush her skin.
The mark isn’t there.
And then without thinking I do touch her. I put my hand on her with my palm flat against the bone at the base of her neck and my fingers curving up into her hair. Like I can hide this from her.
Then I draw in my breath and pull my hand back. Stupid. Just because I’m fully immune doesn’t mean I can’t still carry some form of the mutated Plague. “I’m sorry—” I begin.
