by Ally Condie
The door to Oker’s lab slams open. “There you are,” Leyna says, her face pale. “I sent someone out of the village to find you.”
“We just got back,” I say. “We must have missed them.”
“What is it?” Oker asks.
“It’s the still,” Leyna says. “They’ve started to die.”
The room goes completely silent. “Is it one of the patients from that first group the Pilot brought in?” Oker asks.
“Yes,” Leyna says. I exhale in relief. That means it isn’t Ky.
“This had to happen eventually,” Oker says. “That first group has been holding on for weeks now. Let’s go see what we can do.”
Leyna nods. But before we go, Oker has me wrap the bulbs back up and lock them away. “Get back to the bags,” he tells Noah and Tess. “But I don’t want anyone working on the actual cure unless I’m here.”
They nod. Oker takes the key back from me. Only then do we follow Leyna toward the infirmary, where people have gathered outside. The crowd parts for Oker and Leyna to come through. I follow behind them, acting like I belong here, and I’m lucky as usual, because no one stops me or asks me what I’m doing. If they did, I’d tell them the truth and say that I’ve found my real Pilot, and I’m not letting him out of my sight until we’ve got the cure.
CHAPTER 38
CASSIA
I was in the infirmary when the first person died.
It wasn’t a good way to go. And it wasn’t still.
I heard a commotion at the other end of the infirmary. “Pneumonia,” one of the village medics said to another. “His lungs are full of infection.” Someone pulled a curtain back and everyone hurried to gather around and try to save the patient, who was breathing with awful, wet, gasping breaths that sounded like he’d swallowed an entire sea. Then he coughed and a spatter of blood came out of his mouth. I saw it even from far away. It was bright red on his clean white sheet.
Everyone was too busy to tell me to go. I wanted to run, but I couldn’t leave Ky. And I didn’t want him to hear the sounds of people trying to save the man, or how Ky’s own breathing sounded labored.
So I crouched down in front of Ky and covered one of his ears with my shaking hand, and then I leaned right up close to his other ear and I sang to him. I didn’t even know I knew how.
I’m still singing when Leyna brings Oker and Xander in. I have to keep singing because someone else has started choking.
One of the village medics walks over to Oker and gets right in his face. “This is your fault for keeping them coherent,” he says to Oker. “Come see what you’ve done. He knows what’s happening. There’s no peace in his eyes.”
“He came back?” Oker asks, and I hear excitement in his voice. It makes me sick.
“Only enough to know that he’s dying,” the medic says. “He’s not cured.”
Xander stops and crouches down next to me. “Are you all right?” he asks.
I nod. I keep singing. He can see in my eyes that I’m not crazy. He touches my arm, very briefly, and goes to stand with Oker and the others over by the patients.
I understand that Xander needs to see what’s happening. And he’s found a Pilot in Oker. If I had to choose someone as the Pilot, I’d pick Anna.
But I also know we can’t plan on anyone else rescuing us. We have to do it ourselves. There can be no one Pilot. We have to be strong enough to go without the belief that someone can swoop down and save us. I think about Grandfather.
“Do you remember what I said once about the green tablet?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say. “You said I was strong enough to go without it.”
“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.”
I remembered another part of the red garden day. And I can get it all back. Grandfather said so. I tighten my fingers around Ky’s and keep singing.
Wind over hill, and under tree.
Past the border no one can see.
I will sing to him until people stop dying and then I will figure out the cure.
CHAPTER 39
KY
Past the border
No one can see.
I’m in the sea.
I go in and out. Over and under. And under. And under.
Indie’s there in the sea.
“You are not supposed to be here,” she says, annoyed. Exactly like I remember. “This is my place. I’m the one who found it.”
“All the water in the world can’t be yours,” I say.
“It is,” she says. “And the sky. Everything that’s blue is mine now.”
“The mountains are blue,” I tell her.
“Then they’re mine.”
Up and down we go, on the waves next to each other. I start to laugh. Indie does, too. My body has stopped hurting. I feel light. I might not even have a body anymore.
“I like the ocean,” I tell Indie.
“I always knew you would,” Indie says. “But you can’t follow me.” Then she smiles. She slips below the waves and is gone.
CHAPTER 40
CASSIA
Cassia,” Anna says, standing in the doorway of the infirmary, “come with us.”
“I can’t,” I say, paging through my notes, looking up the flowers Anna mentioned. Mariposa lily. Ephedra. Paintbrush. Anna said she’d bring me pictures of the flowers. Did she forget? I’m about to ask her when she speaks again.
“Not even to see the vote?” The people of the village and the farmers have gathered outside to decide what to do with the cures Oker and Xander and the other assistants have made. There’s some disagreement about what to try first and how to proceed.
“No,” I tell Anna. “I need to keep thinking. There’s something I’ve missed. And I have to do it here. Someone’s been taking the medicine from Ky. I’m not leaving.”
“Is that true?” Anna asks one of the medics.
He shrugs unhappily. “It could be,” he says. “But I don’t see how. We always have medics in attendance. And who in the village would want to harm the patients? We all want to find a cure.”
Neither Anna nor I state the obvious. Perhaps not everyone in the village feels this way.
“I made your stone myself,” Anna says to me. She hands me a tiny stone with my name written on it. Cassia Reyes. I glance up at her for the first time and see that she has the blue lines painted all over her face and arms. She notices my glance. “On a voting day, I dress with the ceremonial marks,” she tells me. “It’s a Carving tradition.”
I take the stone from her. “I have a vote?” I ask.
“Yes,” Anna says. “It was decided by the village council that you and Xander could each have one stone, just like everyone else.”
The gesture touches me. The people here have come to trust the two
of us. “I don’t like to leave Ky,” I say. “Can someone put my stone in for me?”
“They could,” Anna says, “but I think you should see the vote. It’s something every leader should witness.”
What does Anna mean? I’m not a leader.
“Would you trust Hunter to stay here and keep watch?” Anna asks. “Just for a few moments, so you can cast your vote?”
I look at Hunter. I remember the first time I saw him. He was burying his daughter, and he put that beautiful poem to mark her place. “Yes,” I say. It won’t take long, and this way I can ask Anna about the flowers again.
Hunter hands his stone to Anna. “I vote with Leyna,” he says.
Anna nods. “I’ll put it there for you.”
Anna was right.
What I see is so extraordinary, I almost forget to breathe.
Everyone has come with a choice in hand. Some, like Anna, carry two stones, because they have been asked by someone else to cast a vote by proxy. So much trust must exist for this to work.
Oker and Leyna stand near the troughs, and others, including Colin, watch to make certain no one moves stones from one place to another. There are two choices today: to vote with Oker or to vote with Leyna. Some stand in indecision, but most walk right up and cast their stones into the trough near Oker. They think we should give Oker’s camassia cure to all of the eligible patients. The more cautious ones cast their stones with Leyna, who wants to try several different cures.
Oker’s trough is almost full.
The decision is made in the shadow of the large village rock, and as everyone clutches their little named stones, I think of Sisyphus, and of the Pilot story, the one I traded the compass for months ago. Beliefs and myths are tied so closely together that you’re never sure which is tale and which is true.
But perhaps that doesn’t matter. Ky said that once, after he’d told me the Sisyphus story on the Hill. Even if Sisyphus didn’t live his story, enough of us have lived lives just like it. So it’s true anyway.
Xander makes his way through the crowd to find me. He looks both exhausted and illuminated, and when I reach out with my free hand to hold his, he grips my fingers tight. “Have you voted already?” I ask.
“Not yet,” he says. “I wanted to ask you how certain you are about the list you last sent us.”
We’re close enough to Oker that he can hear what we say, but I answer Xander honestly anyway. “Not certain at all,” I say. “I missed something.” I see a little flash of relief cross Xander’s face; my saying this has made his choice easier. Now it’s not as if he has to choose between Oker and me.
“What do you think you missed?” Xander asks.
“I’m not sure yet,” I say, “but I think it has something to do with the flowers.”
Xander tosses his stone into the trough near Oker. “What will you do?” Xander asks.
I’m not ready to vote yet. I don’t know enough about the choice I’d be making. Maybe for the next vote I’ll be ready, if I’m still here. So I reach into my pocket and take out the paper that my mother gave me and I put the stone inside, next to the microcard. “I’m saving mine.” I’m careful to preserve the shape, to fold along the lines my mother made. When I look back up, my gaze meets Oker’s. His expression is sharp and thoughtful, a little disconcerting. I look away, to Xander.
“Which way do you think Ky would have voted?” Xander asks.
“I don’t know,” I say.
“The plan is to give the cure that wins to Ky,” Xander says gently. “Because he’s the most recently still.”
“No,” I say. “They can try it on the other patients first.” But how will I stop them?
“I think this cure will work,” Xander says. “Oker was so certain. I think—”
“Xander,” Oker says, his voice cutting between us. “Let’s go.”
“Aren’t you staying for the flooding?” Leyna asks Oker, sounding surprised.
“No,” Oker says.
“The farmers will see it as a slight,” she says. “This is their part of the voting ceremony.”
Oker waves a hand in the air, already moving. “No time,” he says. “They’ll understand.”
“You’ll be in the infirmary?” Xander asks me.
“Yes,” I say. I will stay with Ky, protecting him, until I know we have a cure that works. But I can’t seem to leave. I have to see the way this plays out.
Colin moves forward and holds up his hand to silence the crowd. “The last stone has been cast,” he says.
It’s clear that Oker’s won. There are far more stones in his trough than in Leyna’s. But Colin doesn’t announce that yet. Instead, he stands back as some of the farmers come forward, holding buckets of water. Their arms are marked in blue. Anna follows them.
“The farmers vote with stones, too,” Eli whispers to me, “but they also use the water. The villagers have added it as part of their voting ceremony now.”
Anna stands in front of the crowd and speaks to us. “Like the floods that came through our canyon home,” she says, “we acknowledge the power of our choice, and we follow the water.”
The farmers pour the water into both troughs at the same time.
The water rushes down, floods flashing through. Some of it slips through the rocks at the end. Even Oker’s trough lets some out. But it has the most stones; it holds the most water.
“The votes have been cast,” Colin says. “We’ll try Oker’s cure first.”
I slip through the crowd as fast as the water through the rocks, racing for the infirmary to protect Ky from the cure.
When I push open the door to the building, I don’t understand what’s happening. It’s raining, inside. I hear a sound like water hitting the floorboards.
The bags are all unhooked, and they drip onto the floor.
All of them, not only Ky’s. I go straight to Ky. He takes a shallow, watery breath.
The line has been pulled out and then looped neatly over the pole next to his bed. It drips out onto the floor. Drip. Drip. Drip.
And it’s happening to everyone else. For a moment, I don’t know what to do. Where are all the medics? Did they leave for the vote? I don’t know how to hook Ky’s line back up.
I hear a movement at the other end of the room and I turn. It’s Hunter, down near the patients who the Pilot first brought to the village. Hunter stands there, a dark shadow at the back, and he doesn’t move. “Hunter,” I say, walking toward him slowly, “what happened?”
I hear someone at the door behind me and I turn to see who it is.
Anna.
Her face is stricken. She stops a few feet away from me and stares at Hunter. He doesn’t look away, and his eyes are full of pain.
Then I notice the crumpled bodies of the medics near him. Are they dead?
“You tried to kill everyone,” I say to Hunter, but as soon as the words are out of my mouth, I know I’m wrong. If he wanted to kill them, it would have been easy while we were all gone.
“No,” Hunter says. “I wanted to make it fair.”
I don’t understand what he means. I thought I could trust him, and I was wrong. Hunter sits down and puts his head in his hands, and I hear the sounds of Anna crying and the bags dripping onto the floor.
“Keep him away from Ky,” I say to Anna, my voice harsh. She nods. Hunter is much stronger than she is, but he looks broken now. I don’t know how long that will last, though, and I need to find people to help the still. I need Xander.
He and Ky are the only people here that I can trust. How could I forget?
CHAPTER 41
XANDER
Oker locks the doors behind us in the lab. “I need you to do something for me,” he says, picking up the bag he used when we dug camassia bulbs and sliding it over his shoulder.
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“Where are you going?” I ask.
Oker peers out the window. “I have to leave now. They’re all still distracted.”
“Wait,” I say. “Won’t you need me to help you?” He can’t dig on his own. Is that what he has in mind?
“I want you to stay here,” Oker says. He reaches into his pockets and takes out the metal ring with the keys to the cabinets where he’s locked the camassia cure. “Destroy all of the cures. I’ll be back with something else we can use.”
“But you won the vote,” I say.
“This cure won’t work,” Oker says. “But now I know what will.”
“We don’t have to destroy everything,” I say.
“Yes, we do,” Oker says. “The people voted on this cure. They’re not going to take a substitute. Do it. Dump it all down the sink. Get rid of the cures Leyna had me make, too. They’re all useless.”
I don’t move because I can’t believe what he’s saying. “You were so sure about the camassia. We can still try it on some of them.”
“It won’t work,” Oker spits. “We’ll waste time. We’ll waste lives. They’re already dying. Do what I tell you.”
I don’t know if I can. We worked so hard on the cure, and he was so sure.
“You think I’m the Pilot, don’t you,” Oker says, watching me. “Do you want to know what the real Pilot is?”
I’m not sure that I do anymore.
“We used to laugh at the Pilot stories back when I worked in the Society,” Oker says. “How could people think that someone was going to come from the sky to save them? Or from the water? Stupid stories. Crazy. Only weak-minded people would need to believe in something like that.” He drops the keys to the cabinet into my hand. “I told you the Society named the viruses.”
I nod.
“When we found out that we’d be dropping it from the sky and sending it on the water, we thought it would be funny to name the Plague after the people’s stories. So we called the Plague the ‘Pilot.’”
