by Ally Condie
When I was new in Oria, it was strange to watch the people flood out of their houses and workplaces and air trains all at once. It made me nervous the way they moved at the same times to the same places. So I pretended the streets were dry gulches from home, and the people were the water after rain that turned the dry beds into streams. I told myself the people in their gray and blue plainclothes were nothing but another force of nature moving along.
But it didn’t do me any good. I got lost in one of the Boroughs, of all places.
And Xander saw me using the compass to try to find my way home. He threatened to turn in Patrick for letting me keep it unless I stole some red tablets.
Xander must have known then that I was an Aberration. I don’t know how he could tell so quickly, and we never talked about it after. But it doesn’t matter. The lesson was a good one to learn. Do not pretend one place is like another or look for similarities. Only look for what is.
“Where, Eli?” I ask him.
He waits for a moment, still grinning, and I remember this, too — the moment of the reveal.
I held out my hand to show Xander the two red tablets I’d stolen. He didn’t think I could do it. I wanted him to know that I was his equal even though I was an Aberration. Just once, I wanted someone to know that before I started a life pretending to be less than everyone around me. For a moment, I felt powerful. I felt like my father.
“Where the water can’t reach,” Eli says now, looking at the painting of the woman who has been washed away. “The caves aren’t down here. They have to be up high.”
“I should have known,” I say as the three of us hurry out of the cave and look up at the cliffs. My father told me about the floods. Sometimes the farmers saw the river rising and knew it would happen. Other times, during the flash floods, they had almost no warning at all. They had to build and farm on the canyon floor where there was space, but when the water rose, they took to the higher caves.
The line of survival is thin in the Carving, my father said. You hope you’re on the right side of it.
Now that we look for them, the signs of old floods are everywhere — marks of sediment up on the canyon walls, dead trees wedged high in crevices from the violence and speed of the flash floods. The force it would take to do these things is one that could bring even the Society to its knees.
“I always thought it was safer to bury stuff,” Vick says.
“Not always,” I tell him, remembering the Hill. “Sometimes it’s safer to take it as high as you can.”
It takes us nearly an hour to find the path we want. From below it is almost impossible to see — the farmers cut it into a cliff so that it blends perfectly into the scarred canyon walls. We follow the path higher and higher until we go around the side of the cliff along a bend that wasn’t visible from below. I imagine you couldn’t see it from above either. Only if you’ve dared to climb right to the spot and look closely.
Once we’re there we see the caves.
They’re the perfect place to store things — high and hidden. And dry. Vick ducks into the first one.
“Any food in there?” Eli asks as his belly grumbles. I grin. We rationed our food carefully but we’ve stumbled upon the township just in time.
“No,” Vick says. “Ky, look at this.”
I duck inside with him to find a cave that holds only a few bulky containers and cases. Near the door I spot marks and footprints where someone — recently — dragged some of the stockpile out of the cave and hauled it away.
I’ve seen cases like these. “Watch out,” I tell Vick, and I pry one open carefully and look inside. Wires. Keypads. Explosives. All Society-issue, from the looks of it.
Could the farmers have been in league with the Society? It doesn’t seem likely. But the farmers could have stolen or traded for these things on the black market. It would take years to assemble a cache that could fill a cave like this.
What happened to the rest of it?
Eli rustles behind me and I hold up my arm to keep him back. “It looks like what’s in our coats,” he says. “Should we take some of it with us?”
“No,” I tell him. “Keep looking for some food. And don’t forget the map.” Eli slides out of the cave.
Vick hesitates. “It might be useful to have,” he tells me, gesturing at the stockpile. “You could rig this stuff, right?”
“I could try,” I say. “But I’d rather not. Better to use the space in our packs for food and papers if we find them.” What I don’t say is that the wires always lead to trouble. I think my father’s constant fascination with them helped bring about his death. He thought he could be like Sisyphus and turn the Society’s weapons back on them.
Of course, I tried the same thing with the other decoys when I rigged their guns before we ran into the Carving. And it likely didn’t turn out any better for them than it did for my father’s village. “It’s dangerous to try to trade with this. I don’t even know if the Archivists will touch it anymore.”
Vick shakes his head but doesn’t argue. He moves farther back into the cave and pulls at one of the rolls of thick plastic. “You know what these are?” he asks.
“Some kind of shelter?” I ask, looking more closely. I can see ropes and thin tubes rolled up inside.
“Boats,” Vick says. “I’ve seen some like this before on the Army base where I lived.”
It’s the most he’s said about his past and I wait to see if he’ll say more.
But Eli calls out to us in a voice filled with excitement. “If you want food, I’ve found it!” he shouts.
We find him eating an apple in the second cave. “This must have been the stuff that was too heavy to carry,” he says. “It’s all kinds of apples and grain. And a lot of seeds.”
“Maybe they stored this in case they had to come back,” Vick says. “They thought of everything.”
I nod in agreement. Standing there looking at what they’ve left, I feel admiration for the people who lived here. And disappointment. I would have liked to meet them.
Vick feels it too. “We’ve all thought about breaking away,” he says. “They really did it.”
The three of us fill our packs with food from the farmers’ stores. We take apples and some kind of flat strong bread that seems like it will last for a long time. We also find a few tarred matches that the farmers must have made themselves. Maybe later there will be a place where it’s safe to have a fire. Once we’ve finished filling our packs, we find a few more in the storage cave and fill them, too.
“Now for a map and something to trade,” I say. I take a deep breath. The cave smells like sandstone — mud and water — and apples.
“I bet it’s here,” Eli says, his voice muffled at the back of the cave. “There’s another room.”
Vick and I follow him around a corner and into another recess of rock. As we shine our flashlights around, we see that it is clean. Well-organized. Full of boxes. I walk across the room and lift the lid to one of them. It’s packed with books and papers.
I try not to think This must be the spot where he learned. He could have sat right on that bench.
“They left so much,” Eli whispers.
“They couldn’t carry it all,” I say. “They probably took the best of it with them.”
“Maybe they had a datapod,” Vick suggests. “They could have entered the information from the books into that.”
“Might be,” I say. Still, I wonder how hard it was to leave all of the real copies behind. The information in this cave is priceless, especially in its original form. And, their ancestors had brought it all in originally. It must have been hard to walk out without it.
In the center of the room stands a table made of small pieces of wood that had to have been carried through the entrance of the cave and pieced together. The whole room, like the township, has that sense of being assembled carefully. Every item seems filled with meaning. The Society didn’t drop it into your lap. You worked for it. Found it. Made it yourself.
I shine my light across the table and onto a hollowed-out wooden bowl filled with charcoal pencils.
I reach inside and pick one up. It leaves a small black mark on my hand. The pencils remind me of the tools I made for writing back in the Borough. I gathered pieces of wood a few at a time on the hill or when a maple tree in the Borough lost a branch. I’d tie them together and lower them into the incinerator to char the ends for writing and drawing. Once, when I needed red, I stole a few petals from one of the blood-colored petunias in a flower bed and used them to color the Officials’ hands and my hands and the sun.
“Look,” Vick says behind me. He’s found a box with maps inside. He pulls some of them out. The warm light of the flashlight changes the papers, making them seem even older than they really are. We sift through them until we find one that I recognize as the Carving.
“This one,” I say, spreading it out on the table. We all gather around it. “Here’s our canyon.” I point to it but my eyes are drawn to the canyon next to ours on the map. A spot there has been inked with thick black ink Xs, like a row of stitches. I wonder what they mean. I wish I could rewrite this map. It would be much easier to mark how I want the world to be, instead of trying to figure out how it really is.
“I wish I knew how to write,” Eli says, and I’m sorry I don’t have the time to teach him. Maybe someday. Right now we have to keep moving.
“It’s beautiful,” Eli says, touching the map gently. “It’s different from the way we paint on the screens back in the Society.”
“I know,” I say. Whoever made the map was something of an artist. The colors and scale of the whole thing fit together perfectly.
“Do you know how to paint?” Eli asks.
“A little,” I say.
“How?”
“My mother taught herself, and then she taught me,” I say. “My father used to come here and trade with the farmers. Once, he brought a paintbrush back for her. A real one. But he couldn’t afford any paint. He always meant to get her some but he never did.”
“Then she couldn’t paint,” Eli says, sounding disappointed.
“No,” I say. “She could. She used water on rock.” I think back to the ancient carvings in a small crevice near our house. I wonder now if that was where she got the idea for writing on stone. But she used water and her touch was always gentle. “Her paintings always vanished in the air,” I tell Eli.
“Then how did you know what they looked like?” Eli asks.
“I saw them before they dried,” I say. “They were beautiful.”
Eli and Vick fall silent and I can tell they might not believe me. They might think I’m making this up and remembering pictures that I wish I’d seen. But I tell the truth. It was almost like her paintings lived — the way they shone and vanished and then new things appeared under her hands. The pictures were beautiful both because of the way they looked while they existed and because they could never last.
“Anyway,” I say. “There’s a way out.” I show them how this canyon continues through to a plain on the other side from where we entered. Judging by the map, there’s more vegetation out there and also another stream, bigger than the one in this canyon. The mountains on the opposite side of the plain have a small dark house marked on them, which I take to be a settlement or safe place, since it’s the same marking the farmers used to denote their own township on the map. And past that, to the north of the mountains, is a place marked SOCIETY. One of the Border Provinces. “I think it will take two or three days to reach the plain. And another few days to cross it and get to the mountains.”
“There’s a stream on that plain,” Vick says, his eyes brightening as he inspects the map. “Too bad we can’t use one of the farmers’ boats and go down it.”
“We could try,” I say, “but I think the mountains are a better option. There’s a settlement there. We don’t know where that stream leads.” The mountains are on the top edge of the map; the stream runs down and disappears at the bottom of the paper.
“You’re right,” Vick says. “But we might be able to stop and fish. Smoked fish last for a long time.”
I slide the map toward Eli. “What do you think?” I ask him.
“Let’s do it,” he says. He puts his finger on the dark house in the mountains. “I hope the farmers are there. I want to meet them.”
“What else should we bring?” Vick asks, looking through some of the books.
“We can find something in the morning,” I say. For some reason the neatly ordered and abandoned books make me feel sad. Tired. I wish Cassia were here with me. She’d turn each page and read every word. I can picture her in the dim light of the cave with her bright eyes and her smile and I close my eyes. That shadowy memory might be as close as I come to seeing her again. We have the map, but the distance we still have to cross looks almost insurmountable.
“We should sleep now,” I say, pushing away the doubt. There’s no good in it. “We need to start as soon as it’s light.” I turn to Eli. “What do you think? You want to go back down and sleep in the houses? They’ve got those beds.”
“No,” Eli says, curling up on the floor. “Let’s stay here.”
I understand why. Late at night the empty township feels exposed — to the river, to the loneliness that settled in when the farmers left — and to the ghostly eyes and hands of the paintings they made. Here in the cave where they kept things safe seems like the place where we might be safe too.
In my dreams, bats fly in and out of the cave all night long. Some fly fat and heavy and I know they’re full of the blood of other living things. Others fly a little higher and I know they’re light with hunger. But they all have noisy, beating wings.
At the end of the night, near dawn, I wake up. Vick and Eli still sleep and I wonder what it was that disturbed me. A sound in the township?
I walk to the outermost door of the caves and look out.
A light flickers in the window of one of the houses below us.
CHAPTER 14
CASSIA
I wait for the dawn, folded inside my coat. Down here in the Carving, I walk and sleep deep in the earth and the Society doesn’t see me. I’m starting to believe they truly don’t know where I am. I’ve escaped.
It feels strange.
All my life I’ve been watched. The Society saw me go to school and learn to swim and walk up the steps to attend my Match Banquet; they sorted my dreams; when they found my data interesting, as my Official did, they altered things and recorded my reaction.
And though it was a different kind of watching, my family watched me, too.
At the end of his life, Grandfather used to sit at a window as the sun went down. I wondered, then, if he stayed awake all night and saw the sun come back up again. During one of those long, wakeful nights, did he decide that he would give me the poems?
I pretend that Grandfather hasn’t vanished but instead floats above it all, and that of all the things in the world to see from up high he chooses to see one small girl curled up in a canyon. He wonders if I will wake and rise when it becomes clear that dawn is on its way after all.
Did Grandfather mean for me to end up here?
“Are you awake?” Indie asks.
“I never slept,” I say, but even as I say it, I can’t be sure it’s true. For what if my imagining Grandfather was really a dream?
“We can start in a few minutes,” Indie says. In the seconds since we first spoke to each other, the light has changed. I can already see her better.
Indie chooses a good spot; even I can tell that. The walls are not nearly as high and sheer as they’ve been in other places and an old rockfall left piles of boulders part of the way up.
Still, the walls of the canyon are daunting, and I haven’t had much practice — just the little time we had last night before we went to sleep.
Indie holds out her hand in a peremptory gesture. “Give me your pack.”
“What?”
“You’re not used t
o climbing,” Indie says evenly. “I’ll put your things in mine and you can carry yours empty. It’ll be easier that way. I don’t want the weight to make you fall.”
“Are you sure?” Suddenly I feel that if Indie has the pack she has too much. I don’t want to let the tablets go.
Indie looks impatient. “I know what I’m doing. Like you did with the plants.” She frowns. “Come on. You trusted me on the air ship.”
She’s right, and that reminds me of something. “Indie,” I ask, “what did you bring with you? What was it you had me hide on the ship?”
“Nothing,” she says.
“Nothing?” I echo, surprised.
“I didn’t think you’d trust me unless you thought I had something to lose, too,” she says, grinning.
“But in the village, you pretended to take something back from me,” I say.
“I know,” she says, not a trace of apology in her voice. I shake my head and in spite of myself I start to laugh as I slide off my pack and hand it to her.
She opens it up and dumps the contents — flashlight, plant leaves, empty canteen, blue tablets — into her own pack.
I suddenly feel guilty. I could have taken off with all the tablets and she still trusted me. “You should keep some of the tablets after this,” I say. “For yourself.”
Indie’s expression changes. “Oh,” she says, her voice wary. “All right.”
She hands me back my empty pack and I slide it over my shoulders. We climb wearing our coats, which makes us bulkier, but Indie thinks it easier than carrying them. She slides her own pack onto her back, over her long braid that burns almost as bright as these cliffs when the sun comes up. “Ready?” she asks.
“I think so,” I say, looking up at the rock.
“Follow me,” she says. “I’ll talk you through it.” She puts her fingers in the holds and hoists herself up. In my eagerness to follow, I knock over a small pile of rocks. They scatter, and I hold tight.
