by Ally Condie
“There’s something I need to tell you,” Cassia whispers in my ear.
“I’m listening,” I say.
She takes a deep breath. “I don’t have the compass anymore. The one you gave me back in Oria.” She hurries on and I hear the sound of tears in her voice. “I traded it to an Archivist.”
“That’s all right,” I tell her, meaning it. She’s here. After all of this the compass isn’t much to have lost along the way. And I didn’t give it to her to keep for me. I gave it to her to have for her own. Still, I’m curious. “What did you get in the trade?”
“Not what I expected,” she says. “I asked for information about where they were taking Aberrations and how to get there.”
“Cassia,” I say, and stop. That was dangerous. But she knew that when she tried it. She doesn’t need me to tell her.
“The Archivist gave me a story instead,” she tells me. “At first I thought he’d cheated me and I was so angry — all I had left to get me to you were the blue tablets.”
“Wait,” I say. “Blue tablets?”
“From Xander,” she says. “I kept them because I knew we’d need them in the canyon to survive.” She looks at me and misreads the look on my face. “I’m sorry. I had to decide so quickly—”
“It’s not that,” I tell her, grabbing her arm. “The blue tablets are poison. Did you take any?”
“Only one,” she says. “And I don’t believe they’re poisoned.”
“I tried to tell her,” Indie says. “I wasn’t there when she took it.”
I breathe out. “How did you keep moving?” I ask Cassia. “Have you eaten?” She nods. I pull out some of the flat bread from my bag. “Eat this now,” I say. Eli reaches into his bag and holds out a piece of bread too.
Cassia takes the food from both of us. “How do you know the tablets are poisoned?” she asks, her voice still doubtful.
“Vick told me,” I say, trying not to panic. “The Society always told us that if there was some kind of disaster the blue tablet would save us. But it’s not true. It stops you instead. And then you die if they don’t come to save you.”
“I still don’t believe it,” Cassia says. “Xander wouldn’t give me something that could hurt me.”
“He must not have known,” I say. “Maybe he meant for you to use the tablets for trade.”
“If it was going to work, it would have by now,” Indie says to Cassia. “You must have walked through it somehow. I’ve never heard of anyone doing that. But you wouldn’t stop until we found Ky.”
We all look at Cassia. She’s thinking something through, her eyes thoughtful. Sorting information. She’s looking for facts to explain what happened, but the only one she needs I already know: She is strong in ways even the Society can’t predict.
“I only took one,” she says softly. “I dropped the other. And the paper that came with it.”
“The paper?” I ask.
Cassia looks up, as if she’s just remembered that we’re there. “Xander hid little pieces of paper with notes printed on them inside the tablets. They’re little scraps of information from his microcard.”
“How?” I ask. Indie leans forward.
“I don’t know how he managed to do any of it — steal the tablets or put the messages inside,” Cassia says. “But he did.”
Xander. I shake my head. Always playing the game. Of course Cassia didn’t leave him behind completely. He’s her best friend. He’s still her Match. But he made a mistake in giving her the tablets.
“Will you give them back to me?” Cassia asks Indie. “Not the tablets. Only the scraps.”
For a moment I see something flash in Indie’s eyes. A challenge. I don’t know if she really wants the papers or if she just doesn’t want to be told what to do. But then she reaches into her pack and pulls out the foil-backed packet. “Here,” she says. “I don’t need any of it anyway.”
“Can you tell me what they said?” I ask, trying not to sound jealous. Indie darts a look at me and I know I haven’t fooled her.
“Just things like his favorite color and his favorite activity,” Cassia says gently. I know she heard the false note in my voice, too. “I think he must have known that I never looked at the microcard.”
And just like that, my worry is gone — swallowed back up — and I’m ashamed of myself. She came all this way to find me.
“That boy in the other canyon,” Indie says. “When you said he’d waited too long, I thought you meant that he’d waited too long to kill himself.”
Cassia covers her mouth with her hand. “No,” she says. “I thought he’d waited too long to take the tablet and it didn’t save him.” Her voice falls to a whisper. “I didn’t know.” She looks at Indie, horrified. “Do you think he knew? Did he mean to die?”
“What boy?” I ask Cassia. So much has happened to us while we were apart.
“A boy who ran with us into the Carving,” Cassia says. “He’s the one who showed us where you went.”
“How did he know?” I ask.
“He was one of the ones you left,” Indie says bluntly. She moves back from the dying fire. The light barely reaches her face. She gestures at the canyon around us. “This is the painting, isn’t it?” she asks. “Number nineteen?”
It takes me a moment to realize what she means. “No,” I say. “The land looks alike, but that carving is even bigger than this one. It’s farther to the south. I’ve never seen it but my father knew people who had.”
I wait for her to say something else, but she doesn’t.
“That boy,” Cassia says again.
Indie curls up to rest. “We have to forget about him,” she tells Cassia. “He’s gone.”
“How are you feeling?” I whisper to Cassia. I sit with my back against the rock. Her head rests on my shoulder. I can’t sleep. What Indie said about the tablet wearing off could be true, and Cassia seems strong, but I need to watch her all the way through the night to make sure she’s all right.
Eli stirs in his sleep. Indie stays silent. I can’t tell if she sleeps or listens, so I speak quietly.
Cassia doesn’t answer me. “Cassia?”
“I wanted to find you,” she says softly. “When I traded for the compass, I was trying to get to you.”
“I know,” I say. “And you did. Even if they cheated you.”
“They didn’t,” she says. “Not completely, anyway. They gave me a story that was more than a story.”
“What story?” I ask.
“It sounded like the one you told me about Sisyphus,” she says. “But they called him the Pilot, and it talked about a rebellion.” She leans in close. “We’re not the only ones. There’s something called a Rising out there. Have you heard of it before?”
“Yes,” I say, but nothing more. I don’t want to talk about the Rising. She said we’re not the only ones as though that were a good thing, but all I want right now is to feel like we are the only ones in the camp. The Carving. The world.
I put my hand along her face, against the curve of her cheek that I tried before to carve in stone. “Don’t worry about the compass. I don’t have the green silk anymore either.”
“Did they take that, too?”
“No,” I say. “It’s still up on the Hill.”
“You left it there?” she asks, surprised.
“I tied it to a branch on one of the trees,” I say. “I didn’t want anyone to take it away.”
“The Hill,” Cassia says. For a moment we are both silent, remembering. And then she says, with a teasing note in her voice, “You never said the words of our poem to me earlier.”
I lean closer to her and this time I can speak. I whisper, though part of me wants to shout. “Do not go gentle.”
“No,” she agrees, her voice, her skin soft in that good night. And then she kisses me hard.
CHAPTER 24
CASSIA
Watching Ky wake is better than a sunrise. One moment, he’s still and down deep, and the next mome
nt I can see him returning out of the dark, coming to the surface. His face shifts, his lips move, his eyes open. And then his smile, the sun. At the same time that he bends down to me, I reach up and am warmed as our lips meet.
We talk about the Tennyson poem, and how we both remembered it, and how he saw me reading it in the woods back in Oria. He’s heard that it was a password before; out here when he was young, and, more recently from Vick.
Vick. Ky talks in a soft voice about his friend who helped him bury and about the girl Vick loved named Laney. Then, in a voice hard and cold, Ky relates the story of his escape and how he left the other villagers. He shines a merciless light on himself and his own actions. But what I see is not who he left but who he brought with him. Eli. Ky did what he could.
I tell him about Indie’s version of the Pilot and more about the boy who vanished into a different canyon in the Carving. “He was looking for something,” I say, and I wonder if the boy knew what was behind the Society’s wall in the other canyon. “And he died.”
Last of all, I tell Ky about the blue-marked Anomalies on top of the Carving and how I wonder if they could have been part of the Rising.
Then we fall silent. Because we do not know what happens next.
“So the Society’s in these canyons,” Ky says.
Eli’s eyes widen. “They’re in our coats, too.”
“What do you mean?” I ask, and Ky and Eli tell us about the wires that keep us warm and take our data.
“I ripped mine out,” Ky says, and I realize that explains the tears in the fabric of his coat.
I glance at Eli, who looks defensive and folds his arms over his chest. “I left mine like it is,” he says.
“Nothing wrong with that,” Ky says. “It’s your choice to make.” He glances at me, asking what I will do.
I smile at him as I pull off my coat and hold it out. He takes it in his hands and looks at me standing in front of him as if he still can’t believe what he sees. I don’t look away. A smile crosses his lips, and then he puts the coat out on the ground in front of him and slits the fabric with swift, sure movements.
When he finishes, he gives me a tangle of blue wires and a small silver disc.
“What did you do with yours?” I ask him.
“We buried them,” he says.
I nod, and begin to dig in the dirt to leave mine, too. When I finish I stand up. Ky holds out my coat and I slip back inside of it. “You should still be warm,” he says. “I didn’t move any of the red wires.”
“What about you?” Eli asks Indie.
She shakes her head. “I’ll stay like you,” she says, and Eli smiles a little.
Ky nods. He doesn’t seem surprised.
“What happens now?” Indie asks. “I don’t think we should try to cross the plain after what happened to your friend.”
Eli flinches at her bluntness, and Ky’s voice, when he speaks, sounds tight. “That’s true. They might come back, and even if they don’t, the water out there is poisoned now.”
“We pulled out some of the poison, though,” Eli says.
“Why?” Indie asks.
“To try to save the stream,” Ky says. “It was stupid.”
“It wasn’t,” Eli says.
“We didn’t get enough of them out to make much of a difference.”
“We did,” Eli says stubbornly.
Ky reaches inside his pack and rolls out a map, a beautiful thing with colors and markings. “We’re here now,” he says, pointing to a spot at the edge of the Carving.
I can’t help but smile. We are here, together. In this wide, wild world, we’ve managed to meet again. I reach out my hand and trace my finger along the path I took to get to him until my hand meets his on the map.
“I was trying to find a way to you,” Ky says. “I wanted to cross the plain and get back to the Society somehow. We took some things from the farmers’ township for trade.”
“That old abandoned settlement,” Indie says. “We came through it too.”
“It’s not abandoned,” Eli says. “Ky saw a light there. Someone didn’t leave.”
I shiver, remembering that feeling of being followed. “What did you take?” I ask Ky.
“This map,” he says. “And these.” He reaches inside his pack again and hands me something else — books.
“Oh,” I say, breathing in their smell, running my fingers along their edges. “Do they have more?”
“They have everything,” Ky says. “Stories, histories, anything you can imagine. They’ve saved them for years inside a cave in the canyon wall.”
“Then let’s go back,” Indie says decisively. “It’s not safe on the plain yet. And Cassia and I need something to trade.”
“We could get more food, too,” Eli says. Then he frowns. “But that light—”
“We’ll be careful,” Indie says. “It has to be better than trying to cross to the mountains right now.”
“What do you think?” Ky asks me.
I remember that day back in Oria at the Restoration site, and how the workers gutted the books and the pages fell out. And I imagine the papers lifting, flying, winging their way for miles until they settled somewhere safe and hidden. Another thought darts into my mind: there might even be information about the Rising among the things the farmers saved. “I want to see all the words,” I tell Ky, and he nods.
At night, Ky and Eli show us a place to camp that Indie and I did not notice on our way out of the Carving. It’s a cave, spacious and large once you’re inside; and when Ky shines his flashlight around it I catch my breath. It’s painted.
I’ve never seen pictures like this — they’re real, not on a port or printed out on a scrap of paper. So much color. So much scale — the paintings cover the walls, wash up on the ceiling. I turn to Ky. “How?” I ask him.
“The farmers must have done it,” he says. “They knew how to make their own supplies with plants and minerals.”
“Are there more?” I ask.
“Many of the houses back in the township are painted,” he says.
“What about these?” Indie asks. She points to another set of art farther along the cave wall — carved pictures showing wild, primitive figures in motion.
“Those are older,” Ky says. “But the theme is the same.”
He’s right. The farmers’ work is less crude, more refined: a whole wall of girls in beautiful dresses and men with colorful shirts and bare feet. But the motions of the people seem to echo those of the earlier etchings.
“Oh,” I whisper. “Do you think they painted a Match Banquet?” As soon as I’ve said it, I feel stupid. They don’t have Match Banquets here.
But Indie doesn’t laugh at me. Her expression as she runs her fingers over the walls and along the pictures is a complex one, longing and anger and hope all together in her eyes.
“What are they doing?” I ask Ky. “Both of the sets of figures are. . moving.” One of the girls has her hands lifted over her head. I put mine up, too, trying to figure out what she is doing.
Ky watches me with that look in his eyes, the one sad and full of love at the same time, the one he gives me when he knows something I don’t, something he thinks has been stolen from me.
“They’re dancing,” he says.
“What?” I ask.
“I’ll show you sometime,” he says, and his voice, tender and deep, sends a shiver through me.
CHAPTER 25
KY
My mother could dance and sing and she went out to watch the sunset every night. “They didn’t have sunsets like these in the main Provinces,” she’d say. She always found the one good part of everything and then turned her face toward it every chance she had.
She believed in my father and went to his meetings. He walked out with her in the desert after the storms and kept her company while she found hollows filled with rain and painted with water. He wanted to make things — changes — that would last. She always understood that what she did would fade away.
When I see Cassia dancing without knowing she’s doing it — turning and turning in delight as she looks at the paintings and carvings in the cave — I understand why my parents both believed as they did.
It’s beautiful and it’s real, but our time together could be as fleeting as snow on the plateau. We can either try to change everything or just make the most of whatever time we have.
CHAPTER 26
CASSIA
Ky leaves one flashlight on so that we can see each other while we talk. When Eli and Indie fall asleep, and Ky and I are the only two left, he switches off the light to save it. The girls on the cave walls dance back into darkness and we are truly alone.
The air in the cave feels heavy between us.
“One night,” Ky says. In his voice, I hear the Hill. I hear the wind on the Hill, and the brush of branches against our sleeves, and the way he sounded when he first told me he loved me. We have stolen time from the Society before. We can do it again. It will not be as much as we want.
I close my eyes and wait.
But he doesn’t go on. “Come with me outside,” he says, and I feel his hand on mine. “We won’t go far.” I can’t see him; but I hear a complicated mix of emotion in his voice and feel it in the way he touches me. Love, concern, and something unusual, something bittersweet.
Outside, Ky and I walk down the path a little way. I lean back against the rock and he stands before me, reaching up to put his hand along my neck, under my hair and the collar of my coat. His hand feels rough, cut from carving and climbing, but his touch is gentle and warm. The night wind sings through the canyon and Ky’s body shields me from the cold.
“One night. .” I prompt him again. “What’s the rest of the story?”
“It wasn’t a story,” Ky says softly. “I was about to ask you something.”
“What?” The two of us draw together under the sky, our breath white and our voices hushed.
“One night,” Ky says, “doesn’t seem like too much to ask.”
I don’t speak. He moves closer and I feel his cheek against mine and breathe in the scent of sage and pine, of old dust and fresh water and of him.
