Crossed m-2

by Ally Condie

  “Where’s our miniport?” I ask.

  “I threw it in the river before we left the township,” Cassia says. Indie draws in her breath.

  “Good,” Hunter says. “We don’t want anything that could track us.”

  Eli shivers.

  “Can you keep going?” Cassia asks him, sounding worried.

  “I think so,” Eli says, looking at me. “Do you think we should?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “We have the headlamps,” Indie adds.

  “Let’s go.” Cassia reaches to help us lift the boat.

  We hurry to the the bank, moving as fast as we can. I feel stones under my feet, thrown from the river. I wonder which one is the fish that marks Vick’s grave. In the dark it all looks different and I’m not sure I know where he lies.

  But I know what Vick would have done if he were still living.

  Whatever he thought would take him closest to Laney.

  In the trees, in the light of a headlamp that we smother down low, Hunter and I snap the boat open and insert the pump. The boat takes shape quickly.

  “Two can ride in it,” Hunter says. “The others who want to make their way to the Rising will have to follow the stream on foot. That way will be much slower.”

  The air sighs into the boat.

  For a moment I stand completely still.

  The rain comes down again, stinging-cold and clean. It’s different from the storm before — this is a shower, not an onslaught. It will end soon.

  “Somewhere higher, this water is snow,” my mother used to say, opening her palms to catch the drops.

  I think of her paintings and how quickly they dried. “Somewhere,” I say out loud and hope she hears, “this water is nothing at all. It is lighter than air.”

  Cassia turns to look at me.

  I imagine these drops of rain hitting the scales of the sandstone fish I carved for Vick. Every drop helps the poisoned stream, I think, holding my hands out open wide. Not catching the drops or trying to hold them. I’m letting them leave their mark and then letting them go.

  Let go. Of my parents, and the pain of what happened to them. Of what I failed to do. Of all the people I failed to save or bury. Of my jealousy of Xander. Of my guilt over what happened to Vick. Of worrying about what I can never be and who I never was in the first place.

  Let go of it all.

  I don’t know if I can, but it feels good to try. So I let the rain hit my palms heavy. Run down my fingers to dirt. Every drop helps me, I think. I tip my head back and try to open myself back up to the sky.

  My father might have been the reason all those people died. But he also helped make their lives bearable. He gave them hope. I used to think that didn’t matter but it does.

  Good and bad. Good in my father, bad in me. No fire raining on me can burn it away. I have to get rid of it myself.

  “I’m sorry,” I say to Cassia. “I should never have lied to you.”

  “I’m sorry, too,” she says. “The sorting was all wrong.”

  We look at each other in the rain.

  “It’s your boat,” Indie says to me. “Who’s going in it?”

  “I traded for it for you,” I say to Cassia. “It’s your choice who comes with you.”

  I feel the way I did before the Match Banquet. Waiting. Wondering if what I’d done would be enough for her to see me again.

  CHAPTER 46

  CASSIA

  Ky,” I say. “I can’t sort people again.” How could he ask this of me?

  “Hurry,” Indie says.

  “You did it right last time,” Ky says. “I belong out here.”

  It’s true. He does. And even though trying to find him has been the hardest thing I’ve ever done, I am stronger because of it.

  I close my eyes and think of the relevant factors.

  Hunter wants to go to the mountains, not the river.

  Eli is the youngest.

  Indie can pilot.

  I love Ky.

  Who should go?

  This time, it’s easier, because there’s only one choice — one configuration — that feels right to me.

  “It’s time,” Hunter says. “Who do you choose?”

  I look at Ky, hoping he’ll understand. He will. He would do the same thing. “Eli,” I say.

  CHAPTER 47

  KY

  Eli blinks. “Me?” he asks. “What about Ky?”

  “You,” Cassia says. “And Indie. Not me.”

  Indie looks up, surprised.

  “Someone has to get Eli down the river,” Cassia says. “Hunter and Indie are the only ones who know anything about water like this, and Hunter’s going to the mountains.”

  Hunter checks the boat. “It’s almost ready.”

  “You can do it, can’t you?” Cassia asks Indie. “You can get Eli there? It’s the fastest way to take him someplace safe.”

  “I can do it,” Indie says, without the slightest sound of doubt in her voice.

  “A river is different from the sea,” Hunter warns Indie.

  “We had rivers that went to the sea,” Indie says. She reaches for one of the oars that came wrapped inside in the boat and slots the pieces together. “I used to run them at night, for practice. The Society never saw me until I went to the ocean.”

  “Wait,” Eli says. We all turn. He lifts his chin and looks at me with his solemn, serious eyes. “I want to cross the plain. That’s what you wanted to do first.”

  Hunter glances over in surprise. Eli will slow him down. But Hunter is not the kind of person who leaves anyone behind.

  “Can I come with you?” Eli asks. “I’ll run as hard as I can.”

  “Yes,” Hunter says. “But we have to go now.”

  I grab Eli and pull him into a hug. “We’ll see each other again,” he says. “I know it.”

  “We will,” I say. I shouldn’t promise a thing like this. My eyes meet Hunter’s over Eli’s head and I wonder if Hunter said the same thing to Sarah when he told her good-bye.

  Eli tears away from me and throws his arms around Cassia and then Indie, who looks surprised. She hugs him back and he straightens up. “I’m ready,” he says. “Let’s go.”

  “I hope we meet again,” Hunter says to us. He raises his hand in a kind of salute and in the light of the headlamp I see the blue marks all down his arm. We all stand for one last moment looking at each other. Then Hunter turns to run and Eli follows him. For a moment through the trees I see the lights from their lamps and then they’re gone.

  “Eli will be all right,” Cassia says. “Won’t he?”

  “It was his choice,” I say.

  “I know,” she says. Her voice is soft. “But it happened so quickly.”

  It did. Like that day I left the Borough. And the day my parents died, and when Vick crossed over. Good-byes are like this. You can’t always mark them well at the moment of separation — no matter how deep they cut.

  Indie pulls off her coat and, with a quick sure movement of her stone knife, slices out the disk inside. She throws it on the ground next to her with a flourish and turns toward me. “Eli’s decided what to do,” she says. “What about you?”

  Cassia looks at me. She reaches up to brush the rain and tears from her face.

  “I’ll follow the river,” I say. “I won’t be as fast as you and Indie will be in the boat, but I’ll catch up with you at the end.”

  “Are you sure?” she whispers.

  I am. “You came a long way to look for me,” I say. “I can come to the Rising with you.”

  CHAPTER 48

  CASSIA

  The rain turns lighter, turns to snow. And I have a sense that we have not yet arrived, that we are still reaching. For each other. For who we are meant to be. I look at him, knowing that I will never see everything, understanding that now, and I make the choice again.

  “It’s hard to cross over,” I tell him, my voice breaking.

  “Cross over where?” he asks.

  “To
who I need to be,” I tell him.

  And then we both move.

  We have both been wrong; we will both try to make things right. That is all we can do.

  Ky leans in to kiss me, but his hands stay down at his sides.

  “Why won’t you hold me?” I ask, drawing back a little.

  He laughs a little, holds out his hands as if in explanation. They are covered in dirt and paint and blood.

  I pull his hand to mine, put my palm against his. I can feel the grit of sand, the slick of paint, and the cuts and scrapes that speak of his own journey.

  “It will all come clean,” I tell him.

  CHAPTER 49

  KY

  When I pull her to me she feels eager, warm and reaching, but then she flinches slightly and draws back. “I’m sorry,” she says, “I forgot.” She pulls a small tube from inside her shirt. She notices the shock on my face and rushes on. “I couldn’t help it.”

  She holds the tube out for me to see, trying to explain. It glints in the light from our headlamps and it takes me a moment to read the name: REYES, SAMUEL. Her grandfather. “I took it when you were all looking at Hunter, after he broke the tube.”

  “Eli stole one too,” I say. “He gave it to me.”

  “Who did he take?” Cassia asks.

  I look over at Indie. She could push the boat away now and leave Cassia behind. But she doesn’t. I knew she wouldn’t. Not this time. If you want to go where Indie wants to go, you couldn’t find a better pilot. She’ll carry your pack and get you through the rough water. She turns her back to us and stands perfectly still under the trees next to the boat.

  “Vick,” I tell Cassia.

  It surprised me at first that Eli didn’t choose his parents, and then I remembered that they wouldn’t have been there. Eli and his family had been Aberrations for years. Vick must have been Reclassified recently enough that the Society hadn’t had time to remove his tube.

  “Eli trusts you,” she says.

  “I know,” I say.

  “I do, too,” she says. “What are you going to do?”

  “Hide it,” I say. “Until I know who was storing the tubes and why. Until I know we can trust the Rising.”

  “And the books you brought from the farmers’ cave?” she asks.

  “Those too,” I say. “I’m going to look for the right place while I’m following the river.” I pause. “If you want me to hide your things, I can. I’ll make sure they get to you somehow.”

  “Won’t they be too heavy to carry?” she asks.

  “No,” I say.

  She hands me the tube and reaches into her pack for the collection of loose papers that she took from the cave. “I didn’t write any of those pages,” she says, an ache in her voice. “Someday I will.” Then she puts her hand against my cheek. “The rest of your story,” she says. “Will you tell it to me now? Or when I see you again?”

  “My mother,” I begin. “My father.” I close my eyes, trying to explain. What I say makes no sense. It’s a string of words—

  When my parents died I did nothing

  So I wanted to do

  I wanted to do

  I wanted to do

  “Something,” she says gently. She takes my hand again and turns it over, looking at the mangled mess of scrapes and paint and dirt that the rain hasn’t yet washed away. “You’re right. We can’t do nothing all our lives. And, Ky, you did something when your parents died. I remember the picture you drew for me back in Oria. You tried to carry them.”

  “No,” I say, my voice breaking. “I left them on the ground and ran.”

  She wraps her arms around me and speaks in my ear. Words just for me — the poetry of I love you—to keep me warm in the cold. With them she turns me back from ash and nothing into flesh and blood.

  CHAPTER 50

  CASSIA

  “ Do not go gentle,” I tell him, one last time, for now.

  Ky smiles then, a smile I’ve never seen before. It’s the kind of daring, reckless smile that could make people follow him straight into a firing, a flood. “There’s no danger of that,” he says.

  I put my hands on him, run my fingers over his eyelids, find his lips, meet them with mine. I kiss the plane of his cheekbones. The salt of his tears tastes like the sea and I don’t see the shore.

  He’s gone, in the trees, and I’m in the river, and there’s no time left.

  “Do what I say,” Indie tells me, shoving an oar into my hands and yelling over the sound of the water rushing near us. “If I say left, paddle on your left. If I say right, paddle right. If I tell you to lean, do it.” The beam of her headlamp glares in my eyes and I’m relieved when she turns to face forward. Tears stream down my cheeks from the farewell and the light.

  “Now,” Indie says, and we both push the boat away from the bank. We sit suspended for a moment and then the stream finds us, pushes us along.

  “Right,” Indie calls.

  Scattered snowflakes star our faces as we ride, little white dashes in the light from our headlamps.

  “If we ever flip over, stay with the boat,” Indie yells back to me.

  She can only see far enough ahead to have time for one fast call, one quick decision; she’s sorting in a way I never could, with spray in her face and water shining silver and black branches tearing at us from the banks, broken trees looming at us from the center of the stream.

  I copy her, follow her, shadow her strokes. And I wonder how the Society ever caught her that day on the ocean. She is a Pilot, on this river, tonight.

  Hours or minutes, they don’t matter, it’s only changes in the water and turns in the stream, shouts from Indie and oars flicking water as we move them from side to side.

  I glance up, once, aware that something is happening above me; night lifting, the earliest part of morning that is still black, but black that feels like it’s rubbing off around the edges, and I miss the moment Indie screams at me to paddle right and then we’re over, over in the stream.

  Cold dark water, poisoned from the Society’s spheres, rushes over me. I see nothing and feel everything, freezing water, driftwood battering me. It’s the moment of my own death, and then something else hits my arm.

  Stay with the boat.

  My fingers scrabble along the edge, and I find one of the grips and hold on, pulling myself to the surface. The water tastes bitter; I spit it out and cling tight. I’m inside the boat, under it, trapped and saved in a bubble of air. Something tears my leg. My headlamp is gone.

  It’s like the Cavern, I’m caught but alive.

  “You will,” Ky said then, but he’s not here now.

  Suddenly I remember the day I met him, that day at the clear blue pool, when he and Xander both went under but came back up.

  Where’s Indie?

  The boat shoots to the side and the water goes still.

  A light shines in. Indie, pushing the boat up. She held on to the outside and somehow she still has her headlamp. “We’re in a smooth spot,” Indie says fiercely. “It won’t last. Get out here with me and push.”

  I swim out under the side. The water is black and glassy, puddled for a moment in a wide place in the stream, dammed somehow from below. “Did you hold on to your oar?” Indie asks, and to my surprise, I did. “On three,” Indie says, and she counts, and we flip the boat back over and grab again for the sides. She flops, fast, like a fish, into the boat and grabs my oar to pull me over, too.

  “You held on,” she says, “I thought I was finally done with you,” and she laughs, and so do I, both of us laughing until we hit the next wave of river and Indie screams, wild and triumphant. I join in.

  “The real danger begins now,” Indie says when the sun comes up, and I know she’s right. The river is still fast; we can see better, but we can be seen, and we are exhausted. The heavier cottonwoods here have been choked out by thinner, less concealing trees that grow spindly, grayish-green, and snarled with thorns. “We have to stay close to the trees for cover,” Indie says,
“but if we’re going too fast and we hit those thorns, they’ll finish our boat.”

  We pass a huge dead cottonwood with scaly brownish bark that has fallen over, tired and done after years of holding on to the bank. I hope Hunter and Eli are in the mountains, I think, and that Ky has cover in the trees.

  Then we hear it. Something overhead.

  Without saying a word, we both pull closer to the bank. Indie reaches with her oar into the thorny branches but it slips and doesn’t hold. We start to drift and I stab my oar into the water, pushing us back.

  The ship overhead flies closer.

  Indie reaches out and grabs hold of the thorny branches with her bare hand. I gasp. She hangs on and I jump out and pull the boat over to the side, hearing the rasp of the thorny bushes along the plastic. Please don’t break, I think. Indie lets go, her hand bleeding, and the two of us hold our breath.

  They pass over. They haven’t seen us.

  “I’d like a green tablet right now,” Indie says, and I start laughing in relief. But the tablets are gone, along with everything else we had, swept away when we flipped in the water. Indie had tied our packs to one of the boat’s handles but the water tore them away in spite of her careful knots; some branch or tree cut right through the rope and I should be grateful it wasn’t our flesh or the plastic of the boat.

  Once I’m back inside, we keep close to the bank. The sun climbs high. No one else flies over.

  I think of my second lost compass sinking to the bottom of the river, like the stone it was before Ky changed it.

  Evening. The reeds at the edge of the stream whisper and hush in the breeze, and in the traces of the sunset in a high and lovely sky, I see the first star of the evening.

  Then I see it shining on the ground, too. Or not the ground, but in water that stretches out dark in front of us.

  “This,” Indie says, “is not the ocean.”