“The officers think they’ve found someone who can help us,” the Pilot says. “A man who knew the person who planted these fields and is willing to talk about it.”
The two of us cross the grassy ditch between the field and the dusty road. Spirals of barbed wire fence in the area. But I can already see the lilies.
They stick out at awkward angles from the little hills and valleys of turned-over dirt, but there they are—white flowers waving banners over the cure. I reach through the wire and turn one toward us; its shape is perfect. Three curved petals make up the bloom, with a trace of red on the inside.
“The Society plowed them under last year,” the man from the town says, coming up behind us. “But this spring, they all came up.” He shakes his head. “I don’t know how many of us even noticed or thought to come out here, with the Plague.”
“You can eat the bulb for food,” the Pilot says. “Did you know that?”
“No,” the man says.
“Who planted the fields before the Society bulldozed them over?” the Pilot asks.
“A man named Jacob Childs,” the man says. “I’m not supposed to remember that the fields were plowed under, but I do. And I’m not supposed to remember that they took Jacob away. But they did.”
“We need to arrange a careful harvest of these bulbs,” the Pilot says. “Can you help us with that? Do you know people who would be willing to work?”
“Yes,” says the man. “Not many. Most are sick or hiding.”
“We’ll bring our own people in, too,” the Pilot says. “But we need to get started immediately.”
A slight wind ruffles the flowers. They’re little waves dancing in their green bay of grass.
Days later, I’m on my way back from taking another round of cures to Central when the Pilot’s voice comes over the speaker again. His voice startles me and so does the timing of his communication—does he know what I have planned? My flying shouldn’t have given him any indication yet. The path he assigned me was perfect, close enough to where I need to be that I can do what I have to do.
“There’s no record of the man named Jacob Childs,” the Pilot says. “He’s vanished.”
“That’s not surprising,” I say. “I’m sure the Society didn’t waste any time Reclassifying him and sending him out to die.”
“I also had them run a search for Patrick and Aida Markham,” the Pilot tells me. “They are nowhere in the databases, Society or Rising.”
“Thank you for taking the time to look,” I say. There are plenty of us who want to know about family, but we have limited resources for searching, even through the data.
“I can’t have you looking for them now,” the Pilot says. “We still need you and your ship for the cure.”
“I understand,” I say. “I’ll look for them on my own time.”
“You don’t have any of your own time right now,” the Pilot says. “Your rest hours are intended to be exactly that. We can’t have you flying exhausted.”
“I have to find them,” I tell him. I owe them everything. Through Anna, I learned what Patrick and Aida traded and sacrificed—even more than I’d originally thought. I ask the Pilot something that I could never have questioned him about before. “Isn’t there anyone,” I say, “that you still have to find?”
I’ve gone too far. The Pilot doesn’t answer.
I look down at the dark land below and the bright lights coming into view, right where they should be.
In the weeks that I’ve been flying out the cure, I’ve stopped in every Province in the Society several times over.
Except Oria.
The Pilot won’t let any of us land in the Provinces where we’re from, because we’ll know too many people there and we’ll be tempted to change the pattern of the cure.
“There were people I had to find,” the Pilot says finally, “but I knew where I needed to look. This is like trying to find a stone in the Sisyphus River. You don’t even know where to begin. It would take too long. Now. But later, you can.”
I don’t answer him. We both know that later often means too late.
The cure works, and so does Cassia’s sorting, telling us where to go next. We’re saving the optimal amount of people. She tells us what she thinks we should do, the computers and other sorters corroborate it—her mind is as fine and clear as anything in this world.
But we’re not saving everyone. Of the still who go down, about eleven percent do not come back at all. And other patients succumb to infections.
I bring the ship in lower.
“I thought I made it clear that you couldn’t look for them now,” the Pilot says.
“You did,” I say. “I’m not going to make people die while I hunt for something I might not find.”
“Then what are you doing?” the Pilot asks me.
“I need to land here,” I say.
“They’re not in Oria,” the Pilot says. “Cassia found it extremely unlikely that they would be anywhere in that Province.”
“She put the highest likelihood that they died out in the Outer Provinces,” I say. “Didn’t she?”
The Pilot pauses for a moment. “Yes,” he says.
I circle until I see a good place for a landing. Over the Hill I go, and I wonder where the green silk from Cassia’s dress is now—a little tattered banner under the sky buried in the ground. Or bleaching out in the sun. Bleeding away in the rain. Blowing away on the wind.
“Oria’s still volatile, and you’re a resource,” the Pilot says. “You need to come in.”
“It won’t take long,” I repeat, and then I bring the ship around and drop down. This ship isn’t like the one the Pilot flies. Mine can’t switch over to propellers and a tighter landing the way his can.
The street will barely be long enough but I know every bit of it. I walked it for all those years. With Patrick and Aida, and they were usually holding hands.
The wheels hit the ground and the metal sails of the ship shift, creating drag and slowing me down. Houses rush past, and at the end of the street I stop the ship right in time. Through my window, I could see into the ones of the house in front of me if the people inside didn’t have their shutters drawn tight.
I climb out of the ship and move as fast as I can. I only have a few houses to go. The flowers in the gardens haven’t been weeded. They grow thick and untended. I pause at the door of the house where Em used to live. The windows are broken. I look inside, but it’s empty, and has been for a long enough time that there are leaves on the floor. They must have blown in from another Borough, since ours no longer has trees.
I keep going.
When I was still, I heard what Anna said about my parents and about Patrick and Aida and Matthew. My mother and father couldn’t get me out. So, when they died, they sent me in as close as they could and hoped that would work. And Patrick and Aida welcomed me and loved me like their own.
I’ll never forget Aida’s screams and Patrick’s face when the Officials took me away, or how they kept reaching for me and for each other.
The Society knew what they were doing when they Matched Patrick and Aida.
If I’d been the one Matched with Cassia, if I’d known I could have eighty years of a good life and most of it spent with her, I wonder if I would have had the strength to try to take the Society down.
Xander did.
I walk up the pathway and knock on the door of the house where he used to live.
CHAPTER 58
XANDER
In the past few weeks we’ve had several breakthroughs in administering the cure. First were the fields Cassia’s mother told us about, which allowed us to make more of the cure and get it out to people quickly. Then we figured out how to synthesize the proteins of the sego lily in the laboratory. The best minds left in the Rising and the Society have come together to try to make this work.
So far, it has. People are getting better. And if the mutation comes back, we have a cure. Unless, of course, the virus changes again. But, for now, the data says that the worst has passed. I wouldn’t trust the data except that Cassia’s the one who sorted it.
Now we’re heading toward a different time: once people are well, they will need to choose what kind of world it is that they want to live in. I don’t know that we’re going to come through that as well as we came through the Plague.
“You saved the world,” my father likes to say.
“It was luck,” I tell him. “We’ve always been lucky.”
And we have. Take a look at my family. My brother went back to the Borough from Oria City when the Plague first broke, and they all managed to keep from getting sick until near the end. And even when they did fall ill, Ky arrived just in time to bring them back here so we could heal them.
“We tried to hold the Borough together,” my father says.
To his credit, they did. They rationed and shared the food and looked after each other for as long as they could.
It’s not like they did anything wrong. My family has always believed that if you worked hard and did the right thing, you were likely to have it all work out. And they’re not stupid. They know it doesn’t always go that way. They’ve seen terrible things happen and it’s torn them up. But that’s as close as they’ve been to real suffering.
Also, I’m a hypocrite, because nothing bad has really happened to me either. Ky’s family has disappeared entirely. Cassia’s family lost her father. But not us, not the Carrows. We’re all fine. Even my brother, who never did join the Rising. I was wrong about him. I’ve been wrong about a lot of things.
But the cure we made does work.
When it’s time for my break, I leave the medical center and walk out toward the river that goes through the center of the City of Camas. Now that the barricade’s down and the mutation is under control, people have taken again to walking along the river. There’s a set of cement steps cut into the embankment not far from the medical center.
Ky and Cassia go there sometimes, when he’s back from an errand, and once I found him there alone watching the water.
I sat down beside him. “Thank you,” I said. It was the first time I’d seen him since he’d brought my family in for the cure.
Ky nodded. “I couldn’t bring my own family back,” he said. “I hoped I’d find yours.”
“And you did,” I said, trying to keep the bitterness out of my voice. “Exactly where the Society left them.”
Ky raised his eyebrows.
“I’m glad they’re back,” I told him. “I’ll owe you for the rest of my life for bringing them in. Who knows how long it would have taken for them to get the cure otherwise.”
“It was the least I could do,” Ky said. “You and Cassia are the ones who cured me.”
“How did you know you loved her?” I asked Ky. “When you first fell for her, she didn’t really know you. She didn’t know anything about where you’d been.”