Reached (21 page)

“We didn’t kill those decoys,” Ky says. “You did. When the Society sent people out to die, you sat back and watched.”

The Pilot continues, relentless. “A river near the Carving was poisoned while you were in the area. You detonated wiring in the Carving, destroying part of a village that belonged to Anomalies. You destroyed tubes in a storage facility in the canyons, a facility that the Rising had infiltrated. You conspired to obtain and carry blue tablets. You even killed a boy with them. We found his body.”

“That’s not true,” I say, but in a way, it is. I didn’t mean to kill that boy by giving him the blue tablets, but I did. And then I realize why the Archivist asked me about locations where tissue preservation samples might be stored. “You’re the one who wanted to know how much I knew about the tubes,” I say. “Do you really trade them?”

“You
trade
the tubes?” Ky asks.

“Of course,” the Pilot says. “I’ll use whatever I need to secure loyalty and resources for finding the cure. The samples are a currency that works when almost nothing else will.”

Ky shakes his head, disgusted. I can’t help but be grateful that we were able to get Grandfather’s tube away from the Cavern. Who knows what the Pilot would have used it for.

“There’s something more,” the Pilot says. “The Cities where you lived were among those who suffered contaminated water supplies.”

The lake. I remember those dead fish. But I don’t understand what he means. The three of us look at each other.
We have to figure this out.

“The Plague spread too quickly,” Xander says, his eyes lighting up. “It stayed contained in Central for a long time, and then all of a sudden it was widespread. Until the virus went into the water, we had an epidemic—people getting sick from transferring it to one another. After the water supplies were contaminated, we had a pandemic.”

And now Ky and I are right there with Xander, putting together the pieces. “It’s a waterborne Plague,” Ky says. “Like the one they sent to the Enemy.”

The numbers of the Plague make sense to me now. “The sudden outbreak we saw at the beginning of the Rising—widespread contamination in several different Cities and Provinces—means that someone added the virus to water sources to hurry up the process.” I shake my head. “I should have realized. So that’s why the illness was everywhere, all at once.”

“And that’s why we were stretched so thin at the medical center,” Xander says. “The Rising didn’t anticipate the sabotage. But we handled it anyway. Everything would have been fine, except for the mutation.”

“You can’t think the three of us could coordinate all of that,” Ky says.

“No,” the Pilot says. “But the three of you were a part of it. And it’s time to come clean with what you know.” He pauses. “There’s something else for Cassia on the datapod.”

I look back at the screen and see a second file embedded. Inside I find a picture of my mother, and one of my father. The screen flashes back and forth between the two of them.

“No,” I say.
“No.”
My parents look up from the screen, glassy-eyed. They are both still.

“They have the mutation,” the Pilot says. “There is no cure. They are both in a medical center in Keya.” He anticipates my next question before I ask it. “We have been unable to locate your brother.”

Bram.
Is he lying somewhere where no one can find him? Is he dead like that boy in the Carving? No. He’s not. I won’t believe it. I can’t imagine Bram still.

“Now,” the Pilot says, “you have an incentive to tell us everything you can. Who do you work for? Are you Society sympathizers? Someone else? Did your group introduce the mutation? Do you have a cure?”

For the first time, I hear him lose control while he speaks. It’s only on the last word,
cure
, and I can tell how truly desperate and driven he is. He wants this cure. He will do anything he can to find it.

But we don’t have a cure. He’s wasting his time with us. What should we do? How can we convince him?

“I know you can do the right thing,” the Pilot says. The break in his voice is gone, and now he sounds coaxing, gentle. “Your father may have sided with the Society and refused to join the Rising, but your grandfather worked for us. You are, of course, the great-granddaughter of Pilot Reyes. And you’ve helped us before, though you don’t remember it.”

I barely hear the last thing he says because—

My great-grandmother.
She
was the Pilot.

She was the one who sang the poems to my grandfather, even when the Society had told her she could only choose a hundred. She was the one who saved the page I burned.

“I never met Pilot Reyes in person,” the Pilot says. “She came before my predecessor. But as the Pilot, I am one of the only people who knows the names of the Pilots who came before. And I know her from her writings. She was the right Pilot at the right time. She preserved records and gathered what we needed to know to take action later. But one thing is the same for
all
Pilots: We have to understand what it means to be the Pilot. Your great-grandmother understood that if you don’t save, you fail. And she knew that the smallest rebel who does their job is as great as the Pilot who leads. She didn’t just believe that. She
knew
it.”

“We haven’t done anything—” I begin, but the ship drops suddenly, down, down.

Ky loses his balance and slams into the cases against the wall. Both Xander and I move to help him.

“I’m fine,” Ky says. I can barely hear him over the sounds of the ship, and then we hit the ground hard. My whole body snaps with the impact.

“When he opens the hold,” Ky says, “we’re going to run. We’ll get away.”

“Ky,” I say, “wait.”

“We can get past him,” Ky says. “There are three of us and only one of him.”

“Two of you,” Xander says. “I’m not going.”

Ky stares at Xander in astonishment. “Have you been listening at all?”

“Yes,” Xander says. “The Pilot wants a cure. So do I. I’ll help him however I can.” Xander looks at me and I see that he still believes in the Pilot. He’s choosing the Pilot over everything else, in this at least.

Why wouldn’t he? Ky and I left Xander behind; I never taught him to write. And I never asked Xander for
his
story because I thought I already knew it. Looking at him now, I realize that I didn’t know it all then, and I certainly don’t know it all now. He has traveled through canyons of his own and come through changed.

And he’s right. All that matters is the cure. That is what we have to fight for now.

I’m the vote in the balance. They both wait for me. And this time, I choose Xander, or at least, I choose his side. “Let’s talk to the Pilot,” I tell Ky. “Just a little more.”

“Are you sure?” Ky asks.

“Yes,” I say, and the Pilot opens the door to the hold. I follow Ky up the ladder, Xander coming after, and I hand the Pilot the datapod with my parents’ pictures on it.

“The Gallery was a place for meeting and poetry,” I tell him. “The blue tablets were an accident. We didn’t know they killed. We used the wiring in the Carving to seal off the cave so that the Society wouldn’t take the villagers’ stores. The poisoned streams and water—that’s the Society’s signature, and we are not the Society, nor do we sympathize with them.”

For a moment everything is as quiet as it can be in a ship in the mountains. The wind moves in the trees outside, and under that is the breathing of those of us who are not still, not yet.

“We’re not trying to take down the Rising,” I say. “We believed in it. All we want is a cure.” And then I realize who the other person the Pilot trusts must be—the pilot he asked to gather us together when he couldn’t spare the time or the risk. “You should listen to Indie,” I say. “We
can
help you.”

The Pilot doesn’t seem surprised that I’ve figured it out.

“Indie,” Ky says. “Does she have the mark?”

“No,” the Pilot says, “but we’ll do our best to keep her flying.”

“You lied to her,” Ky says. “You used her to bring us all in.”

“There is no stone I won’t overturn,” the Pilot says, “to find the cure.”

“We can help you,” I tell the Pilot again. “I can sort data. Xander has been working with the sick and has seen the mutation firsthand. Ky—”

“May be the most useful of all,” the Pilot says.

“I’ll be a body,” Ky says. “Just like in the Outer Provinces.” Ky walks away from me, closer to the door. He moves slower than usual, but with the same fluidity that I’ve always associated with him; his body belongs to him more than most people’s do, and I ache at the thought that it might have to stop, be still.

“You don’t know that, yet,” I say, my heart sinking. “You might not be sick.” But Ky’s expression is resigned. Does he know more than he’s saying? Can he feel the mutation inside of him, running through his veins, making him ill?

“Either way, Ky’s been exposed to the virus,” Xander says. “You don’t want to risk him exposing the people you have working on the cure to the mutation.”

“There’s no risk,” the Pilot says. “The villagers are immune.”

“So
that’s
why you’re looking here for a cure,” Xander says, and he smiles. His voice fills with hope. “There
is
a chance we’ll find it.”

“But if you knew about the red mark, why didn’t you bring some of those who had it out here earlier?” I ask the Pilot. “Maybe our data could be useful.” If I’m immune, they could correlate my data with that of the villagers from the mountain.

The moment the words leave my mouth, I shake my head. “It won’t work,” I say, answering my own question, “because our data is compromised. All the immunizations, the exposures we’ve had—you need a pure sample group to find the cure.”

“Yes,” the Pilot says, looking at me with a measuring expression. “We can only use those who have lived outside of the Society since birth. Others can help us work on the cure, but we can’t use their data.”

“And you must give more weight to data from those who have lived longest outside of the Society,” I say. “For second-generation, and third-generation villagers. Their information will have greater importance.”

“We’ve come by some additional data recently,” the Pilot says. “A second group of villagers has also proved to be immune, though they only arrived in the mountains recently.”

The farmers from the Carving. It must be. I remember the small dark house, the symbol for
settlement
, that we saw marked on the mountains of the farmers’ map. They didn’t know the name of the village or if anyone still lived there, but that was where the farmers fled when the Carving was no longer safe.

Ky is looking at me. He’s had the same thought.
What if we can see Eli again? Or Hunter?

“When the people from the Carving arrived, the villagers of Endstone let them build a settlement of their own nearby,” the Pilot says. “We weren’t sure at first if the people from the Carving would also be immune to the mutation. They lived in a very different climate and had had no contact with those living in Endstone for many years. But they were immune. Which was a huge boon to us because—”

“—then you could correlate
their
data,” I say, understanding instantly. “You could look for commonalities between the two groups. It would save you time.”

“How close
are
you?” Xander asks.

“Not as close as we’d like,” the Pilot says. “There were many commonalities in the diets and habits of the two groups. We’re ruling out each possibility as fast as we can, but it takes time, and people to try the cure on.”

He’s looking at the three of us. Have we convinced him?

Xander watches me, too. When our eyes meet he smiles and I see the old Xander in him again, the one who used to smile at me exactly this way to try to get me to jump in the pool, to join in the games. When I turn back to Ky, I see that his hands are shaking just a little, his fine hands that taught me to write, that touched me when we went through the canyons.

Long ago on the Hill, Ky warned me about a situation like this, where we might be caught. He told me about the prisoner’s dilemma and how we would have to keep each other safe. Did he ever think that there might be three of us, not two?

Here, between Xander’s smile and Ky’s hands, I come to my own understanding, that the only way to keep one another safe is to find the cure.

“We can help you,” I say again to the Pilot, hoping that this time he will believe me.

Grandfather believed in me. In my palm, I hold the microcard. It is wrapped in a paper from my mother that is covered in my father’s words, written by my brother’s hand.

PART FIVE

PRISONER’S DILEMMA

CHAPTER 24

XANDER

O
utside the ship, Ky paces the clearing while we wait for the villagers to come down to meet us. “You should rest,” I tell him. “There’s no evidence that continued motion delays the onset of the illness.”

“You sound like an Official,” Ky says.

“I used to be one,” I say.

“The reason you don’t have any evidence that this works,” Ky says, “is because you never had anyone try it.”

He and I are talking and joking, using the same tone we did when we played at the game tables. Once again Ky is going to lose and it’s not fair. He shouldn’t have to be still.

But he hasn’t lost Cassia. The way the two of them look at each other is like touching. I’m caught in the middle of it.

There’s no time to think about that now. A group of people emerges from the trees. There are nine of them. Five carry weapons and the rest have stretchers.

“I don’t have any patients for you today,” the Pilot says. “Nor supplies, I’m afraid. Just these three.”

“My name is Xander,” I say, trying to put the villagers at ease.

“Leyna,” says one of the women. Her hair is in a long blond braid and she looks young, like us. None of the others move to introduce themselves, but they all appear strong. I see no signs of illness among them.

“I’m Cassia,” Cassia says.

“Ky,” Ky says.

“We’re Anomalies,” Leyna says. “Probably the first you’ve ever seen.” She waits for our reaction.

“We knew other Anomalies in the Carving,” Cassia says.

“Really?” Leyna asks, her voice full of interest. “When was this?”

“Right before they came here,” Cassia says.

“So you know Anna,” says one of the men. “Their leader.”

“No,” Cassia says. “We came after she left. We only knew Hunter.”

“We were surprised when the farmers came to Endstone,” Leyna says. “We thought everyone in the Carving had died long ago. We believed that those of us in the stone villages were all that was between the Society and the rest of the world.”

She’s very good at this. Her voice is warm but strong, and she takes in our measure as she looks at us. She’d make a good physic. “What can they do for us?” she asks the Pilot, addressing him not as her leader but as her equal.

“I’m a body,” Ky says. “I’ve got the mutation. I just haven’t gone down yet.”

Leyna raises her eyebrows. “We haven’t seen anyone standing,” she says to the Pilot. “All the other patients were already still.”

“Ky is a pilot,” Cassia says. I can tell she doesn’t like the way Leyna is talking about Ky. “One of the best.”

Leyna nods, but she keeps watching Ky. Her eyes are shrewd.

“Xander’s a medic,” Cassia says, “and I can sort.”

“A medic and a sorter,” Leyna says. “Excellent.”

“I’m not actually a medic anymore,” I say. “I’ve been working in administration. But I’ve seen a lot of the sick and I’ve been assisting with their care.”

“That will be useful,” Leyna says. “It’s always good to speak to someone who has seen the virus and how it works in the Cities and Boroughs.”

“I’ll return as soon as I can,” the Pilot says. “Is there anything new to report?”

“No,” Leyna says, “but there will be soon.” She gestures to one of the stretchers. “We can carry you if you need it.” She’s speaking to Ky.

“No,” Ky says. “I’ll keep going until I drop.”

“You trust the Pilot very much,” I say to Leyna as we climb up the path to the village. Cassia and Ky walk ahead of us, keeping a steady but slow pace. I know Leyna and I are both watching them. Others in the group keep looking at Ky, too. Everyone’s waiting for the moment when he goes still.

“The Pilot isn’t our leader,” she says, “but we trust him enough to work with him, and he feels the same way about us.”

“And you’re really immune?” I ask. “Even to the mutation?”

“Yes,” she says. “But we don’t have a mark. The Pilot told us that some of you do.”

I nod. “I wonder why there’s a discrepancy,” I say. In spite of what I’ve seen it do to people, the workings of the Plague and its mutation fascinate me.

“We’re not sure,” Leyna says. “Our expert in the village says that viruses and immunity are incredibly complex. His best explanation is that whatever causes our immunity simply prevents infection from ever being established at all, which means we don’t get the mark.”

“And it also means that you’d better not change your diet or environment too much before you find out
what
makes you immune, or you could get sick,” I say.

She nods.

“That must have taken courage to volunteer for exposure to the mutation,” I say.

“It did.”

“How many people live in the village?” I ask.

“More than you would think,” Leyna says. “The stones are rolling.”

What does she mean?

“When the Society began rounding up the Aberrations and Anomalies to send to the decoy camps,” Leyna explains, “more and more of them started escaping to these places, the stone villages. Have you heard of them?”

“Yes,” I say, remembering Lei.

“Now we’re all gathering together in one village, the last one,” Leyna says. “It’s called Endstone. We’re pooling our resources to try to turn our immunity into your cure.”

“Why?” I ask. “What have those of us who live in the Provinces ever done for you?”

Leyna laughs. “Not much,” she says. “But the Pilot has promised us something in return if we succeed.”

“What is it?” I ask.

“If we find a cure,” she says, “he’ll use his ships to take us to the Otherlands. It’s what we want most, and the cure is what
he
wants most, so the trade is fair. And if it turns out that our immunity changes when we leave, we will certainly want cures to take with us to the Otherlands as a precaution.”

“So the Otherlands
do
exist,” I say.

“Of course,” she says.

“If you let everyone in the Provinces die, you could take the Pilot’s ships yourselves,” I say. “Or you could wait until everyone was gone and then go in and take their Cities and houses for your own.”

For the first time, her easy, charming mask slips a little and I see the contempt underneath. “You’re like rats,” she says, her voice still pleasant. “Even if most of you die, there are too many of you for us to overcome. We’re ready to leave you all behind and go someplace you haven’t touched.”

“Why are you telling me all of this?” I ask her. We’ve just met, so it can’t be that she trusts me yet.

“It’s good for you to understand how much we have to lose,” she says.

And I do understand. With so much at stake, she can’t and won’t tolerate anything that might compromise her goal. We’ll need to watch our step here. “We have the same objective,” I say. “To find a cure.”

“Good,” Leyna tells me. She lowers her voice and looks at Ky. “So tell me,” she says, “when is he going to go down?”

Ky’s pace has picked up a little. “It won’t be long now,” I say. Cassia is electric, lit up simply because Ky is near her, even though she’s worried that he might be ill.
Would it be worth it to have the mutation if I knew she loved me?
I wonder.
If I could trade places with him right now, would I do it?