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  The Rising is for everyone.

  And they—we—are not going to fail.

  Since the sidewalk is narrow, I walk behind Official Brewer and Official Lei on our way back to the air car. Another family with a daughter wearing Banquet attire hurries down the street. They’re late, and the mother is not happy. “I told you again and again—” she says to the father, and then she catches sight of us and stops cold.

  “Hello,” I say as we pass them. “Congratulations.”

  “When do you next see your Match?” Official Lei asks me.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “The Society hasn’t scheduled our next port-to-port communication.”

  Official Lei is a little older than I am: at least twenty-one, because she’s celebrated her Marriage Contract. As long as I’ve known her, her spouse has been out in the Army stationed somewhere at the edge of the Borders. I can’t ask her when he’s due back. That kind of information is classified. I don’t think even Official Lei knows when he’ll return.

  The Society doesn’t like us to get too specific when we talk about our work assignments with others. Cassia’s aware that I’m an Official, but she doesn’t know exactly what I do. There are Officials in all different departments in the Society.

  The Society trains many kinds of workers at the medical center. Everyone knows about the medics because they can diagnose and help people. There are also surgics who operate, pharmics who make medicines, nurses who assist, and physics like me. Our job is to oversee aspects of the medical field—for example, administrating medical centers. Or, if we become Officials, we’re often asked to serve on Committees, which is what I do. We take care of the distribution of tablets to infants and assist in collecting tissue at Final Banquets. According to the Society, this assignment is one of the most important ones an Official can have.

  “What color did she choose?” Official Lei asks as we approach the air car.

  For a second, I don’t know what she means, and then I realize she’s asking about Cassia’s dress. “She chose green,” I say. “She looked beautiful.”

  Someone cries out and the three of us turn in unison. It’s the baby’s father, running toward us as fast as he can. “I can’t wake my older son,” he calls out. “I went in to see if he was still asleep and—something is wrong.”

  “Contact the medics on the port,” Official Brewer calls back, and the three of us move as fast as we can to the house. We go inside without knocking and hurry to the back where the bedrooms always are. Official Lei puts her hand on the wall to steady herself before Official Brewer opens the bedroom door. “You all right?” I ask her. She nods.

  “Hello?” Official Brewer says.

  The mother looks up at us, her face ashen. She still holds the baby. The older child lying on the bed doesn’t move at all.

  He rests on his side, his back to us. He’s breathing, but it’s slow, and his plainclothes hang a little loose around his neck. His skin color looks all right. There’s a small red mark in between his shoulder blades and I feel a rush of pity and exultation.

  This is it.

  The Rising said it would look like this.

  I have to keep myself from glancing at the others in the room. Who else knows? Is anyone here part of the Rising? Have they seen the information I’ve seen about how the rebellion will proceed?

  Though the incubation period may vary, once the disease is manifest, the patient deteriorates quickly. Slurred speech is followed by a descent into an almost comatose state. The most telltale sign of the live Plague virus is one or more small red marks on the back of the patient. Once the Plague has made significant inroads into the general populace, and can no longer be concealed by the Society, the Rising will begin.

  “What is it?” the mother asks. “Is he ill?”

  Again, the three of us move at the same time. Official Lei reaches for the boy’s wrist to take his pulse. Official Brewer turns to the woman. I try to block her view of her child lying still on the bed. Until I know the Rising is on the move, I have to proceed as usual.

  “He’s breathing,” Official Brewer says.

  “His pulse is fine,” Official Lei says.

  “The medics will be here soon,” I tell the mother.

  “Can’t you do something for him?” she asks. “Medicine, treatment . . .”

  “I’m sorry,” Official Brewer says. “We need to get to the medical center before we can do anything more.”

  “But he’s stable,” I tell her. Don’t worry, I want to add. The Rising has a cure. I hope she can hear the sound of hope in my voice since I can’t tell her outright how I know it’s all going to work out.

  This is it. The beginning of the Rising.

  Once the Rising comes to power, we’ll all be able to choose. Who knows what might happen then? When I kissed Cassia back in the Borough she caught her breath in what I think was surprise. Not at the kiss: she knew that was coming. I think she was surprised by how it felt.

  As soon as I can, I want to tell her again, in person: Cassia, I’m in love with you and I want you. So, what will it take for you to feel the same? A whole new world?

  Because that’s what we’re going to have.

  The mother edges a tiny bit closer to her child. “It’s just,” she says, and her voice catches, “that he’s so still.”

  CHAPTER 2

  CASSIA

  Ky said he’d meet me tonight, by the lake.

  When I see him next, I’ll kiss him first.

  He’ll pull me so close that the poems I keep underneath my shirt, near my heart, will rustle, a sound so soft that only the two of us will hear. And the music of his heartbeat, his breathing, the cadence and timbre of his voice, will set me to singing.

  He will tell me where he has been.

  I will tell him where I want to go.

  I stretch out my arms to make sure that nothing shows underneath the cuffs of my shirt. The red silk of the dress I’m wearing slips neatly under the unflattering lines of my plainclothes. It’s one of the Hundred Dresses, possibly stolen, that came up in a trade. It was worth the price I paid—a poem—to have such a piece of color to hold up to the light and pull over my head, to feel so bright.

  I sort for the Society here in their capital of Central, but I have a job to do for the Rising, and I trade with the Archivists. On the outside, I’m a Society girl wearing plainclothes. But underneath, I have silk and paper against my skin.

  I have found that this is the easiest way to carry the poems; wrap them around my wrists, place them against my heart. Of course, I don’t keep all of the pages with me. I’ve found a place to hide most of them. But there are a few pieces I don’t ever like to be without.

  I open my tablet container. All the tablets are there: blue, green, red. And something else besides. A tiny scrap of paper, on which I’ve written the word remember. If the Society ever makes me take the red tablet, I’ll slip this up into my sleeve, and then I’ll know that they’ve made me forget.

  I can’t be the first to have done something like this. How many people out there know something they shouldn’t—not what they have lost, but that they have lost?

  And there’s a chance I won’t forget anything—that I’m immune like Indie, and Xander, and Ky.

  The Society thinks the red tablet does work on me. But they don’t know everything. According to the Society, I’ve never been in the Outer Provinces at all. I’ve never crossed through canyons or run down a river in the night with stars sprinkled overhead and a silver spray of water all around. As far as they know, I never left.

  “This is your story,” the Rising officer said to me before they sent me on into Central. “This is what you say when people ask where you’ve been.”

  He handed me a sheet of paper. I looked down at the printed words:

  The Officers f
ound me in the forest in Tana, near my work camp. I don’t remember anything about my last evening and night there. All I know is that I ended up in the woods somehow.

  I looked back up. “We have an Officer who is prepared to corroborate your story and claim she found you in the woods,” he said.

  “And the idea is that I’d been given a red tablet,” I said. “To forget that I saw them take the other girls away on the air ships.”

  He nodded. “Apparently one of the girls caused a disturbance. They had to give red tablets to several others who woke up and saw her.”

  Indie, I thought. She’s the one who ran and screamed. She knew what was happening to us.

  “So we’ll say that you went missing after that,” he said. “They lost track of you for a moment, and you wandered off while the red tablet was taking effect. Then they found you days later.”

  “How did I survive?” I asked.

  He tapped the paper in front of me.

  I was lucky. My mother had told me how to identify poisonous plants. So I foraged. In November, there are still plants on the ground that can be used for food.

  In a way, that part of the story was true. My mother’s words did come back to help me survive, but it was in the Carving, not in the forest.

  “Your mother worked in an Arboretum,” he said. “And you’ve been in the woods before.”

  “Yes,” I said. It was the forest on the Hill, not the one in Tana; but hopefully it would be close enough.

  “Then it all adds up,” he said.

  “Unless the Society questions me too closely,” I said.

  “They won’t,” he said. “Here’s a silver box and a tablet container to replace the ones you lost.”

  I took them from him and opened the tablet container. One blue tablet, one green. And one red, to replace the one I’d supposedly taken at an Official’s command in Tana. I thought about those other girls who really did take the tablet; most wouldn’t remember Indie, how she cried out. She’d have disappeared. Like me.

  “Remember,” he said, “you can recall finding yourself alone in the forest and the time you spent foraging for food. But you’ve forgotten everything that really happened in the twelve hours before you went on the air ship.”

  “What do you want me to do once I’m in Central?” I asked him. “Why did they tell me I could best serve the Rising from within the Society?”

  I could see him sizing me up, deciding if I really could do whatever it is that he wanted. “Central is where the Society planned to send you for your final work position,” he said. I nodded. “You’re a sorter. A good one, according to the Society’s data. Now that they think you’ve been rehabilitated in the work camp, they’ll be glad to have you back, and the Rising can make use of that.” And then he told me what kind of sort to look for, and what I should do when it happened. “You’ll need to be patient,” he said. “It may take some time.”

  Which was a wise piece of advice, it seems, since I haven’t sorted anything out of the ordinary yet. Not that I remember, anyway. But that’s all right. I don’t need the Rising to tell me how to fight the Society.

  Whenever I can, I write letters. I’ve made them in many ways: a K out of strands of grass; an X with two sticks crossed over each other, their wet bark black against a silvery metal bench in the greenspace near my workplace. I set out a little ring of stones in the shape of an O, like an open mouth, on the ground. And of course I write the way Ky taught me, too.

  Wherever I go, I look to see if there are new letters. So far, no one else is writing, or if they are, I haven’t seen it. But it will happen. Maybe even now there’s someone charring sticks the way Ky told me he did, preparing to write the name of someone they love.

  I know that I’m not the only one doing these things, committing small acts of rebellion. There are people swimming against the current and shadows moving slowly in the deep. I have been the one looking up when something dark passed before the sun. And I have been the shadow itself, slipping along the place where earth and water meet the sky.

  Day after day, I push the rock that the Society has given me up the hill, over and over again. Inside me are the real things that give me strength—my thoughts, the small stones of my own choosing. They tumble in my mind, some polished from frequent turning, some new and rough, some that cut.

  Satisfied that the poems don’t show, I walk down the hallway of my tiny apartment and into the foyer. I’m about to open the door when a knock sounds on the other side of it, and I start a little. Why would anyone be here now? Like many of the others who have a work assignment but who have not yet celebrated their Marriage Contract, I live alone. And, just like in the Boroughs, we aren’t encouraged to visit one another’s residences.

  An Official stands at the door, smiling pleasantly. There’s only one, which is strange. Officials almost always travel in groups of three. “Cassia Reyes?” she asks.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “I’ll need you to come with me,” she says. “You’re required at the sorting center for extra work hours.”

  But I’m supposed to see Ky tonight. It seemed that things were, at last, aligning for us—he was finally assigned to come to Central, and the message he sent telling me where we could meet arrived just in time. Sometimes, it takes weeks instead of days for our letters to go through, but this one came quickly. Impatience floods over me as I look at the Official, with her white uniform and her impassive face and her neat insignia. Don’t bother with us anymore, I think. Use the computers. Let them do all the work. But that goes against one of the Society’s key tenets, one that they tell to us from the time that we’re small: Technology can fail us as it did the societies before ours.

  And then I realize that the Official’s request might hide something more—could it be time for me to do what the Rising has asked? Her face remains smooth and calm. It’s impossible to tell what she knows or for whom she really works. “Others will meet us at the air-train stop,” she says.

  “Will it take long?” I ask her.

  She doesn’t answer.

  As we ride in the air train, we pass by the lake, dark now in the distance.

  No one goes to the lake here. It still suffers from pre-Society pollution and isn’t safe for walking in or drinking. The Society tore out most of the docks and wharves where people long ago used to keep boats. But, when it’s light, you can see that there are three piers left in one spot, jutting out into the water like three fingers, all equal length, all reaching. Months ago, when I first came here, I told Ky of this place and that it would be a good spot to meet, something he could see from above that I have noticed from below.

  And now, on the other side of the air train, the dome of Central’s City Hall comes into view, a too-close moon that never sets. In spite of myself, I have a little stirring of pride and hear the notes of the Anthem of the Society singing in my mind whenever I see the familiar shape of a Hall.

  No one goes to Central’s City Hall.

  There’s a tall white wall around the Hall and the other buildings nearby. The wall has been here since before I came. “Renovations,” everyone says. “The Society will open the stillzone back up again soon.”

  I’m fascinated by the stillzone, and by its name, which no one seems to be able to explain to me. I’m also intrigued by what’s on the other side of the barrier, and sometimes after work I take a small detour on my way home so that I can walk next to the smooth, white surface. I keep thinking of how many paintings Ky’s mother could have put along the length of the wall, which curves back in what I imagine is a perfect circle. I’ve never followed it all the way around, so I can’t be sure.

  Those I’ve asked are uncertain about how long the barrier has been here—all they say is that it went up sometime in the last year. They don’t seem to remember why it’s really here, and if they do, they’re not
saying.

  I want to know what’s behind those walls.

  I want so much: happiness, freedom, love. And I want a few other tangible things, too.

  Like a poem, and a microcard. I’m still waiting for two trades to come in. I traded two of my poems for the end of another, one that began I did not reach Thee and tells of a journey. I found the beginning of it in the Carving and knew I had to have the end.

  And the other trade is even more expensive, even more risky—I traded seven poems to bring Grandfather’s microcard from my parents’ house in Keya here to me. I asked the trader to approach Bram first with an encoded note. I knew Bram could decipher it. After all, he’d figured out the games I made for him on the scribe when he was younger. And I thought he’d be more likely to send the microcard than either of my parents.

  Bram. I’d like to find a silver watch for him to replace the one the Society took. But so far the price has been too high. I rejected a trade for a watch earlier today at the air-train stop on my way to work. I will pay what’s fair, but not too much. Perhaps this is what I learned in the canyons: What I am, what I’m not, what I’ll give, and what I won’t.

  The sorting center is filled to capacity. We are some of the last to arrive, and an Official ushers us to our empty cubicles. “Please begin immediately,” she says, and no sooner have I sat down in my chair than words appear on the screen: Next sort: exponential pairwise matching.

  I keep my eyes on the screen and my expression neutral. Inside, I feel a little tick of excitement, a tiny skip in the beat of my heart.

  This is the kind of sort the Rising told me to look for.

  The workers around me give no indication that the sort means anything to them. But I’m sure there are others in the room looking at these words and wondering Is it finally time?

  Wait for the actual data, I remind myself. I’m not just looking out for a sort; I’m also looking out for a particular set of information, which I’m supposed to mismatch.