Crossed

  Everyone sleeps in the little house. Eli, Cassia, Indie. I stay awake and listen. Their breathing makes it sound as though the house itself breathes in and out but of course the walls hold still. I know Hunter won’t harm us but I can’t rest. I have to keep watch.

  Sometime near the approach of dawn, when I’m standing in the doorway looking out, I hear a sound from the other side of the room. Someone’s awake.

  Indie. She comes toward me.

  “What do you want?” I ask, trying to keep my tone even. I recognized Indie the moment I saw her. She is like me—a survivor. I don’t trust her.

  “Nothing,” Indie says. In the silence I hear her shift the pack. She never lets it out of sight.

  “What are you hiding in there?” I ask.

  “There’s nothing to hide,” she says, an edge to her voice. “Everything in here belongs to me.” She pauses. “Why don’t you want to join the Rising?”

  I don’t answer. We stand in silence for a little while. Indie pulls her pack over her shoulder and holds it tightly against her chest. She seems far away. I am too. Part of me is back with Cassia under the stars in the Carving. On the Hill with the wind. Back in the Borough when I was young, I never would have believed any of this could happen. I never dreamed I could steal so much from the Society.

  I hear someone stirring. Cassia.

  “She dreams about Xander,” Indie whispers behind me. “I’ve heard her call his name.”

  I tell myself that the scraps Xander hid in the tablets don’t matter. Cassia knew Xander and she still chose me. And the scraps won’t last. The port paper deteriorates so quickly. They’ll turn to flakes as delicate as snow. As spent and silent as ash.

  I can’t lose her now.

  Lived in the Outer Provinces for much of his life.

  Peers listed Ky Markham’s name as the student they most admired 0.00% of the time.

  No one was ever going to get a list about me.

  And no one who loves someone else would want that person to have a Match like me.

  Does loving someone mean you want them to be safe? Or that you want them to be able to choose?

  “What do you want?” I ask Indie.

  “I want to know Xander’s secret,” Indie says.

  “What do you mean?”

  In answer she holds out a scrap of paper. “Cassia dropped this,” Indie says. “I didn’t give it back.”

  I know I shouldn’t take the scrap but I do. Careful to keep the light away from Cassia and Eli, I switch on my flashlight to read the paper:

  Has a secret to tell his Match when he sees her again.

  A line like that would never be included on Xander’s official microcard. He added something new. “How did he do it?” I ask in spite of myself, as though Indie would know. The Society carefully monitors all typing and printing. Did he risk using a port at school? At home?

  “He must be very smart,” Indie says.

  “He is,” I say.

  “So what’s the secret?” Indie asks, leaning closer.

  I shake my head. “What makes you think I’d know?” I do know and I’m not telling.

  “You and Xander were friends,” Indie says. “Cassia told me so. And I think you know a lot more than you say.”

  “About what?” I ask.

  “Everything,” she says.

  “I think the same about you,” I say. “You’re hiding something.”

  I shine the flashlight full on her and she blinks. In the light she looks almost blindingly beautiful. Her hair is a color that isn’t seen very often, a fire color of red and gold. And she’s tall and fine-featured and strong. Wild. She wants to survive, but there’s an element of unpredictability about how she’ll do it that keeps me on edge. “I want to know the secret,” she says. “And how to find the Rising. I think you know the answers. You won’t tell Cassia, and I think I know why.”

  I shake my head but don’t speak. I let the silence hang between us. She can fill it if she chooses.

  For an instant I think she will. Then she turns away and walks back to the spot where she slept. She doesn’t look at me again.

  After a moment I walk back to the door and steal outside. I open my hand to the wind and let the scrap blow away into the last of the night.

  CHAPTER 30

  CASSIA

  On the wall across from the angels, there is a very different painting. I did not notice it before, so intent was I on the picture of the angels. The others all sleep; even Ky has slumped over near the door where he insisted on keeping watch.

  I climb out of the bed and try to decide what the painting represents. It has curves, angles, and shapes, but I don’t know what it could be. None of the Hundred look like this. They are all clearly people, places, things. After a few moments, I hear Ky move at the other end of the room. Our eyes meet across the gray expanse of floor and the huddled dark shapes of Indie and Eli. Silently, Ky rises to his feet and comes to stand next to me. “Did you sleep enough?” I whisper.

  “No,” he says, leaning in and closing his eyes.

  When he opens them again neither of us have words or breath left.

  We both look at the painting. After a few moments, I ask, “Is it a canyon?” but even as I name the picture, I realize it could be something else. Someone’s flesh cut open, a sunset striping above a river.

  “Love,” he says, finally.

  “Love?” I ask.

  “Yes,” he says.

  “Love,” I repeat softly, still puzzled.

  “I think ‘love’ when I look at it,” Ky says, trying to explain. “You might think something else. It’s like the Pilot in your poem—everyone thinks something different when they hear that name.”

  “What do you think of when you hear my name?” I ask him.

  “Many things,” Ky whispers, sending rivers of chills along the length of my skin. “This. The Hill. The Carving. Places we’ve been together.” He pulls back and I feel him looking at me and I hold my breath because I know there is so much he sees. “Places we haven’t been together,” he says, “yet.” His voice sounds fierce as he speaks of the future.

  We both want to move, to be outside. Indie and Eli still sleep and we don’t disturb them; they’ll be able to see us from the window when they awake.

  This canyon that I earlier thought so barren and dry has surprising amounts of green, especially near the stream. Watercress laces the edges of the marshy banks; moss jewels the red rocks along the river; swamp grass tangles green blades with gray. I step against the ice at the edge of the stream and it breaks, reminding me of the time I shattered the glass that protected my dress fragment back in the Borough. Looking down at where I’ve pressed my foot, I see that even the ice I’ve broken is green under the white. It is exactly the color of my dress at the Match Banquet. I noticed none of this green the first time through the canyon; I was so fixed on finding a sign of Ky.

  I look up at him walking along the stream and notice the ease of his walk, even when he steps in places where shifting sands have drifted across the path. He looks back at me and stops and smiles.

  You belong here, I think. You move differently than you did in the Society. Everything about the township seems right for him—the beautiful, unusual paintings, the stark independence of the town.

  All that’s missing are people for him to help lead. He only has the few of us.

  “Ky,” I say as we reach the edge of the stand of trees.

  He stops. His eyes are all for me, and his lips have touched mine, and brushed my neck, my hands, the insides of my wrists, each finger. While we stood kissing that night under the cold burning stars and held on tight, it did not feel that we were stealing time. It felt that it was all our own.

  “I know,” he says.

  We hold each other’s eyes for another long moment before we duck under the branches of the trees. They have weathered gray bark and drifts of brown leaves underneath that move and sigh with the canyon wind.

  As the leaves shi
ft, I see other flat gray stones on the ground like the one Hunter put down yesterday. I touch Ky’s arm. “Are these all—”

  “Places where people are buried,” he says. “Yes. It’s called a graveyard.”

  “Why didn’t they bury them higher?”

  “They needed that land for the living.”

  “But the books,” I say. “They stored those high and books aren’t living.”

  “The living still have use for books,” Ky says softly. “Not for bodies. If a graveyard floods, nothing is ruined that wasn’t already gone. It’s different with the library.”

  I crouch down to look at the stones. The places where people lie are marked in different ways. Names, dates, sometimes a line of verse. “What is this writing?” I ask.

  “It’s called an epitaph,” he says.

  “Who chooses it?”

  “It depends. Sometimes if the person knows they are dying, they choose it. Often it’s those left behind who have to choose something that fits the person’s life.”

  “That’s sad,” I say. “But beautiful.”

  Ky raises his eyebrows at me and I hurry to explain. “The deaths aren’t beautiful,” I say. “I mean the idea of the epitaph. The Society chooses what’s left of us when we die there. They say what goes on your history.” Still, I wish again that I had taken the time to view Grandfather’s microcard more closely before I left. But Grandfather did decide what was left of him as far as preservation goes: nothing.

  “Did they make stones like this in your family’s village?” I ask Ky, and as soon as I do I wish I hadn’t done it, wish I hadn’t asked for that part of the story yet.

  Ky looks at me. “Not for my parents,” he says. “There wasn’t time.”

  “Ky,” I say, but he turns away and walks down another row of stones. My hand feels cold now without his around it.

  I shouldn’t have said anything. Except for Grandfather, the people I have seen dead were not people I loved. It is as though I have peered down into a long dark canyon where I have not had to walk.

  As I move between the stones, careful not to step on them, I see that the Society and Hunter are right about the life expectancy out here. Most of the life spans don’t reach eighty years. And other children lie in the ground, too, besides the one Hunter buried.

  “So many children died here,” I say out loud. I’d hoped the girl yesterday was an exception.

  “Young people die in the Society too,” Ky says. “Remember Matthew.”

  “Matthew,” I repeat, and as I hear his name, I suddenly remember Matthew, really remember him, think of him by name for the first time in years instead of as just the first Markham boy, the one who died in a rare tragedy at the hands of an Anomaly.

  Matthew. Four years older than Xander and me; so much older as to be untouchable, unreachable. He was a nice boy who said hello to us in the street but was years ahead of us. He carried tablets and went to Second School. The boy I remember, now that his name has been given back to me, was enough like Ky to be his cousin; but taller, bigger, less quick and smooth.

  Matthew. It was almost as though his name died with him, as though naming the loss would have made it more real.

  “But not as many,” I say. “Just him.”

  “He’s the only one you remember.”

  “Were there others?” I ask, shocked.

  A sound from behind makes me turn; it’s Eli and Indie closing the door to our borrowed house. Eli lifts a hand to wave and I wave back. The light is full in the sky now; Hunter will be here soon.

  I look down at the stone he placed yesterday and reach out and put my hand on the name carved there. SARAH. She had few years; she died at five. Under the dates is a line of writing, and with a chill I realize that it sounds like a line from a poem:

  SUDDENLY ACROSS THE JUNE A WIND WITH FINGERS GOES

  I reach for Ky’s hand and hold on as tight as I can. So that the cold wind around us won’t try to steal him from me with its greedy fingers, its hands that take things from times that should be spring.

  CHAPTER 31

  KY

  When Hunter comes to meet us he has a canteen of water and a pile of ropes slung over his shoulder. I wonder what he intends. Before I can ask, Eli speaks.

  “Was she your sister?” Eli points to the newly placed stone.

  Hunter doesn’t glance back down at the grave. The smallest flicker of emotion crosses his face. “You saw her? How long were you watching?”

  “A long time,” Eli says. “We wanted to talk to you but we waited until you were finished.”

  “That’s very kind of you,” Hunter says flatly.

  “I’m sorry,” Eli says. “Whoever she was, I’m sorry.”

  “She was my daughter,” Hunter says. Cassia’s eyes widen. I know what she’s thinking: His daughter? But he’s so young, only twenty-two or twenty-three. Certainly not twenty-nine, which is the youngest someone with a five-year-old child can be in the Society. But this is not the Society.

  Indie’s the first to break the silence. “Where are we going?” she asks Hunter.

  “To another canyon,” Hunter says. “Can all of you climb?”

  When I was small my mother tried to teach me the colors. “Blue,” she said, pointing to the sky. And “blue” again, the second time pointing to the water. She told me I shook my head because I could see that sky blue was not always the same as water blue.

  It took me a long time—until I lived in Oria—to use the same word for all the shades of a color.

  I remember this as we walk through the canyon. The Carving is orange and red, but you’d never see this kind of orange and red back in the Society.

  Love has different shades. Like the way I loved Cassia when I thought she’d never love me. The way I loved her on the Hill. The way I love her now that she came into the canyon for me. It’s different. Deeper. I thought I loved her and wanted her before, but as we walk through the canyon together I realize this could be more than a new shade. A whole new color.

  Hunter stops ahead of us and gestures up at the cliff. “Here,” he says. “This is the best place.” He begins testing the rock and looking around.

  I put up my hand to block the sun so I can better see the climb above us. Cassia glances at me and does the same. “This is where Indie and I came back over,” she says in recognition.

  Hunter nods. “It’s the best place to climb.”

  “There’s a cave in that other canyon,” Indie tells Hunter.

  “I know,” Hunter says. “It’s called the Cavern. The question I need you to answer is about what’s inside.”

  “We didn’t go in,” Cassia says. “It’s sealed tight.”

  Hunter shakes his head. “It looks like that. But my people have used it since we first came to the Carving. After the Society took it we found a way to get back in.”

  Cassia looks puzzled. “But then you know—”

  Hunter interrupts her. “We know what’s there. We don’t know why.” He looks at Cassia, his gaze unnerving in its assessment. “I think you might know why.”

  “Me?” she asks, sounding startled.

  “You’ve been part of the Society longer than the others,” Hunter says. “I can tell.” Cassia flushes and brushes her hand down her arm, as if she wants to remove some taint of the Society.

  Hunter glances over at Eli. “Do you think you can do this?”

  Eli stares up at the cliff. “Yes,” he says.

  “Good,” Hunter says. “It’s not a particularly technical climb. Even the Society could do it if they tried.”

  “Why didn’t they?” Indie asks.

  “They did,” Hunter says. “But this was one of our best-guarded areas. Anyone trying to climb in we cut down. And you can’t fly an air ship into the canyon. It’s too narrow. They had to come in on foot and we had the advantage.” He finishes another knot and hooks the rope through one of the metal bores on the wall. “It worked for a long time.”

  But now the farmers are
gone across the plain. Or dead on top of the Carving. It’s only a matter of time before the Society realizes that and decides to come in.

  No one knows that better than Hunter. We have to hurry.

  “We used to climb everywhere,” Hunter says. “The Carving was all ours.” He looks down at the rope in his hands. I think he’s remembering again that everyone is gone. You wouldn’t think you can forget but sometimes you can—for a moment or two. I’ve never been able to decide if I think that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Forgetting lets you live without the pain for a moment but remembering hits hard.

  It all hurts. Sometimes—when I’m weak—I wish that the red tablet did work on me.

  “We saw bodies on top of the Carving,” Indie says. She looks up at the climb, assessing it. “They had blue marks like you. Were they farmers, too? And why did they go up if it was better to wait for the Society down below?” In spite of myself I admire her. She’s bold to ask Hunter those questions. I’ve been wanting to know the answers too.

  “That place on top is the only area wide and flat enough for the Society to land their ships,” Hunter says. “Lately, for whatever reason, they’d become more agressive about entering the Carving, and we couldn’t guard all of the canyons. Only the one where our township is.” He makes another knot, tightens the rope. “For the first time in the history of the farmers, we had a split we couldn’t resolve. Some of us wanted to go up and fight so the Society would leave the canyons alone. Others wanted to escape.”

  “Which did you want?” Indie says.

  Hunter doesn’t answer.

  “So those who crossed the plain,” Indie says, pushing for more information, “did they go to join the Rising?”

  “I think that’s enough,” Hunter says. The expression on his face keeps even Indie from asking more. She closes her mouth and Hunter hands her a rope. “You have the most climbing experience,” he says. It’s not a question. He can tell somehow.

  She nods and almost smiles as she looks up at the rocks. “I used to sneak away sometimes. There was a good spot near our house.”