“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
Outside 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.”