It’s clear that Oker’s won. There are far more stones in his trough than in Leyna’s. But Colin doesn’t announce that yet. Instead, he stands back as some of the farmers come forward, holding buckets of water. Their arms are marked in blue. Anna follows them.
“The farmers vote with stones, too,” Eli whispers to me, “but they also use the water. The villagers have added it as part of their voting ceremony now.”
Anna stands in front of the crowd and speaks to us. “Like the floods that came through our canyon home,” she says, “we acknowledge the power of our choice, and we follow the water.”
The farmers pour the water into both troughs at the same time.
The water rushes down, floods flashing through. Some of it slips through the rocks at the end. Even Oker’s trough lets some out. But it has the most stones; it holds the most water.
“The votes have been cast,” Colin says. “We’ll try Oker’s cure first.”
I slip through the crowd as fast as the water through the rocks, racing for the infirmary to protect Ky from the cure.
When I push open the door to the building, I don’t understand what’s happening. It’s raining, inside. I hear a sound like water hitting the floorboards.
The bags are all unhooked, and they drip onto the floor.
All of them, not only Ky’s. I go straight to Ky. He takes a shallow, watery breath.
The line has been pulled out and then looped neatly over the pole next to his bed. It drips out onto the floor. Drip. Drip. Drip.
And it’s happening to everyone else. For a moment, I don’t know what to do. Where are all the medics? Did they leave for the vote? I don’t know how to hook Ky’s line back up.
I hear a movement at the other end of the room and I turn. It’s Hunter, down near the patients who the Pilot first brought to the village. Hunter stands there, a dark shadow at the back, and he doesn’t move. “Hunter,” I say, walking toward him slowly, “what happened?”
I hear someone at the door behind me and I turn to see who it is.
Anna.
Her face is stricken. She stops a few feet away from me and stares at Hunter. He doesn’t look away, and his eyes are full of pain.
Then I notice the crumpled bodies of the medics near him. Are they dead?
“You tried to kill everyone,” I say to Hunter, but as soon as the words are out of my mouth, I know I’m wrong. If he wanted to kill them, it would have been easy while we were all gone.
“No,” Hunter says. “I wanted to make it fair.”
I don’t understand what he means. I thought I could trust him, and I was wrong. Hunter sits down and puts his head in his hands, and I hear the sounds of Anna crying and the bags dripping onto the floor.
“Keep him away from Ky,” I say to Anna, my voice harsh. She nods. Hunter is much stronger than she is, but he looks broken now. I don’t know how long that will last, though, and I need to find people to help the still. I need Xander.
He and Ky are the only people here that I can trust. How could I forget?
CHAPTER 41
XANDER
Oker locks the doors behind us in the lab. “I need you to do something for me,” he says, picking up the bag he used when we dug camassia bulbs and sliding it over his shoulder.
“Where are you going?” I ask.
Oker peers out the window. “I have to leave now. They’re all still distracted.”
“Wait,” I say. “Won’t you need me to help you?” He can’t dig on his own. Is that what he has in mind?
“I want you to stay here,” Oker says. He reaches into his pockets and takes out the metal ring with the keys to the cabinets where he’s locked the camassia cure. “Destroy all of the cures. I’ll be back with something else we can use.”
“But you won the vote,” I say.
“This cure won’t work,” Oker says. “But now I know what will.”
“We don’t have to destroy everything,” I say.
“Yes, we do,” Oker says. “The people voted on this cure. They’re not going to take a substitute. Do it. Dump it all down the sink. Get rid of the cures Leyna had me make, too. They’re all useless.”
I don’t move because I can’t believe what he’s saying. “You were so sure about the camassia. We can still try it on some of them.”
“It won’t work,” Oker spits. “We’ll waste time. We’ll waste lives. They’re already dying. Do what I tell you.”
I don’t know if I can. We worked so hard on the cure, and he was so sure.
“You think I’m the Pilot, don’t you,” Oker says, watching me. “Do you want to know what the real Pilot is?”
I’m not sure that I do anymore.
“We used to laugh at the Pilot stories back when I worked in the Society,” Oker says. “How could people think that someone was going to come from the sky to save them? Or from the water? Stupid stories. Crazy. Only weak-minded people would need to believe in something like that.” He drops the keys to the cabinet into my hand. “I told you the Society named the viruses.”
I nod.
“When we found out that we’d be dropping it from the sky and sending it on the water, we thought it would be funny to name the Plague after the people’s stories. So we called the Plague the ‘Pilot.’”
The Plague is the Pilot.
Oker didn’t only help engineer the cure. First, he helped create the Plague. The Plague that is now mutated and turning everyone still.
“You see,” Oker says, “I have to find a cure.”
I do see. It’s the only thing that can redeem him. “I’ll destroy the camassia cure,” I say. “But before you go, tell me: What plant is it you’re going to find?”
Oker doesn’t answer. He walks over to the door and glances over at me. I realize he can’t let go of being the only pilot for the cure. “I’ll be back,” he says. “Lock the door behind me.”
And then he’s gone.
Oker believes I’ll do what he told me to do. He trusts me. Do I trust him? Is this the wrong cure? Would it set us too far back to try it out?
He’s right that we’re out of time.
I unlock the cabinet. Did the Rising know the Plague was once called the Pilot? How were we ever going to succeed against these odds?
The Rising was never going to work.
I don’t know if I can do this, I think.
What can’t you do, Xander, I ask myself.
Can’t keep going.
You’re not even still. You have to keep going.
I do the right thing. I don’t give up. I do it all with a smile on my face. I’ve always believed that I’m a good person.
What if I’m not?
There’s no time to think like that now. I trusted Oker and when it comes down to it, I trust myself to make the right call.
I open the cabinet and pull out a tray of cures. When I unseal the first one and pour it down the sink, I find myself biting down so hard on the inside of my lip that I taste blood.
CHAPTER 42
KY
It’s raining. So I should remember.
Something.
Someone.
The water is gathering inside of me.
Who do I remember?
I don’t know.
I’m drowning.
I remember to breathe.
I remember to breathe.
I remember.
I.
CHAPTER 43
CASSIA
People still mill about in the village circle, talking about the result of the vote, so I hurry around the back of the buildings at the edge of the village to try to get to Xander. It’s dark and dank here, hemmed in by trees and mountain, and as I come up behind the research lab, I almost step on something twisted in the mud. Not something, someone—
Oker is here.
He’s lying on the ground, his face caught in a grimace or a smile; it’s hard to tell with his skin stretched tight over his old sharp bones.
“No, no,” I say, and I stop and bend down to touch him.No air comes out of his mouth and when I put my ear to his chest I don’t hear his heart beating, even though he is still warm. “Oker,” I whisper, and I look at his open eyes, and I see that one of his hands is muddy. Why? I wonder, irrationally, and then I see that he made something there in the mud, a shape that seems familiar.
It looks like he pressed his knuckles into the earth three times, making a sort of star.
I sit back on my heels, my knees dirty and my hands shaking. There’s nothing I can do for him. But if anyone can help Oker, it’s Xander.
I stand up and stagger the last few steps to the research lab, pleading, Xander, Xander, please be here.
The door is locked. I pound and pound and call out his name. When I stop to take a breath, I hear the villagers coming up the path on the other side of the building. Have they heard me?
“Xander,” I cry out again, and he opens the back door.
“I need you,” I say. “Oker’s dead. And Hunter disconnected all of the still.” I’m about to say more, but then Leyna and the others come around the back of the building and stop short.
“What has happened?” Leyna asks, looking down at Oker. Her face doesn’t change at all and I understand why, because this is beyond comprehension. Oker cannot be dead.
“It looks like a heart attack,” says one of the medics, his face ashen. He kneels in the mud next to Oker. They try to bring him back by breathing for him and pushing on his chest to get his heart beating again.
Nothing works. Leyna sits back on her heels, wiping her face with her hand. She’s muddy now. She pulls the bag from Oker’s shoulder and searches inside. The bag is empty, except for a dirty shovel and traces of soil. “What was he doing?” she asks Xander.
“He wanted to go find something,” Xander says. “He didn’t tell me what it was. He wouldn’t let me come with him.”
For a moment, it is completely silent. Everyone stares down at Oker. “The still in the infirmary,” I say. “They’ve all been unhooked.”
The medic looks up. “Are any of them dead?” he asks me.
“No,” I say. “But I don’t know how to start their lines again. Please. And you shouldn’t go alone. The medics there were attacked.”
Colin signals to several of the others, who then leave with the medic. Leyna stays behind, looking at Xander with the same flat expression she’s had since she first saw Oker.
I want to run to be with Ky. But I suddenly have a terrible feeling that Xander is the one in the most danger now, and I can’t leave him alone.
“Everything isn’t lost,” Leyna says. “Oker left us the cure.” This strikes me as funny, though nothing should in a moment like this. Minutes ago we were voting between Leyna’s plan and Oker’s, and now Leyna has come around to believing that we should do what Oker suggested. His death changed her mind.
I have to sort out what has happened with Xander, and I have to find out what can cure Ky, and why Hunter was letting patients go, and what Oker was trying to tell us with the star he made in the mud that the villagers have now trampled into oblivion and no one but me has seen.