Her smile widens. “This whole situation. The Plague. Its mutation. You being here now.”
“Tell me,” I say. “I’d like to be in on the joke.” I keep my voice easy, conversational, but I’ve seen too many still to think that anything about what’s happened to them is funny.
“You all called us Anomalies,” Leyna says. “Not good enough to live among you. Not good enough to marry you. And now you need us to save you.”
I smile back at her. “True,” I say. I lower my voice. I’m not entirely sure that Oker is asleep. “So,” I say to Leyna, “you’ve asked me plenty of questions. Let me ask you one or two.”
“Of course,” she says, her eyes flickering. She’s enjoying this.
“Is there any chance at all you can find a cure?”
“Of course,” she says again, perfectly confident. “It’s only a matter of time. You’ll be helpful to us. I won’t lie. But we’d have found the cure without you. You’ll just help us speed up the process, which is valuable, of course. The Pilot’s not going to take us to the Otherlands if too many people die before we can save them.”
“What if your immunity provides no clues?” I ask. “What if it turns out to be a matter of genetics?”
“It’s not,” she says. “We know that. The people in the village come from many different places. Some came generations ago, some more recently. The Pilot doesn’t want us to include the recent arrivals in the data, so we don’t, but we’re all immune. It must be environmental.”
“Still,” I say, “an immunity and a cure aren’t the same thing. You might not figure out how to bring people back. Maybe you’ll only find out how to keep them from getting the virus in the first place.”
“If so,” Leyna says, “that’s still an extremely valuable discovery.”
“But only if you make it in time,” I say. “You can’t immunize people if they’ve already gotten the virus. So we’re very useful to you, actually.”
I hear a snort from the corner. Oker stands up and walks over toward us.
“Congratulations,” Oker says to me. “You’re not just a Society boy after all. I’d been wondering.”
“Thank you,” I say.
“You were a physic in the Society, weren’t you?” Oker asks.
“I was,” I say.
He waves one knotted hand in my direction. “Assign him to my lab when you’re done,” he tells Leyna.
She doesn’t like it, I can tell, but she nods. “All right,” she says. It’s a sign of a good leader when they know the most important player in their game, and if Oker is it, she should make sure he has what he needs to try to win.
It takes them almost all night to finish questioning me. “You should get some rest,” Leyna says. “I’ll show you where you’ll sleep.”
She walks with me through the village and I hear the crickets singing. Their music sounds different up here than it did in the Borough, like it matters more. There aren’t many other sounds to cover it up, so you have to listen.
“Did you grow up in this village?” I ask her. “It’s beautiful.”
“No,” Leyna says. “I used to live in Camas. Those of us in the Border Provinces were the last to go. They used to let us work at the Army base sometimes. We left for the mountains when the Society tried to gather in the last of the Anomalies and Aberrations.”
She looks off in the distance. “The Pilot was the one who warned us that we should go,” she says. “The Society wanted us all dead. Those who didn’t come along were picked up by the Society and sent out to the Outer Provinces to die.”
“So that’s why you trust the Pilot,” I say. “He warned you.”
“Yes,” she says. “And he’d been part of the vanishings. I don’t know if you’ve heard about them.”
“I have,” I say. “People who escaped from the Society and ended up either here or in the Otherlands.”
She nods.
“And no one has ever returned from the Otherlands?”
“Not yet,” she says. She stops at a building with bars on the windows. A guard stands at the door and nods to her. “I’m afraid this is the prison,” she says. “We don’t know you well enough to trust you on your own without supervision, so there are times when we will need to keep you here, especially at night. Some of the other people the Pilot brought have been less cooperative than you have. They’re here full-time.”
It makes sense. I’d do the same thing, if I were in charge of this situation. “And Cassia?” I ask. “Where will she stay?”
“She’ll have to sleep here, too,” Leyna says. “But we’ll come for you soon.” She gestures for the guard to take me inside.
“Wait,” I say. “I’m trying to understand.”
“I thought it was clear,” she says. “We don’t know you. We can’t trust you alone.”
“It’s not that,” I say. “It’s about the Otherlands, and why you want to go there. You’re not even sure that they exist.”
“They do,” she says.
Does she know something I don’t? It’s possible that she might not be telling me everything. Why would she? As she’s pointed out, she doesn’t know me and she can’t trust me yet. “But no one ever came back,” I say.
“People like you see that as evidence that the Otherlands aren’t real,” Leyna tells me. “People like me see it is evidence that it’s a place so wonderful no one would ever want to come back.”
CHAPTER 28
CASSIA
Where are you, Ky?
This is it, my greatest fear. What I’ve been afraid of ever since the Carving when I saw those people, dead, out under the sky. Someone I love is leaving me.
The lead sorter, Rebecca, is about my mother’s age. She has me complete a few test sorts. After she goes through my work, she smiles at me and tells me that I can start right away.
“You’ll find that the way we work here is different from what you’re used to,” she says. “In the Society, you sort alone. Here, you will need to talk to Oker and the medics about everything.” She puts the datapod down on the table. “If we make an error and leave something out, miss some pattern, then it could be critical.”
This will be different from any sorting I’ve done before. In the Society, we were not supposed to know what the data was attached to, what it really looked like; everything remained encoded.
“I’ve made a data set with the people in our village and those from the Carving who have lived outside of the Society their entire lives.”
I want to tell her that I know some of those who lived in the Carving—I want to find out how Eli and Hunter are doing. But right now I have to focus on the cure and on Ky and my family.
“We have information about diet, age, recreational habits, occupations, family histories,” Rebecca says. “Some of the data is corroborated by other sources, but most of it is self-reported.”
“So it’s not the most reliable data set,” I observe.
“No,” she says. “But it’s all we have. Commonalities are everywhere in the data, of course. But we’ve been able to narrow certain things down by extrapolating from what we have. For example, our data indicates an environmental or dietary exposure.”
“Do you want me to work on sorting the elements for the cure now?” I ask hopefully.
“I will,” Rebecca says, “but I have another project for you first. I need you to solve a constrained optimization problem.”
I think I already know what she means. It’s the problem that’s been on my mind since I realized there was no cure for the mutation. “You want me to find out how long it will be before the Rising starts unhooking people,” I say. “We need to know how much time we have.”
“Yes,” she says. “The Pilot won’t fly us out if there’s no one left to save. I want you to work on that while I continue sorting for the cure. Then you can help me.” She pushes a datapod across the table. “Here are the notes from Xander’s interview. They include information regarding rate of infection, rate at which the resources were being expended, and patient attributes. We have additional data from the Pilot about these same things.”
“I’m still missing some information,” I say. “I don’t know the initial quantity of the resources or the population of the Society as a whole.”
“You’ll have to extrapolate the initial quantity of resources from the rate of expenditure,” she says. “As for the population of the Provinces as a whole, the Pilot was able to give us an estimate of twenty-point-two million.”
“That’s all?” I ask, stunned. I thought the Society was much larger than that.
“Yes,” she says.
The Rising will be trying to figure out how to best allocate resources and personnel. People have to take care of the still, obviously. Others have to work to keep food coming through, to make sure the buildings in the Cities and Boroughs have power and water. And even if a small pocket of people is safe due to contracting the initial Plague, there are only so many of them, and they’re the ones who are going to have to care for everyone else.
I need to know how many of them are out there—how many people are likely to be immune. I will have to figure out how many people are likely to go still, what percentage of those sick the immune can reasonably keep alive, and how quickly that percentage will decrease.
“Oker’s estimate is that five to ten percent of the population is generally immune to any plague,” Rebecca says. “So there will be that group, as well as the very small group of people like your friend Xander, who were initially immune and then contracted the live virus at precisely the right time. You’ll need to take both of those groups into account.”
“All right,” I say. And, as I have had to do so often before, when I sort the data I must put Ky out of my mind. For a faltering, fragile moment, I want to leave this impossible task behind, let the numbers fall where they might, and walk over to the little room where Ky is and hold him, the two of us together in the mountains now after having come through the canyons.
That can happen, I tell myself. Only a little farther now. Like the journey in the I did not reach Thee poem:
We step like plush, we stand like snow—
The waters murmur now,
Three rivers and the hill are passed,
Two deserts and the sea!
Now Death usurps my premium
And gets the look at Thee.
But I will rewrite the last two lines. Death will not take the people I love. Our journey will end differently.
It takes me a long time, because I want to get it right.
“Are you finished?” Rebecca asks quietly.
For a moment I can’t look up from my result. Back in the Carving, I wished for a time like this, a collaboration with people who have lived out on the edges. Instead we found an empty village in a beautiful place, peopled only by papers and pages left in a cave, things treasured up and left behind.
