Reached

“These are pictures of the flowers you wanted,” she says. “I’m sorry it took me so long. I had to make the colors. I just finished them now, so you’ll have to be careful not to smear the paints.”

I’m stunned that she did this, with everything else that must have been on her mind tonight, and I’m touched that she still believes me capable of sorting for the cure. “Thank you,” I say.

Under the flowers she has written their names.

Ephedra, paintbrush, mariposa lily.

And others, of course. Plants and flowers.

I’m crying, and I wish I weren’t. I wrote that lullaby for so many people. And now we may lose almost all of them. Hunter. Sarah. Ky. My mother. Xander. Bram. My father.

Ephedra, Anna wrote. Underneath she drew a spiky-looking bush with small, cone-like flowers. She painted it yellow and green.

Paintbrush. Red. This one I’ve seen, in the canyons.

Mariposa lily. It’s a beautiful white flower with red and yellow coloring deep down inside its three petals.

My hands know what I’ve seen before my mind does; I’m reaching into my pocket and pulling out the paper my mother sent, recognizing the meaning in its shape. I remember Indie’s wasp nest, how it had space inside, and I pull the edges of the paper out and then I know.

I hold a paper flower in my hand. My mother made this. She cut or tore the paper carefully so that three pieces fan out from the middle, like petals.

It is the same as the flower in the picture; white, three-petaled, the edges crimped in and pointed like a star. I realize that I also saw it printed in the earth.

This is what Oker was trying to find.

He saw me take out the paper flower when I put the voting stone inside.

Anna’s picture tells me that the name of this flower is mariposa lily. But I never heard my mother speak that name. And it’s not a newrose or an oldrose or a sprig of Queen Anne’s lace. What other flowers did she tell me about?

I’m back in the room in our house in Oria, where she showed me the blue satin square from the dress she wore to her Banquet. She’s recently returned from traveling out into different Provinces to investigate rogue crops for the Society. “The second grower had a crop I’d never seen before, of white flowers even more beautiful than the first,” she says. “Sego lilies, they called them. You can eat the bulb.”

“Anna,” I say, my heart racing, “does mariposa lily have another name?” If it does, that might account for the problem in the data. We’ve been counting this flower as two separate data points, but it was, in fact, a single variable.

“Yes,” Anna says, after a pause. “Some people call it the sego lily.”

I pick up the datapod and search for the name. There it is. The properties are all the same. One flower, reported under two different names. Now, with its names combined, it rises right to the top of potential ingredients. It was a critical, elemental mistake made by those gathering the data, but we should have noticed it earlier. How did I miss it before? How could I fail to recognize the name, when my mother had told it to me? You only heard it once, I remind myself, and that was long ago. “Where does it grow?” I ask.

“We should be able to find some not far from here,” Anna says. “It’s early in the season, but it could be in bloom.” She looks at the paper flower in my hand. “Did you make that?”

“No,” I say. “My mother did.”

It’s almost dark when we finally find them, in a little field away from the village and the path.

I drop down to my knees to look closer. I’ve never seen a flower so beautiful. It’s a simple white bloom, three curved petals coming out from a sparsely leaved stalk. It’s a little white banner, like my writing, not of surrender but of survival. I pull out the crumpled paper flower.

Though my hands shake, I can tell that it’s a match. This flower growing in the ground is the one my mother made before she went still.

The real thing is much more beautiful. But that doesn’t matter. I think of Ky’s mother, who painted water on stone, who believed the important thing was to create, not capture. Even though the paper lily isn’t a perfect rendering, it’s still a tribute to its beauty that my mother tried.

I don’t know whether she intended the flower as art or message, but I choose to take it as both.

“I think,” I say, “that this might be the cure.”

CHAPTER 46

XANDER

I can’t see Cassia herself, but the solar-cell lamps cast her shadow on the prison wall. Her voice carries from the entryway to my cell. “We think we have found a possible cure,” she tells the guards. “We need Xander to make something for us.”

The guard laughs. “I don’t think so,” he says.

“I’m not asking you to release Xander,” Cassia says. “We just need to give him the equipment and have him prepare the cure.”

“And then what are you going to do with it?” another guard asks.

“We’re going to give it to one patient,” she says. “Our patient. Ky.”

“We can’t go against Colin,” one of the guards says. “He’s our leader. And we’d lose our chance at the Otherlands.”

“This is your chance at the Otherlands,” Cassia says. Her voice is low, quiet, full of conviction. “This is what Oker was going to find.” She pulls something out of her bag. “Mariposa lily.” I can see from her shadow that she’s holding a flower. “You eat the bulb, don’t you? You eat it when it blooms in the summer, and store it for the winter.”

“Are they already in bloom?” one of them asks. “How many did you pull up?”

“Only a few,” Cassia says.

Another shadow moves into view and I hear Anna’s voice. “We had these flowers in the Carving, too,” Anna says. “We also used them for food. I know how to gather them so that they’ll come back again next year.”

“What does it matter if they take all the plants, anyway?” one of the guards says to the other. “If we’re gone to the Otherlands, we won’t need to harvest.”

“No,” Anna says. “Even if everyone is gone, the flower must come back. We cannot take it all and leave nothing.”

“The bulbs are so small,” another guard says dubiously. “I don’t see how it could be a cure.”

Cassia comes into view, and I see that she holds the real flower and the paper that her mother sent her. They’re a perfect match. “Oker saw me take out this flower—the paper one—during the vote. I believe this is the flower he was going to find.” She sounds confident that she’s sorted everything. She could be right: Oker did change his mind right after he saw her take out the paper.

“Please,” Cassia says to the guards. “Let us try.” Her voice is gentle, persuasive. “You can feel it, can’t you?” she asks, and now she sounds wistful. “The Otherlands are getting farther and farther away.”

Everything goes quiet as we realize that Cassia’s right. I do feel the Otherlands receding for me, like the real world probably did for Lei and Ky when they went still. I feel everything slipping out of my grasp. I’ve followed the Pilot, Oker, and Cassia, but things didn’t go as I’d hoped. I thought I’d see a rebellion, find a cure, and have someone love me back.

What if they all left? What if everyone else flew to the Otherlands or went still and I was here alone? Would I keep going? I would. I can’t seem to treat this life I have as anything but the only thing.

“All right,” one of the guards says. “But hurry.”

Anna has thought of everything. She’s brought equipment from the lab: a syringe, a mortar and pestle, clean water that’s been boiled and treated, and some of Oker’s base mixtures, with a list of the ingredients in each. “How did you know what we’d need?” I ask her.

“I didn’t,” she says. “Tess and Noah did. They think it’s possible that Oker changed his mind. They’re not sure they believe you, but they’re not sure that they don’t, either.”

“They gave all of this to you?” I ask.

She nods. “But if anyone asks, we stole it. We don’t want to get them in trouble.”

Cassia holds the flashlight for me while I scrub my hands with the sterilizing solution. I use the edge of the pestle to split the bulb in half. “It’s beautiful,” Cassia says.

The inside of the bulb looks white and luminescent like the camassia bulbs. I grind it down, pulverizing the bulb until it’s a paste. Then Anna hands me a tube. Cassia watches and I find myself hesitating. Maybe it’s the memory of the night back in Oria when I traded for the blue tablets. I took blood when I shouldn’t have, and when I did, I implied promises that no one was in a position to keep. I did exactly what the Society and the Rising have done—I took advantage of people’s fears so that I could have something I wanted.

Am I doing that again by making this cure? I look at Cassia. She trusts me. And she shouldn’t. I killed that boy in the Carving with the blue tablets. I didn’t do it on purpose, but if it wasn’t for me, he would never have had the tablets in the first place.

I haven’t let myself think about this, even though I’ve known about it since we came in on the ship. Panic and bile rise together in my throat and I want to run away from what I’ve been asked to do. I can’t make a cure: I’ve made the wrong call too many times.

“You know that I can’t guarantee that this will work,” I tell Cassia. “I’m not a pharmic. I might not put in the right amount, or there might be a reacting agent in the base that I don’t know about—”

“There are a lot of ways it could go wrong,” she agrees. “I might not have found the right ingredient. But I think that I have. And I know you can make the cure.”

“Why?” I ask.

“You always come through for the people who need you,” she says, and her voice sounds sad. Like she knows this is going to cost me but she’s asking me to do it anyway and it breaks her heart.

“Please,” she says. “One more time.”

CHAPTER 47

CASSIA

Inside the infirmary, Anna distracts the medics while I inject the cure into Ky’s line. It doesn’t take long; Xander told me how to do this. Before, I might have been afraid to try, but after seeing Xander compound a cure in a prison cell and Ky labor to breathe on through the stillness, there is no room left for my own fears.

I cover the needle back up and slide it and the empty vial that held the cure into my sleeve, next to the poems I always carry. As I sit down next to Ky, I pick up the datapod. I pretend to keep sorting, though my eyes are really on Ky, watching, waiting. He is taking the biggest risk; it’s his veins the cure runs through. But we all have so much to lose.

I have sometimes seen the three of us as separate, discrete points, and of course we are that, each individuals. But Ky and Xander and I all have to believe in one another to keep each other safe. In the end, I had to trust Xander to make a cure for Ky, and Ky trusted us to bring him back, and Xander trusted my sorting, and around and around we go, a circle, the three of us, connected, always, in the turning of days and the keeping of promises over and over again.