Crossed (3 page)

I keep my eyes down for a moment before looking up toward the port. Compose your face, your hands, your eyes. Look out at them so they cannot see into you.

“Cassia,” someone else says, a voice I know.

And then I look up, and I don’t believe what I see.

He’s here.

The port is blank, and he stands before me, real.

He’s here
.

Whole and healthy and unharmed.

Here
.

Not alone—an Official stands behind him—but still, he’s—

Here.

I put my red, mapped hands over my eyes because it’s too much to see.

“Xander,” I say.

CHATPER 3

KY

I
t’s been a month and a half since we left that boy in the water. Now I lie in the dirt and fire comes down from above.

It’s a song,
I tell myself, same as I always do. The bass sound of the heavy shots, the soprano of the screams, the tenor of my own fear. All part of the music.

Don’t try to run
. I told the others too, but new decoys never listen. They believe what the Society told them on the way out here:
Do your time in the villages and we’ll bring you home in six months. We’ll give you Citizen status again
.

No one lasts six months.

When I climb out, there will be black buildings and splintered gray sagebrush. Burned, fallen bodies strewn along the orange sandy earth.

And now there’s a break in the song and I swear. The air ships are on the move. I know what draws their fire.

Early this morning, boots crunched in the frost behind me. I didn’t look back to see who followed me to the edge of the village.

“What are you doing?” someone asked. I didn’t recognize the voice, but that didn’t mean much. They’re always sending new people out here to the villages from the camp. We die faster and faster these days.

I knew even before they pushed me onto that train back in Oria that the Society would never use us to fight. They have plenty of technology and trained Officers for that. People who aren’t Aberrations or Anomalies.

What the Society needs—what we are for them—are bodies. Decoy villagers. They move us. Put us wherever they need more people to draw fire from the Enemy. They want the Enemy to think the Outer Provinces are still inhabited and viable, although the only people I’ve seen here are ones like us. Dropped down from the sky with just enough to keep us alive until the Enemy kills us.

No one goes home.

Except me. I came home. The Outer Provinces are where I once belonged.

“The snow,” I told the new decoy. “I’m looking at the snow.”

“It doesn’t snow here,” he scoffed.

I didn’t answer. I kept looking up at the top of the nearest plateau. It’s something worth seeing, white snow on red rocks. While it melts it turns from white to crystal clear and shot through with rainbows. I’ve been up high before when the snow came down. It was beautiful the way it feathered the winter-dead plants.

Behind me, I heard him turn and run back toward the camp. “Look up on the plateau!” he yelled, and the others stirred and called back in excitement.

“We’re going up to get the snow, Ky!” someone hollered at me a few moments later. “Come on.”

“You won’t make it,” I told them. “It will melt too fast.”

But no one listened to me. The Officials still keep us thirsty and what water we do have tastes like the insides of our canteens. The closest river now
is
poisoned and rain doesn’t come often.

One cold swallow of fresh water. I can see why they wanted to go.

“You sure?” one of them called back to me, and I nodded again.

“You going, Vick?” someone called out.

Vick stood up, shielded his hard blue eyes with one hand, and spit down into the frosted sagebrush. “No,” he said. “Ky says it’ll melt before we get there. And we’ve got graves to dig.”

“You’re always making us dig,” one of the decoys complained. “We’re supposed to act like farmers. That’s what the Society says.” He was right. They want us to use the shovels and seeds from the village sheds to plant winter crops and to leave the bodies where they lie. I’ve heard other decoys say that that’s what they do in the other villages. They leave the carcasses for the Society or the Enemy or any animals who might want them.

But Vick and I bury people. It started with the boy and the river and no one’s stopped us yet.

Vick laughed, a cold sound. In the absence of any Officials or Officers he has become the unofficial leader out here and sometimes the other decoys forget that he doesn’t actually have any power within the Society. They forget that he’s an Aberration, too. “I don’t make you do anything. Neither does Ky. You know who does, and if you want to take your chances up there, I won’t stop you.”

The sun climbed higher and so did they. I watched for a while. Their black plainclothes and the distance between the village and the plateau made them look like ants swarming a hill. Then I stood up and started back to work, digging holes in the graveyard for the ones who died in the firing the night before.

Vick and the others worked next to me. We had seven holes to dig. Not too many, considering the intensity of the firing and the fact that there were almost a hundred of us to lose.

I kept my back to the climbers so I didn’t have to see how the snow was all gone by the time they reached the top of the plateau. Climbing up there was a waste of time.

It’s also a waste of time to think about people who are gone. And judging by the way things out here are going, I don’t have a lot of time to waste.

But I can’t help it.

On my first night in Mapletree Borough, I looked out of the window in my new bedroom and not one thing was familiar or seemed like home. So I turned away. And then Aida came through the door, and she looked enough like my mother that I could breathe again.

She held out her hand with the compass in it. “Our parents only had one artifact, and two daughters. Your mother and I agreed that we would take turns sharing it, but then she left.” She opened my hand and put the compass inside. “We had the same artifact. And now we both have the same son. It’s for you.”

“I can’t have it,” I told her. “I’m an Aberration. We’re not allowed to keep things like this.”

“Nevertheless,” Aida said. “It is yours.”

And then I gave it to Cassia to keep and she gave me the green silk. I knew they’d take it from me someday. I knew I would never get to keep it. And so that’s why, when we walked down from the Hill the last time, I paused and tied it to a tree. Quickly, so she wouldn’t notice.

I like to think of it out there on top of the Hill under wind and rain.

Because in the end you can’t always choose what to keep. You can only choose how you let it go.

Cassia.

I was thinking of her when I first saw the snow. I thought,
We could climb up there. Even if it all melted. We’d sit and write words on the still-damp sand. We could do that, if you weren’t gone.

But then,
I remembered,
you’re not the one who’s gone. I am.

A boot appears now at the edge of the grave. I know whose it is by the notches carved around the edge of the sole—a method some use out here to mark time survived. No one else has as many cuts, as many days tracked. “You’re not dead,” Vick says.

“No,” I say, pushing myself to my feet. I spit dirt out of my mouth and reach for the shovel.

Vick digs next to me. Neither of us talk about the people we won’t be able to bury today. The ones who tried to climb to the snow.

Back in the village, I hear the decoys calling to each other and to us.
Three more dead here,
they cry out, and then fall silent as they look up.

Not one of the decoys who went up to the plateau will be coming back. I find myself hoping the impossible, that at least they quenched their thirst before the fire. That they had mouths full of clean, cold snow when they died.

CHAPTER 4

CASSIA

X
ander, here, in front of me. Blond hair, blue eyes, smile so warm that I can’t stop from reaching out to him even before the Official has given us permission to touch.

“Cassia,” Xander says, and doesn’t wait, either. He pulls me into his arms and we both hold on tight. I don’t even try to keep myself from burying my face against his chest, against his clothes that smell like home and him.

“I’ve missed you,” Xander tells me, his voice rumbling above my head. It sounds deeper. He seems stronger. It’s such a good and glorious feeling, this being with him, that I lean back and grab his face in both my hands and pull him down and kiss him on the cheek, in a place dangerously near his mouth. When I step away we both have tears in our eyes. It is such a strange sight, Xander with tears, that I catch my breath.

“I’ve missed
you
,” I tell him, and I wonder how much of the ache inside me comes from having lost Xander, too.

The Official behind Xander smiles. Our reunion lacks nothing. He steps away a little, discreet, giving us space, and enters something into his datapod. Probably something like:
Both subjects expressed appropriate reaction upon seeing each other.

“How?” I ask Xander. “How are you here?” Though it’s so good to see him, it’s almost too good. Is this another test from my Official?

“It’s been five months since our Matching,” he says. “All the Matchees from our month are having their first face-to-face meetings. The Department hasn’t eliminated
that
yet.” He smiles down at me, something sad in his eyes. “I pointed out that we don’t live near each other anymore, so we deserved a meeting, too. And it’s customary to meet where the girl lives.”

He didn’t say
at the girl’s home
. He understands. He’s right. I live here. But this work camp is not home. I could call Oria home, because Xander lives there, and Em, and because I began there. Although I haven’t lived there, I could also call the new place in Keya home, because my parents and Bram live there.

And there is a place where Ky lives that I think of as home, even though I cannot name it and don’t know where, exactly, it is.

Xander reaches for my hand. “We’re allowed to go on an outing,” he says. “If you’d like.”

“Of course,” I say, laughing; I can’t help it. Minutes ago I stood scrubbing my hands and feeling alone and now Xander is here. It’s as though I have walked by the lighted windows of a house in the Borough, pretending I don’t care about what I’ve lost and left behind, and then suddenly I’m in that golden-warm room without even having lifted my hand to open the door.

The Official gestures toward the exit, and I realize he’s not the same Official who accompanied us on our outing to the dining hall back in the Borough. That was a special arrangement for Xander and me, arranged in place of our first port-to-port communication since we already knew each other. The Official who escorted us that night was young. This one is, too, but kinder looking. He notices my glance and inclines his head, a gesture formal and polite but warm somehow. “There are no longer specific Officials assigned to each Match,” he tells me in an explanatory tone. “It’s more efficient.”

“It’s too late for a meal,” Xander says. “But we can go into town. Where would you like to go?”

“I don’t even know what’s there,” I say. I have a blurry memory of coming into town on the long-distance train and walking down the street to the transport that brought us to the camp. Of almost-bare trees sparking the sky with their sparse red and gold leaves. But was that
this
town, or one near a different camp? It must have been earlier in the fall for the leaves to be so bright.

“The facilities are smaller here,” Xander says. “But they have what we did in the Borough—a music hall, a game center, a showing or two.”

A showing. I haven’t been to one in so long. For a moment I think that’s what I’ll choose; I even open my mouth to say it. I picture the theater going dark and my heart pounding as I wait for images to come rising onto the screen and music to swell through the speakers. Then I remember the firings and the tears in Ky’s eyes as the lights came up, and another memory flickers inside me. “Do they have a museum?”

Something dances in Xander’s eyes; I can’t tell what. Amusement? Surprise? I lean closer to try to see; Xander is not usually a mystery to me. He’s open, honest, a story I read again and again and love every time. But, in this moment, I can’t tell what he thinks. “Yes,” he says.

“I’d like to go there,” I say, “if that would be all right with you.”

Xander nods.

It takes some time to walk into town and the smell of farming hangs thick in the air—burning wood and cool air and apples turning to cider. I feel a wave of affection for this place that I know has to do with the boy standing near me. Xander always makes every place, every person, better. The evening air holds the bittersweet tang of what might have been, and I catch my breath as Xander turns to look at me under the warm light of the street lamp. His eyes still speak of what might be.

The museum only has one floor and my heart sinks. It’s so small. What if things here are different than they are in Oria?

“We close in half an hour,” the man at the front desk says. His uniform seems threadbare and tired and so does he, as though he’s coming apart along the edges. He slides his hands along the top of the desk and pushes a datapod toward us. “Type in your names,” he says, and we do, the Official going first. Up close, the Official seems to have the same tired look about his eyes as the older man at the desk.

“Thank you,” I say, after I enter my name and slide the datapod back across the surface toward the man.

“We don’t have much to see,” he tells us.

“We don’t mind,” I say.

I wonder if our Official thinks it a strange choice to come here, but to my surprise he turns away almost immediately as we enter the museum’s main display room. As though he
wants
to give us space alone to talk. He walks to a glass-fronted case and leans forward, his hands behind his back in a posture that seems almost elegant in its casualness. A kind Official. Of course they must exist. Grandfather was one.

Relief washes over me as I find what I’m looking for almost immediately—a glassed-in map of the Society. It’s in the middle of the room. “There,” I say to Xander. “Should we look at that one?”

Xander nods. While I read the names of the rivers and Cities and Provinces, he shifts position next to me and runs his hand through his hair. Unlike Ky, who holds still in places like this, with Xander it’s always a series of confident movements, little waves of motion. It’s what makes him so effective in the games—the quirking of his eyebrows, the smiling, the way his hands continually move the cards.

“That display hasn’t been updated recently,” a voice behind us says, startling me. It’s the man from the desk. I glance around the room, looking for another worker. He sees me doing it and smiles almost mournfully. “The others are in the back closing up for the night. If you want to know anything, I’m the only one to ask.”

I look over at our Official. He still stands at the case nearest the entrance, his full interest seemingly absorbed by whatever is in the display. I look at Xander and try to send him a message without speaking.
Please.

For a moment I think he doesn’t understand or doesn’t want to. I feel his fingers tighten around mine and see a hardening in his eyes and a slight clenching of his jaw. But then his expression softens and he nods. “Hurry,” he says, and he lets go and walks toward the Official on the other side of the room.

I have to try, even though I don’t think this tired gray man has any answers for me and the hope I had seems to be slipping away. “I want to know more about the Glorious History of Tana Province.”

A pause. A beat.

The man draws in a breath and begins to speak. “Tana Province has beautiful geography and is also renowned for its farming,” he says, his voice flat.

He doesn’t know.
My heart sinks. Back in Oria, Ky told me that the poems Grandfather gave me could be valuable, and also that asking the history of the Province was a way to let the Archivists know you wanted to trade. I’d hoped it would be the same way here. It was stupid of me. Perhaps there are no Archivists in Tana at all, and if there were, they must have better places to be than waiting for closing time in this sad little museum.

The man continues. “Floods sometimes occurred in Tana pre-Society, but that has been controlled for many years now. We are one of the most productive farming Provinces in the Society.”

I don’t look back at Xander. Or the Official. Just at the map in front of me. I tried to trade before and it didn’t work then either. But the first time it was because I couldn’t bring myself to give away the poem Ky and I shared.

Then I notice that the man has stopped speaking. He looks at me directly. “Is there anything else?” he asks.

I should give up. Should smile and turn away to Xander and forget about this, accept that the man knows nothing and move on. But for some reason I think suddenly of one of those last red leaves holding on against the sky. I breathe. It falls.

“Yes,” I say softly.

Grandfather gave me two poems. Ky and I loved the Thomas one, but there were other words, too, and those are the ones that come to me now. I don’t remember all of it, that poem by Tennyson, but one stanza comes back to me clear in my mind as though it were written there all along. Perhaps it was the man’s mention of flooding that brought it back:

“For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place

The flood may bear me far,

I hope to see my Pilot face to face

When I have crossed the bar.”

As I speak the words quietly, the man’s face changes. He becomes clever, alert, alive. I must have remembered correctly. “That’s an interesting poem,” he says. “Not, I think, one of the Hundred.”

“No,” I say. My hands tremble and I dare to hope again. “But still worth something.”

“I’m afraid not,” he says. “Unless you have the original.”

“No,” I say. “It was destroyed.”
I destroyed it
. I remember that moment at the Restoration site and how the paper fluttered up before it went down to burn.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and it sounds as though he is. “What is it you were hoping to trade
for
?” he asks, a hint of curiosity in his voice.

I point to the Outer Provinces. If I can just get to them, there’s a slim but real chance I can find Ky. “I know they’re taking the Aberrations there,” I say softly. “But I want to know
exactly
where and how I can get there. A map.”

He shakes his head at me.
No
.

He can’t tell me? Or he won’t? “I have something else,” I say.

I angle my back so that neither Xander nor the Official can see my hands; I reach into the bag. My fingers brush the foil of the tablets and the hard surface of the compass at the same time and I stop.

Which should I trade?

Suddenly I’m dizzy, confused, remembering the time I had to sort Ky. The steam in the room, the sweat, the ache of the decision pressing against me . . .

Stay clear,
I tell myself. I glance over my shoulder at Xander and meet the blue of his eyes for one brief moment before he turns back to the Official. I remember Ky looking down at me from the air-train platform before they took him away and feel again the panic of time running out.

I make up my mind and reach into the bag, pulling out the item for trade. I hold it up just high enough for the man to see, trying to keep my hands from shaking and attempting to convince myself that I
can
give this up.

He smiles and nods at me. “Yes,” he says. “
That
is worth something. But what you want would take days—weeks—to arrange.”

“I only have tonight,” I say.

Before I can say anything more, the man takes the offering and leaves my hand empty. “Where are you going next?”

“The music hall,” I say.

“Check under your seat when you leave,” he whispers. “I will do the best I can.” Above us, the lights dim. His eyes do, too, and then, in the flat voice he first used he tells me, “We’re closing. You all need to go.”

Xander leans over during the music. “Did you get what you needed?” he asks, his voice deep and low and his breath brushing my neck. On his other side, the Official stares ahead. He taps his fingers on the armrest of his chair, keeping time to the music.

“I don’t know yet,” I tell him. The Archivist said to look under my seat when I left, not before, but I am still tempted to try earlier. “Thank you for helping me.”

“It’s what I do,” Xander says.

“I know it is,” I say. I remember the gifts he gave me: the painting, the blue tablets neatly rowed in their compartments. Even the compass, I realize, my gift from Ky, was something Xander saved for me once, on that day back in the Borough when they took the artifacts.

“But you don’t know everything about me,” Xander says. A mischievous grin crosses his face.

I glance down at his hand around mine, his thumb brushing across my skin, and then I look back up into his eyes. Though he still smiles there’s something serious about his expression now. “No,” I agree. “I don’t.”

We hold on to each other. The Society’s music plays around and over us, but our thoughts are always our own.

When I stand up, I brush my hand underneath the chair. Something’s there—a folded square of paper—and it comes away easily when I tug on it. Though I want to look
now
, I slip it into my pocket instead, wondering what I have, what I’ve traded for.