Reached (20 page)

CHAPTER 23

CASSIA

W
e were supposed to meet months ago on a dark early-spring night by the lake, where we could be alone.

Ky’s face is drawn with fatigue, and I catch the scent of sage and sand and grass, of the world outdoors. I know that look of stone in his face, that set of his jaw. His skin is rough. His eyes are deep.

We began with his hand around mine, showing me shapes.

In Ky’s eyes is such complete love and hunger that it goes through me like the sharp, high note of a bird in the canyon, echoing all the way through my body. I am seen and known, if not yet touched.

The moment sings between us and then everything turns to motion.

“No,” Ky says, moving back toward the ladder. “I forgot. I can’t be down here with you.”

He’s too late; the Pilot has closed the hatch above us. Ky pounds on the door as the engines fire up and the Pilot’s voice comes through the speakers. “Prepare for takeoff,” he says. I grab hold of one of the straps hanging from the ceiling. Xander does the same. Ky still hammers at the door to the hold.

“I can’t stay,” he says. “There’s an illness out there, worse than the Plague, and I’ve been exposed to it.” His eyes look wild.

“It’s all right,” Xander tries to tell Ky, but Ky can’t hear over the roar of the engines and the pounding of his hands.

“Ky,” I say, as loud as I can, between the beats of his fists hitting the metal. “It’s. All. Right. I. Can’t. Get. Sick.”

Then
he turns around.

“Neither can Xander,” I say.

“How do you know?” Ky asks.

“We both have the mark,” Xander says.

“What mark?”

Xander turns around and pulls down his collar so Ky can see. “If you’ve got this, it means you can’t get the mutated Plague.”

“I have it, too,” I say. “Xander looked for me when we were flying here.”

“I’ve been working with the mutation for weeks,” Xander says.

“What about me?” Ky asks. He turns around, and in one fast motion, pulls his shirt over his head. There, in the dim light of the air ship, I see the planes and muscles of his back, smooth and brown.

And nothing else.

My throat tightens. “Ky,” I say.

“You don’t have it,” Xander says, his words blunt but his voice sympathetic. “You should stay away from us, in case your exposure didn’t actually infect you. We could still be carriers.”

Ky nods and pulls his shirt back over his head. When he turns to us there’s something haunted and relieved in his eyes. He didn’t expect to be immune; he’s never been lucky. But he’s glad that I am. My eyes burn with angry tears. Why does it always have to be like this for Ky? How does he stand it?

He keeps moving.

The Pilot’s voice comes in through a speaker in the wall. “The flight won’t be long,” he tells us.

“Where are we going?” Ky asks.

The Pilot doesn’t answer.

“To the mountains,” I say, at the same time Xander says, “To help the Pilot find a cure.”

“That’s what Indie told you,” Ky says, and Xander and I nod. Ky raises his eyebrows as if to say,
But what does the
Pilot
have in mind?

“There’s something in the hold for Cassia,” the Pilot says. “It’s in a case at the back.”

Xander finds the case first and pushes it toward me. He and Ky both watch as I open it up. Inside are two things: a datapod and a folded piece of white paper.

I take out the datapod first and hand it to Xander to hold. Ky stays on the other side of the ship. Then I lift out the paper. It’s slick, white paper from a port, and heavier than it should be, folded in an intricate pattern to conceal something inside. When I peel away the layers, I see Grandfather’s microcard in the center.

Bram sent it after all.

He sent something else, too. Radiating out from the middle of the paper are lines of dark writing. A code.

I recognize the pattern in the writing—he’s made it look like a game I once made for him on the scribe.
This is my brother’s writing.
Bram taught himself to write, and instead of just deciphering my message, he’s put together a simple code of his own. We thought he couldn’t pay attention to detail, but he can, when it interests him enough. He would have been a wonderful sorter after all.

My eyes fill with tears as I picture my exiled family at their home in Keya. I only asked for the microcard, but they sent more. The code from Bram, the paper from my mother—I think I see her careful hand in the folding. The only one who didn’t send anything is my father.

“Please,” the Pilot says, “go ahead and view the microcard.” His tone remains polite, but I hear a command in his words.

I slide the microcard into the datapod. It’s an older model, but it only takes a few seconds for the first image to load. And there he is. Grandfather. His wonderful, kind, clever face. I haven’t seen him in almost a year, except in my dreams.

“Is the datapod working?” the Pilot asks.

“Yes,” I say, my throat aching. “Yes, thank you.”

For a moment, I forget that I’m looking for something specific—Grandfather’s favorite memory of me. Instead I’m distracted by the pictures of his life.

Grandfather, young, a child standing with his parents. A little older, wearing plainclothes, and then with his arm around a young woman. My grandmother. Grandfather appears holding a baby, my father, with my grandmother laughing next to him, and then that too is gone.

Bram and I appear on the screen with Grandfather.

And vanish.

The screen stops on a picture of Grandfather at the end of his life, his handsome face and dark eyes looking out from the datapod with humor and strength.

“In parting, as is customary, Samuel Reyes made a list of his favorite memory of each of his surviving family members,” the historian says. “The one he chose of his daughter-in-law, Molly, was the day they first met.”

My father remembered that day, too. Back in the Borough, he told me how he went with his parents to meet my mother at the train. My father said they all fell in love with her that day; that he’d never seen anyone so warm and alive.

“His favorite memory of his son, Abran, was the day they had their first real argument.”

There must be a story behind this memory. I’ll have to ask my father about it when I see him again. He rarely argues with anyone. I feel a little pang. Why didn’t Papa send me something? But he must have approved of their sending the microcard. My mother would never have gone behind my father’s back.

“His favorite memory of his grandson, Bram, was his first word,” the historian says. “It was ‘more.’”

Now, my turn. I find myself leaning forward, the way I did when I was small and Grandfather told me things.

“His favorite memory of his granddaughter, Cassia,” the historian says, “was of the red garden day.”

Bram was right. He heard the historian correctly. She did say
day
. Not days. So did the historian make a mistake? I wish they’d let Grandfather speak for himself. I’d like to hear
his
voice saying these words. But that’s not the way the Society did things.

This has told me nothing except that Grandfather loved me—no small thing, but something I already knew. And a red garden day could be any time of year. Red leaves in the fall, red flowers in the summer, red buds in the spring, and even, sometimes, when we sat outside in the winter, our noses and cheeks turned red from the cold and the sun set crimson in the west. Red garden days. There were so many of them.

And for that, I am grateful.

“What happened on the red garden day?” the Pilot asks, and I look up. For a moment, I’d forgotten that he was listening.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t remember.”

“What does the paper say?” Xander asks.

“I haven’t decoded it yet,” I tell him.

“I can save you the time,” the Pilot says. “It reads,
‘Cassia, I want you to know that I’m proud of you for seeing things through, and for being braver than I was.’
It’s from your father.”

My father
did
send me a message. And Bram encoded it for him, and my mother wrapped it up.

I glance down at Bram’s code to make sure the Pilot has translated the note correctly, but then the Pilot interrupts me.

“This trade didn’t come through until recently,” the Pilot says. “It appears that after it left your family’s hands, the trader involved fell ill. When it did come through, we found the microcard intriguing, and the message as well.”

“Who gave this to you?” I ask.

“I have people who watch out for things they know might interest me,” the Pilot says. “The head Archivist in Central is one of those people.”

She has betrayed me again. “Trades are supposed to be secret,” I say.

“In a time of war, different rules apply,” the Pilot says.

“We are not at war,” I say.

“We are
losing
a war,” the Pilot says, “against the mutation. We have no cure.”

I look at Ky, who doesn’t have the mark, who isn’t safe, and I understand the urgency of the Pilot’s words. We can’t lose.

“You are either helping us to find and administer the cure,” the Pilot says, “or you are hindering our efforts.”

“We want to help you,” Xander says. “That’s why you’re taking us to the mountains, isn’t it?”

“I
am
taking you to the mountains,” the Pilot says. “What happens to you when you arrive there is something I haven’t determined yet.”

Ky laughs. “If you’re spending this much time deciding what to do with the three of us when there’s an incurable virus raging through the Provinces, you’re either stupid or desperate.”

“The situation,” the Pilot says, “is long past desperate.”

“Then what can you possibly expect
us
to do?” Ky asks.

“You will help,” the Pilot says, “one way or the other.” The ship turns a little and I wonder where we are in the sky.

“There are not very many people I can trust,” the Pilot says. “So when two of them tell me contradictory things, that worries me. One of my associates thinks that the three of you are traitors who should be imprisoned and questioned away from the Provinces, out where I’m certain of the loyalty of the people. The other thinks you can help me find a cure.”

The head Archivist is the first person,
I think.
But who is the other?

“When the Archivist drew my attention to this trade,” the Pilot says, “I was interested, as she knew I would be, both by the name on the microcard and the message included on the paper. Your father did not side with the Rising. What, exactly, did you do that he didn’t dare to do? Did you take things one step further and strike
against
the Rising?

“And then when I looked more closely, I found other things worthy of notice.”

He begins reciting the names of flowers to me. At first, I think he’s gone crazy, and then I realize what he’s saying:

Newrose, oldrose, Queen Anne’s lace.

“You wrote that and distributed it,” the Pilot says. “What does the code represent?”

It’s not a code. It’s just my mother’s words, turned into a poem. Where did he find it? Did someone give it to him? I meant for it to be shared, but not like this.

“
Where
is the place over the hill, under the tree, and past the border no one can see?”

When he asks the question like that, it sounds complicated, like a riddle. And it was only supposed to be simple, a song.

“Who were you meeting there?” he asks, his voice clear and even. But Ky’s right. The Pilot
is
desperate. There’s no undertone of fear when he speaks; but the questions he’s asking, the way he’s gambling some of his precious time on the three of us—it all makes me cold with fear. If the Pilot doesn’t know how to save us from the new Plague, who does?

“No one,” I say. “It’s a poem. It doesn’t have to have a literal meaning.”

“But poems often do,” the Pilot says. “You know this.”

He’s right. I’ve thought about the poem with the Pilot’s name in it and whether that was the one Grandfather really meant me to find. He gave me the compact, he told me the stories of hiking the Hill, of his mother, who sang forbidden poems to him. What
did
Grandfather want me to do? I’ve always wondered.

“Why did you gather people at the Gallery?” the Pilot asks.

“So they could bring what they’d made.”

“What did you talk about there?”

“Poetry,” I say. “Songs.”

“And that’s all,” the Pilot says.

His voice can be as cold or as warm as a stone, I realize. Sometimes it sounds generous and welcoming, like sandstone under sun, and other times it’s as unforgiving as the marble of the steps at City Hall.

I have a question of my own for him. “Why did my name interest you
now
?” I ask. “People in the Rising must have seen it before. It meant nothing to them.”

“Things have happened since you first joined the Rising several months ago,” the Pilot says. “Poisoned lakes. Mysterious codes. A Gallery built where people could gather and exchange things they’d written. It seemed your name was worth a second look. And when we looked again, there was a great deal to find.” And now his voice is
very
cold.

“Cassia’s not fighting against the Rising,” Xander says. “She’s part
of
the Rising. I can vouch for her.”

“So can I,” Ky says.

“That might mean something to me,” the Pilot says, “if it weren’t for the confluence of data around the three of you. There’s enough to make
all
of you suspect.”

“What do you mean?” I ask. “We did whatever the Rising wanted us to do. I came back to Central to live. Ky flew ships for you. Xander saved patients.”

“Your small obediences did serve to camouflage your other actions to those in the Rising with less authority and information,” the Pilot tells me. “They initially had no reason to report you to me. But after you were brought to my attention, I saw things and made connections that were unavailable to others. As the Pilot, I have access to more information. When I looked closely, I found the truth. People died wherever you went. The decoys in your camp, for example, many of whom were Aberrations.”