Reached (30 page)

CHAPTER 43

CASSIA

P
eople 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.

“Let’s get the cure,” Leyna says to Xander, and I take one of his hands and hold on tight as he walks back into the research lab. He lets me touch him but something is wrong. He doesn’t hold on to me like he used to, and his muscles are tensed.

“What have you done?” Leyna asks. For the first time since I’ve known her, her voice sounds small. And shocked.

“Oker asked me to get rid of them,” Xander says.

The sink is full of empty tubes.

“Oker told me that he’d been wrong about the camassia cure,” Xander says. “He was planning to make something new, and he didn’t want us to waste time trying out anything else before he had his new cure ready.”

“So what was he going to put in this new cure?” Colin asks. He wants to know. He, at least, appears to be listening, instead of automatically assuming that Xander destroyed the cures for his own reasons. Anna would listen, too, if she were here.
What is she doing now? What’s going to happen to Hunter? How is Ky?

“I asked Oker,” Xander says, “but he wouldn’t tell me.”

But then, saying this, he loses Colin. “You’re saying that Oker trusted you enough to ask you to ruin all the cures, but he didn’t trust you enough to tell you what he was going to find? Or how he planned to make the new cure?”

“Yes,” Xander says. “That’s what I’m saying.”

For a long moment, Leyna and Colin look at Xander. In the sink, one of the empty tubes clinks and settles.

“You don’t believe me,” Xander says. “You think I killed Oker and ruined the cure on my own. Why would I do that?”

“I don’t have to know why you did it,” Colin says. “All I know is that you’ve cost this village time, which we don’t have.”

Leyna turns to the other two assistants. “Can you make more of the camassia cure?”

“Yes,” Noah says. “But it’s going to take some time.”

“Get started,” Leyna says. “Now.”

The villagers take both Xander and Hunter to the prison building. The medics in the infirmary weren’t dead; only unconscious. None of the other still have died, but the villagers will hold Hunter accountable for the earlier two deaths, and for disconnecting the other patients and compromising their health.

And Xander, of course, has destroyed the camassia cure, the villagers’ best and last chance at the Otherlands. Some believe that Xander harmed Oker, but since there’s no evidence to support that, Xander is only being held accountable for the cures. The people look at him like he’s killed something, which I suppose to them, he has, even if it is only the cure and not its creator. It’s true that the still, and the chance of saving them, seems much further away with Oker gone.

“What are you going to do to Xander and Hunter?” I ask Leyna.

“We’ll have another vote after we’ve had time to gather evidence,” Leyna says. “The people will decide.”

Out in the village circle, I see the villagers and farmers taking back their stones. The water in the troughs spills away.

CHAPTER 44

KY

CHAPTER 45

CASSIA

S
uspicions trickle through the village, cold and creeping like winter rain. The farmers and the villagers whisper to each other.
Did anyone help Hunter disconnect the still? How much did Cassia know about Xander destroying the cure?

The village leaders decide to keep Xander and Hunter locked away while evidence is gathered. The next vote will decide what happens to them.

I am split into three segments, like Oker’s muddy star. I should be with Ky in the infirmary. I should be with Xander in the prison. I should be sorting for a cure. I can only try to do all three and hope these pieces of myself are enough to find something that can make whole.

“I’m here to visit Xander,” I say to the prison guard.

Hunter looks up as I pass and I stop. It seems wrong to walk by. Besides, I would like to talk to him. So I face him through the bars. His shoulders are strong and his hands are, as always, marked in blue. I remember how he snapped those tubes in the Cavern.
He looks strong enough to break through these bars here,
I think. Then I realize that he’s past breaking through—he seems broken, in a way I didn’t see even in the Carving when Sarah had just died.

“Hunter,” I say, very gently, “I just want to know.
Were
you the one who disconnected Ky all those times?”

He nods.

“Was he the only one?” I ask.

“No,” he says. “I disconnected the others, too. Ky was the only one who had someone visiting him often enough to notice.”

“How did you get past the medics?” I ask.

“It was easiest at night,” Hunter says. I remember how he used to track and kill and stay hidden in a canyon to survive, and I imagine that the infirmary and the village were child’s play to him. And then, left alone in broad daylight, something snapped.

“Why Ky?” I ask. “You came out of the canyon together. I thought the two of you understood each other.”

“I had to be fair,” Hunter says. “I couldn’t disconnect everyone else and leave Ky alone.”

The door opens behind me, letting in light. I turn a little. Anna has come in, but she stays out of Hunter’s line of view. She wants to listen.

“Hunter,” I say, “some of them
died
.” I wish I could get him to answer me, to tell me
why
.

Hunter stretches out his arms. I wonder how often he does the markings to keep them so bright. “People dying is what happens if you don’t have the right medicines to save them,” Hunter says.

And now I do understand. “Sarah,” I say. “You couldn’t get the medicine for her.”

Hunter’s hands tighten back into fists. “Everyone—Society, Rising, even people here in the village—we’re all doing everything to help these patients from the Society. No one did anything for Sarah.”

He’s right. No one did, except Hunter himself, and it wasn’t enough to save her.

“And if we find the cure, then what?” Hunter asks. “Everyone flies away to the Otherlands. There’s been too much of that, people going away.”

Anna comes a little closer so that Hunter can see her. “There has,” she agrees.

Then tears come to his eyes and he puts his head down and weeps. “I’m sorry,” he says.

“I know,” she tells him.

There’s nothing I can do. I leave them and go to Xander.

“You left Ky alone in the infirmary,” Xander says. “Are you sure that’s safe?”

“There are medics and guards watching,” I say. “And Eli won’t leave Ky’s side.”

“So you trust Eli?” Xander asks. “The way you trusted Hunter?” There’s an uncharacteristic edge to Xander’s voice.

“I’ll go back soon,” I say. “But I had to see you. I’m going to try to figure out what the cure could be. Do you have any idea what Oker was looking for?”

“No,” Xander says. “He wouldn’t tell me. But I think it was a plant. He took the same equipment that we used when we gathered the bulbs.”

“When did he change his mind about the cure?” I ask. “When did he decide that the camassia was wrong?”

“During the vote,” Xander says. “Something happened while we were out there that made him change his mind.”

“And you don’t know what it is.”

“I think it was something you said,” Xander tells me. “You talked about how you felt like you were missing something, and said it had to do with the flowers.”

I shake my head. How could that have helped Oker? I reach into my pocket to make sure that I still have the paper from my mother. It’s there, and so are the microcard and the little stone. I wonder if the villagers will still let me vote.

“It’s lonely,” Xander says.

“What is?” I ask him. Does he mean that it’s lonely in the research lab now that Oker is gone?

“Death,” Xander says. “Even if someone is with you, you still have to do the actual dying all alone.”

“It is lonely,” I say.

“
Everything
is,” Xander says. “I’m lonely with you sometimes. I didn’t think it could ever be that way.”

I don’t know what to say. We stand there looking at each other, sorrowful, seeking. “I’m sorry,” I say finally, but he shakes his head. I’ve missed the point somehow; whatever it was he wanted to say, I did not listen the way he had hoped.

The light coming in through the infirmary windows is gauzy, gray. Ky’s face looks very still. Very gone. The bag drips neatly into his veins. He and Xander are both trapped. I have to find a way to free them.

And I don’t know how.

I look at the lists again. I’ve gone over them so many times. Everyone else is working on re-creating Oker’s camassia cure. But I think Oker was right, and that we were all wrong. The sorters, the pharmics—we have all missed something.

I’m so tired.

Once, I wanted to watch the floods coming into a canyon, to stand on the edge and see it happen, on ground that was safe but shaking.
I’d like to hear the trees snap away and see the water come higher,
I thought,
but only from a place where it couldn’t reach me.

Now I think it might be a terrifying, bright relief to stand on the canyon floor and see the wall of water coming down, and to know
this is it, I am finished,
and before you could even complete the thought, you would be swallowed, and whole.

As evening falls, Anna comes to sit beside me in the infirmary. “I’m sorry,” she says, looking at Ky. “I never thought that Hunter—”

“I know,” I say. “Neither did I.”

“The vote will be tomorrow,” she tells me. For the first time, Anna sounds
old
.

“What will they do?” I ask.

“Xander will likely be exiled,” she says. “He could also be found innocent, but I don’t think that will happen. The people are angry. They don’t believe Oker told Xander to destroy the cure.”

“Xander’s from the Provinces,” I say. “How is he supposed to survive in exile?” Xander’s smart, but he’s never lived out in the wild before, and he will have nothing when they send him away. I had Indie.

“I don’t think,” Anna says, “that he is supposed to survive.”

If Xander is exiled, what will I do? I’d go with him, but I can’t leave Ky. And we need Xander for the cure. Even if I do find the right plant, I don’t know how to make a cure, or the best way to give it to Ky. If this is to work, it will take all three of us. Ky, Xander, me.

“And Hunter?” I ask Anna, very softly.

“The best we can hope for Hunter,” she says, “is exile.” Though I know she has other children who came with her from the Carving, her voice sounds as sad as if Hunter were her own child, the very last of her blood.

And then she hands me something. A piece of paper,
real
paper, the kind she must have carried with her all the way from the cave in the Carving. It smells like the canyons, here in the mountains, and it makes me ache a little and wonder how Anna could stand to leave her home.

“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.”