Chapter 6
CASSIA
Once I’m sure the others sleep, their breathing heavy in the room, I roll over onto my side and slip the Archivist’s paper from my pocket.
The page feels pulpy and cheap, not like the thick cream-colored sheet with Grandfather’s poems. It’s old, but not as old as Grandfather’s paper. My father might be able to tell me the age; but he’s not here, he let me go. As I unfold the page carefully it makes small sounds that seem loud, and I hope the other girls will think it is the rustling of blankets or an insect singing its wings.
It took a long time for everyone to fall asleep tonight. When I came back from my outing they told me that none of us have received our transfer assignments yet; that the Officer said they would tell us our destinations in the morning. I understood the girls’ uneasiness—I feel it, too. We’ve always known the night before where we’d be sent the next day. Why the change? With the Society, there’s always a reason.
I slide the paper into a square of spilled-white light from the moon outside. My heart pounds quickly, a running beat though I am still. Please let this be worth the cost, I think to nothing and no one, and then I look at the page.
No.
I push my fist against my mouth to keep from saying the word out loud into the sleeping room.
It’s not a map, or even a set of directions.
It’s a story, and I know the moment I read the first line that it’s not one of the Hundred:
A man pushed a rock up the hill. When he reached the top, the stone rolled down to the bottom of the hill and he began again. In the village nearby, the people took note. “A judgment,” they said. They never joined him or tried to help because they feared those who issued the punishment. He pushed. They watched.
Years later, a new generation noticed that the man and his stone were sinking into the hill, like the setting of the sun and moon. They could only see part of the rock and part of the man as he rolled the stone along to the top of the hill.
One of the children became curious. So, one day, the child walked up the hill. As she drew closer, she was surprised to see that the stone was carved with names and dates and places.
“What are all these words?” the child asked.
“The sorrows of the world,” the man told her. “I pilot them up the hill over and over again.”
“You are using them to wear out the hill,” the child said, noticing the long deep groove worn where the stone had turned.
“I am making something,” the man said. “When I am finished, it will be your turn to take my place.”
The child was not afraid. “What are you making?”
“A river,” the man said.
The child went back down the hill, puzzling at how one could make a river. But not long after, when the rains came and the flood flashed through the long trough and washed the man somewhere far away, the child saw that the man had been right, and she took her place pushing the stone and piloting the sorrows of the world.
This is how the Pilot came to be.
The Pilot is a man who pushed a stone and washed away in the water. It is a woman who crossed the river and looked to the sky. The Pilot is old and young and has eyes of every color and hair of every shade; lives in deserts, islands, forests, mountains, and plains.
The Pilot leads the Rising—the rebellion against the Society—and the Pilot never dies. When one Pilot’s time has finished, another comes to lead.
And so it goes on, over and over like a stone rolling.
Someone in the room turns and stirs and I freeze, waiting for the girl’s breathing to even back into sleep. When it does, I look down at the last line on the page:
In a place past the edge of the Society’s map, the Pilot will always live and move.
The hot pain of hope shoots unexpectedly through me as I realize what this truly says, what I’ve been given.
There’s a rebellion. Something real and organized and longstanding, with a leader.
Ky and I are not alone.
The word Pilot was the link. Did Grandfather know this? Is that why he gave me the paper before he died? Have I been wrong all along about the poem he meant me to follow?
I can’t sit still.
“Wake up,” I whisper so softly that I can barely hear myself. “We’re not alone.” I put one foot over the edge of my bed. I could climb down and wake the other girls and tell them about the Rising. Maybe they already know. I don’t think so. They seem so hopeless. Except for Indie. But, though she has more fire to her than the others, she also doesn’t have purpose. I don’t think she knows either.
I should tell Indie.
For a moment I think I’ll do it. My feet hit the ground softly as I reach the bottom of the ladder, and I open my mouth. Then I hear the sound of an Officer on patrol walking past our door and I freeze, the dangerous paper like a small white flag in my hand.
In that moment I know that I won’t tell the others. I’ll do what I always do when someone trusts me with dangerous words:
I’ll destroy.
“What are you doing?” Indie asks softly behind me. I didn’t hear her coming across the room, and I almost jump but I catch myself in time.
“Washing my hands again,” I whisper, resisting the urge to turn around. The icy water streams over my fingers, making a river sound in the dark of the cabin. “I didn’t get them clean enough earlier. You know how the Officers are about getting dirt on the beds.”
“You’ll wake the others,” she says. “They had a hard time getting to sleep.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, and I am. But I could think of no other way to drown the words.
It took me long agonizing moments to rip the paper into tiny bits. First I held it against my lips, breathed on it so that the tearing wouldn’t be so loud. I hope I’ve torn the pieces small enough that they won’t choke and flood the sink.
Indie reaches across and turns off the water. For a moment I think she does know something. Perhaps she doesn’t know about the Rising, the rebellion, but I have the strangest feeling she knows something about me.
Click. Click. The heels of the patrol Officer’s boots on the cement. Indie and I both dart for our beds, and I climb the rungs as fast as I can and peer out the window.
The Officer pauses by our cabin for a moment, listening, and then walks on.
I stay sitting up for a moment, watching her go back along the path. She pauses at the door of another cabin.