Pop-pop-pop.
The pathetic little sounds of the guns we rigged come from behind us. Out here, it’s nothing.
“Don’t you want to live?” I ask Eli, furious that he’s making this so hard, that he won’t let me forget what is happening behind us.
And then the animal underneath our feet shudders. Something big has hit, and Eli and I move fast, no instinct left but to live. Nothing in my mind except run.
I’ve done this before. Years ago. My father told me once, “If anything happens, run for the Carving,” he said, and so I did it. As always, I wanted to survive.
But that time the Officials came down in an air ship in front of me, making short work of the miles it had taken me hours to run. They pushed me to the ground. I struggled. A rock scraped against my face. But I held on to the one thing I’d carried out of the village—my mother’s paintbrush.
On the air ship I saw the only other survivor—a girl from my village. Once we were flying again, the Officials held out the red tablets for us to take. I’d heard the rumors. I thought I was going to die. So I clamped my mouth shut. I wouldn’t take mine.
“Come now,” said one of the Officials sympathetically, and then she shoved my mouth open and pushed a green tablet in. The false calm came over me, and I couldn’t fight when she put the red one in my mouth too. But my hands knew. They gripped the paintbrush so hard that it broke.
I didn’t die. They took us back behind a curtain in the air ship and washed our hands and faces and hair. They were gentle with us while we were forgetting and gave us fresh clothes and told us a new story to remember instead of what really happened.
“We’re sorry,” they said, arranging their faces into expressions of regret. “The Enemy made a strike on the fields where many in your village were working. Overall casualties were low, but your parents were killed.”
I thought, Why tell us this? Do you think we’re going to forget? Casualties weren’t low. Almost everyone died. And they weren’t in the fields. I saw it all.
The girl cried and nodded and believed, even though she should have known they were lying. And I realized that forgetting was exactly what I was supposed to do.
I pretended to forget. I nodded like the girl and tried to put the same blank look on my face that she had under her tears.
But I didn’t cry like she did. I knew that if I did I would never stop. And then they would know what I’d really seen.
They took away the broken paintbrush and asked why I had it.
And for a moment I panicked. I couldn’t remember. Was the red tablet working? Then I did remember. I had the paintbrush because it was my mother’s. I found it in the village when I came down from the plateau after the firing.
I looked at them and said, “I don’t know. I found it.”
They believed me and I learned how to lie just enough to not get caught.
The Carving looms closer now. “Which one?” Vick calls out to me. Up close to the Carving you can see what you can’t see from far away—the deep cracks in its surface. Each a different canyon and a different choice.
I don’t know. I’ve never been here before, only heard my father talk about it, but I have to decide fast. I’m the leader now for a minute. “That one,” I say, pointing to the closest divide in the earth. The one with a pile of boulders lying near it. Something about it seems right, like a story I have known before.
No flashlights now. The moon will have to do. We need both hands to get down into the earth. I cut my arm on a rock and the burrs of plants attach anywhere they can, like stowaways.
Behind us, I hear a boom—a sound that isn’t like the Enemy’s fire. And it wasn’t in the village. It was close. Somewhere on the plain right behind us.
“What’s that?” Eli asks.
“Go,” Vick and I tell him at the same time, and we scramble fast, faster, cut and bleeding and bruised. Hunted.
After a few moments, Vick pauses and I push past him. We have to get deep inside the slot canyon now. “Careful,” I call back. “Ground’s rocky.” I hear Eli and Vick breathing behind me.
“What was that?” Eli asks again as soon as we get inside.
“Someone followed us,” Vick says. “And got shot down.”
“We can stop for a minute,” I say, climbing under a large overhang of rock. Vick and Eli scramble in with me.
Vick’s breathing is raspy. I look at him. “It’s fine,” he says. “It happens when I run, especially where there’s dust.”
“Who shot them down?” Eli asks. “The Enemy?”
Vick doesn’t say anything.
“Who?” Eli asks, voice shrill.
“I don’t know,” Vick says. “I really don’t.”
“You don’t know?” Eli says.
“No one knows anything,” Vick says. “Except Ky. He thinks he’s found the truth in a girl.”
Hate boils up in me, pure exhausted rage, but before I can do anything, Vick adds, “Who knows. He might be right.” He pushes away from the rocky wall he’s leaning against. “Let’s go. You first.”
The canyon air burns cold in my throat as I draw in my breath and wait for my eyes to adjust and the shades of darkness to turn into shapes of rocks and plants. “This way,” I say. “Shine your flashlights low if you need them, but the moon should be enough.”
The Society likes to keep things from us, but the wind doesn’t care what we know. It brings hints of what has happened as we slip farther into the canyon—the smell of smoke and a white substance that falls on us. White ash. I don’t for one moment think that it’s snow.
Chapter 10
CASSIA
When we land I want to be the first off the air ship, to see if Ky is there. But I remember what he told me back in the Borough about blending in, so I stay in the middle of the group of girls and search for Ky in the rows and rows of black-coated boys standing before us.
He’s not here.
“Remember,” the Official says to the boys, “treat these new villagers as you treat the others. No violence of any kind. We’ll be watching and listening.”
No one responds. There doesn’t seem to be a leader. Next to me, Indie shifts her weight. A girl behind us stifles a sob.
“Come forward to get your rations,” the Official says, and there is no pushing. No shoving. The boys all drift into a line and file past. It must have rained last night. Their boots are thick with red clay mud.