“Are you saying that for us?” the boy gasps out, the first time he’s spoken in hours.
“We’re not dead,” I say. No one dead feels this tired.
“We’re here,” the boy says, and he stops. I look at where he points and I see a group of boulders that will be difficult, but not impossible, to climb down.
We made it.
The boy doubles over in exhaustion. Indie and I look at each other and I reach to touch the boy’s shoulder, thinking he’s ill, but then he straightens up.
“Let’s go,” I say, not sure why he waits.
“I’m not coming with you,” he says. “I’m taking that canyon instead.” He points back along the Carving.
“Why?” I ask, and Indie says, “How do we know we can trust you? How do we know this is the right canyon?”
The boy shakes his head. “That’s the one,” he tells us, holding out his hand for payment. “Hurry. It’s almost morning.” He speaks softly, without feeling, and that’s what convinces me he’s telling the truth. He’s far too tired to lie. “The Enemy didn’t end up firing tonight. People will realize we’ve gone. They might report it on the miniport. We have to get into the canyons.”
“Come with us,” I say.
“No,” he says. He looks up at me and I see that he needed us for the run. It’s one that would be too hard to do alone. Now, for whatever reason, he wants to take his own path. He whispers. “Please.”
I reach into my pack and pull out the tablets. As I unwrap them, my hands clumsy and cold even as sweat trickles down my back, he looks behind him at where he wants to be. I want him to come with us. But it’s his choice.
“Here,” I say, holding out half of the tablets. He looks down at them, sealed away in their little compartments, the backing of each tablet labeled neatly. Blue. Blue. Blue. Blue.
And then he laughs.
“Blue,” he says, laughing harder. “All blue.” And then, as if he’s brought the color into being by saying it, we all notice that the sky has turned to morning.
“Take some,” I say, moving closer to him. I see sweat frozen on the ends of his too-short hair; frost on his eyelashes. He shudders. He should put on his coat. “Take some,” I say again.
“No,” he says, pushing my hand away. The tablets fall to the ground. I cry out, dropping to my knees to pick them up.
The boy pauses. “Maybe one or two,” he says, and I see his hand dart down. He snatches the packet and breaks away two little squares. Before I can stop him, he throws the rest back at me and turns to run.
“But I have others,” I call after him. He helped us get here. I could give him the green to calm. Or the red, and then he could forget that long awful run and the scent of his friends’ deaths as we passed by the burned village. I should give him both. I open my mouth to call out again but we never even knew his name.
Indie has not moved.
“We have to go after him,” I say, urging her. “Come on.”
“Number nineteen,” she says softly. What she says doesn’t make sense to me until I follow her gaze and see past the boulders. What’s beyond them is now visible: the Carving up close and with light for the first time.
“Oh,” I whisper. “Oh.”
The world changes here.
Before me is a land of canyons, of chasms, of gashes and gorges. A land of shadows and shades, of rises and falls. Of red and blue and very little green. Indie’s right. As the sky lightens and I see the jagged stones and gaping canyons, the Carving does remind me a little of the painting Xander gave me.
But the Carving is real.
The world is so much bigger than I thought it was.
If we descend into that Carving with its miles of mountains and acres of valleys, with its cliffs and its coves, we will vanish almost entirely. We will become almost nothing.
I think suddenly of a time in Second School, back before we began to specialize, when they showed us diagrams of our bones and our bodies and told us how fragile we were, how easily we could break or become ill without the Society. I remember seeing in the pictures that our white bones were actually filled with red blood and marrow, and thinking I didn’t know I had this inside of me.
I didn’t know the earth had this inside of it. The Carving seems as wide as the sky it stands under.
It is the perfect place for someone like Ky to hide. An entire rebellion could take cover in a place like this. I begin to smile.
“Wait,” I say as Indie moves to climb down the boulders and into the Carving. “It will be sunrise in a few minutes.” I’m greedy. I want to see more.
She shakes her head. “We have to be inside before it gets light.”
Indie’s right. I take one final look back at the boy growing smaller, moving faster than I thought he could. I wish I had thanked him before he left.
I climb down behind Indie, scrambling into the canyon where I hope Ky went only two days ago. Away from the Society, from Xander, from my family, from the life I knew. Away from the boy who led us here, from the light that creeps across this land, turning the sky blue and the stone red, the light that could get us killed.
Chapter 11
KY
There should be patrols in the canyon. I thought we’d have to barter and beg our way past checkpoints like my father did the first time he came. But no one comes. At first the stillness is unsettling. Then I begin to realize that the Carving still teems with life. Black ravens wheel in the sky above and send sharp calls down into the canyons. There’s scat from coyotes, jackrabbits, and deer on the ground, and a tiny gray fox slips away from the stream when we come to drink. A small bird seeks shelter in a tree that has a long dark wound down the middle. It looks as though the tree were struck once by lightning but then grew around the burn.
But still nothing human.
Has something happened to the Anomalies?
The stream grows larger the farther into the canyon we go. I keep us walking on the rounded, smoothed-out rocks next to it. If we step on them we don’t leave as many footprints for someone to find. In the summer, I use a walking stick and go right in the river itself, my father told me.
But the water’s too cold to walk in now. Sheets of ice edge the banks. I look around and wonder what my father would have seen in the summertime. Scrubby small trees that are barren now would be full-leaved, or as full-leaved as anything gets in the desert. The sun would beat down hot, and the cool water would feel good on his feet. Fish would swim away when they felt him coming.