“No. This one is new. It’s my own words.”
“How did you learn to write?” Indie moves a little closer, looks curiously at the letters in the sand.
“He taught me,” I say. “The boy I’m looking for.”
She falls silent again and I think of another line.
Your hand around mine, showing me shapes.
“Why are you an Aberration?” Indie asks. “Are you first-generation?”
I hesitate, not wanting to lie to Indie, but then I realize that I’m not lying anymore. If the Society has discovered my escape, I’ll certainly earn Aberration status. “I am,” I say. “First generation.”
“So it was you who did something?” she asks.
“Yes,” I say. “I caused my own Reclassification.” That’s true, too, or will be. When my status changes, it won’t be my parents’ fault.
“My mother made a boat,” Indie says, and I hear her swallow another piece of the plant. “She carved it out of an old tree. She worked on it for years. And then she paddled away and the Officials found her within an hour.” She sighs. “They picked her up and saved her. They told us she only wanted to try out the boat and that she was grateful they found her in time.”
I hear a strange sound in the dark that I can’t place, a sort of delicate movement like a whispering. It takes me a moment to realize that the sound is Indie, turning the wasp nest around and around in her hands as she speaks.
“I’ve never lived near the water,” I say. “Not the ocean, anyway.”
“It calls,” Indie says softly. Before I can ask what she means, she adds, “Later, when the Officials were gone, she told my father and me what really happened. She said that she meant to go. She said the worst part was that she didn’t even lose sight of the shore before they found her.”
I feel that I stand at the edge of an ocean and something, some knowledge, laps at my feet. I can almost see the woman on the boat in the water, drifting farther, seeing nothing behind her but sea and sky. I can almost hear her deep breath of relief as she turns her face away from where the shore once was, and I wish she had made it far enough for that.
Indie says quietly, “When the Officials found out what she’d told us, they gave us all red tablets.”
“Oh,” I say. Should I act as if I know what happens next? The forgetting?
“I didn’t forget,” Indie says. And though it’s too dark to see her eyes anymore, I can tell that she looks at me.
She must think I know what the red tablets do. She is like Ky and Xander. She is immune.
How many more are there like them? Am I one of them?
The red tablet tucked among the blue tempts me sometimes, the way it did the morning they took Ky away. But now, it’s not because I want to forget. It’s because I want to know. Am I immune, too?
But I might not be. And now is not a time for forgetting. Besides, I might need the red tablet later.
“Were you angry that she tried to go?” I ask, thinking of Xander and what he said about how I left. The moment the words leave my mouth I wish them unsaid, but Indie doesn’t take offense.
“No,” she says. “She always planned to come back for us.”
“Oh,” I say. Neither of us speaks for a moment, and I think suddenly of a time when Bram and I stood near the little Arboretum pond waiting for my mother. Bram wanted to throw a stone into the pool but knew he’d get in trouble if someone saw him. So he waited. Watched. Just when I thought he’d lost his nerve he snapped his arm forward and the rock went in and rippled the water.
Indie throws first. “She’d heard about a rebellion on an island off the coast. She wanted to find it and come back for the family.”
“I’ve heard of a rebellion, too,” I say, unable to control my excitement. “The one I’ve heard of is called the Rising.”
“That’s the same one,” Indie says, sounding eager. “It’s everywhere, someone told her. This Carving is exactly the kind of place it might be.”
“I think that too,” I say. In my mind, I see a piece of translucent paper laid over one of the Society’s maps, its markings showing places the Society doesn’t know about or doesn’t want us to see.
“Do you believe in a leader called the Pilot?” I ask.
“Yes,” Indie says, excited. And then, to my surprise, she recites something in a gentle voice very unlike her usual brusque tone:“Every day the sun rolls by
Across the sky and through night’s door
Every night the stars light high
Above the earth and shine once more
Any day her boat might fly
Across the waves and to the shore.”
“Did you write that?” I ask, a sudden flash of jealousy cutting into me. “I know it’s not one of the Hundred Poems.”
“I didn’t write it. And it’s not a poem,” Indie says with certainty.
“It sounds like one,” I say.
“No.”
“Then what is it?” I ask. I’m learning quickly that it’s useless to argue with Indie.
“Something my mother used to say every night before I went to sleep,” Indie tells me. “When I was old enough to ask about it, she told me that the Pilot is the one who will lead the Rising. My mother thought it would be a woman who comes across the water.”
“Oh,” I say, surprised. I always thought of the Pilot as someone from the sky. But Indie might be right. I remember again the sound of the Tennyson poem. There was water in it.
Indie’s thinking the same thing. “That poem you said when we were running,” she begins. “I hadn’t heard it before, but it proves that the Pilot could come from the water. A bar is a ridge of sand in a shallow place in the water. And a Pilot is someone who steers the ships safely in and out of the harbor.”
“I don’t know much about the Pilot,” I say, which is true, but I do have my own hopes about the leader of the rebellion and they don’t quite align with Indie’s version. Still, the idea is the same, and the story the Archivist gave me says that the Pilot changes over and over. Indie and I could both be right. “But I don’t think it matters. It could be either a man or a woman, coming from the sky or the water. Don’t you think?”
“Yes,” Indie says, sounding triumphant. “I knew it. You aren’t only looking for a boy. You’re looking for something else, too.”