Though I’d guessed that must be the case, I still hate to hear him say it.
“How?” Vick asks.
“My parents got sick. They died in a medical center in Central. And then I got sent away. If I’d been a Citizen, someone could have adopted me. But I wasn’t. I’ve been an Aberration for as long as I can remember.”
His parents got sick? And died? That wasn’t supposed to happen—didn’t happen, as far as I knew—to people as young as Eli’s parents must have been, not even Aberrations. Dying that early doesn’t happen unless you live in the Outer Provinces. And it especially doesn’t happen in Central. I’d assumed they’d died like Eli was meant to, out in the villages somehow.
But Vick doesn’t seem surprised. I don’t know if that’s for Eli’s benefit or if Vick has heard something like this before.
“Eli, I’m sorry,” I say. I was lucky. If Patrick and Aida’s son hadn’t died and Patrick hadn’t pushed so hard, I never would have been brought to Oria. I might be dead right now.
“I’m sorry too,” Vick says.
Eli doesn’t answer. He scoots closer to the fire and closes his eyes as if talking has exhausted him. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” he says quietly. “I just wanted to tell you.”
After a pause, I change the subject. “Eli,” I ask, “what did you bring from the farmers’ cave?”
Eli opens his eyes and pulls his pack across the ground toward him. “They’re heavy, so I couldn’t bring many,” he says. “Only two. But look. They’re books. With words and pictures.” He opens one up to show us. A painting of an enormous winged creature with colors all along its back curls through the sky above an enormous stone house.
“I think my father told me about one of these books,” I say. “The stories were for children. They could look at the pictures while their parents read them the words. Then when the kids got older they could do it all themselves.”
“These have to be worth something,” Vick says.
What Eli’s chosen are hard to trade, I’d imagine. The stories can be replicated but the pictures cannot. But at the moment he grabbed them, Eli wasn’t thinking of trading.
We sit by the embers of the fire and read the stories over Eli’s shoulder. There are words we don’t know, but we puzzle out the meanings by looking at the pictures.
Eli yawns and closes the books. “We can look at them again tomorrow,” he says decisively, and I grin to myself as he packs them into his bag. He seems to be telling us I brought these here and you can see them on my terms.
I pick up a stick from the ground and start writing Cassia’s name in the dirt. Eli’s breathing slows as he falls asleep.
“I loved someone too,” Vick says to me a few minutes later. “Back in Camas.” He clears his throat.
Vick’s story. I never thought he’d tell it. But there’s something about the fire tonight that makes us all talk. I wait a moment to make sure I ask the right question. A bright spot in the coals flares and goes dark. “What was her name?” I ask.
A pause. “Laney,” Vick says. “She worked at the base where we lived. She told me about the Pilot.” He clears his throat. “I’d heard it before, of course. And on the base people used to wonder if one of the Officers could be the Pilot. But for Laney and her family it was different. When they talked about the Pilot it meant more to them.”
He glances at the spot where I wrote Cassia’s name over and over in the dirt. “I wish I could do that,” he says. “We never had anything but scribes and ports in Camas.”
“I can teach you how.”
“You do it,” he says. “On this.” He shoves a piece of wood toward me. Cottonwood, probably from the stand of trees where we fished. I start in on it with my sharp piece of stone, not looking up at Vick. Near us, Eli sleeps on.
“She used to fish, too,” Vick says. “I’d go to meet her at the stream. She—” Vick stops for a moment. “My father was so angry when he found out. I’d seen him get angry before. I knew what would happen but I did it anyway.”
“People fall in love,” I say, my voice hoarse. “It happens.”
“Not Anomalies and Citizens,” Vick says. “And most people don’t celebrate their Contract.”
I draw in my breath. She was an Anomaly? They celebrated their Contract?
“It wasn’t sanctioned by the Society,” he says. “But when the time came I chose not to be Matched. And I asked her parents if I could Contract with her. They said yes. The Anomalies have their own ceremony. No one recognizes it but them.”
“I didn’t know that,” I say, and I dig the agate deeper into the wood. I wasn’t sure Anomalies other than the ones in the Carving still existed so recently or so close to Society. In Oria no one had seen or heard of any in years, except for the one who killed my cousin, the first Markham boy.
“I asked her parents on the day I saw the rainbow,” Vick says. “I pulled it out of the river and saw the colors flash in the sun. I put it back right away when I saw what it was. When I told her parents about it, they said it was a good omen. A sign. You know what that is?”
I nod. My father talked about signs sometimes.
“I haven’t seen one since,” Vick says. “A rainbow trout, I mean. And it wasn’t a good omen after all.” He takes a deep breath. “Only two weeks later I heard that the Officials were coming for us. I went to find her, but she was gone. So was her family.”
Vick reaches for the cottonwood. I hand it back to him although I haven’t finished. He turns the piece and studies the way her name looks right now—LAN—almost all straight lines. Like notches in a boot. And suddenly I know what he has been marking all along. Not time survived in the Outer Provinces—time lived without her.
“The Society found me before I got home,” Vick says. “They took me to the Outer Provinces right away.” He hands the carving back to me and I start working on it again. The firelight plays on the agate like the sun might have on the scales of the rainbow when Vick pulled it from the water.
“What happened to your family?” I ask Vick.
“Nothing, I hope,” he says. “The Society Reclassified me automatically, of course. But I wasn’t the parent. My family should be fine.” I hear the uncertainty in his voice.