He talks to me while Eli and I pull spheres from the stream. Over and over Vick tells me his story about Laney. I picture it in my mind—him falling in love with an Anomaly. Telling Laney how he felt. Watching the rainbow and going to speak with her parents. Standing up to celebrate a Contract. Smiling as he reached for her hand to claim happiness in spite of the Society. Coming back to find her gone.
“Stop it,” I say to Vick. I ignore Eli’s look of surprise. I’m turning into my father. He always heard voices in his head, telling him to talk to the people, to try to change the world.
When we’ve cleared as many spheres as we can, Eli and I dig Vick’s grave together. It’s hard going, even with the loose ground, and my muscles scream in exhaustion and the grave isn’t as deep as I would like. Eli works doggedly next to me, his small hands scooping out earth.
When we finish, we put Vick inside.
He’d emptied out one of his packs at our camp and brought it with him to carry his catch. I find one silver-scaled fish dead inside and I put it in the grave too. We leave Vick’s coat on him. The hole over his heart where the silver disk once was looks like a small wound. If the Society digs him up, they won’t know anything about him. Even the notches in his boots mean something that they won’t understand.
Vick keeps talking to me while I carve a piece of sandstone into a fish to leave on his shallow grave. The fish’s scales are dull and orange. A rainbow without all the colors. Not real like the one Vick saw. But the best I can do. I want it to mark not only that he died but that he loved someone and she loved him back.
“They didn’t kill me,” Vick says to me.
“No?” I say, but I say it quiet so that Eli can’t hear me.
“No,” he says with a grin. “Not as long as the fish are still around, still swimming, spawning, laying eggs.”
“Can’t you see this place?” I ask Vick. “We tried. But they’re going to die, too.”
And then he stops talking to me and I know that he’s really gone and I wish for a voice in my head again. I finally understand that as long as my father had that, he never had to be alone.
Chapter 20
CASSIA
My breathing sounds wrong. Like little waves of a stream lapping up against rock and making small tired sounds, hoping to wear away at the stone.
“Talk to me,” I say to Indie. I notice she carries two packs, two canteens. How did that happen? Are they mine? I’m too tired to care.
“What do you want me to say?” she asks.
“Anything.” I need to hear something besides my own breath, my own tired heart.
Somewhere, before Indie’s words turn into nothing sounds in my ears, I realize that she’s telling me things, many things; that she can’t stop herself from talking now that she thinks I’m too far gone to really listen. I wish that I could pay better attention to the words, that I could remember this. I only catch a few phrasesAlways at night before I slept
and
I thought everything would be different after
and
I don’t know how much longer I can believe
It almost sounds like poetry, and I wonder again if I will ever be able to finish that poem for Ky. If I will know the right words to say when I finally see him. If he and I will ever have time for more than beginnings.
I want to ask Indie for another blue tablet from my pack, but before I can say anything I remember once again how Grandfather told me that I was strong enough not to take the tablets.
But, Grandfather, I think, I didn’t understand you as well as I thought I did. The poems. I thought I knew what you intended. But which one did you want me to believe?
I remember the words Grandfather said when I took the paper from him that last time. “Cassia,” he whispered, “I am giving you something you won’t understand, yet. But I think you will someday. You, more than the rest.”
A thought flitters into my mind like one of the mourning cloaks, the butterflies that string their cocoons along the twigs both here and back in Oria. It’s a thought I’ve almost had before but I haven’t let myself finish it until now.
Grandfather, were you once the Pilot?
And then another thought comes, one light and fast and that I don’t grasp completely, leaving me with another impression of gently moving wings.
“I don’t need them anymore,” I say to myself. The tablets, the Society. I don’t know if it’s true. But it seems that it should be.
And then I see it. A compass, made of stone, sitting on a ledge exactly at eye level.
I pick it up, although I’ve dropped everything else.
I hold it in my hand as we walk even though it weighs more than many of the things I have let fall to the ground. I think, This is good, even though it’s heavy. I think, This is good, because it will hold me to the earth.
Chapter 21
KY
Say the words,” Eli tells me.
My hands shake with exhaustion from the hours of work. The sky grows dark beyond us. “I can’t, Eli. They don’t mean anything.”
“Say them,” Eli commands, tears coming again. “Do it.”
“I can’t,” I tell him, and I put the sandstone fish down on top of Vick’s grave.
“You have to say them,” Eli says. “You have to do this for Vick.”
“I already did what I could for Vick,” I say. “We both did. We tried to save the stream. Now it’s time to go. He would do the same.”
“We can’t cross the plain now,” Eli says.
“We’ll stay by the trees,” I say. “It’s not night yet. Let’s get as far as we can.”
We go back and gather our things at the camp near the mouth of the canyon. As we wrap up the smoked fish, they leave silver scales on our hands and clothes. Eli and I divide up the food from Vick’s pack. “Do you want any of these?” I ask Eli when I find the pamphlets Vick brought.
“No,” he says. “I like what I chose better.”
I slide one into my pack and leave the rest. It’s not worth carrying them all.
Eli and I start across the plain walking side by side in the dusk.
Then Eli stops and looks back. A mistake.
“We have to keep going, Eli.”
“Wait,” he says. “Stop.”
“I’m not going to stop,” I tell him.
“Ky,” he says. “Look back.”