Ky comes into the cave then, brushing dust from his hair, and I walk over to him, and touch his hands, which feel cold and rough but nothing like stone. “Thank you for helping me,” I say into the warmth of his neck. Then I pull away so he can see what’s here.
“It is Society,” Ky says, his voice as quiet as the Cavern. He strides across the floor of the cave and Hunter and I follow. Ky puts his hand on the door at the other side of the room. “Steel,” he says.
“They’re not supposed to be here,” Hunter says, his voice tight.
It feels wrong: this overlay of the sterile and the Society over the earthy and the organic. The Society wasn’t supposed to be in my relationship with Ky, either, I think, remembering how my Official told me that they’d known all along. The Society slides in everywhere, snakes in a crack, water dripping against a rock until even the stone has no choice but to hollow and change shape.
“I have to know what they killed us for,” Hunter says to me, gesturing to the cases. They are filled with tubes. Rows and rows of them, glittering in the blue light. Beautiful as the sea, I imagine.
Indie comes into the cave next. She looks around and her eyes widen. “So what are they?” she asks.
“Let me look more closely,” I say, and I walk between two of the rows of tubes. Ky comes with me. I run my hand along the cases made of smooth, clear plastic. To my surprise, there are no locks on the doors, and I open one to get a better look. It makes a soft hiss as it opens and I gaze at the tubes in front of me, overwhelmed all at once by both the amount of sameness and the amount of choice.
I don’t want to disturb the tubes in case the Society has an alarm system, so I crane my neck until I can see the information on the tube in the center of the middle row. HANOVER, MARCUS. KA. The first notation is a name, clearly, and the second is the abbreviation for Keya Province. Beneath the Province, two dates and a bar code have been engraved.
These are samples of people, buried in the earth with the bones of creatures long dead and with the sediment of seas long stone, rows and rows of glass tubes similar to the one Grandfather had, the one containing his tissue preservation sample.
Behind the exhaustion and fatigue, I feel my sorting mind grind its gears, whir into action. Trying to make sense of what I see and the numbers in front of me. The cave is a place of preservation, accidental and intentional, in the mudded fossils above us and the tissues stored in tubes.
Why here? I wonder. Why so far on the edge of the Society? Surely there are better places, dozens of them. It is the opposite of a graveyard. It is the reverse of saying good-bye. And I understand this. Though I wish it didn’t, in some ways this makes more sense to me than putting people forever into the earth and letting them go the way the farmers do.
“They’re tissue samples,” I tell Ky. “But why would the Society store them here?” I shiver and Ky puts his arm around me.
“I know,” he says.
But he doesn’t.
The Carving doesn’t care.
We live, we die, we turn to rock or lie in earth or drift out to sea or burn to ash, and the Carving doesn’t care about any of it. We will come and go. The Society will come and go. The canyons will live on.
“You know what they are,” Hunter says. I look over at him. What must someone who has never lived in the Society think of something like this?
“Yes,” I say. “But I don’t know why. Wait a moment. Let me think.”
“How many are in here?” Ky asks.
I do a quick estimation based on the rows in front of me. “There are thousands,” I say. “Hundreds of thousands.” The tubes are small, row upon row, case upon case, aisle upon aisle, in the vast space of the Cavern. “But not enough to account for all the samples that must have been taken over the years. This can’t be the only facility.”
“Could they be moving them out of the Society?” Ky asks.
I shake my head, confused. Why would they do that? “They’re arranged by Province,” I say, noting that all the tubes in the case before me say KA.
“Find Oria,” Ky says.
“It should be on the next row,” I say, calculating, walking fast.
Indie and Hunter stand together watching us. I turn the corner and find tubes marked OR for Oria. Seeing the familiar abbreviation in such a strange place gives me an odd feeling that is both intimate and distant.
I hear a sound at the secret entrance to the Cavern. We all turn. Eli comes through just like Ky did, grinning and brushing dirt from his hair. I rush over to him and grab Eli tight, my heart hammering in my chest at what he went through all alone.
“Eli,” I say, “I thought you were going to wait.”
“I’m fine,” he tells me. He glances over my shoulder, looking for Ky.
“You did it,” Ky calls out to Eli, and Eli seems to stand a little straighter. I shake my head at Eli. Promising one thing, then choosing his own way when he changed his mind. Bram would have done the same thing.
Eli looks around, wide-eyed. “They’re storing tubes here,” he says.
“We think they’re organized by Province,” I tell him, and then I see Ky signaling to me.
“Cassia. I found something.”
I hurry back over to where Ky is while Indie and Eli wander up and down other rows, looking for their own Provinces. “If the first date is the birthdate,” Ky says, “then the second date is likely . . .” He pauses, waiting to see if I draw the same conclusion.
“The death date. The date the sample was taken,” I say. And then I realize what he means. “They’re too close. They’re not eighty years apart.”
“They weren’t just storing the old,” Ky says. “These people—they can’t all be dead.”
“They don’t only take the samples when we die,” I say, my mind racing. I think back—so many chances. Our forks. Our spoons. The clothes we wear. Or maybe we even give the samples ourselves, nod and scrape our own tissue away, hand it over and then take a red tablet. “The sample at the end means nothing. The Society already has tubes for everyone they want to keep. Maybe younger tissue works better. And this way, if we don’t know about the other samples, they can keep us compliant until the very end.” My heart leaps within me, perversely, in gratitude to the Society.
Grandfather might have a sample in here. It might not matter that my father destroyed the one taken at the Final Banquet.