Reached (Matched, #3)

by Ally Condie

“What are all these words?” the child asked. “The sorrows of the world,” the man told her. “I pilot them up the hill over and over again.” “You are using them to wear out the hill,” the child said, noticing the long deep groove worn where the stone had turned.

The Pilot is a man who pushed a stone and washed away in the water. It is a woman who crossed the river and looked to the sky. The Pilot is old and young and has eyes of every color and hair of every shade; lives in deserts, islands, forests, mountains, and plains. The Pilot leads the Rising—the rebellion against the Society—and the Pilot never dies. When one Pilot’s time has finished, another comes to lead. And so it goes on, over and over like a stone rolling. In a place past the edge of the Society’s map, the Pilot will always live and move.

There must be a world past the Enemy territory. How much has been erased and taken away?

I want to find Patrick and Aida. I don’t want them to think that they’ve lost another son. One is enough.

I don’t hate Ky. I respect him. But that doesn’t mean I think he should be with Cassia. I think she should be with whomever she wants to be with, and I still believe it could be me in the end.

It’s so calculated—the way they paired us up, the way they’ve made just enough of the cure. “This sounds like the Society,” I say out loud. “We are not the Society,” the Pilot says, “but we recognize that we have to save people before we can free them.” Indie and I stare at each other. Did the Pilot answer me? Indie covers her mouth with her hand and I find myself, inexplicably, trying not to laugh.

The Pilot sings it slow, and sad. The Society is dying, is dead. Tears stream down my cheeks. In spite of myself, I find that I am crying for the Society, for its end. For the death of what did keep some of us safe for a very long time.

I know Ky will understand why I have to write this, why there was nothing else that would suffice.

Cassia told me that Xander was assigned to Camas. It’s strange that he might be on the other side of that barricade, working in the medical center. Our paths haven’t crossed in Camas, though we’ve both been here for months. I wish I had seen Xander. I’d like to talk to him. I’d be interested to hear what he thinks of the Rising—if he’s found it everything he hoped it would be. I don’t wonder if he still loves Cassia. I’m sure that he does.

I can’t figure Caleb out. He’s the only one who brings cases back when we’re dropping off the cure. None of the other ships are taking on cargo. The commander always tells us it’s approved, but I think there’s more going on than we know. And I think Caleb has been assigned to work with Indie and me to watch one of us—but I can’t figure out which of us it is. Maybe both.

“You saw those samples in the Carving. How could you bring anyone back from that? And even if you could use the sample to create someone a lot like the original person, it would never be the person themselves. You can’t bring anyone back, ever. Do you see what I mean?”

Sometimes, when I feel that it isn’t fair that we’re telling each other our stories in bits and pieces again, I remind myself that we are luckier than most, because we can write to each other. That gift, the first of many you’ve given me, means more to me each day. We have a way to keep in touch until we can be together again.

She tilts her head, scrutinizing me. “My name is Indie,” she says. She smiles and it makes her beautiful. I smile back and then she’s gone, too.

Ky and I were friends almost from the beginning of his time in the Borough. At first, I was jealous of him. I dared him to steal the red tablets, and he did. After that we respected each other.

Right then I knew we were feeling the same thing. I knew we loved Cassia, if not exactly the same way, then the same amount. And the amount was: completely. One hundred percent. The Society said that numbers like that don’t exist but neither Ky nor I cared. I respected that about him, too.

“Have you seen anything unusual?” she asks. “Any variations on the basic virus?” She’s trying to figure out the Plague on her own and not taking what the Rising says for granted. Which should make me uneasy about having vouched for her, but it doesn’t.

I am not the only one writing. I am not the only one creating. The Society took so much from us, but we still hear rumors of music, hints of poetry; we still see intimations of art in the world around us. They never did keep us from all of it. We took it in, sometimes without knowing, and many still ache for a way to let it out.

“I analyzed the viral genome taken from the patient with the circumferential rash,” he says. “It reveals an additional copy of the neural-insertion envelope protein gene. Do you understand what I’m saying?” I do. We have a mutation on our hands.

I know you love me. I love you, and I always will, but things can’t hold like this. They have to break. You say you don’t mind, that you’ll wait for me, but I think that you do mind, and you should. Because we’ve done too much waiting in our lives, Xander. Don’t wait for me anymore. I hope for love for you.

“Is something wrong?” one of the fighters asks over the speaker. “No,” I say. “I’m bringing it in.” I’ve seen what I needed to see. The ground is bare. It’s been completely bulldozed. Burned. Butchered. It’s like the Hill never knew trees. Parts of the Hill have sloughed downward, no longer anchored by the roots of living things.

She is not the Pilot. I know it now. She reminds me of my Official, back in Oria. They both have in common their conviction that they are still learning, still growing, when in fact they have long ago lost that ability.

He wants me to look at data now? When we’ve just had a death? The entire team looks rattled. The point of the medical center, and the Rising, is that we save people. We don’t lose them like this.

“Was that the first time you’ve seen anyone die in real life?” I ask. “People didn’t die in the Society,” he says. “They did,” I say. “They were just better at hiding it.”

“The Otherlands are the places far past Enemy territory. And the stone villages were built by Anomalies along the edge of the Outer Provinces when the Society came to power. The villages are like stepping-stones in a river. That’s how they got their name. They run north to south and they’re all built a day’s journey apart from one another. When you reach the last one, you have to cross through Enemy territory if you want to go on to the Otherlands. You really haven’t heard of the villages?”

“You don’t have it,” Xander says, his words blunt but his voice sympathetic. “You should stay away from us, in case your exposure didn’t actually infect you. We could still be carriers.” Ky nods and pulls his shirt back over his head. When he turns to us there’s something haunted and relieved in his eyes. He didn’t expect to be immune; he’s never been lucky. But he’s glad that I am. My eyes burn with angry tears. Why does it always have to be like this for Ky? How does he stand it?

The numbers of the Plague make sense to me now. “The sudden outbreak we saw at the beginning of the Rising—widespread contamination in several different Cities and Provinces—means that someone added the virus to water sources to hurry up the process.”

But one thing is the same for all Pilots: We have to understand what it means to be the Pilot. Your great-grandmother understood that if you don’t save, you fail. And she knew that the smallest rebel who does their job is as great as the Pilot who leads.

He and I are talking and joking, using the same tone we did when we played at the game tables. Once again Ky is going to lose and it’s not fair. He shouldn’t have to be still. But he hasn’t lost Cassia. The way the two of them look at each other is like touching. I’m caught in the middle of it.

When it happens, everything feels sudden and slow at the same time.

But as I feel Ky’s fingers tighten around mine, I think how this is always the way he is, giving me something even when most would think there was nothing left to do but let go.

It’s good to know that Xander’s here. So that when I go down, she won’t be alone. “You walked through the Carving to find me,” I tell Cassia softly. “I’m going to walk through this to reach you.”

She’ll know that I was here. And that I loved her. She’ll always know that, unless she chooses to forget.

“People like you see that as evidence that the Otherlands aren’t real,” Leyna tells me. “People like me see it is evidence that it’s a place so wonderful no one would ever want to come back.”

But I will rewrite the last two lines. Death will not take the people I love. Our journey will end differently.

“How long before they start letting people go?” “They will have already begun,” I say.

“When the Rising asked him to lead, I told him not to believe them. They’re no rebellion. They’re Society, with a different name, and they just want you and your followers, I said. But he was so sure it would work.”

“Sione executed a trade on another’s behalf to bring someone—his nephew—to the stone villages. We farmers never assisted in any of that, of course. But Sione told me about it.” My mind is whirling. Matthew Markham. Patrick and Aida’s son. He isn’t dead? “Sione performed that trade with no fee, because it was a family member who wanted it. It was his wife’s sister. Her husband knew something was rotten in the Society. He wanted his child out. It was an extremely delicate, dangerous trade.”

The pain wants to eat me away. I wish I could have one without the other, but that’s the problem with being alive. You don’t usually get to choose the measure of suffering or the degree of joy you have.

Some things cannot be shared. I could tell him everything that happened in the Carving and he still won’t have been there with me. And it’s the same for him. He could tell me all about the Plague and the mutation that followed and what he saw, but I still wasn’t there.

“It’s not the Society anymore,” I remind him. “Of course it is,” he says, tipping back his canteen to drink. He wipes off his mouth with the back of his hand and glares at me. “Only fools think that anything has changed. The Rising and the Society have infiltrated each other so thoroughly that they don’t even know who’s who anymore. It’s like a snake eating its own damn tail. This—out here—is the only true rebellion.”

“It’s perfect Society logic,” I say. “While they’re protecting you, they also implant a virus so that they can still control you if they need to. But why didn’t more people go still before now?”

I also know we can’t plan on anyone else rescuing us. We have to do it ourselves. There can be no one Pilot. We have to be strong enough to go without the belief that someone can swoop down and save us.

I don’t understand what he means. I thought I could trust him, and I was wrong. Hunter sits down and puts his head in his hands, and I hear the sounds of Anna crying and the bags dripping onto the floor.

I want to run to be with Ky. But I suddenly have a terrible feeling that Xander is the one in the most danger now, and I can’t leave him alone.

“Why Ky?” I ask. “You came out of the canyon together. I thought the two of you understood each other.” “I had to be fair,” Hunter says. “I couldn’t disconnect everyone else and leave Ky alone.” The door opens behind me, letting in light. I turn a little. Anna has come in, but she stays out of Hunter’s line of view. She wants to listen. “Hunter,” I say, “some of them died.” I wish I could get him to answer me, to tell me why. Hunter stretches out his arms. I wonder how often he does the markings to keep them so bright. “People dying is what happens if you don’t have the right medicines to save them,” Hunter says.

Asshole.

Ky’s face looks very still. Very gone. The bag drips neatly into his veins. He and Xander are both trapped. I have to find a way to free them. And I don’t know how.

“Anna,” I say, my heart racing, “does mariposa lily have another name?” If it does, that might account for the problem in the data. We’ve been counting this flower as two separate data points, but it was, in fact, a single variable. “Yes,” Anna says, after a pause. “Some people call it the sego lily.” I pick up the datapod and search for the name. There it is. The properties are all the same. One flower, reported under two different names. Now, with its names combined, it rises right to the top of potential ingredients. It was a critical, elemental mistake made by those gathering the data, but we should have noticed it earlier.

“We need Xander to make something for us.” The guard laughs. “I don’t think so,” he says. “I’m not asking you to release Xander,” Cassia says. “We just need to give him the equipment and have him prepare the cure.” “And then what are you going to do with it?” another guard asks. “We’re going to give it to one patient,” she says. “Our patient. Ky.”

“There are a lot of ways it could go wrong,” she agrees. “I might not have found the right ingredient. But I think that I have. And I know you can make the cure.” “Why?” I ask. “You always come through for the people who need you,” she says, and her voice sounds sad. Like she knows this is going to cost me but she’s asking me to do it anyway and it breaks her heart. “Please,” she says. “One more time.”

I have sometimes seen the three of us as separate, discrete points, and of course we are that, each individuals. But Ky and Xander and I all have to believe in one another to keep each other safe. In the end, I had to trust Xander to make a cure for Ky, and Ky trusted us to bring him back, and Xander trusted my sorting, and around and around we go, a circle, the three of us, connected, always, in the turning of days and the keeping of promises over and over again.