Reached (Matched, #3)

by Ally Condie

“What Hunter did was wrong,” Anna says, “but he didn’t mean to kill. If that was his intent, he could have done it easily and escaped. What Hunter wanted was to make things fair. He felt that since the Provinces denied Anomalies access to any of their medications for years, we should do the same for their patients.”

FUCK him. He was killing them!

Will we be able to bring enough people back? Will the cure work again? How will we find enough bulbs? Who will decide which people get the cure first? There are a lot of questions and I’m not sure we can find the answers fast enough.

“There is a cure,” Cassia says. “Xander can show your pharmics how to make it.” She holds out a tube to the Pilot. She’s at the game table and she’s throwing down all her cards.

Cassia pushes open the door to the infirmary as if she’s perfectly confident that everything inside is fine. But I see how her lips tremble when Ky looks up at her, his eyes clear and aware. She didn’t know it was working, at least not this well. And then, for a second, it’s like none of the rest of us are here. They’re the only two in the world. “Ky,” she says. “Can we run yet?” he asks her. His voice is barely a whisper. Everyone, including Leyna and Colin, leans in to hear Ky, even though what he’s saying isn’t meant for the rest of us.

“Thank you,” Ky says to me as we bring him onto the ship, Cassia close behind. “You would have done the same,” I say.

I know that a virus doesn’t think or feel, but it still seems as if this one likes to take down those who were the most alive.

“So there really was an Enemy,” Ky says. “But after they were gone, the Rising stepped in to act their part. Did you kill the farmers on top of the Carving to keep your cover?” “No,” the Pilot says. “That was the Society. For years, they used the people in the Outer Provinces as a buffer between the main Provinces and the Enemy.” He clears his throat. “So I should have realized that we were no longer a true rebellion when we let the farmers, and so many other Anomalies and Aberrations, die. We told ourselves that the timing wasn’t right to reveal ourselves, but we still should have tried.”

“The Society decided that it would be easier to become the Rising,” Ky says. “Didn’t they?” As soon as he says this, I know that he’s right. That’s why the transition of power was so smooth, with so little fighting. “Because if they became the Rising,” I say, “they could predict the outcome.”

The Society must have known that people become restless eventually. They may even have predicted it. Why not have a rebellion, if they could calculate the outcome and secure their power again under a different name? Why not use the Rising, a real rebellion in the beginning, to make things seem authentic?

“Thank you,” I say to Xander, and I mean those words as much as I love you, as much as anything I’ve ever said. And I feel a heavy, low, longing note of regret. For in the end, I didn’t fail him because I didn’t love him back, because I do love him back. I failed him because I cannot do for him what Ky does for me. I can’t help Xander sing.

“It’s better than selling the tubes,” he says. “That’s the other job that pays well.” His eyes are different—so much older, having seen so much more—and still the same, with that obstinate glint that I know well. “I won’t do that. Selling the tubes is a lie. Telling people whether or not their friends or family are dead is the truth.”

I do not know how I can feel this much pain and survive, and at the same time know how much I have to live.

I stop at the door for a second and look back at Lei. You’re not supposed to do what we’ve done with this cure and Ky and let one patient take on so much significance. It’s just one person. Of course, one person can be the world.

The painting above her is the same one, that picture of the girl fishing. Lei stares up at the water, and I smile just in case. “Lei,” I say. That’s all I can get out before her eyes move the slightest bit and focus on me. She’s here. She sees me.

She finds it hard to breathe without him, I think, something in her is still drowning a little from loss.

“In that way, he was a true rebel. I think that’s why he chose that argument with your father as his favorite memory. Though he was upset when the fight happened, later he came to see that your father was strong in choosing his own path, and he admired him for it.” I see why my father had to honor Grandfather’s last request—to destroy his sample—even though my father didn’t agree with the choice. It was his turn to give that back; to be the one to respect and honor a decision made. And my father also extended that gift to me. I remember what he said in his note: Cassia, I want you to know that I’m proud of you for seeing things through, and for being braver than I was.

I draw in a ragged breath, the kind you take when the pain is too deep to cry, when you can’t cry because all you are is pain, and if you let some of it out, you might cease to exist.

The man holds out a datapod. It’s old, but the pictures on the screen are clear. Grandfather, younger, holding artifacts. Grandfather, burying the artifacts in a forested area. “Where is this?” I say. “Here,” they say. “On the Hill.”

“You don’t have to enter anything,” the woman says. “All you have to do is access an additional data set and transfer some of that data.”

“Why did you pick me?” I ask. “You fit all the criteria,” he says. “You’re assigned to the sort today.” “Also, you’re one of the fastest,” the woman says. “And the best.” Then she says something else, something that sounds like, “And you’ll forget.”

The man and woman said that these other people belong in the pool, that it’s unfair to leave them out. Just as it’s unfair to leave Grandfather out from having his sample preserved. I’m doing it for Grandfather, but I’m also doing it for me. I want to have my real Match, with all the possibilities included.

And this, I realized, is why the Society doesn’t trust technology. It can be overridden and manipulated. Like people, whom the Society also does not trust.

I look around again at the red buds, the flowers. “Or,” I say, something sharpening in me, “you could call it a red garden day.” “Yes,” Grandfather says. “A red garden day. A day to remember.”

The Rising and the Society both used me, because they knew that I would forget. The Society knew I’d forget the sort and its proximity to the Match Banquet, and the Rising knew I could not betray them if I didn’t remember what I’d done.

Out of all the people in the Society, were Ky and Xander really the two I fit best with? Wouldn’t the Society have noticed that I had two Matches, or have some fail-safe to catch such an occurrence? Or did the Society not even have a procedure in place for something like that, believing that it would never happen, trusting in their own data and their belief that there could be only one perfect Match for each person? So many questions, and I may never have the answers.

This might be the last wave by, the last chance we have to cure a significant amount of people before they go too far under. These deeds—our flying, Cassia’s sorting, Xander’s curing—will either be frail or bright.

We’re saving the optimal amount of people. She tells us what she thinks we should do, the computers and other sorters corroborate it—her mind is as fine and clear as anything in this world. But we’re not saving everyone. Of the still who go down, about eleven percent do not come back at all. And other patients succumb to infections.

I’ll never forget Aida’s screams and Patrick’s face when the Officials took me away, or how they kept reaching for me and for each other. The Society knew what they were doing when they Matched Patrick and Aida. If I’d been the one Matched with Cassia, if I’d known I could have eighty years of a good life and most of it spent with her, I wonder if I would have had the strength to try to take the Society down. Xander did. I walk up the pathway and knock on the door of the house where he used to live.

Now we’re heading toward a different time: once people are well, they will need to choose what kind of world it is that they want to live in. I don’t know that we’re going to come through that as well as we came through the Plague.

“Thank you,” I said. It was the first time I’d seen him since he’d brought my family in for the cure. Ky nodded. “I couldn’t bring my own family back,” he said. “I hoped I’d find yours.”

“I wanted to stay alive after my family died,” he said. “But I didn’t feel like I was living again until I met Cassia.” “But you didn’t feel like she really knew you, did you?” I asked again. “No,” Ky said, “but I felt like she could.”

She told me that she didn’t even need to change her name, just reverse it. Nea Lei. Lei Nea. When you say it out, it sounds like Laney. Ky had never seen it spelled when he carved the name of the girl Vick loved. Neither, perhaps, had Vick.

“Xander, you can’t go to the Otherlands. We need you.” “I’m sorry,” Xander says, “but I can’t let that keep me here anymore.”

“We could stay out here,” Ky says, low in my ear. “We don’t have to go back.” It’s a conversation we’ve had before. We know the answer. We love each other, but there are others to think of, too. Ky has to look for Patrick and Aida, in case they are still alive. I have to be with my family.

Anna takes Ky’s hand and draws a blue line on it, tracing one of his veins. “The pilot,” she says. She lifts my hand and draws the line from Ky to me. “The poet.” Then Anna takes Xander’s hand and draws the line from me to him. “The physic,” she says.

Xander’s journeys happened in those walled rooms and long hallways of the sick, when he worked with Lei. When I saw him again in the Pilot’s air ship, Xander had already been places I would never go and become someone else.

Xander is going out to a place that is Other, a place so distant I can’t even be certain there is a coming back.

“I love you,” she says. It’s not all gone. She loved someone before and so did I. The Society and the Rising and the world are all still out there, pressing against us. But Lei holds them away. She’s made enough space for two people to stand up together, whether or not any Society or Rising says that they can. She’s done it before. The amazing thing is that she’s not afraid to do it again. When we fall in love the first time, we don’t know anything. We risk a lot less than we do if we choose to love again.

She’s right. We would compose poems about love and tell stories that have been heard in some form before. But it would be our first time feeling and telling.

“Do you think she’ll take it?” I ask Ky. He’s talking about Lei, of course. “I think she’ll take it,” Ky says, “and then let it go.”