CHAPTER 62

XANDER

It sounds like a million birds beating their wings against the sky, but it’s only the ships flying above me. At the last minute, I realized I couldn’t go with them to the Otherlands. But I also couldn’t make myself go back to Camas. I’m stuck here in the middle, as always.

Morning comes. I climb up to the stream near the field where Oker and I dug the camassia, skirting the village so I don’t have to talk to anyone. Later, I’ll come back and ask them if there’s something I can do: maybe work in Oker’s old lab.

Roots from the trees at the edge of the stream dangle down into the water. They are tiny and red. I never knew roots could be that color.

And then I see a larger glimpse of red. Another. Another. They’re almost hideous—strange jaws, round eyes—but the color is so brilliant.

They’re the redfish Lei told me about. I’m seeing them at last.

My throat aches and my eyes burn. I come down closer to the water.

Then I hear something behind me. I turn around, change my expression to a grin, ready to talk to whatever villager found their way out here.

“Xander,” she says.

It’s Lei.

“Are they back?” she asks me. “The redfish?”

“Yes,” I say.

“I didn’t know you were here,” she says. “I didn’t see you on the ships from Camas.”

“We must not have been on the same ship,” I say. “I meant to go to the Otherlands.”

“I did, too,” she says. “But I couldn’t leave.”

“Why not?” I ask, and I don’t know what I hope the answer will be, but my heart pounds in my chest and in my ears there’s a sound like rushing water or those ships lifting into the sky.

She doesn’t answer, but she looks toward the stream. Of course. The fish.

“Why do they come all the way back?” I ask her.

“To find each other.” Her eyes meet mine. “We used to come to the river together,” she says. “He looked a little like you. He had very blue eyes.”

The rushing in my ears is gone. Everything feels very quiet. She came back because she couldn’t leave the country where she knew him. It has nothing to do with me.

I clear my throat. “You said these fish are blue in the ocean,” I say. “Like a completely different animal.”

“Yes and no,” she says. “They have changed. We’re allowed to change.” She’s very soft with me. Her voice is gentle.

And then Lei is the one to close the distance. She moves right to me.

I want to say something I’ve never said before, and it won’t be to Cassia, the way I always thought it would be. “I love you,” I say. “I know you still love someone else, but—”

“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.

There is something extraordinary about the first time falling.

But it feels even better to find myself standing on solid ground, with someone holding on to me, pulling me back, and know that I’m doing the same for her.

“Remember the story I told you?” Lei asks. “The one about the Pilot and the man she loved?”

“Yes,” I say.

“Who do you think had to be more brave?” she asks. “The Pilot who let him go, or the man who had to start all over in a new world?”

“They were both brave,” I say.

Her eyes are level with mine. So I see when she closes them and lets herself fall for me: right when my lips meet hers.

CHAPTER 63

CASSIA

Ky and I stand together at the top of the steps of City Hall, holding hands and blinking in the brightness of an end-of-summer day in Camas. No one notices us. They have other things to think about on their way up the stairs. Some look uncertain, others excited.

An older woman stops at the top of the steps and glances at me. “When do we write our names?” she asks.

“Once you get inside to vote,” I tell her.

The woman nods and disappears into the building.

I look at Ky and smile. We have just finished putting our names to paper, making a choice about who we want to lead.

“When people chose the Society, it was almost the end of us,” I say. “It might be the end of us again, forever this time.”

“It might be,” Ky agrees. “Or we might make a different choice.”

There are three candidates offering to lead the people. The Pilot represents the Rising. An Official represents the Society.

And Anna represents everyone else. She and Eli came back to Camas with us. “What about Hunter?” Ky asked Anna, and she said, “I know where he’s gone,” and smiled, sadness and hope mixed together in her expression, a feeling I know all too well.

This voting is such a large and impossible task, such a beautiful and terrible experiment, and it could go wrong in so many ways. I think of all those little white papers inside, all those people who have learned to write, at least their names. What will they choose? What will become of us, and our lands of blue sky and red rock and green grass?

But, I remind myself, the Society can’t take it all again unless we let them. We can get our memories back, but we will have to talk with each other and trust one another. If we’d done that before, we might have found the cure sooner. Who knows why that man planted those fields? Perhaps he knew we’d need the flowers for a cure. Maybe he just thought they were beautiful, like my mother did. But we do find answers in beauty, more often than not.

This is going to be very difficult. But we came through the Plague and its mutation together, all of us. Those who believed in the Rising and those who believed in the Society and those who believed in something else entirely all worked side by side to help the still. Some didn’t. Some ran and some killed. But many people tried to save.

“Who did you vote for?” I whisper to Ky as we walk down the steps.

“Anna,” he says. He smiles at me. “What about you?”

“Anna,” I say.

I hope she wins.

It’s time for the Anomalies and Aberrations to have their turn.

But will we let them?

In the debates on the ports, the Official was clear and concise, statistical. “Don’t you think we’ve seen this before?” she asked. “Everything you do has been done before. You should let the Society help you again. This time, of course, we will allow for greater increase of expression. Give you more choices. But, left too much to your own devices, what would happen?”

I thought, We’d write something. We’d sing something.

“Yes,” said the Official, as if she knew my thoughts, as if she knew what everyone in the Society was thinking. “Exactly. You would write the same books that other people have written. You’d write the same poems: they’d be about love.”

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.

I remember what Anna called the three of us.

The Pilot. The Poet. The Physic.

They are in all of us. I believe this. That every person might have a way to fly, a line of poetry to put down for others to see, a hand to heal.

Xander sent a message to let us know where he is now. He wrote it out by hand. It was the first time I ever saw his writing, and the neat rows of letters brought tears to my eyes.

I’m in the mountains. Lei’s here, too. Please tell my family that I’m fine. I’m happy. And I’ll be back someday.

I hope that’s true.

My mother and Bram wait for us on the steps down to the river.

“You’re finished voting,” Bram says. “How was it?”

“Quiet,” I say, thinking back to that large Hall full of people and the sounds of pencils on paper, names being written slowly and carefully.

“I should be able to vote,” Bram says.

“You should,” I agree. “But they decided on seventeen.”

“Banquet age,” Bram says. “Do you think I’m going to have a Banquet?”

“You might,” I say. “But I hope not.”

“I have something for you,” Ky says. He holds out his hand and there is Grandfather’s tube, the one we found in the Cavern, the one that Ky hid for me in a tree.

“When did you get this?” I ask.

“Yesterday,” Ky says. “We were in the Outer Provinces again, looking for survivors.” After the mutated Plague was under control, the Pilot let Ky and some of the others try to find those who are still lost, like Patrick and Aida. The hope was that some of them might have found their way to the Rising’s old camp, the one on the map near the lake.

So far, we’re still looking.

“I brought this back, too,” he says. “It’s the one Eli saved.” He holds out his hand and I see the label on the tube. Roberts, Vick.

“I thought you didn’t believe in the tubes,” Bram says.

“I don’t,” Ky says. “But I think this one should be given to someone who loved him so they can decide what to do.”

“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.”

Because she loves Xander now. She’s chosen to love again.

Sometimes, I felt angry that Grandfather hadn’t told me exactly which poem he wanted me to find. But now I see what he did give me. He gave me a choice. That’s what it always was.

“It’s hard to do this,” I say, holding Grandfather’s tube. “I wish I’d kept the poems. That would make it easier. I’d have something of him left.”

“Sometimes paper is only paper,” my mother says. “Words are just words. Ways to capture the real thing. Don’t be afraid to remember that.”

I know what she means. Writing, painting, singing—it cannot stop everything. Cannot halt death in its tracks. But perhaps it can make the pause between death’s footsteps sound and look and feel beautiful, can make the space of waiting a place where you can linger without as much fear. For we are all walking each other to our deaths, and the journey there between footsteps makes up our lives.

“Good-bye,” I say to Grandfather, and to my father, and I hold the tube in the river and pause a moment. We hold the choices of our fathers and mothers in our hands and when we cling on or let them slip between our fingers, those choices become our own.

Then I unstop the tube and hold it in the water, letting it take the last little bit of Grandfather away, just as he wanted and asked my father to do.

I wish the two of them could see all of this: green field planted with cures for the future; blue sky; a red flag on top of City Hall signaling that it is time to choose.