“A boy who ran with us into the Carving,” Cassia says. “He’s the one who showed us where you went.”
“How did he know?” I ask.
“He was one of the ones you left,” Indie says bluntly. She moves back from the dying fire. The light barely reaches her face. She gestures at the canyon around us. “This is the painting, isn’t it?” she asks. “Number nineteen?”
It takes me a moment to realize what she means. “No,” I say. “The land looks alike, but that carving is even bigger than this one. It’s farther to the south. I’ve never seen it but my father knew people who had.”
I wait for her to say something else, but she doesn’t.
“That boy,” Cassia says again.
Indie curls up to rest. “We have to forget about him,” she tells Cassia. “He’s gone.”
“How are you feeling?” I whisper to Cassia. I sit with my back against the rock. Her head rests on my shoulder. I can’t sleep. What Indie said about the tablet wearing off could be true, and Cassia seems strong, but I need to watch her all the way through the night to make sure she’s all right.
Eli stirs in his sleep. Indie stays silent. I can’t tell if she sleeps or listens, so I speak quietly.
Cassia doesn’t answer me. “Cassia?”
“I wanted to find you,” she says softly. “When I traded for the compass, I was trying to get to you.”
“I know,” I say. “And you did. Even if they cheated you.”
“They didn’t,” she says. “Not completely, anyway. They gave me a story that was more than a story.”
“What story?” I ask.
“It sounded like the one you told me about Sisyphus,” she says. “But they called him the Pilot, and it talked about a rebellion.” She leans in close. “We’re not the only ones. There’s something called a Rising out there. Have you heard of it before?”
“Yes,” I say, but nothing more. I don’t want to talk about the Rising. She said we’re not the only ones as though that were a good thing, but all I want right now is to feel like we are the only ones in the camp. The Carving. The world.
I put my hand along her face, against the curve of her cheek that I tried before to carve in stone. “Don’t worry about the compass. I don’t have the green silk anymore either.”
“Did they take that, too?”
“No,” I say. “It’s still up on the Hill.”
“You left it there?” she asks, surprised.
“I tied it to a branch on one of the trees,” I say. “I didn’t want anyone to take it away.”
“The Hill,” Cassia says. For a moment we are both silent, remembering. And then she says, with a teasing note in her voice, “You never said the words of our poem to me earlier.”
I lean closer to her and this time I can speak. I whisper, though part of me wants to shout. “Do not go gentle.”
“No,” she agrees, her voice, her skin soft in that good night. And then she kisses me hard.
Chapter 24
CASSIA
Watching Ky wake is better than a sunrise. One moment, he’s still and down deep, and the next moment I can see him returning out of the dark, coming to the surface. His face shifts, his lips move, his eyes open. And then his smile, the sun. At the same time that he bends down to me, I reach up and am warmed as our lips meet.
We talk about the Tennyson poem, and how we both remembered it, and how he saw me reading it in the woods back in Oria. He’s heard that it was a password before; out here when he was young, and, more recently from Vick.
Vick. Ky talks in a soft voice about his friend who helped him bury and about the girl Vick loved named Laney. Then, in a voice hard and cold, Ky relates the story of his escape and how he left the other villagers. He shines a merciless light on himself and his own actions. But what I see is not who he left but who he brought with him. Eli. Ky did what he could.
I tell him about Indie’s version of the Pilot and more about the boy who vanished into a different canyon in the Carving. “He was looking for something,” I say, and I wonder if the boy knew what was behind the Society’s wall in the other canyon. “And he died.”
Last of all, I tell Ky about the blue-marked Anomalies on top of the Carving and how I wonder if they could have been part of the Rising.
Then we fall silent. Because we do not know what happens next.
“So the Society’s in these canyons,” Ky says.
Eli’s eyes widen. “They’re in our coats, too.”
“What do you mean?” I ask, and Ky and Eli tell us about the wires that keep us warm and take our data.
“I ripped mine out,” Ky says, and I realize that explains the tears in the fabric of his coat.
I glance at Eli, who looks defensive and folds his arms over his chest. “I left mine like it is,” he says.
“Nothing wrong with that,” Ky says. “It’s your choice to make.” He glances at me, asking what I will do.
I smile at him as I pull off my coat and hold it out. He takes it in his hands and looks at me standing in front of him as if he still can’t believe what he sees. I don’t look away. A smile crosses his lips, and then he puts the coat out on the ground in front of him and slits the fabric with swift, sure movements.
When he finishes, he gives me a tangle of blue wires and a small silver disc.
“What did you do with yours?” I ask him.