“So we have a little time,” she says.
Time. It’s what we’ve always wanted, what we rarely have.
She’s sitting in the copilot’s chair and she turns it so that she faces me. There’s mischief in her bright green eyes and I catch my breath.
Cassia slides her hands behind my neck and I lean forward.
I close my eyes and remember her standing as beautiful as snow when she came out of the canyons. I remember holding the green silk against her cheek on the Hill. I remember her skin and sand in the canyons, and her face looking down on me in the mountains, bringing me back.
“I love you,” she whispers.
“I love you,” I say back.
I choose her again, and again, and again. Until the Pilot interrupts us and it’s time to fly.
Into the sky we go. The two of us together. As the wisps of clouds go by, I pretend that they’re my mother’s paintings, evaporated up from the stone. Drifting even higher on their way to something new.
CHAPTER 61
CASSIA
He takes us up higher and the air ship shudders and groans, and my heart beats fast, and I am not afraid.
There are the mountains, enormous blue and green against the sky, and then less, and less, below us, and it is blue all around.
In the blue, there is white and gold, white wisps of cloud trailing across the sky like the cottonwood seed I once gave Grandfather. “Clouds of glory,” I whisper, remembering, and I wonder where he found those words and if this is a journey he made after he died, coming up to be warmed by the sun, his fingers catching hold of these bits of sky, letting go.
And then where? I wonder. Could there be anywhere else as glorious as this?
Maybe this is where the angels went when they flew up. Perhaps it is where my father is now, drifting in the sun. Maybe it would be a cruel thing to bring him back and weigh him down. Or maybe when they are light, they are lonely.
I look over at Ky. His face is as I have rarely seen it before, perfectly serene.
“Ky,” I say. “You’re the Pilot.”
He smiles.
“You are,” I say. “Look how you fly. It’s like Indie.”
His smile turns sad.
“You must think of her when you fly,” I say, a little sharp pain cutting through me even though I understand. There are places, times, when I will always think of Xander. Whenever I see a blue pool, a red newrose, the roots of a plant pulled up from the ground.
“Yes,” Ky says. “But all the time, I think of you.”
I lean over and press my hand against his cheek, not wanting to distract him too much from what he’s doing.
The flight, with the man I love, is gorgeous, glorious. But there are so many people trapped below.
We drop lower, out of the clouds, and the mountains wait for us. The evening light on their faces turns white snow pink and gray rock gold. Dark trees and water, flat at first and then glinting and gaining dimension as we come closer, cling to the sides of the mountain; ravines of tumbled stone cut into green foothills.
Hand in hand, we walk up the path from the landing meadow to the village to find and speak with Anna and Eli. I hope they’ll come with us, I think. We need them in the Provinces. But they might want to go to the Otherlands, or stay in the mountains, or go out to look for Hunter, or back to the Carving. There are many choices now.
Ky stops on the path. “Listen,” he says. “Music.”
At first I hear only the murmur of the wind through those tall pine trees. And then I hear singing from the village.
We all quicken our pace. When we come into the village, Ky points at someone. “Xander,” Ky says. He’s right. Xander’s ahead of us—I see his blond hair, his profile. He must have flown in on one of the other ships.
He’s going to try to go to the Otherlands.
Xander must know we’re here, somewhere, but he’s not looking for us. All he’s doing, right now, is listening.
The villagers aren’t just singing, they are also dancing around the stone, in a farewell. Fire dances, too, and somehow, with things carved of wood and strung with string, the villagers are making music.
One of the officers moves to break it up, but Ky stops him. “They saved us,” he reminds the officer. “Give them a little time.”
The officer nods.
Ky turns to me. I brush my fingers along his lips. He’s so alive. “What now?”
“Dance with me,” he says. “I told you I would teach you.”
“I already learned how,” I say, thinking of that time back at the Gallery.
“I’m not surprised,” Ky whispers. His hands go down around my waist. Something sings inside me and we begin to move. I don’t ask if I’m doing this right. I know I am.
“Cassia.” He says the word like a song. His voice has always had that music in it.
He says my name, over and over as we move together, until I’m caught in a strange place between weak and strong, between dizziness and clarity and need and satiety and give and take and . . . “Ky,” I say back.
For so long, we cared about who saw us. Who might be watching, who might be hurt. But now, we are only dancing.
I come back to myself as the song ends, when the strings make a sound like hearts breaking. And then I can’t help but look for Xander. When I find him, I see that he watches us, but there’s no jealousy in his gaze. There is nothing but longing, but it’s not for me anymore.
You will find love, Xander, I want to tell him. The firelight flickers across Leyna’s face. She is very beautiful, very strong. Could Xander love Leyna? Someday? If they go to the Otherlands together?
“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.
“When I was flying,” Ky says, “I used to imagine that I came down and gathered everyone up and flew us all away.”
“Maybe we can do that someday,” I say.
“It might be,” Ky says, “that we won’t have to go so far to look for a new world. Maybe the vote really will be a beginning.”
It is the most hopeful I have ever heard him sound.
Anna walks over to Xander and says something to him, and he follows her toward Ky and me. The light from the fire shades and lightens, flickers and holds, and when it does, I see that Anna holds a piece of blue chalk in her hand. “You did it,” she says to the three of us. “You found the cure, and you each had a part.” 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.
Evening in the mountain, with its fresh pine and burning wood smells, its lights and music, gathers around us as Anna steps back. I hold on to Xander and Ky at the same time, the three of us standing in a little circle at the edge of the known world, and even as the moment exists I find myself mourning its passing.
The little girl Xander and I saw in the village dances over, wearing the wings we saw her in before. She looks up at the three of us. It’s plain she wants to dance with one of the boys, and Ky lets her lead him away, leaving me alone with Xander to say good-bye.
The music, this time lively, runs along us, over us, into us, and Xander is here with me. “You can dance,” he says. “And you can sing.”
“Yes,” I say.
“I can’t,” Xander says.
“You will,” I say, taking his hands.
He moves smoothly. Despite what he thinks, the music is in him. He’s never been taught to dance, and yet he’s guiding me. He doesn’t notice because he’s concentrating so hard on what he doesn’t have—what he thinks he can’t do.
“Can I ask you about something?”
“Of course,” he says.
“I remember something I shouldn’t,” I say. “From a day when I took the red tablet.” I tell him about the way I reclaimed the red garden day memory.
“How could I get part of my memory back?” I ask him.
“It might have something to do with the green tablet,” Xander says. His voice sounds very kind and very tired. “Maybe your not taking it, ever, means you could get your memories back somehow. And, you walked through the blue. Oker told me that the blue tablet and the Plague are related. Maybe you helped yourself become immune.” He shakes his head. “The Society made the tablets like a puzzle. Everything is a piece. I’m learning from the pharmics and scientists how complicated it all is. The way medications work together, and the ways they work differently in different people—it’s something you could spend your whole life trying to figure out.”
“So what you’re saying,” I tell him, “is that I might never know.”
“Yes,” he says. “You might always have to wonder.”
“‘It’s all right to wonder,’” I say. Besides the words on the microcard, that was the last thing Grandfather said to me before he died. He gave me the poems. And he told me that it was all right to wonder. So it’s fine that I don’t know which poem he meant for me to follow. Perhaps that’s even what he intended. It’s all right that I can’t figure everything out right here, right now.
“It might also just be you,” Xander says. I think he’s smiling. “You’ve always been one of the strongest people I know.”
Eli has joined Ky and the little girl in their dance. They have linked hands and are laughing, the firelight shimmering on the girl’s wings. She reminds me of Indie—the abandoned way she moves, the way the fire turns her hair to red. I wish Indie was here, I think, and my father, and everyone else we’ve lost.
Xander and I stop dancing. We stand very close and still in the middle of people moving. “Back in the Borough,” he says, “I asked you, if we could choose, would you ever have chosen me?”
“I remember,” I say. “I told you that I would.”
“Yes,” he says. “But we can’t go back.”
“No,” I agree.
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. But I didn’t see it. I believed him unchanging, a stone in all good senses of the word, solid, dependable, something and someone you could build upon. But he is as we all are: light as air, transient as wisps of cloud before the sun, beautiful and fleeting, and if I ever did truly have hold of him, that has ended now.
“Xander,” I say, and he pulls me close, one last time.
The ships lift into the sky, dark on stars. The bonfire burns; some of the villagers, mostly those from the Carving, have decided to stay in the mountains.
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.