“You would have done the same,” I say.

Cassia looks around as if she’s expecting to see someone else, but the Pilot flies alone.

“Where is Indie?” she asks the Pilot as we climb into our seats. “Is she all right?”

“No,” the Pilot says. “She got the mutation and she ran until she had no fuel left. Her ship went down in the old Enemy territory. We couldn’t spare anyone to retrieve her body.”

Indie is dead. I look at Ky first to see how he’s taking it and his face is full of pain, but he’s not surprised. Somehow, he already knew. Cassia looks shocked, as if she can’t believe this is true. But of course it is. 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.

CHAPTER 54

CASSIA

Two impossible things have happened. Ky, cured.

And Indie, dead?

I have so many pictures of Indie in my mind. Indie climbing the walls of the Carving, piloting the boat down the river, holding the wasp nest carefully in her hands. How can she be gone? She can’t. It’s impossible.

But Ky believes it.

Ky is back.

There’s no time to linger over the miracle, to watch him return, to sit and hold his hand and talk with him.

Instead there’s the race and rush to get us on board, and within minutes of the Pilot landing in the village, we are lifting off. I don’t have a chance to thank Anna for the bulbs, to say good-bye to Eli, to look back at Leyna and Colin and the other villagers as they watch us leave, hoping we will return someday, this time with ships that can take them all the way to the Otherlands.

Xander sits in the copilot’s seat and we strap Ky’s stretcher down in the hold, where it will be the most secure. Xander told Tess and Noah what he’d added to the cure, and they gave him Oker’s formula for the base we used. This way, we can tell those in the Provinces what we used, and the villagers can begin curing the still left behind. A collaboration, again, all of us doing something together that would take us much more time alone.

“It will be like an extra trial of the cure,” Leyna told the Pilot. “When you return to take us out, we’ll have cured all of these patients, and you can bring them back to their families.” She sounded as if she’d never doubted Xander; as though they hadn’t planned to sentence him to exile, or worse, for destroying the camassia cure. But it’s true that the cure belongs to the village. Anna and Oker, Colin and Leyna, Tess and Noah, the guards—they are also the pilots of the cure.

I sit in the runner’s seat for takeoff, but as soon as we’re stable I unbuckle the straps and kneel down next to Ky, holding his hand tightly. He looks up at the side of the ship and I see something drawn there, a real picture, not notches or markings. There are people standing and looking up at the sky, which seems to be falling down upon them. But some of the people—not all—have picked up the pieces and are tipping them back to their mouths.

“Drinking the sky,” Ky says. “That’s what Indie said they were doing. We had a picture like this in one of our ships, too.” He takes a deep breath. His voice sounds stronger already. “It’s a picture of you bringing water to the Enemy to help them survive the Plague,” he says to the Pilot. “Isn’t it?”

For a few minutes, the Pilot doesn’t answer. Then I hear his voice coming through the speaker in the hold. It is quiet and sad, and I think that we are, for the first time, hearing his true voice. “The Society told us the Plague would make the Enemy ill and easy to defeat,” the Pilot says. “They said we’d bring the Enemy in as prisoners. But when the Plague started to work, our orders were to leave the Enemy where they were.”

“And you saw them die,” Xander says.

“Yes,” the Pilot says. “When a few of us ran the risk of flying in water, most of the Enemy wouldn’t drink it even though there was a drought. They didn’t trust us. Why would they? We’d been killing one another for years.”

I think of those thirsty, dying people, unable to drink anything but the rain which did not come.

“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.”

Ky’s hand, warm in the dark, tightens on mine. If the Rising had stepped in, so many might have been saved. Ky’s family, Vick, the boy who took the blue tablet.

“You should know that the Rising was real,” the Pilot says. “The scientists who came up with the immunity to the red tablet were true rebels. So was your great-grandmother. And so were many of the others, especially those of us in the Army. But then, the Society realized that their power was slipping and discovered that they had a rebellion in their midst. At first, they tried to take back control by getting rid of the Aberrations and Anomalies. Then the Society began to infiltrate us the way we had infiltrated them. Now I don’t know who is who anymore.”

“Then who put the Plague in the Cities’ water supplies?” I ask. “Who tried to sabotage the Rising, if it wasn’t people working for the Society?”

“It appears,” says the Pilot, “that the water supplies were contaminated by well-intentioned supporters of the Rising who felt that the rebellion wasn’t happening quickly enough and decided to move it along.”

For a few long moments, none of us speak. When things like this happen—when what was meant to help results in harm, when a salve brings pain instead of healing—it is clear how wrong even choices intended to be right can become.

“But why didn’t the Society destroy the Rising outright if they knew you existed?” Xander asks, breaking the silence. “The Society could have cured everyone on their own—Oker told me that they always had the cure. Why didn’t the Society make enough cures so that they could let the Plague come in and administer the cure themselves?”

“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 final predicted outcome. That’s what my Official said back in Oria at the Museum. That’s what she wanted to see in my case, and what the Society always took into account.

“The Society had discovered that we’d been making people immune to the red tablet,” the Pilot says.

“So more and more people couldn’t forget,” I say, understanding. “People were showing signs of wanting a change, a rebellion. This way, they got one, and the Society stayed in power without the people—including many of those who participated in the Rising—knowing what had really happened. They’d make a few changes, but for the most part, things would go on as they had.” 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? The Society knew people believed in the Pilot, and they took advantage of that.

But it didn’t turn out as the Society intended. The Plague mutated. And the people know more and want more than the Society thought they did, even people who weren’t chosen for immunity to the red tablet. People like me.

The Society is dead, even if they don’t know it yet.

I believe in a new beginning. And so do many others out there—those writing on scraps to hang in the Gallery, those who continue to work hard to take care of the sick, those who dare to believe that we can all be the pilots of something new and better.

We step like plush, we stand like snow—

The waters murmur now,

Three rivers and the hill are passed,

Two deserts and the sea!

I look at Ky and rewrite the end of the poem in my mind.

But I must count this journey, all

For it has brought me thee.

The door to the hold opens and Xander comes down, the light from the cockpit flooding in behind him. “I thought I should check on Ky,” he says, and I smile at Xander and he smiles back and for a moment it is all as it was, it is the same. Xander looks at me with longing and pain in his eyes; we are flying wild through a world that could belong to anyone, and I know why Ky kissed Indie back.

And then it is gone, and I know for a certainty that it is too late for us, for Xander and me, in that way. Not because I can’t still love him, but because I can no longer reach him.

“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.

When we land in Camas, I find that I am soon to fly again. We pause only long enough for Xander to make more of the cure so that I can bring it with me to Keya. And though this is a journey that I long to take, it is hard to leave Ky and Xander behind.

“I’ll be back soon,” I promise the two of them, and I will, in a matter of hours, instead of days or weeks. But I see the worry in Ky’s eyes that I know is in mine. We are haunted by other good-byes, so many of them.

And so is Xander. Hunter was right about one thing. There has been too much of leaving.

We land in a long field, not even a runway, near the small town where my parents lived in Keya. As the pilot, the medic, and I leave the ship, I see several figures on the ground walking to meet us. One of them, smaller than the others, breaks into a run and I begin running, too.

He throws his arms around me. He’s grown, but I am still taller, and the oldest, and I was not here to protect him. “Bram,” I say, and then my throat aches so much I can’t speak anymore.

A Rising officer comes up behind Bram. “We found him right before you were due to land.”

“Thank you,” I manage, and then I pull back to look at Bram. He stares up at me. He’s so dirty, very thin, and his eyes have changed and darkened. But I still know him. I turn him around and breathe a sigh of relief when I find the red mark on his neck.

“They both got sick,” Bram says. “Even with the immunizations.”

“We think we found a cure,” I say. I take a deep breath. “Is it too late? Do you know where they are?”

“Yes,” Bram says, and then he shakes his head. His eyes fill with tears, and I can tell he’s pleading with me not to speak any more, not to ask which question he’s answering.