Everyone stares, waiting for me to explain all of this. Anger and embarrassment rise up within me. Why do they think I have the answers? Because I’m the most Society of us all?
But there are things I do not understand, parts of the Society, parts of myself.
Ky puts his hand on my arm. “Cassia,” he says softly.
“I’m not Xander!” I say, too loud in the echoing cave. Ky blinks as the sound of my voice calls all around him. “I don’t know about medicine. Or tablets. Or sample storage. Or what the Society can or can’t do in the medical field. I don’t know.”
For a moment, everyone is silent. Then Indie speaks. “Xander’s secret,” she says, turning to Ky. “Does it have anything to do with this?”
Ky opens his mouth to say something, but before he can, we all see it — a little red light flashing now on the top of the case Hunter opened.
Fear sings through me again, and I don’t know which frightens me more — the Society, or the Cavern that has us caught.
CHAPTER 33
KY
Hunter reaches for another tube and snaps that one in his hand too.
“Get out of here,” I say to Cassia and the others. “Go.”
Indie doesn’t hesitate. She turns and runs for the entrance to the cave and slides into the rocks.
“We can’t leave him here,” Cassia says, looking at Hunter, who sees nothing and hears nothing but the tubes he breaks in his hands.
“I’ll try to get him to come with us,” I promise. “But you have to go. Now.”
“We need him for the climb,” she says.
“Indie can help you. Go. I won’t stay long.”
“We’ll wait at the crossing,” Cassia promises. “The Society might take a long time to get here.”
Unless they’re in the area already, I think. Then it could be a matter of minutes.
Once they’re gone I turn to Hunter. “You have to stop,” I say. “Come back with us.”
He shakes his head and breaks another tube.
“We could try to catch up with the farmers who went across the plain,” I say.
“They could all be dead by now,” he says.
“Did they leave to join the Rising?” I ask him.
He doesn’t answer.
I don’t try to stop him. One tube, a thousand — what’s the difference? The Society will know of this either way. And part of me wants to join him. When you’ve lost everything, why not take what you can before they come down on you? I remember that feeling. Another, darker part of me thinks, And if he doesn’t come with us, then he can’t tell Cassia about the Rising and how to find them. I’m sure he knows.
I go back to the entrance of the crevice and find a stone. I carry it back over to him. “Try this,” I say. “It will go faster.”
Hunter doesn’t say anything but he takes the rock from me and holds it over his head. Then he brings the stone down fast over a row of tubes. I hear them break as I slide into the crevice to get out.
Once I’m outside I listen for the sound of the air ships above us.
Nothing.
Yet.
They waited for me. “You should have gone on ahead,” I say to Cassia, but that’s all I have time to say before we’re all clipped in and climbing. Up. Across. For a moment on the top on that bare plain of rock I wonder if I should run behind or ahead — which is the best way to protect her — and then I find us just running side by side.
“Are they going to find us?” Eli gasps once we reach the other canyon.
“We’ll run on the cobble when we can,” I say.
“But sometimes it’s all sand,” Eli says, panicked.
“It’s all right,” I tell him. “There’s always rain.”
We all look up. The sky above us is a delicate early-winter blue. Gray clouds hang in the distance but they are miles away.
Cassia hasn’t forgotten what Indie said in the cave. She comes up next to me and puts her hand on my arm. “What did Indie mean?” she asks, out of breath. “About Xander’s secret?”
“I don’t know what she’s talking about,” I lie.
I don’t look back at Indie. Her boots sound on the rocks behind us but she doesn’t contradict me and I know why.
Indie wants to find the Rising and for some reason she thinks I’m the most likely to know how to get there. She’s decided to cast her lot with mine even though she doesn’t like me any more than I like her.
I reach for Cassia’s hand and listen for the beats of the Society’s ships above us, but for now they do not come.
Neither does the rain.
When Xander and I took the red tablets that day long ago, we counted to three and swallowed them at the same time. I watched his face. I couldn’t wait for him to forget.
It didn’t take long to realize that it didn’t work and that he was immune, too. Until then I’d thought I was the only one.
“You’re supposed to forget,” I told Xander.
“I didn’t,” he said.
Cassia told me what happened that day in the Borough after I left — how she learned that Xander was immune to the red tablets. But she doesn’t know his other secret. And I’m keeping that one because it’s the fair thing to do, I tell myself. Because it’s his right to tell her. Not mine.
I try not to think about the other reasons I don’t tell Cassia Xander’s secret.
If she knows it, she might change her mind about him. And about me.
CHAPTER 34
CASSIA
Indie carries her pack even more carefully than before and I wonder if something happened to her wasp nest during our crawl into the Cavern. She brought the bag with her and, though she’s thin, I don’t know how she managed to protect it either coming or going in a space so tight. I don’t know how she could have kept the fragile shell of the nest from being crushed.
Something about the story of Indie’s mother and the boat seems strange, like an echo coming off a canyon wall and leaving part of the original words behind. I wonder how well I really know Indie. But then she shifts her pack again and I have a sudden image of the fragile, papery nest inside, and a memory of a picture fallen to pieces and rose petals dry and light. I’ve known Indie since the work camps and she hasn’t let me down yet.
Ky turns around and calls to us to hurry. Indie looks at him, and I see an expression very like hunger cross her face.
You smell the rain here before you see it or feel it. If Ky’s favorite smell from the Outer Provinces is sage, I think mine is this rain that smells ancient and new, like rock and sky, river and desert. The clouds we saw earlier sail in the wind, and the sky turns purple, gray, blue as the sun goes down and we reach the township.
“We can’t stay here for very long, can we?” Eli asks as we climb the path to the storage caves. A strip of lightning runs hot-white between earth and sky and thunder cracks through the canyon.
“No,” Ky says. I agree, too. The danger of the Society coming in the canyons now seems to outweigh what we face out in the plain. We’ll have to move.
“But we have to stop in the cave,” I say. “We need more food, and Indie and I don’t have any books or papers.” And there might be something to find about the Rising.
“The storm should buy us a little time,” Ky says.