The boy turns his on and swears. “I forgot to look up,” he says. When I do, I see that, in our struggle to avoid little ravines and sharp-edged rocks, we have begun to turn around.
“You’re tired,” Indie says to the boy. “Let me lead.”
“I can do it,” I say.
“Wait,” Indie tells me, her voice tight and tired. “I think you might be the only one who’ll have enough left to run us in at the end.”
Our clothes catch on tough spiky bushes; the sharp smell in the air is distinct, dry. Could it be sage? I wonder. Ky’s favorite smell from home?
Miles on, we stop running in a line. We run side by side. It is inefficient. But we need each other too much.
We’ve all fallen. We all bleed. The boy’s injured his shoulder; Indie’s legs are scraped; I fell into a small ravine and my body feels battered. We run so slow we almost walk.
“A marathon,” Indie breathes. “That’s what you call a run like this. I heard a story about it.”
“Can you tell it to me?” I ask her.
“You don’t want to hear it.”
“I do.” Anything to keep my mind off how hard this is, how far we still have to go. Even though we draw closer, any steps at all begin to feel like too many. I can’t believe Indie can talk. The boy and I both stopped miles ago.
“It was at the end of the world. A message had to be delivered.” She breathes hard, her words grow choppy. “Someone ran to deliver it. Twenty-six miles. Like us. He made it. Gave the message.”
“And then they rewarded him?” I say, my breath ragged. “Did an air ship come down and save him?”
“No,” she says. “He delivered his message. Then he died.”
I start to laugh, which isn’t good for saving breath, and Indie laughs, too. “I told you that you wouldn’t want to hear it.”
“At least the message got through,” I say.
“I guess,” Indie answers. As she glances over at me with a smile still on her face, I see that what I have mistaken for coldness in her is actually warmth. There’s a fire in Indie that keeps her alive and moving even in a place like this.
The boy coughs and spits. He’s been out here longer than we have. He sounds weak.
We stop talking.
A few miles still out from the Carving, the air smells different. Not clean, like the plant smell from earlier, but dark and smoky, like burning. As I look across the land, I think I see glimmers of embers, shifts in the light, bits of amber-orange under the moon.
I notice another scent in the night — one I don’t know well, but that I think might be death.
None of us say anything, but the smell keeps us running when almost nothing else would, and for a little while, we don’t breathe deep.
We run forever. I say the words from the poem over and over to the beat of my feet. It almost sounds like someone else’s voice. I don’t know where I find the air and I keep getting the words wrong: From out our bourne of death and space the flood will wash me far but it doesn’t even matter. I never knew that words might not matter.
“Are you saying that for us?” the boy gasps out, the first time he’s spoken in hours.
“We’re not dead,” I say. No one dead feels this tired.
“We’re here,” the boy says, and he stops. I look at where he points and I see a group of boulders that will be difficult, but not impossible, to climb down.
We made it.
The boy doubles over in exhaustion. Indie and I look at each other and I reach to touch the boy’s shoulder, thinking he’s ill, but then he straightens up.
“Let’s go,” I say, not sure why he waits.
“I’m not coming with you,” he says. “I’m taking that canyon instead.” He points back along the Carving.
“Why?” I ask, and Indie says, “How do we know we can trust you? How do we know this is the right canyon?”
The boy shakes his head. “That’s the one,” he tells us, holding out his hand for payment. “Hurry. It’s almost morning.” He speaks softly, without feeling, and that’s what convinces me he’s telling the truth. He’s far too tired to lie. “The Enemy didn’t end up firing tonight. People will realize we’ve gone. They might report it on the miniport. We have to get into the canyons.”
“Come with us,” I say.
“No,” he says. He looks up at me and I see that he needed us for the run. It’s one that would be too hard to do alone. Now, for whatever reason, he wants to take his own path. He whispers. “Please.”
I reach into my pack and pull out the tablets. As I unwrap them, my hands clumsy and cold even as sweat trickles down my back, he looks behind him at where he wants to be. I want him to come with us. But it’s his choice.
“Here,” I say, holding out half of the tablets. He looks down at them, sealed away in their little compartments, the backing of each tablet labeled neatly. Blue. Blue. Blue. Blue.
And then he laughs.
“Blue,” he says, laughing harder. “All blue.” And then, as if he’s brought the color into being by saying it, we all notice that the sky has turned to morning.
“Take some,” I say, moving closer to him. I see sweat frozen on the ends of his too-short hair; frost on his eyelashes. He shudders. He should put on his coat. “Take some,” I say again.
“No,” he says, pushing my hand away. The tablets fall to the ground. I cry out, dropping to my knees to pick them up.
The boy pauses. “Maybe one or two,” he says, and I see his hand dart down. He snatches the packet and breaks away two little squares. Before I can stop him, he throws the rest back at me and turns to run.
“But I have others,” I call after him. He helped us get here. I could give him the green to calm. Or the red, and then he could forget that long awful run and the scent of his friends’ deaths as we passed by the burned village. I should give him both. I open my mouth to call out again but we never even knew his name.
Indie has not moved.
“We have to go after him,” I say, urging her. “Come on.”
“Number nineteen,” she says softly. What she says doesn’t make sense to me until I follow her gaze and see past the boulders. What’s beyond them is now visible: the Carving up close and with light for the first time.
“Oh,” I whisper. “Oh.”
The world changes here.
Before me is a land of canyons, of chasms, of gashes and gorges. A land of shadows and shades, of rises and falls. Of red and blue and very little green. Indie’s right. As the sky lightens and I see the jagged stones and gaping canyons, the Carving does remind me a little of the painting Xander gave me.
But the Carving is real.
The world is so much bigger than I thought it was.
If we descend into that Carving with its miles of mountains and acres of valleys, with its cliffs and its coves, we will vanish almost entirely. We will become almost nothing.
I think suddenly of a time in Second School, back before we began to specialize, when they showed us diagrams of our bones and our bodies and told us how fragile we were, how easily we could break or become ill without the Society. I remember seeing in the pictures that our white bones were actually filled with red blood and marrow, and thinking I didn’t know I had this inside of me.
I didn’t know the earth had this inside of it. The Carving seems as wide as the sky it stands under.
It is the perfect place for someone like Ky to hide. An entire rebellion could take cover in a place like this. I begin to smile.
“Wait,” I say as Indie moves to climb down the boulders and into the Carving. “It will be sunrise in a few minutes.” I’m greedy. I want to see more.