I slide the map toward Eli. “What do you think?” I ask him.
“Let’s do it,” he says. He puts his finger on the dark house in the mountains. “I hope the farmers are there. I want to meet them.”
“What else should we bring?” Vick asks, looking through some of the books.
“We can find something in the morning,” I say. For some reason the neatly ordered and abandoned books make me feel sad. Tired. I wish Cassia were here with me. She’d turn each page and read every word. I can picture her in the dim light of the cave with her bright eyes and her smile and I close my eyes. That shadowy memory might be as close as I come to seeing her again. We have the map, but the distance we still have to cross looks almost insurmountable.
“We should sleep now,” I say, pushing away the doubt. There’s no good in it. “We need to start as soon as it’s light.” I turn to Eli. “What do you think? You want to go back down and sleep in the houses? They’ve got those beds.”
“No,” Eli says, curling up on the floor. “Let’s stay here.”
I understand why. Late at night the empty township feels exposed — to the river, to the loneliness that settled in when the farmers left — and to the ghostly eyes and hands of the paintings they made. Here in the cave where they kept things safe seems like the place where we might be safe too.
In my dreams, bats fly in and out of the cave all night long. Some fly fat and heavy and I know they’re full of the blood of other living things. Others fly a little higher and I know they’re light with hunger. But they all have noisy, beating wings.
At the end of the night, near dawn, I wake up. Vick and Eli still sleep and I wonder what it was that disturbed me. A sound in the township?
I walk to the outermost door of the caves and look out.
A light flickers in the window of one of the houses below us.
CHAPTER 14
CASSIA
I wait for the dawn, folded inside my coat. Down here in the Carving, I walk and sleep deep in the earth and the Society doesn’t see me. I’m starting to believe they truly don’t know where I am. I’ve escaped.
It feels strange.
All my life I’ve been watched. The Society saw me go to school and learn to swim and walk up the steps to attend my Match Banquet; they sorted my dreams; when they found my data interesting, as my Official did, they altered things and recorded my reaction.
And though it was a different kind of watching, my family watched me, too.
At the end of his life, Grandfather used to sit at a window as the sun went down. I wondered, then, if he stayed awake all night and saw the sun come back up again. During one of those long, wakeful nights, did he decide that he would give me the poems?
I pretend that Grandfather hasn’t vanished but instead floats above it all, and that of all the things in the world to see from up high he chooses to see one small girl curled up in a canyon. He wonders if I will wake and rise when it becomes clear that dawn is on its way after all.
Did Grandfather mean for me to end up here?
“Are you awake?” Indie asks.
“I never slept,” I say, but even as I say it, I can’t be sure it’s true. For what if my imagining Grandfather was really a dream?
“We can start in a few minutes,” Indie says. In the seconds since we first spoke to each other, the light has changed. I can already see her better.
Indie chooses a good spot; even I can tell that. The walls are not nearly as high and sheer as they’ve been in other places and an old rockfall left piles of boulders part of the way up.
Still, the walls of the canyon are daunting, and I haven’t had much practice — just the little time we had last night before we went to sleep.
Indie holds out her hand in a peremptory gesture. “Give me your pack.”
“What?”
“You’re not used to climbing,” Indie says evenly. “I’ll put your things in mine and you can carry yours empty. It’ll be easier that way. I don’t want the weight to make you fall.”
“Are you sure?” Suddenly I feel that if Indie has the pack she has too much. I don’t want to let the tablets go.
Indie looks impatient. “I know what I’m doing. Like you did with the plants.” She frowns. “Come on. You trusted me on the air ship.”
She’s right, and that reminds me of something. “Indie,” I ask, “what did you bring with you? What was it you had me hide on the ship?”
“Nothing,” she says.
“Nothing?” I echo, surprised.
“I didn’t think you’d trust me unless you thought I had something to lose, too,” she says, grinning.
“But in the village, you pretended to take something back from me,” I say.
“I know,” she says, not a trace of apology in her voice. I shake my head and in spite of myself I start to laugh as I slide off my pack and hand it to her.
She opens it up and dumps the contents — flashlight, plant leaves, empty canteen, blue tablets — into her own pack.
I suddenly feel guilty. I could have taken off with all the tablets and she still trusted me. “You should keep some of the tablets after this,” I say. “For yourself.”
Indie’s expression changes. “Oh,” she says, her voice wary. “All right.”
She hands me back my empty pack and I slide it over my shoulders. We climb wearing our coats, which makes us bulkier, but Indie thinks it easier than carrying them. She slides her own pack onto her back, over her long braid that burns almost as bright as these cliffs when the sun comes up. “Ready?” she asks.
“I think so,” I say, looking up at the rock.
“Follow me,” she says. “I’ll talk you through it.” She puts her fingers in the holds and hoists herself up. In my eagerness to follow, I knock over a small pile of rocks. They scatter, and I hold tight.
“Don’t look down,” Indie says.
It takes much longer to climb than it does to fall.
It strikes me how much of this is holding on and waiting, deciding the next move and then committing to it. My fingers grip tightly into the rock and my toes curl as much as they can. I focus on the task at hand, and somehow that means that, even though I don’t think of Ky, I’m completely immersed in thinking of him. Because I’m being like him.
The canyon walls here are reddish-orange, drizzled with black. I’m not sure where the black came from; it’s almost like an ocean thick with tar lapped against the sides long ago.
“You’re doing fine,” Indie tells me as I come up next to her on a ledge. “Now this will be the hardest part,” she says, pointing. “Let me try it out first.”
I sit on the ledge, lean my back against the rock. My arms ache from holding on so tightly. I wish the rock would hold us, cradle us back as we cling to it, but it doesn’t. “I think I’ve got it,” Indie calls down softly. “When you come up here—”
I hear the sound of falling rocks, of flesh scraping stone. I’m on my feet. The ledge is small and my balance uncertain. “Indie!”
She dangles above me, holding onto the rocks. One of her legs hangs down near me, scraped, bloody. I hear her swear softly.
“Are you all right?” I call up.
“Push,” she says, her voice ragged. “Push me up.”
I put my palms under the tread of her boot, worn from the run across the plain and dusty-soled from the canyon and the rocks.
There is a terrible moment when she rests there on my hands, so heavy, and I know she can’t find anything to grab above. Then she is gone; the weight of her boot leaves my hand; the imprint of it is left on my palm.
“I’m up,” she calls down. “Come around to your left. I can talk you up from here.”
“Is it safe? Are you sure you’re all right?”