Ky leans in to kiss me, but his hands stay down at his sides.
“Why won’t you hold me?” I ask, drawing back a little.
He laughs a little, holds out his hands as if in explanation. They are covered in dirt and paint and blood.
I pull his hand to mine, put my palm against his. I can feel the grit of sand, the slick of paint, and the cuts and scrapes that speak of his own journey.
“It will all come clean,” I tell him.
CHAPTER 49
KY
When I pull her to me she feels eager, warm and reaching, but then she flinches slightly and draws back. “I’m sorry,” she says, “I forgot.” She pulls a small tube from inside her shirt. She notices the shock on my face and rushes on. “I couldn’t help it.”
She holds the tube out for me to see, trying to explain. It glints in the light from our headlamps and it takes me a moment to read the name: REYES, SAMUEL. Her grandfather. “I took it when you were all looking at Hunter, after he broke the tube.”
“Eli stole one too,” I say. “He gave it to me.”
“Who did he take?” Cassia asks.
I look over at Indie. She could push the boat away now and leave Cassia behind. But she doesn’t. I knew she wouldn’t. Not this time. If you want to go where Indie wants to go, you couldn’t find a better pilot. She’ll carry your pack and get you through the rough water. She turns her back to us and stands perfectly still under the trees next to the boat.
“Vick,” I tell Cassia.
It surprised me at first that Eli didn’t choose his parents, and then I remembered that they wouldn’t have been there. Eli and his family had been Aberrations for years. Vick must have been Reclassified recently enough that the Society hadn’t had time to remove his tube.
“Eli trusts you,” she says.
“I know,” I say.
“I do, too,” she says. “What are you going to do?”
“Hide it,” I say. “Until I know who was storing the tubes and why. Until I know we can trust the Rising.”
“And the books you brought from the farmers’ cave?” she asks.
“Those too,” I say. “I’m going to look for the right place while I’m following the river.” I pause. “If you want me to hide your things, I can. I’ll make sure they get to you somehow.”
“Won’t they be too heavy to carry?” she asks.
“No,” I say.
She hands me the tube and reaches into her pack for the collection of loose papers that she took from the cave. “I didn’t write any of those pages,” she says, an ache in her voice. “Someday I will.” Then she puts her hand against my cheek. “The rest of your story,” she says. “Will you tell it to me now? Or when I see you again?”
“My mother,” I begin. “My father.” I close my eyes, trying to explain. What I say makes no sense. It’s a string of words—
When my parents died I did nothing
So I wanted to do
I wanted to do
I wanted to do
“Something,” she says gently. She takes my hand again and turns it over, looking at the mangled mess of scrapes and paint and dirt that the rain hasn’t yet washed away. “You’re right. We can’t do nothing all our lives. And, Ky, you did something when your parents died. I remember the picture you drew for me back in Oria. You tried to carry them.”
“No,” I say, my voice breaking. “I left them on the ground and ran.”
She wraps her arms around me and speaks in my ear. Words just for me — the poetry of I love you—to keep me warm in the cold. With them she turns me back from ash and nothing into flesh and blood.
CHAPTER 50
CASSIA
“Do not go gentle,” I tell him, one last time, for now.
Ky smiles then, a smile I’ve never seen before. It’s the kind of daring, reckless smile that could make people follow him straight into a firing, a flood. “There’s no danger of that,” he says.
I put my hands on him, run my fingers over his eyelids, find his lips, meet them with mine. I kiss the plane of his cheekbones. The salt of his tears tastes like the sea and I don’t see the shore.
He’s gone, in the trees, and I’m in the river, and there’s no time left.
“Do what I say,” Indie tells me, shoving an oar into my hands and yelling over the sound of the water rushing near us. “If I say left, paddle on your left. If I say right, paddle right. If I tell you to lean, do it.” The beam of her headlamp glares in my eyes and I’m relieved when she turns to face forward. Tears stream down my cheeks from the farewell and the light.
“Now,” Indie says, and we both push the boat away from the bank. We sit suspended for a moment and then the stream finds us, pushes us along.
“Right,” Indie calls.
Scattered snowflakes star our faces as we ride, little white dashes in the light from our headlamps.
“If we ever flip over, stay with the boat,” Indie yells back to me.
She can only see far enough ahead to have time for one fast call, one quick decision; she’s sorting in a way I never could, with spray in her face and water shining silver and black branches tearing at us from the banks, broken trees looming at us from the center of the stream.
I copy her, follow her, shadow her strokes. And I wonder how the Society ever caught her that day on the ocean. She is a Pilot, on this river, tonight.
Hours or minutes, they don’t matter, it’s only changes in the water and turns in the stream, shouts from Indie and oars flicking water as we move them from side to side.
I glance up, once, aware that something is happening above me; night lifting, the earliest part of morning that is still black, but black that feels like it’s rubbing off around the edges, and I miss the moment Indie screams at me to paddle right and then we’re over, over in the stream.
Cold dark water, poisoned from the Society’s spheres, rushes over me. I see nothing and feel everything, freezing water, driftwood battering me. It’s the moment of my own death, and then something else hits my arm.
Stay with the boat.
My fingers scrabble along the edge, and I find one of the grips and hold on, pulling myself to the surface. The water tastes bitter; I spit it out and cling tight. I’m inside the boat, under it, trapped and saved in a bubble of air. Something tears my leg. My headlamp is gone.
It’s like the Cavern, I’m caught but alive.
“You will,” Ky said then, but he’s not here now.
Suddenly I remember the day I met him, that day at the clear blue pool, when he and Xander both went under but came back up.
Where’s Indie?
The boat shoots to the side and the water goes still.
A light shines in. Indie, pushing the boat up. She held on to the outside and somehow she still has her headlamp. “We’re in a smooth spot,” Indie says fiercely. “It won’t last. Get out here with me and push.”
I swim out under the side. The water is black and glassy, puddled for a moment in a wide place in the stream, dammed somehow from below. “Did you hold on to your oar?” Indie asks, and to my surprise, I did. “On three,” Indie says, and she counts, and we flip the boat back over and grab again for the sides. She flops, fast, like a fish, into the boat and grabs my oar to pull me over, too.
“You held on,” she says, “I thought I was finally done with you,” and she laughs, and so do I, both of us laughing until we hit the next wave of river and Indie screams, wild and triumphant. I join in.