“The real danger begins now,” Indie says when the sun comes up, and I know she’s right. The river is still fast; we can see better, but we can be seen, and we are exhausted. The heavier cottonwoods here have been choked out by thinner, less concealing trees that grow spindly, grayish-green, and snarled with thorns. “We have to stay close to the trees for cover,” Indie says, “but if we’re going too fast and we hit those thorns, they’ll finish our boat.”
We pass a huge dead cottonwood with scaly brownish bark that has fallen over, tired and done after years of holding on to the bank. I hope Hunter and Eli are in the mountains, I think, and that Ky has cover in the trees.
Then we hear it. Something overhead.
Without saying a word, we both pull closer to the bank. Indie reaches with her oar into the thorny branches but it slips and doesn’t hold. We start to drift and I stab my oar into the water, pushing us back.
The ship overhead flies closer.
Indie reaches out and grabs hold of the thorny branches with her bare hand. I gasp. She hangs on and I jump out and pull the boat over to the side, hearing the rasp of the thorny bushes along the plastic. Please don’t break, I think. Indie lets go, her hand bleeding, and the two of us hold our breath.
They pass over. They haven’t seen us.
“I’d like a green tablet right now,” Indie says, and I start laughing in relief. But the tablets are gone, along with everything else we had, swept away when we flipped in the water. Indie had tied our packs to one of the boat’s handles but the water tore them away in spite of her careful knots; some branch or tree cut right through the rope and I should be grateful it wasn’t our flesh or the plastic of the boat.
Once I’m back inside, we keep close to the bank. The sun climbs high. No one else flies over.
I think of my second lost compass sinking to the bottom of the river, like the stone it was before Ky changed it.
Evening. The reeds at the edge of the stream whisper and hush in the breeze, and in the traces of the sunset in a high and lovely sky, I see the first star of the evening.
Then I see it shining on the ground, too. Or not the ground, but in water that stretches out dark in front of us.
“This,” Indie says, “is not the ocean.”
The star flickers out. Something has passed over it, either in the sky or in the water.
“But it’s so huge,” I say. “What else could it be?”
“A lake,” Indie says.
A strange hum comes across the water.
It’s a boat, coming fast for us. There is no way to outrun it and we are both so tired we don’t even try. We sit there together, hungry and aching and adrift.
“I hope it’s the Rising,” Indie says.
“It has to be,” I say.
Suddenly, as the humming draws closer, Indie grabs my arm. “I would have chosen blue for my dress,” she tells me. “I would have looked right into his eyes, whoever he was. I wouldn’t have been afraid.”
“I know,” I say.
Indie nods and turns back to face what’s coming. She sits tall. I picture the blue silk — the exact color of my mother’s dress — blowing around Indie. I picture her standing by the sea.
She is beautiful.
Everyone has something of beauty about them. In the beginning for me, it was Ky’s eyes I noticed, and I love them still. But loving lets you look, and look, and look again. You notice the back of a hand, the turn of a head, the way of a walk. When you first love, you look blind and you see it all as the glorious, beloved whole, or a beautiful sum of beautiful parts. But when you see the one you love as pieces, as whys—why he walks like this, why he closes his eyes like that—you can love those parts, too, and it’s a love at once more complicated and more complete.
The other boat comes closer and I see that the people on board wear waterproof gear. Is it to avoid getting wet? Or do they know the river is poisoned? I wrap my arms around myself, suddenly feeling contaminated, though the skin hasn’t burned from our bones and we’ve resisted the temptation of drinking the water down.
“Put your hands up,” Indie says. “Then they can see we don’t have anything.” She puts her oar down across her lap and raises her hands in the air. The gesture is so vulnerable, so uncharacteristic of her, that it takes me a moment to follow her lead.
She doesn’t wait for them to speak first. “We’ve escaped,” she calls out. “We’ve come to join you.”
Their boat draws closer. I look at them, taking in their slick black clothes and their number: nine of them. Two of us. They stare back. Do they note our Society coats, our battered boat, our empty hands?
“Come to join whom?” one asks.
Indie doesn’t hesitate. “The Rising,” she says.
CHAPTER 51
KY
I run. Sleep. Eat a little. Drink from one of the canteens. When it empties I throw it to the side. No point in filling it with poisoned water.
I run again. On and on along the bank of the river, keeping to the trees when I can.
I run for her. For them. For me.
The sun shines down on the stream. The rain has stopped, but the broken pools are connected again.
My father taught me to swim one summer when we had more rain than usual and some of the holes in the land became pools for a week or two. He taught me how to hold my breath, stay afloat, and open my eyes underneath the blue-green water.
The pool in Oria was different. Made of white cement instead of red rock. You could see all the way to the bottom in most places, unless the angle of the sun blinded you. The water and the edges met in neat lines. Kids jumped off the diving board. It seemed that the whole Borough came to swim that day, but it was Cassia at the side of the water who caught my eye.
It was the way she sat, so still. She seemed almost suspended while everyone else called and screamed and ran. For a moment — the first time since I’d come to the Society — I felt clear. I felt rested. When I saw her there, something in me felt right again.
Then she stood up and I could tell from the tightness in her back that she was worried. She stared at a spot in the pool where a boy swam deep underwater. I walked over to her as fast as I could and asked, “Is he drowning?”
“I can’t tell,” she said.
So I went under to try to help Xander.
The chemicals in the pool burned my eyes and I had to close them for a moment. At first the pain and the way the bright light made it seem red behind my eyelids made me think that I was bleeding and going blind. I put my hands up to check but I only felt water, not blood. My panic embarrassed me. Fighting the pain, I pulled my hands away and opened up my eyes again to look around.
I saw legs and bodies and people swimming and then I stopped looking for someone drowning. All I could think was—there’s nothing here.
I’d known the pool was clean and neat but seeing it from below was so strange. Even in the rain pools that only lasted for a little while life took hold. Moss grew. Water bugs skittered in the sun along the surface until the pools dried up. But there was nothing along the bottom of this place but cement.
I forgot where I was and tried to breathe.
When I came up choking I could tell that she saw the differences in me. Her eyes rested on the scrape on my face from the Outer Provinces. But it was as though she was a little like me. She noticed the differences and then she decided what mattered and what didn’t. She laughed with me then, and I loved the way the laugh reached her green eyes and crinkled the skin around them.
I was a kid. I knew I loved her but I didn’t know what it meant. Over the years everything changed. She did. I did.