“Time,” Vick said, “is what we don’t have.”
The world shattered outside and someone else started screaming.
“I wish I had a gun that worked,” Vick said. “I’d blow everyone on those air ships away. Pieces of them would come down like fireworks.”
“Finished,” Vick says now, folding up his foilware into a sharp silver square. “We’d better get back to work.”
“I wonder why they don’t just give us blue tablets,” I say. “Then they wouldn’t have to bother with our meals.”
Vick looks at me as if I’m crazy. “You don’t know?”
“Know what?” I ask.
“The blue tablets don’t save you. They stop you. If you take one, you’ll slow down and stay where you are until someone finds you or you die waiting. Two will finish you outright.”
I shake my head and look up at the sky, but I’m not looking for anything. I only look to see the blue. I hold my hand up and block out the sun so I can see the sky around it better. No clouds.
“Sorry,” Vick says, “but it’s true.”
I glance over at Vick. I think I see concern on his stone-hard face. It’s so ludicrous, all of it, that I start to laugh, and Vick laughs too. “I should have known,” I say. “If something happened to the Society, they wouldn’t want anyone to live on without them.”
A few hours later we hear a beep from the miniport Vick carries. He pulls it from his belt loop and checks the screen. Vick’s the only decoy who has a miniport — a device roughly the same size as a datapod. Miniports, however, can be used for communication. A datapod only stores information. Vick keeps the miniport with him most of the time, but now and then — like when he tells new decoys the truth about the village and the guns — he hides the port somewhere for a little while.
We’re pretty sure that the Society tracks our location by the miniport. We don’t know if they can listen in on us too, the way they can on the larger ports. Vick thinks so. He thinks the Society listens all the time. I don’t think they care.
“What do they want?” I ask Vick as he reads the message on his screen.
“We’re moving,” he says.
Others fall in line with us as we walk to meet the ships that land silently outside of the village. The Officers act hurried, as usual. They don’t like to spend much time out here. I’m not sure if it’s because of us or because of the Enemy. I wonder who they think is the bigger threat.
He’s young, but the Officer in charge of this transfer reminds me of the one who used to be in charge of us on the Hill back in Oria. His expression says How did I end up here? What am I supposed to do with these people?
“So,” he says, looking out at us. “Up on the plateau. What was that? What happened there? The casualties wouldn’t have been nearly so bad if you’d all stayed down in the village.”
“There was snow up there this morning and they went up to get it,” I say. “We’re always thirsty.”
“You’re sure that’s the only reason they were up there?”
“There aren’t many reasons to do anything,” Vick says. “Hunger. Thirst. Not dying. That’s all there is. So if you don’t believe us, take your pick from the other two.”
“Maybe they hiked up there for the view,” the Officer suggests.
Vick laughs, and it’s not a good sound. “Where are the replacements?”
“They’re on the ship,” the Officer says. “We’re going to take you all to a new village, and we’ll give you more supplies.”
“And more water,” Vick says. Though he’s unarmed and at the mercy of the Officer he sounds like he’s the one giving the orders. The Officer smiles. The Society isn’t human but the people who work for it sometimes are.
“And more water,” the Officer says.
Vick and I both curse under our breath when we see the replacements on the air ship. They are young, much younger than us. They look to be fourteen, thirteen. Their eyes are wide. Frightened. One of them, the youngest-looking kid, looks a little like Cassia’s brother, Bram. He’s darker-skinned than Bram, darker than me, even, but his eyes are bright like Bram’s. Before it was cut, his hair must have been curly like Bram’s.
“The Society must be running out of bodies,” I say to Vick, keeping my voice low.
“Maybe that’s the plan,” he says.
We both know the Society wants the Aberrations dead. It explains why we’re dumped out here. Why we don’t get to fight. But there’s another question, one I can’t answer:
Why do they hate us so much?
We fly blind. The air ship is windowless except for the pilot’s compartment.
So it’s not until we step outside that I know where we are.
I don’t know the village itself but I know the area. The field we walk is orange-sanded and black-rocked, yellow-grassed with plants that grew green this summer. There are fields like this one all over the Outer Provinces. But I still know exactly where I am because of what I see in front of me.
I’m home.
It hurts.
There it is on the horizon — the landmark of my childhood.
The Carving.
From where we are now, I can’t see all of it — just pieces of red or orange sandstone jutting up here and there. But when you get closer — when you reach the edge and look into the Carving — you realize that the stones aren’t small at all. They’re the tips of formations as large as mountains.
The Carving isn’t one canyon, one mountain, but many — a network of interlocking formations that goes on for miles. The land rises and falls like water, its high jagged peaks and deep slot canyons striped with the colors of the Outer Provinces — gradations of orange, red, white. In the faraway stretches of the Carving the fire colors of the sandstone grow shadowed with blue from distant clouds.
I know all of this because I’ve been to the edge several times.
But I’ve never been inside.
“What are you grinning about?” Vick asks me, but before I can answer, the Bram kid comes up to us and gets right in Vick’s face.
“I’m Eli,” the kid says.
“All right,” Vick says, and then turns away in irritation, back to the row of faces who have selected him as their leader even when he never wanted to be one. Some people can’t help being leaders. It’s in their blood and bones and brains, and there’s no getting around it.
And some people follow.
You have a better chance of surviving if you follow, I remind myself. Your father thought he was a leader. Couldn’t get enough of being a leader, and look what happened to him. I stand one step behind Vick.
“Aren’t you going to give us a speech or anything?” Eli asks. “We just got here.”
“I’m not in charge of this mess,” Vick says. And there it is. The anger that he spends most of his energy keeping in check shows a little. “I’m not the Society’s spokesman.”
“But you’re the only one with one of those,” Eli says, pointing at the port clipped to Vick’s belt.
“You want a speech?” Vick asks, and all the new kids nod and stare at him. They’ll have heard the same lecture we did when we came in on the air ships about how the Society needs us to act like villagers and civilians to draw out the Enemy. How it’s only a six-month job, and once we go back to Society our Aberration status will be wiped clean.
It will take exactly one day of firing for them to realize that no one has lasted six months. Not even Vick comes close to having that many notches on his boots.
“Watch the rest of us,” Vick says. “Act like a villager. That’s what we’re supposed to do here.” He pauses. Then he pulls the port from his belt and tosses it to a decoy who has been around a couple of weeks. “Take this for a run,” he says. “Make sure it still works out by the end of the town.”