Reached

stand up to stretch it out. I’m almost out of space in the bag.
    Oker’s impatient for me to finish. He crouches down next to me and starts sawing at a plant, his motions clumsy. The flowers bob back and forth, back and forth. He pulls up the roots, fumbling with his twisted hands, and then gives the plants to me. “Can’t wrap it,” he says. “You’ll have to do it for me.”
    I wrap up Oker’s harvest and finish filling our bags. When I start to sling his bag over my shoulder with mine—I should carry it for him now that it’s full—Oker shakes his head. “I can carry my own.”
    I nod and hand it over. “Do you think this camassia is really the cure?”
    “I think there’s a very good chance,” Oker says. “Let’s go.”

    Oker has to stop and rest on the way back to the village. “Forgot to eat this morning,” he says. It’s the first time I’ve seen him worn out. He leans up against a rock, his face twisted into a scowl of impatience as he waits for his heart to stop racing.
    “I’ve been wondering something,” I say. Oker grunts but doesn’t tell me I can’t ask, so I go ahead. “How did the villagers know that they were immune to the Plague in the first place, before the mutation?”
    “They’ve known about their immunity to the original Plague for years,” Oker says. “When the Society first sent it out to the Enemy, one of the pilots who dropped the virus ran away from his Army base and came to the first stone village, the one nearest Camas.”
    Oker takes a moment to catch his breath. “What the idiot didn’t realize when he came,” Oker says, “is that he himself had caught the Plague. He thought it could only come through water, because that’s how he’d distributed it in the Enemy’s rivers and streams. But it can also be transmitted from person to person, and he’d had contact with some of the Enemy. Apparently he’d tried to help them before he came to the stone village.”
    “Why did he run to the village?” I ask.
    “He was one of the pilots who took part in the vanishings,” Oker says, “so he knew the people in the village and they knew him. A week after he took refuge there, he became sick.” Oker pushes himself away from the rock. “Let’s get going.”
    Birds chatter in the trees around us and the grass grows so long over the path that it
whisk-whisks
against our pant legs. “Of course, the Society had cures for any of their workers who happened to contract the disease,” Oker says. “But since the pilot didn’t go back to the Society, he didn’t get the cure. He came to the stone villages, and he died.”
    “Because the villagers didn’t have a cure,” I say, “or because they killed him?”
    Oker looks at me, his glance sharp. “They left him out in the woods with food and water, but they knew he’d die.”
    “They had to,” I say. “They thought he could infect their whole village.”
    Oker nods. “When the pilot became sick, he told them about the Plague and the Enemy and what had happened. He begged the villagers to go back into the Society and get him a cure. By that time, he’d already exposed most of the village. The entire community thought they were going to die, and they knew they’d never get their hands on the cure in time. They had to try to do what they could.” Oker laughs. “Of course, at the time they had no idea that they would turn out to be immune.”
    “Did they exile anyone else?” I ask.
    “No,” Oker says. “They quarantined those who’d been exposed, but no one ever got sick.”
    I breathe out a sigh of relief.
    “Their immunity wouldn’t have mattered to the Society, of course,” Oker says, “since they already had a cure. But it meant something to the villagers. They knew that if the Society tried to put the Plague in the villagers’ waters, they wouldn’t die. For the most part, they kept their immunity a secret. Someone told the Pilot, but he didn’t do anything with the knowledge until the mutation happened.”
    “And then he wondered if the villagers might be immune to the mutation, too,” I say.
    “Right,” Oker says. “He came out here to ask if anyone was willing to test their immunity, and to find out if we could help discover a cure.”
    “I know people volunteered to be exposed to the mutated virus,” I say. “Why?”
    “Foilware meals,” Oker says, sounding disgusted. “He brought us an entire cargo hold full of them and said that he could bring more.”
    “Why