Reached

would anyone want those?” I ask. “The food here is so much better.”
    “For the trip to the Otherlands,” he says. “Those meals last for years. They’d be perfect for the journey. The Pilot promised he could get enough for
all
the travelers to take, if only a few of us would volunteer for exposure to the virus. They injected people with the mutation and had them go stay in one of the other villages just in case. But no one got sick.” Now Oker’s grinning from ear to ear. “You should have seen the look on the Pilot’s face. He couldn’t believe there was a chance. That’s when he offered us the ships if we could find a cure.”
    Oker steps over a puddle of blue flowers growing right in the center of the path. “Your friends who try to walk through the illness are closer to the truth about the virus and the blue tablets than you might think. Those tablets aren’t poison. They’re a trigger.”
    “A trigger?” I ask.
    “When the Society made the Plague to use on the Enemy,” Oker says, “they engineered several other viruses as experiments. One of them had a very similar effect to what the Plague does—it made people stop and go still—but it couldn’t be transmitted from person to person. It only affected the person who had direct contact with the tablet. The Society decided not to use that particular virus on the Enemy. They used it on their own people instead.”
    Oker glances over his shoulder to look back at me. “The Society named the viruses,” he says. “That one was called the Cerulean virus.”
    “Why?”
    “It’s another word for blue,” Oker says, “and they used blue labels for that virus in the lab so they could easily tell it apart from the others. I wonder sometimes if that’s what gave the Officials the idea to use it in the blue tablet. The Society modified the Cerulean virus and put it in the babies’ immunizations. Then, if they needed to, they could trigger the virus later with the blue tablet.”
    “It’s perfect Society logic,” I say. “While they’re protecting you, they also implant a virus so that they can still control you if they need to. But why didn’t more people go still before now?”
    “Because it’s latent,” Oker says. “It works its way into your DNA, but then it lies dormant. The virus doesn’t become active until you take the trigger, which is the blue tablet. If you take one, you’ll go still until the Society helps you, if they find you in time. If they don’t, you die. They had a cure for the Cerulean virus as well as the Plague. But that was the limit of their science. They haven’t found a cure for the mutation.”
    “Why are you telling me all of this?” I ask.
    “Because I could drop dead at any minute,” Oker says. “Someone needs to know what’s going on.”
    “And why’d you pick me?” I ask. “You don’t even know me.”
    “You know people who have the mutation,” Oker says. “You’ve got family or friends on the inside, and that friend of yours here now. You want people to get better for personal reasons. And you know that if you don’t get your friend cured, you’ll always wonder who she would have chosen out of the two of you.”
    Oker’s right, of course. He’s noticed more than I thought he would have, although I shouldn’t be surprised. A true pilot would have to be that way.
    We don’t talk the rest of the way back.

    When we get to the lab, we sling the bulbs out on the table. “Wash them,” Oker tells Tess and Noah. “But don’t scrub them. We just want them clean from dirt.”
    They nod.
    “I’ll sort out the best bulbs,” he says to me, pushing through the assortment with his knuckles. “You gather equipment. We need knives, a cutting board, and mortar and pestle. Make sure it’s all sterilized.”
    I hurry to get the equipment ready. Oker’s already finished sorting by the time I’m done. He taps a little pile of bulbs. “These are the best ones,” he says. “We’ll start with them.” He pushes one toward me. “Cut it open. You’re going to have to do this part. I can’t.”
    So I make the incision down the middle of the bulb. When we’ve laid it open, I draw in my breath. It’s layered like an onion inside, and the color is beautiful: a pearly, almost glittery white.
    Oker hands me the mortar and pestle. “Pulverize it,” he says. “We’re going to need enough for everyone.”
    The door to Oker’s lab slams open. “There you are,” Leyna says, her face