Reached

right, and that we were all wrong. The sorters, the pharmics—we have all missed something.
    I’m so tired.
    Once, I wanted to watch the floods coming into a canyon, to stand on the edge and see it happen, on ground that was safe but shaking.
I’d like to hear the trees snap away and see the water come higher,
I thought,
but only from a place where it couldn’t reach me.
    Now I think it might be a terrifying, bright relief to stand on the canyon floor and see the wall of water coming down, and to know
this is it, I am finished,
and before you could even complete the thought, you would be swallowed, and whole.

    As evening falls, Anna comes to sit beside me in the infirmary. “I’m sorry,” she says, looking at Ky. “I never thought that Hunter—”
    “I know,” I say. “Neither did I.”
    “The vote will be tomorrow,” she tells me. For the first time, Anna sounds
old
.
    “What will they do?” I ask.
    “Xander will likely be exiled,” she says. “He could also be found innocent, but I don’t think that will happen. The people are angry. They don’t believe Oker told Xander to destroy the cure.”
    “Xander’s from the Provinces,” I say. “How is he supposed to survive in exile?” Xander’s smart, but he’s never lived out in the wild before, and he will have nothing when they send him away. I had Indie.
    “I don’t think,” Anna says, “that he is supposed to survive.”
    If Xander is exiled, what will I do? I’d go with him, but I can’t leave Ky. And we need Xander for the cure. Even if I do find the right plant, I don’t know how to make a cure, or the best way to give it to Ky. If this is to work, it will take all three of us. Ky, Xander, me.
    “And Hunter?” I ask Anna, very softly.
    “The best we can hope for Hunter,” she says, “is exile.” Though I know she has other children who came with her from the Carving, her voice sounds as sad as if Hunter were her own child, the very last of her blood.
    And then she hands me something. A piece of paper,
real
paper, the kind she must have carried with her all the way from the cave in the Carving. It smells like the canyons, here in the mountains, and it makes me ache a little and wonder how Anna could stand to leave her home.
    “These are pictures of the flowers you wanted,” she says. “I’m sorry it took me so long. I had to make the colors. I just finished them now, so you’ll have to be careful not to smear the paints.”
    I’m stunned that she did this, with everything else that must have been on her mind tonight, and I’m touched that she still believes me capable of sorting for the cure. “Thank you,” I say.
    Under the flowers she has written their names.
    Ephedra, paintbrush, mariposa lily.
    And others, of course. Plants and flowers.
    I’m crying, and I wish I weren’t. I wrote that lullaby for so many people. And now we may lose almost all of them. Hunter. Sarah. Ky. My mother. Xander. Bram. My father.
    Ephedra,
Anna wrote. Underneath she drew a spiky-looking bush with small, cone-like flowers. She painted it yellow and green.
    Paintbrush
. Red. This one I’ve seen, in the canyons.
    Mariposa lily.
It’s a beautiful white flower with red and yellow coloring deep down inside its three petals.
    My hands know what I’ve seen before my mind does; I’m reaching into my pocket and pulling out the paper my mother sent, recognizing the meaning in its shape. I remember Indie’s wasp nest, how it had space inside, and I pull the edges of the paper out and then I
know
.
    I hold a paper flower in my hand. My mother made this. She cut or tore the paper carefully so that three pieces fan out from the middle, like petals.
    It is the same as the flower in the picture; white, three-petaled, the edges crimped in and pointed like a star. I realize that I also saw it printed in the earth.
    This is what Oker was trying to find.
    He saw me take out the paper flower when I put the voting stone inside.
    Anna’s picture tells me that the name of this flower is
mariposa lily
. But I never heard my mother speak that name. And it’s not a newrose or an oldrose or a sprig of Queen Anne’s lace. What other flowers did she tell me about?
    I’m back in the room in our house in Oria, where she showed me the blue satin square from the dress she wore to
her
Banquet. She’s recently returned from traveling out into different Provinces to investigate rogue crops for the Society. “The second grower had a crop I’d never seen