Reached

before, of white flowers even more beautiful than the first,” she says. “Sego lilies, they called them. You can eat the bulb.”
    “Anna,” I say, my heart racing, “does mariposa lily have another name?” If it does, that might account for the problem in the data. We’ve been counting this flower as two separate data points, but it was, in fact, a single variable.
    “Yes,” Anna says, after a pause. “Some people call it the sego lily.”
    I pick up the datapod and search for the name. There it is. The properties are all the same. One flower, reported under two different names. Now, with its names combined, it rises right to the top of potential ingredients. It was a critical, elemental mistake made by those gathering the data, but we should have noticed it earlier. How did I miss it before? How could I fail to recognize the name, when my mother had told it to me?
You only heard it once,
I remind myself,
and that was long ago.
“Where does it grow?” I ask.
    “We should be able to find some not far from here,” Anna says. “It’s early in the season, but it could be in bloom.” She looks at the paper flower in my hand. “Did you make that?”
    “No,” I say. “My mother did.”

    It’s almost dark when we finally find them, in a little field away from the village and the path.
    I drop down to my knees to look closer. I’ve never seen a flower so beautiful. It’s a simple white bloom, three curved petals coming out from a sparsely leaved stalk. It’s a little white banner, like my writing, not of surrender but of survival. I pull out the crumpled paper flower.
    Though my hands shake, I can tell that it’s a match. This flower growing in the ground is the one my mother made before she went still.
    The real thing is much more beautiful. But that doesn’t matter. I think of Ky’s mother, who painted water on stone, who believed the important thing was to create, not capture. Even though the paper lily isn’t a perfect rendering, it’s still a tribute to its beauty that my mother tried.
    I don’t know whether she intended the flower as art or message, but I choose to take it as both.
    “I think,” I say, “that this might be the cure.”

CHAPTER 46
    XANDER
    I can’t see Cassia herself, but the solar-cell lamps cast her shadow on the prison wall. Her voice carries from the entryway to my cell. “We think we have found a possible cure,” she tells the guards. “We need Xander to make something for us.”
    The guard laughs. “I don’t think so,” he says.
    “I’m not asking you to release Xander,” Cassia says. “We just need to give him the equipment and have him prepare the cure.”
    “And then what are you going to do with it?” another guard asks.
    “We’re going to give it to one patient,” she says. “
Our
patient. Ky.”
    “We can’t go against Colin,” one of the guards says. “He’s our leader. And we’d lose our chance at the Otherlands.”
    “This
is
your chance at the Otherlands,” Cassia says. Her voice is low, quiet, full of conviction. “This is what Oker was going to find.” She pulls something out of her bag. “Mariposa lily.” I can see from her shadow that she’s holding a flower. “You eat the bulb, don’t you? You eat it when it blooms in the summer, and store it for the winter.”
    “Are they already in bloom?” one of them asks. “How many did you pull up?”
    “Only a few,” Cassia says.
    Another shadow moves into view and I hear Anna’s voice. “We had these flowers in the Carving, too,” Anna says. “We also used them for food. I know how to gather them so that they’ll come back again next year.”
    “What does it matter if they take all the plants, anyway?” one of the guards says to the other. “If we’re gone to the Otherlands, we won’t need to harvest.”
    “No,” Anna says. “Even if everyone is gone, the flower must come back. We cannot take it all and leave nothing.”
    “The bulbs are so small,” another guard says dubiously. “I don’t see how it could be a cure.”
    Cassia comes into view, and I see that she holds the real flower and the paper that her mother sent her. They’re a perfect match. “Oker saw me take out this flower—the paper one—during the vote. I believe
this
is the flower he was going to find.” She sounds confident that she’s sorted everything. She could be right: Oker did change his mind right after he saw her take out the paper.
    “Please,” Cassia says to the guards.