Reached

Somehow, he already knew. Cassia looks shocked, as if she can’t believe this is true. But of course it is. I know that a virus doesn’t think or feel, but it still seems as if this one likes to take down those who were the most alive.

CHAPTER 54
    CASSIA
    T wo impossible things have happened. Ky, cured.
    And Indie, dead?
    I have so many pictures of Indie in my mind. Indie climbing the walls of the Carving, piloting the boat down the river, holding the wasp nest carefully in her hands. How can she be gone? She can’t. It’s impossible.
    But Ky believes it.
    Ky is back.
    There’s no time to linger over the miracle, to watch him return, to sit and hold his hand and talk with him.
    Instead there’s the race and rush to get us on board, and within minutes of the Pilot landing in the village, we are lifting off. I don’t have a chance to thank Anna for the bulbs, to say good-bye to Eli, to look back at Leyna and Colin and the other villagers as they watch us leave, hoping we will return someday, this time with ships that can take them all the way to the Otherlands.

    Xander sits in the copilot’s seat and we strap Ky’s stretcher down in the hold, where it will be the most secure. Xander told Tess and Noah what he’d added to the cure, and they gave him Oker’s formula for the base we used. This way, we can tell those in the Provinces what we used, and the villagers can begin curing the still left behind. A collaboration, again, all of us doing something together that would take us much more time alone.
    “It will be like an extra trial of the cure,” Leyna told the Pilot. “When you return to take us out, we’ll have cured all of these patients, and you can bring them back to their families.” She sounded as if she’d never doubted Xander; as though they hadn’t planned to sentence him to exile, or worse, for destroying the camassia cure. But it’s true that the cure belongs to the village. Anna and Oker, Colin and Leyna, Tess and Noah, the guards—they are also the pilots of the cure.
    I sit in the runner’s seat for takeoff, but as soon as we’re stable I unbuckle the straps and kneel down next to Ky, holding his hand tightly. He looks up at the side of the ship and I see something drawn there, a real picture, not notches or markings. There are people standing and looking up at the sky, which seems to be falling down upon them. But some of the people—not all—have picked up the pieces and are tipping them back to their mouths.
    “Drinking the sky,” Ky says. “That’s what Indie said they were doing. We had a picture like this in one of our ships, too.” He takes a deep breath. His voice sounds stronger already. “It’s a picture of you bringing water to the Enemy to help them survive the Plague,” he says to the Pilot. “Isn’t it?”
    For a few minutes, the Pilot doesn’t answer. Then I hear his voice coming through the speaker in the hold. It is quiet and sad, and I think that we are, for the first time, hearing his true voice. “The Society told us the Plague would make the Enemy ill and easy to defeat,” the Pilot says. “They said we’d bring the Enemy in as prisoners. But when the Plague started to work, our orders were to leave the Enemy where they were.”
    “And you saw them die,” Xander says.
    “Yes,” the Pilot says. “When a few of us ran the risk of flying in water, most of the Enemy wouldn’t drink it even though there was a drought. They didn’t trust us. Why would they? We’d been killing one another for years.”
    I think of those thirsty, dying people, unable to drink anything but the rain which did not come.
    “So there really was an Enemy,” Ky says. “But after they were gone, the Rising stepped in to act their part. Did you kill the farmers on top of the Carving to keep your cover?”
    “No,” the Pilot says. “That was the Society. For years, they used the people in the Outer Provinces as a buffer between the main Provinces and the Enemy.” He clears his throat. “So I should have realized that we were no longer a true rebellion when we let the farmers, and so many other Anomalies and Aberrations, die. We told ourselves that the timing wasn’t right to reveal ourselves, but we still should have tried.”
    Ky’s hand, warm in the dark, tightens on mine. If the Rising had stepped in, so many might have been saved. Ky’s family, Vick, the boy who took the blue tablet.
    “You should know that the Rising
was
real,” the Pilot says. “The