Reached

where they should be.
    In the weeks that I’ve been flying out the cure, I’ve stopped in every Province in the Society several times over.
    Except Oria.
    The Pilot won’t let any of us land in the Provinces where we’re from, because we’ll know too many people there and we’ll be tempted to change the pattern of the cure.
    “There were people I had to find,” the Pilot says finally, “but I knew where I needed to look. This is like trying to find a stone in the Sisyphus River. You don’t even know where to begin. It would take too long. Now. But later, you can.”
    I don’t answer him. We both know that
later
often means
too late.
    The cure works, and so does Cassia’s sorting, telling us where to go next. We’re saving the optimal amount of people. She tells us what she thinks we should do, the computers and other sorters corroborate it—her mind is as fine and clear as anything in this world.
    But we’re not saving everyone. Of the still who go down, about eleven percent do not come back at all. And other patients succumb to infections.
    I bring the ship in lower.
    “I thought I made it clear that you couldn’t look for them now,” the Pilot says.
    “You did,” I say. “I’m not going to make people die while I hunt for something I might not find.”
    “Then what are you doing?” the Pilot asks me.
    “I need to land here,” I say.
    “They’re not in Oria,” the Pilot says. “Cassia found it extremely unlikely that they would be anywhere in that Province.”
    “She put the highest likelihood that they died out in the Outer Provinces,” I say. “Didn’t she?”
    The Pilot pauses for a moment. “Yes,” he says.
    I circle until I see a good place for a landing. Over the Hill I go, and I wonder where the green silk from Cassia’s dress is now—a little tattered banner under the sky buried in the ground. Or bleaching out in the sun. Bleeding away in the rain. Blowing away on the wind.
    “Oria’s still volatile, and you’re a resource,” the Pilot says. “You need to come in.”
    “It won’t take long,” I repeat, and then I bring the ship around and drop down. This ship isn’t like the one the Pilot flies. Mine can’t switch over to propellers and a tighter landing the way his can.
    The street will barely be long enough but I know every bit of it. I walked it for all those years. With Patrick and Aida, and they were usually holding hands.
    The wheels hit the ground and the metal sails of the ship shift, creating drag and slowing me down. Houses rush past, and at the end of the street I stop the ship right in time. Through my window, I could see into the ones of the house in front of me if the people inside didn’t have their shutters drawn tight.
    I climb out of the ship and move as fast as I can. I only have a few houses to go. The flowers in the gardens haven’t been weeded. They grow thick and untended. I pause at the door of the house where Em used to live. The windows are broken. I look inside, but it’s empty, and has been for a long enough time that there are leaves on the floor. They must have blown in from another Borough, since ours no longer has trees.
    I keep going.
    When I was still, I heard what Anna said about my parents and about Patrick and Aida and Matthew. My mother and father couldn’t get me out. So, when they died, they sent me in as close as they could and hoped that would work. And Patrick and Aida welcomed me and loved me like their own.
    I’ll never forget Aida’s screams and Patrick’s face when the Officials took me away, or how they kept reaching for me and for each other.
    The Society knew what they were doing when they Matched Patrick and Aida.
    If I’d been the one Matched with Cassia, if I’d known I could have eighty years of a good life and most of it spent with her, I wonder if I would have had the strength to try to take the Society down.
    Xander did.
    I walk up the pathway and knock on the door of the house where he used to live.

CHAPTER 58
    XANDER
    I n the past few weeks we’ve had several breakthroughs in administering the cure. First were the fields Cassia’s mother told us about, which allowed us to make more of the cure and get it out to people quickly. Then we figured out how to synthesize the proteins of the sego lily in the laboratory. The best minds left in the Rising and the Society have come together to try to make this work.
    So far, it has. People are getting better. And if the mutation comes back, we have a