Reached

all right to wonder,’”
I say. Besides the words on the microcard, that was the last thing Grandfather said to me before he died. He gave me the poems. And he told me that it was all right to wonder. So it’s fine that I don’t know which poem he meant for me to follow. Perhaps that’s even what he intended. It’s all right that I can’t figure everything out right here, right now.
    “It might also just be you,” Xander says. I think he’s smiling. “You’ve always been one of the strongest people I know.”
    Eli has joined Ky and the little girl in their dance. They have linked hands and are laughing, the firelight shimmering on the girl’s wings. She reminds me of Indie—the abandoned way she moves, the way the fire turns her hair to red.
I wish Indie was here,
I think,
and my father, and everyone else we’ve lost.
    Xander and I stop dancing. We stand very close and still in the middle of people moving. “Back in the Borough,” he says, “I asked you, if we could choose, would you ever have chosen me?”
    “I remember,” I say. “I told you that I would.”
    “Yes,” he says. “But we can’t go back.”
    “No,” I agree.
    Xander’s journeys happened in those walled rooms and long hallways of the sick, when he worked with Lei. When I saw him again in the Pilot’s air ship, Xander had already been places I would never go and become someone else. But I didn’t see it. I believed him unchanging, a stone in all good senses of the word, solid, dependable, something and someone you could build upon. But he is as we all are: light as air, transient as wisps of cloud before the sun, beautiful and fleeting, and if I ever did truly have hold of him, that has ended now.
    “Xander,” I say, and he pulls me close, one last time.

    The ships lift into the sky, dark on stars. The bonfire burns; some of the villagers, mostly those from the Carving, have decided to stay in the mountains.
    Xander is going out to a place that is Other, a place so distant I can’t even be certain there is a coming back.

CHAPTER 62
    XANDER
    I t sounds like a million birds beating their wings against the sky, but it’s only the ships flying above me. At the last minute, I realized I couldn’t go with them to the Otherlands. But I also couldn’t make myself go back to Camas. I’m stuck here in the middle, as always.
    Morning comes. I climb up to the stream near the field where Oker and I dug the camassia, skirting the village so I don’t have to talk to anyone. Later, I’ll come back and ask them if there’s something I can do: maybe work in Oker’s old lab.
    Roots from the trees at the edge of the stream dangle down into the water. They are tiny and red. I never knew roots could be that color.
    And then I see a larger glimpse of red. Another. Another. They’re almost hideous—strange jaws, round eyes—but the color is so brilliant.
    They’re the redfish Lei told me about. I’m seeing them at last.
    My throat aches and my eyes burn. I come down closer to the water.
    Then I hear something behind me. I turn around, change my expression to a grin, ready to talk to whatever villager found their way out here.
    “Xander,” she says.
    It’s Lei.
    “Are they back?” she asks me. “The redfish?”
    “Yes,” I say.
    “I didn’t know you were here,” she says. “I didn’t see you on the ships from Camas.”
    “We must not have been on the same ship,” I say. “I meant to go to the Otherlands.”
    “I did, too,” she says. “But I couldn’t leave.”
    “Why not?” I ask, and I don’t know what I hope the answer will be, but my heart pounds in my chest and in my ears there’s a sound like rushing water or those ships lifting into the sky.
    She doesn’t answer, but she looks toward the stream. Of course. The fish.
    “
Why
do they come all the way back?” I ask her.
    “To find each other.” Her eyes meet mine. “We used to come to the river together,” she says. “He looked a little like you. He had very blue eyes.”
    The rushing in my ears is gone. Everything feels very quiet. She came back because she couldn’t leave the country where she knew him. It has nothing to do with me
.
    I clear my throat. “You said these fish are blue in the ocean,” I say. “Like a completely different animal.”
    “Yes and no,” she says. “They have changed. We’re allowed to change.” She’s very soft with me. Her voice is gentle.
    And then Lei is the one to close the distance. She moves right to