Reached

me.
    I want to say something I’ve never said before, and it won’t be to Cassia, the way I always thought it would be. “I love you,” I say. “I know you still love someone else, but—”
    “I love you,” she says.
    It’s not all gone. She loved someone before and so did I. The Society and the Rising and the world are all still out there, pressing against us. But Lei holds them away. She’s made enough space for two people to stand up together, whether or not any Society or Rising says that they can. She’s done it before. The amazing thing is that she’s not afraid to do it again. When we fall in love the first time, we don’t know anything. We risk a lot less than we do if we choose to love again.
    There is something extraordinary about the first time falling.
    But it feels even better to find myself standing on solid ground, with someone holding on to me, pulling me back, and know that I’m doing the same for her.
    “Remember the story I told you?” Lei asks. “The one about the Pilot and the man she loved?”
    “Yes,” I say.
    “Who do you think had to be more brave?” she asks. “The Pilot who let him go, or the man who had to start all over in a new world?”
    “They were both brave,” I say.
    Her eyes are level with mine. So I see when she closes them and lets herself fall for me: right when my lips meet hers.

CHAPTER 63
    CASSIA
    K y and I stand together at the top of the steps of City Hall, holding hands and blinking in the brightness of an end-of-summer day in Camas. No one notices us. They have other things to think about on their way up the stairs. Some look uncertain, others excited.
    An older woman stops at the top of the steps and glances at me. “When do we write our names?” she asks.
    “Once you get inside to vote,” I tell her.
    The woman nods and disappears into the building.
    I look at Ky and smile. We have just finished putting
our
names to paper, making a choice about who we want to lead.
    “When people chose the Society, it was almost the end of us,” I say. “It might be the end of us again, forever this time.”
    “It might be,” Ky agrees. “Or we might make a different choice.”
    There are three candidates offering to lead the people. The Pilot represents the Rising. An Official represents the Society.
    And Anna represents everyone else. She and Eli came back to Camas with us. “What about Hunter?” Ky asked Anna, and she said, “I know where he’s gone,” and smiled, sadness and hope mixed together in her expression, a feeling I know all too well.
    This voting is such a large and impossible task, such a beautiful and terrible experiment, and it could go wrong in so many ways. I think of all those little white papers inside, all those people who have learned to write, at least their names. What will they choose? What will become of us, and our lands of blue sky and red rock and green grass?
    But,
I remind myself,
the Society can’t take it all again unless we let them. We can get our memories back, but we will have to talk with each other and trust one another. If we’d done that before, we might have found the cure sooner. Who knows why that man planted those fields? Perhaps he knew we’d need the flowers for a cure. Maybe he just thought they were beautiful, like my mother did. But we do find answers in beauty, more often than not.
    This is going to be very difficult. But we came through the Plague and its mutation together, all of us. Those who believed in the Rising and those who believed in the Society and those who believed in something else entirely all worked side by side to help the still. Some didn’t. Some ran and some killed. But many people tried to save.
    “Who did you vote for?” I whisper to Ky as we walk down the steps.
    “Anna,” he says. He smiles at me. “What about you?”
    “Anna,” I say.
    I hope she wins.
    It’s time for the Anomalies and Aberrations to have their turn.
    But will we let them?
    In the debates on the ports, the Official was clear and concise, statistical. “Don’t you think we’ve seen this before?” she asked. “Everything you do has been done before. You should let the Society help you again. This time, of course, we will allow for greater increase of expression. Give you more choices. But, left too much to your own devices, what would happen?”
    I thought,
We’d write something. We’d sing something.
    “Yes,” said the Official, as if she knew my thoughts, as if she knew what everyone