Reached

thinking how cold it must be.
    And then I’m thinking of Cassia, that long-ago day in Oria when she jumped into the warm blue pool.
    Indie breaks to the surface, wet and laughing and shivering.
    Even though she’s beautiful, with a certain wildness in her eyes, I can’t help but think,
I wish Cassia were here.
    Indie sees it. A little of the light in her eyes disappears as she looks away from me and pulls herself from the river, reaching for her uniform and slapping hands with the others. Someone else jumps in and the crowd hollers again.
    Indie shivers, wringing out her long hair.
    And I think,
I have to stop this. I don’t have to love Indie the way I do Cassia, but I
do
have to stop thinking about Cassia when I look at Indie.
I know how it feels when people look right through you, or worse, see you as something or someone other than what you are.
    A formation of air ships flies overhead and we all glance at the sky, a reflex now that we spend so much time there.
    Indie climbs up on one of the rocks next to the river and watches the others jump in. She leans her head back and closes her eyes. She reminds me of one of the little lizards in the Outer Provinces. They might look lazy, but if you try to catch them, they’ll run away, fast as the lightning that breaks the desert sky before the summer thunderstorms.
    I climb up next to her and watch the river and all the things that float and swim along it—birds, debris from the mountains. You could build a dozen boats from everything that races past in an hour or two, especially in the spring.
    “Wonder if they’ll ever let either of you fly on your own,” Connor says. His voice is loud, of course, so that everyone can hear, and he comes closer, trying to intimidate us. He’s huge and hulking, at least six foot three. I’m only six feet even, but I’m much faster, so I’m not worried about a fight. He won’t catch Indie or me if we decide we need to run. “Seems like the Pilot always has the two of you paired up. Like he doesn’t think either of you can fly without the other.”
    Indie laughs out loud. “That’s ridiculous,” she says. “The Pilot knows I can fly alone.”
    “Maybe,” Connor says, and he’s so easy to read, the dirty thing he’s ready to say obvious before he can even spit it out, “the reason he has the two of you fly together is because you’re—”
    “The best,” Indie says. “Of course. We are.”
    Connor laughs. Water drips off him from his jump into the river. He looks soaked and stupid, not fine and shining like Indie. “You think a lot of yourself,” he says. “Think you’ll be the Pilot one day?” He glances over his shoulder to see if the others are all laughing, too, at how ridiculous this is. But everyone stays quiet.
    “Of course,” Indie says, as if she can’t believe he’d even ask.
    “We all hope for that,” a girl named Rae says. “Why not? We can dream now.”
    “But not
you
,” Indie says to Connor. “You need a different dream. You’re not good enough to be the Pilot. And I don’t think you ever will be.”
    “Really?” he says, leaning in, a sneer on his face. “And how do you know that?”
    “Because I’ve flown with you,” she says, “and you never give in to the sky.” Connor laughs and starts to say something, but Indie keeps talking over him. “You’re always thinking about yourself. How it looks, what you’re doing. Who will notice.”
    Connor turns away from her. Over his shoulder he says something crude about Indie—what he’d do to her and with her if she weren’t crazy. I start after him.
    “It doesn’t matter,” Indie says, her tone perfectly unconcerned. I want to tell her that it’s dangerous to be so oblivious to people like Connor. But would it do any good?
    The fun’s over. People start back to the camp for dry clothes. Some of the pilots and runners shiver as they walk. Almost everyone went into the river.
    As we walk, Indie begins to braid her long, wet hair. “What if you could bring back anyone who’s gone?” she asks me, keeping up her line of questioning from before. “And don’t say Cassia,” she adds, with a little
huff
of impatience. “She doesn’t count. She’s not dead.”
    It feels good to hear Indie say that, even though of course she doesn’t know for certain. Although, if Cassia sent me a message, that’s a good thing. I close my fingers around the paper again and smile.
    “Who would I bring back from the dead?” I ask