Reached

the messages to dry. Hopefully the others won’t miss me.
    When I turn back, I see Indie walking across the rocks. She’s changed into a dry uniform and she sits down next to me. I keep one hand on a corner of the paper, afraid to let go in case the wind picks up and sends the message sailing. For once, Indie doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t ask any questions.
    So
I
do. “What’s the secret?” I ask Indie.
    She looks at me and raises her eyebrows.
What do you mean?
    “What’s the secret to flying like you do?” I ask. “Like that time when the landing gear malfunctioned and you brought the ship in fine.” We’d scraped along the asphalt of the runway, the ship’s metal belly sending up sparks, and Indie hadn’t seemed flustered at all.
    “I know how spaces fit together,” she says. “When I look at things, they make sense to me.”
    She’s right. She’s always had a good sense of proportion and position when it comes to concrete objects. She carried that wasp nest because she liked the way it fit together. When she climbed the walls of the canyon, she made it look easy. But still, excellent spatial reasoning alone—even if it’s practically intuition the way it is for her—doesn’t account for how good she is at flying and how fast she learned. I’m not bad myself, but I’m nothing like Indie.
    “And I know how things move,” Indie says. “Like that.”
    She points to another heron over the water. This one skims along the river, wings outstretched, following a current of air for as long as it lasts. I look at Indie and feel a sharp ache of loneliness for her, like she’s the bird. She knows how things fit together and move, but so few people understand her. She’s the most solitary person I’ve ever known.
    Has it always been that way?
    “Indie,” I ask, “did
you
take a tube from the Cavern?”
    “Of course,” she says.
    “How many?” I ask.
    “Only one.”
    “Who?”
    “Just someone,” Indie says.
    “Where did you hide it?”
    “I didn’t keep it for long. It got lost in the water when we went down the stream to the Rising.”
    She’s not telling the whole truth. I can’t tell where the lie comes in, but there’s no way to get Indie to talk about something when she’s decided to keep her own counsel.
    “You and Hunter are the only ones who didn’t,” Indie says. “Take one of the tubes, I mean.”
    Of course. Because Hunter and I accept the truth about death.
    “I’ve seen people dead,” I tell Indie. “So have you. When they’re dead, they’re gone. You can’t bring them back.”
    We are the ones who are alive. Here. With everything to lose.
    “What if you needed to get something over the walls of the barricade?” I ask Indie, changing the subject. “Would you say that’s impossible?”
    “Of course not,” she says. Just like I knew she would. “There are lots of ways to do it.”
    “Like what?” I ask. I’m grinning. I can’t help it.
    “Climb,” Indie says.
    “They’ll see us.”
    “Not if we’re fast,” Indie tells me. “Or we could fly.”
    “They’d catch us for sure that way.”
    “Not if it’s the Pilot who sends us in,” she says.

CHAPTER 12
    XANDER
    T here’s always a feeling of excitement in the medical center when the cures come in. It’s one of the few times we get to see people who are
really
from outside the barricade. We’ve got medics and patients coming in all the time, but the pilots and runners who bring the cures are different. They’re not tied down to the medical center or even to Camas.
    And there’s a chance that we might see the Pilot. The rumor is that he brings in some of the Camas City cures himself. Apparently the landing within our barricade is one that only the best pilots can manage.
    The first ship drops down from the sky onto the street they use for a runway. The pilot brings the ship to a stop yards away from the marble steps of City Hall.
    “I don’t know how they do that,” one of the other physics says, shaking her head.
    “Neither do I,” I say. The ship turns and comes toward us. It goes a lot slower on land than it did in the air. As I watch it come in, I wonder if someday I’ll have a chance to fly in one of those ships. There are so many things to look forward to after we get everyone cured.

    We physics open the cases in the medical storage room and scan the tubes with our miniports.
Beep. Beep. Beep
. The Rising officers from the ships bring in the cases one after another.
    I