Reached

finish scanning the tubes in the first case. As soon as I do, another appears in front of me.
    “Thank you,” I say, reaching out to take it from the officer. I look up.
    It’s Ky.
    “Carrow,” he says.
    “Markham,” I say. It’s odd using his last name. “You’re in the Rising.”
    “Of course,” he says. “Always.” He grins at me because we both know it’s a lie. There are about a thousand things I want to ask him but we don’t have time. We’ve got to keep the supplies moving.
    Suddenly that doesn’t feel like the most important thing in the world anymore. I want to ask him how and where she is and if he’s heard from her.
    “It’s good to see you,” Ky says.
    “You too,” I tell him. And it is. Ky holds out his hand to shake mine and we grip tightly, and I feel him press a piece of paper into my palm.
    “It’s from her,” Ky says in a low voice so the others can’t hear. Before anyone can tell us to get back to work, he heads for the door. After he disappears, I glance over at the rest of the people delivering cures and find a girl with red hair watching me.
    “You don’t know me,” she says.
    “No,” I agree.
    She tilts her head, scrutinizing me. “My name is Indie,” she says. She smiles and it makes her beautiful. I smile back and then she’s gone, too.
    I shove the paper into my pocket. Ky doesn’t come back again, at least not that I see. I can’t help but feel like we’re playing at the tables back in the Borough, when he was throwing the game and I was the only one who knew. We’ve got another secret. What does it say on that paper? I wish I could read it now, but my shift isn’t over. When you’re working, there isn’t time for anything else.

    Ky and I were friends almost from the beginning of his time in the Borough. At first, I was jealous of him. I dared him to steal the red tablets, and he did. After that we respected each other.
    I remember another time when Ky and I were younger. We must have been thirteen or so, and we were both in love with Cassia. We stood talking near her house pretending to care what the other was saying but really waiting to see her when she came home.
    At some point we both stopped pretending. “She’s not coming,” I said.
    “Maybe she went to visit her grandfather,” Ky said.
    I nodded.
    “She’ll come home eventually,” Ky said. “So I don’t know why it matters so much that she’s not here now.”
    Right then I knew we were feeling the same thing. I knew we loved Cassia, if not exactly the same way, then the same amount. And the amount was: completely. One hundred percent.
    The Society said that numbers like that don’t exist but neither Ky nor I cared. I respected that about him, too. And I always admired the way he didn’t complain or get upset about anything even though life couldn’t have been easy for him in the Borough. Most people there saw him as a replacement for someone else.
    That’s something I’ve always wondered about: What
really
happened to Matthew Markham? The Society told us that he died, but I don’t believe it.
    On the night Patrick Markham went walking up and down the street in his sleepclothes, it was my father who went out and talked him into going back home before anyone called the Officials.
    “He was out of his mind,” my father whispered to my mother on our front steps after he took Patrick home. I listened through the door. “He was saying things that couldn’t possibly be true.”
    “What did he say?” my mother asked.
    My father didn’t speak for a while. Right when I thought he wasn’t going to tell her, he said, “Patrick kept asking me,
Why did I do it?
”
    My mother drew in her breath. I did too. They both turned around and saw me through the screen. “Go back to bed, Xander,” my mother said. “There’s nothing to worry about. Patrick’s home now.”
    My father never told the Officials what Patrick said. And the neighborhood knew that Patrick wandered the street that night because he was grieving his son’s death—no need to give any of us a red tablet to explain that away. Besides, his distress reminded us all of the need to keep Anomalies away from everyone else.
    But I remember what my father whispered to my mother later that night when they came down the hall together. “I think I saw something else in Patrick’s eyes besides grief,” my father said.
    “What?” my mother asked.
    “Guilt,” my father said.
    “Because it was at his workplace that