Reached

surroundings.
    There. I think I’ve found something. A tiny line, scratched into the wall near the floor:
    l
    An
L
, lowercase?
    I smile a little to myself, at how I want to find letters in everything. It could be a scratch, the haphazard scarring and scraping that comes with the loading and shifting of cargo. But the more time I spend running my fingers over it, the more I’m convinced it was carved with intent. I try to feel for more but I can’t stretch any farther while I’m still strapped in.
    Glancing up at the door to the hold, I unbuckle the strap and move quietly so that I can feel farther down.
    There are many of them, carved in a row.
    llllll
    This letter must mean something,
I think,
to write it so many times
, and then I realize; not letters. Notches. Like the ones Ky told me about the decoys cutting into their boots to mark time survived out in the work camps.
    I remember what Ky told me about his friend Vick, how every day he marked was a day without the girl he loved.
    Ky and I have been marking, too, with flags on the Hill. With the poetry of others and with words of our own. Whoever carved here was keeping time and holding on.
    I do the same, running my fingers across each tiny groove in the metal over and over again, thinking about the pieces of the Gallery lifted up into the sky. I wonder if, when the Rising sets them down again to make a wall, some of the papers will have survived the flight.

    The door to the hatch opens and Indie beckons for me to come up.
    The ship is flying itself, somehow. Indie sits back down at the controls. She gestures for me to take the seat next to her and I do, my heart pounding. Until now, I’ve never been able to see while I fly, and I feel a dizzying lightness as I look out at the land below us.
    Is
this
what I’ve missed?
    The stars have come to the earth, and the ocean has turned over the ground; dark waves meet the sky. They are unmoving, barely visible but for the light of the sun rising behind them.
    Mountains,
I realize. That’s what the ocean is. Those waves are peaks. The stars are lights in houses and on streets. The earth reflects the sky and the sky meets the earth and, every now and then, if we’re lucky, we have a moment to see how small we are.
    Thank you,
I want to tell Indie.
Thank you for letting me see while I fly. I have wanted it for so long.

CHAPTER 21
    XANDER
    P
atient number 73 exhibits little to no improvement.
    Patient number 74 exhibits little to no improvement.
    Wait, that’s a mistake. I haven’t examined Patient 74 yet. I delete the notation and hook the vital-stats machine up to Patient 74. The display lights up with numbers. Her spleen is enlarged, so I turn her very carefully when I perform my exam. When I shine a light into her eyes, she doesn’t respond.
    Patient number 74 exhibits little to no improvement.
    I move on to the next patient. “I’m checking your stats again,” I tell him. “Nothing to worry about.”
    It’s been weeks and none of the patients is getting better. The rashes along the infected nerves turn into boils, which would be extremely painful if the still could feel anything. We don’t think they can. But we’re not certain.
    Only a few of us are left who haven’t gotten sick. I’m still a physic but because we’re so shorthanded I spend most of my time changing the patients’ nutrition bags and catheter bags, monitoring their stats, and performing physical exams. Then I sleep for a few hours and do it all again.
    They don’t bring in new patients very often anymore, except for those who are already here working when they get sick. We don’t have room for anyone else because the still don’t go home. I used to pride myself on how fast we got patients into recovery. Now my satisfaction comes from keeping as many of them here as long as possible because these days, if a patient leaves, it means they’ve died.
    Once I’m finished with this round, I’ll get to rest. I think I’ll be able to fall asleep quickly. I’m exhausted. If I didn’t know better, I’d think I was coming down with the mutated Plague myself. But this is the same old weariness I’ve felt for days.
    Most of the workers at the medical center have figured out by now that those who have the small red mark are the exceptions among those of us who the Rising initially made immune. The virologist’s theory appears to be right. If someone was lucky enough to get exposed to the earlier Plague—the live virus—they’re