Reached

“She never got to tell people what she had seen in the Otherlands. But she had saved the one she loved. She knew that, no matter what else happened.”
    In the silence that follows her story, she leans against me. I don’t think she even knows she’s doing it. She’s going down.
    “Do you think you could do that?” she asks.
    “Fly?” I say. “Maybe.”
    “No,” she says. “Do you think you could let someone go if you thought it was best for them?”
    “No,” I say. “I’d have to
know
it was best for them.”
    She nods, as if she expected my answer. “Almost anyone could do that,” she says. “But what if you didn’t know and you only
believed
?”
    She doesn’t know if it’s true. But she wants it to be.
    “That story would never be one of the Hundred,” she says. “It’s a Border story. The kind of thing that can only happen out here.”
    Was she a pilot once? Is that where her husband is? Did she fly him out and now she’s going down? Is this story true? Any of it?
    “I’ve never heard of the Otherlands,” I say.
    “You have,” she says, and I shake my head.
    “Yes,”
she says, challenging me. “Even if you never heard the name, you had to know they existed. The world can’t only be the Provinces. And it isn’t flat like the Society’s maps. How would the sun work? And the moon? And the stars? Didn’t you look up? Didn’t you notice that they changed?”
    “Yes,” I say.
    “And you didn’t think about why that might be?”
    My face burns.
    “Of course,” Lei says, her voice quiet. “Why would they teach you? You were meant to be an Official from the very beginning. And it’s not in the Hundred Science Lessons.”
    “How do
you
know?” I ask.
    “My father taught me,” she says.
    There’s a lot I’d like to ask her. What is her father like? What color did she wear when she was Matched? Why didn’t I find out all of this before? Now there’s not enough time for the little things. “You’re not a Society sympathizer,” I say instead. “I’ve always known that. But you weren’t Rising at the beginning.”
    “I’m not Rising or Society,” she says. The fluid drips into her arm slowly. It can’t keep pace with what’s happening to her.
    “Why don’t you believe in the Rising?” I ask. “Or the Pilot?”
    “I don’t know,” she says. “I wish I could.”
    “What do you believe?” I ask.
    “My father also taught me that the earth is a giant stone,” she says. “Rolling and turning through the sky. And we’re all on it together. I do believe that.”
    “Why don’t we fall off?” I ask.
    “We couldn’t if we tried,” she says. “There’s something that holds us here.”
    “So the world is moving under my feet right now,” I say.
    “Yes.”
    “But I don’t feel it.”
    “You will,” she says. “Someday. If you lie down and hold very still.”
    She looks at me. We both realize what she’s said:
still
.
    “I was hoping to see him again before this happened,” she says.
    I almost say,
I’m here.
But looking at her I know that it’s not going to be enough, because I’m not who she wants. I’ve seen someone look at me this way before. Not through me, exactly, but beyond to someone else.
    “I was hoping,” she says, “that he’d find me.”

    After she’s still, I find a stretcher left behind by the medics. I lie her down and hang up the bag. One of the head medics comes past. “We don’t have room in this wing,” he says.
    “She’s one of ours,” I tell him. “We’re making room.”
    He has the red mark, too, so he doesn’t hesitate to bend down and look more closely at her. Recognition crosses his face. “Lei,” he says. “One of the best. The two of you worked together even before the Plague, didn’t you?”
    “Yes,” I tell him.
    The medic’s face is sympathetic. “Feels like that was in a whole different world, doesn’t it?” he says.
    “Yes,” I say. It does. I feel strangely detached, like I’m watching myself take care of Lei. It’s just the exhaustion, but I wonder if this is what it feels like to be still. Their bodies stay in one place, but can their minds go somewhere else?
    Maybe part of Lei is floating around the medical center and going to all the places she knew. She’s in the patients’ rooms, overseeing their care. She’s in the courtyard, breathing in the night air. She’s at the port, looking at the painting of the girl fishing. Or, maybe she’s left the medical center behind