Reached

suffered contaminated water supplies.”
    The lake. I remember those dead fish. But I don’t understand what he means. The three of us look at each other.
We have to figure this out.
    “The Plague spread too quickly,” Xander says, his eyes lighting up. “It stayed contained in Central for a long time, and then all of a sudden it was widespread. Until the virus went into the water, we had an epidemic—people getting sick from transferring it to one another. After the water supplies were contaminated, we had a pandemic.”
    And now Ky and I are right there with Xander, putting together the pieces. “It’s a waterborne Plague,” Ky says. “Like the one they sent to the Enemy.”
    The numbers of the Plague make sense to me now. “The sudden outbreak we saw at the beginning of the Rising—widespread contamination in several different Cities and Provinces—means that someone added the virus to water sources to hurry up the process.” I shake my head. “I should have realized. So that’s why the illness was everywhere, all at once.”
    “And that’s why we were stretched so thin at the medical center,” Xander says. “The Rising didn’t anticipate the sabotage. But we handled it anyway. Everything would have been fine, except for the mutation.”
    “You can’t think the three of us could coordinate all of that,” Ky says.
    “No,” the Pilot says. “But the three of you were a part of it. And it’s time to come clean with what you know.” He pauses. “There’s something else for Cassia on the datapod.”
    I look back at the screen and see a second file embedded. Inside I find a picture of my mother, and one of my father. The screen flashes back and forth between the two of them.
    “No,” I say.
“No.”
My parents look up from the screen, glassy-eyed. They are both still.
    “They have the mutation,” the Pilot says. “There is no cure. They are both in a medical center in Keya.” He anticipates my next question before I ask it. “We have been unable to locate your brother.”
    Bram.
Is he lying somewhere where no one can find him? Is he dead like that boy in the Carving? No. He’s not. I won’t believe it. I can’t imagine Bram still.
    “Now,” the Pilot says, “you have an incentive to tell us everything you can. Who do you work for? Are you Society sympathizers? Someone else? Did your group introduce the mutation? Do you have a cure?”
    For the first time, I hear him lose control while he speaks. It’s only on the last word,
cure
, and I can tell how truly desperate and driven he is. He wants this cure. He will do anything he can to find it.
    But we don’t have a cure. He’s wasting his time with us. What should we do? How can we convince him?
    “I know you can do the right thing,” the Pilot says. The break in his voice is gone, and now he sounds coaxing, gentle. “Your father may have sided with the Society and refused to join the Rising, but your grandfather worked for us. You are, of course, the great-granddaughter of Pilot Reyes. And you’ve helped us before, though you don’t remember it.”
    I barely hear the last thing he says because—
    My great-grandmother.
She
was the Pilot.
    She was the one who sang the poems to my grandfather, even when the Society had told her she could only choose a hundred. She was the one who saved the page I burned.
    “I never met Pilot Reyes in person,” the Pilot says. “She came before my predecessor. But as the Pilot, I am one of the only people who knows the names of the Pilots who came before. And I know her from her writings. She was the right Pilot at the right time. She preserved records and gathered what we needed to know to take action later. But one thing is the same for
all
Pilots: We have to understand what it means to be the Pilot. Your great-grandmother understood that if you don’t save, you fail. And she knew that the smallest rebel who does their job is as great as the Pilot who leads. She didn’t just believe that. She
knew
it.”
    “We haven’t done anything—” I begin, but the ship drops suddenly, down, down.
    Ky loses his balance and slams into the cases against the wall. Both Xander and I move to help him.
    “I’m fine,” Ky says. I can barely hear him over the sounds of the ship, and then we hit the ground hard. My whole body snaps with the impact.
    “When he opens the hold,” Ky says, “we’re going to run. We’ll get away.”
    “Ky,” I say, “wait.”
    “We can get past him,” Ky