Crossed

CHAPTER 28 CASSIA

When the sun comes into the Carving, we are already on the move again. The path is so narrow that we usually have to walk single file, but Ky stays near me, his hand on the small of my back, our fingers brushing and clinging every chance we get.

We have never had such a thing before — a whole night to talk, to kiss and hold on — and the thought and we never will again keeps coming back to me, will not stay buried where it should, even in the beautiful light of the Carving morning.

When the others woke, Ky told us what he thought our plan should be: get back to the township by evenfall and try to slip into one of the houses farthest from where he saw the light. Then we’ll keep watch. If there’s still only one light, we can try to approach in the morning. There are four of us and, Ky thinks, only one or two of them.

Of course, Eli is so young.

I glance back at him. He doesn’t notice. He walks on with his head down. Though I’ve seen him smile, I know the loss of Vick weighs heavily on both of them. “Eli wanted me to say the Tennyson poem over Vick,” Ky told me. “I couldn’t do it.”

In the lead, Indie shifts her pack and looks back at us to make sure we still follow. I wonder what would have happened to her if I had died. Would she have cried for me, or would she have gone through my things, taken what she needed, and moved on?

We steal into the township at dusk, Ky in the lead.

I didn’t look closely when we came through before, and now the homes intrigue me as we move quickly down the street. People must have built their own, each house different in some way from the one next to it. And they could walk into each other’s residences, cross each other’s thresholds whenever they wanted. The dirt paths speak of this; unlike the ones in the Borough, the paths here do not go straight from front door to sidewalk. They wind, they web, they interconnect. The people have not been gone long enough for their comings and goings to have been completely erased. I see them there in the dirt. I almost hear their echo in the canyon, the callings-out: hello, good-bye. How are you?

The four of us crowd inside a tiny weathered house with a watermarked door. “I don’t think anyone saw us,” Ky says.

I barely hear him. I’m staring at the pictures painted on the walls. The figures were painted with a different hand than the ones in the cave, but again they are beautiful. They have no wings on their backs. They do not look surprised at flight. Their eyes are not turned up to the sky, but instead look down toward the ground, as though they will keep that sight of earth as a memory for higher days.

But still I think I recognize them.

“Angels,” I say.

“Yes,” Ky says. “Some of the farmers still believed in them. In my father’s time, anyway.”

The dark falls a little deeper and the angels turn into shadows behind us. Then Ky sees it, in the small house across the way. He points out the light to us. “It’s in the same house as the night before.”

“I wonder what’s happening inside,” Eli says. “Who do you think is in there? A thief? Do you think they’re robbing the homes?”

“No,” Ky says. He glances over at me in the shadowy night. “I think they are home.”

Ky and I are both at the window at first light, watching, so we are the ones who see the man first.

He comes out of the house, alone, carrying something, and walks through the dust, along the path closer to us, down to a little stand of trees that I noticed when we first came in. Ky motions to all of us to be quiet. Indie and Eli go to the other window in the front of the house and look out, too. We all watch carefully over the edge of the windowsills.

The man stands tall and strong; he’s dark and tanned. He reminds me of Ky in some ways: his coloring, that quiet movement. But there’s a tiredness in him and he seems unaware of anything except what he carries, and in that moment I realize it’s a child.

Her dark hair streams over his arms and her dress is white. An Official color, but of course she’s no Official. The dress is lovely, as though she’s going to a Banquet, but she’s much too young.

And much too still.

I put my hand to my mouth.

Ky glances over at me and nods. His eyes are sad and weary and kind.

She’s dead.

I glance over at Eli. Is he all right? Then I remember that he’s seen much more death than this. Maybe he’s even seen a child dead before.

But I never have. Tears fill my eyes. Someone so young, so tiny. How?

The man puts her gently on the ground, in the dead grass under the trees. Something, a sound carried on the canyon wind, reaches our ears. Singing.

It takes a long time to bury someone.

While the man digs the hole, slowly and steadily, it begins to rain again. It’s not a heavy rain, but a sustained spatter of water against dirt and mud, and I wonder why he brought her out with him. Maybe he wanted her to have rain on her face, one last time.

Maybe he just didn’t want to be alone.

I can’t stand it anymore. “We have to go help him,” I whisper to Ky, but Ky shakes his head.

“No,” he says. “Not yet.”

The man climbs back out of the hole and walks over to the girl. But he doesn’t put her in the grave; he brings her near it and puts her body down.

And then I notice the blue lines all over his arms.

He reaches down and lifts up the girl’s arm.

He pulls out something. Blue. He marks it on her skin. The rain keeps washing it off and yet he keeps drawing, over and over and over. I can’t tell if he still sings. Finally the rain stops and the blue stays.

Eli’s not watching anymore. He sits with his back to the wall underneath his window and I crawl over across the floor to sit next to him, not wanting my movement to catch the eye of the man outside. I put my arm around Eli and he slides closer.

Indie and Ky keep watching.

So young, I keep thinking. I hear a thump, thump sound and for a moment I can’t tell if it is the beating of my heart or the sound of the dirt as it falls on the little girl in her grave.

“I’m going now,” Ky whispers finally. “The rest of you, wait here.”

I turn and look at him, surprised. I raise my head so I can see out the window again. The man has finished burying. He lifts a flat gray stone and puts it over the spot now filled in with dirt. I don’t hear singing. “No,” I whisper.

Ky looks at me, raises his eyebrows.

“You can’t,” I say. “Let’s wait until tomorrow. Look at what he’s had to do.”

Ky’s voice is gentle but firm. “We gave him all the time we could. We have to find out more now.”

“And he’s alone,” Indie says. “Vulnerable.”

I look at Ky, shocked, but he doesn’t discount what Indie says. “It’s the right time,” he says.

Before I can say more, he opens the door and leaves.