Crossed

CHAPTER 35 KY

As I turn the pages of the farmers’ histories my own history flashes back to me. It comes in glimpses like the lightning outside the cave. Bright. Fast. I can’t tell if I’m seeing more or being blinded. The rain pours down and I picture the river outside pushing everything before it. Running over the name carved on Sarah’s little stone and leaving her bones bare.

Panic rises in me. I can’t be trapped here. I can’t come so close to breaking free and fail.

I find a notebook filled with lined paper covered in a childish scrawl. S. S. S. A hard letter to learn for the first one. Was it Hunter’s daughter who wrote this?

“I think you’re old enough now,” my father said, handing me a piece of cottonwood he’d brought out of the canyon with him. He had one, too, and he made a mark in the mud left over from the rain the night before. “It’s something I learned in the canyons. Look. K. That’s how your name starts. They say you should always teach a person’s name first. That way, even if they never learn to write anything else, they’ll always have something.”

Later, he told me he was going to teach the other children too.

“Why?” I asked. I was five. I didn’t want him to teach the others.

He knew what I was thinking. “It’s not knowing how to write that makes you interesting,” he said. “It’s what you write.”

“But if everyone can write, I won’t be special,” I said.

“That isn’t the only thing that matters,” he said.

“You want to be special,” I said. Even then I knew. “You want to be the Pilot.”

“I want to be the Pilot so I can help people,” he told me.

Back then I nodded. I believed him. I think he might have believed himself, too.

Another memory flashes to mind: a time when I took a note around the village for my father, running it from place to place so the others could have a turn reading it. The paper said the time and place of the next meeting and my father burned it as soon as I came home.

“What’s this meeting about?” I asked my father.

“The farmers have refused again to join the Rising,” he said.

“What will you do?” my mother asked.

He loved the farmers. They, not the Rising, were the ones who taught him to write. But the Rising had approached him first back before we were Reclassified. They planned to fight and he loved to fight. “I’ll stay loyal to the Rising,” he said. “But I’ll still trade with the farmers.”

Indie leans forward and catches my eye. She gives me a slight smile and her hand rests on her pack, as though she’s just slipped something inside. What did she find?

I look at her until she turns away. Whatever it is, she’s not showing Cassia either. I’ll have to find out later.

A few months before the last firing, my father taught me to wire. That was his job — to repair the wiring on everything that fell apart in the village. Things broke often there and we were used to it. All our equipment was the leftovers from Society, just like us. The food-warming mechanisms in particular were always breaking. We even heard rumors that the meals the Society shipped us were mass-produced and contained standardized vitamins, nothing like the individually calibrated meals given to people back in the other Provinces.

“If you can do my jobs here,” he said, “like fixing the food machines and the heaters in the houses, I can keep traveling into the canyon. No one will tell the Society that it’s you working instead of me.”

I nodded.

“Not everyone is good with their hands,” my father said, sitting back. “You are. You come by it from both of us.”

I glanced over to where my mother painted and then looked back to the wires I held.

“I always knew what I wanted to do,” my father said. “I knew how low to score to get assigned to mechanical repair.”

“That was risky,” I said.

“It was,” he said, “but I always come out where I should.” He smiled at me and around him at the Outer Provinces, which he loved and where he belonged. Then he became serious. “Now. Let’s see if you can do what I did.”

I arranged the wires, the plastic tabs, and the timer the way he showed me, with one small alteration.

“Good,” my father said, sounding pleased. “You have intuition, too. The Society says it doesn’t really exist, but it does.”

The next book I pick up is heavy, engraved with the word LEDGER. I turn the pages carefully, beginning at the end and working my way backward.

Though I half expected it, it still hurts when I see his trades in there. I know them by his signature on the lines and by the dates mentioned. He was one of the last to keep trading with the farmers, even when life in the Outer Provinces became more and more dangerous. He thought that quitting would seem like a sign of weakness.

Like it says in the pamphlets, there’s always a Pilot, and others being groomed to take his or her place if the Pilot falls. My father was never the Pilot, but he was one of the people standing in line.

“Do what the Society tells you,” I said to him when I got older and could see how many risks he took. “Then we won’t get in trouble.”

But he couldn’t help himself. He was smart and cunning, but he was all action, no subtlety, and he never knew when to stop. I could see that even when I was a child. It wasn’t enough to go into the canyons to trade — he had to bring writing out. It wasn’t enough to teach me — he had to teach all the children and then their parents. It wasn’t enough to know of the Rising — he had to move it forward.

It was his fault we died. He pushed too hard and took too many risks. The people wouldn’t have been gathered together for a meeting if it weren’t for him.

And after that final firing, who came to get the survivors?

The Society. Not the Rising. I’ve seen how they leave you when they don’t need you anymore. I’m afraid of the Rising. Even more than that, I’m afraid of who I’d be in the Rising.

I walk over to where Indie stood when she slipped something into her pack. On the table in front of me sits a waterproof box full of maps.

I glance over at Indie. She’s moved on. Her fingers turn the pages of a book and her bent head reminds me of the bell of a yucca flower tipped down toward the ground.

“We’re running low on time,” I say, picking up the box. “I’m going to find a map for each of us to use in case we get separated.”

Cassia nods. She’s found something else interesting. I can’t see what it is, but I can see the joy in her face and the way her body tenses with excitement. The very idea of the Rising makes her come alive. It’s what she wants. Maybe it’s even what her grandfather wanted her to find.

I know you came into the Carving for me, Cassia. But the Rising is the one place I don’t know if I can go for you.