Crossed

CHAPTER 36 CASSIA

Ky puts a map down on the table and reaches for a little black charcoal pencil. “I found another one we can use,” he says to me as he begins marking the page. “I’ll have to update it. It’s a little old.”

I pick up another book and flip the pages, looking for something to help us, but somehow I end up composing a poem in my mind instead. It’s about Ky, not for him, and I find myself copying the mystery author’s style:

I look over at Ky. His hands move as quick and careful with marking the map as they do with writing, as sure as they move over me.

He doesn’t look up and I find myself wanting. I want him. And I want to know what he thinks and how he feels. Why does Ky have to be able to sit so silent, hold so still, see so much?

How can he both draw me in and keep me out?

“I need to go outside,” I say later, exhaling in frustration. We haven’t found anything concrete — only pages and pages of history and propaganda about the Rising and the Society and the farmers themselves. At first it was fascinating, but now I’m aware of the river outside rising higher and higher. My back aches, my head hurts, and I feel a small flutter of panic beginning in my chest. Am I losing my ability to sort? First the wrong decision about the blue tablets, now this. “Has the lightning stopped?”

“I think it has,” Ky says. “Let’s go see.”

In the cave full of food, Eli has curled up to sleep, packs filled with apples surrounding him.

Ky and I step outside. The rain comes down but the electricity has left the air. “We can move when it’s light,” he says.

I look over at him, at his dark profile lit faintly by the flashlight he carries. The Society would never know how to put this on a microcard. Belongs to the land. Knows how to run. They would never be able to write what he is.

“We still haven’t found anything.” I try to laugh. “If I ever go back, the Society will have to change my microcard. Exhibits exceptional promise in sorting would have to be deleted.”

“What you’re doing is more than sorting,” Ky says simply. “We should rest soon, if we can.”

He’s not as driven as I am to find the Rising, I realize. He’s trying to help me, but if I weren’t here, he wouldn’t care at all about looking for a way to join with them.

I think suddenly of the words of that poem. I did not reach Thee.

I push the words away. I’m tired, that’s all, feeling fragile. And, I realize, I haven’t heard Ky’s complete story yet. He has reasons for feeling the way he does, but I don’t know all of them.

I think of all the things he can do — write, carve, paint — and suddenly, watching him stand in the dark at the edge of the empty settlement, something sorrowful washes over me. There is no place for someone like him in the Society, I think, for someone who can create. He can do so many things of incomparable value, things no one else can do, and the Society doesn’t care about that at all.

I wonder if, when Ky looks at this empty township, he sees a place where he could have belonged. Where he could have written with the others, where the beautiful girls in the paintings would have known how to dance.

“Ky,” I say, “I want to hear the rest of your story.”

“All of it?” he asks, his voice serious.

“Anything you want to tell me,” I say.

He looks at me. I lift his hand to my lips and kiss his knuckles, the scraped places on his palm. He closes his eyes.

“My mother painted with water,” he says. “And my father played with fire.”