Crossed by Ally Condie

in and out of the red ones. I don’t want to alter the warming mechanism. It works fine as it is. “Because,” I tell Eli, “they don’t care about us, but they love data.” Once the silver disk is free, I hold it up. “I bet this records things like our pulse rates, our hydration levels, our moment of death. And anything else they’ve thought up that they want to know about while we’re out in the villages. They’re not using these to track us constantly. But they gather our data after we die.”
    “The coats don’t always burn,” Vick says.
    “And even if they do, the disks are fireproof,” I say. Then I start to grin. “We’ve been making it hard for them,” I tell Vick. “All those people we buried.” My grin fades as I think of the Officers dragging the bodies back out of the dirt just to strip them of their coats.
    “That first boy in the water,” Vick remembers. “They made us take off his coat before we got rid of him.”
    “But if they don’t care about us, why would they care about our data?” Eli asks.
    “Death,” I say. “It’s the one thing they haven’t fully conquered. They want to know more about it.”
    “We die, they learn how not to,” Eli says. His voice sounds distant, as though he isn’t only thinking of the coats but of something else too.
    “I wonder why they didn’t stop us,” Vick says. “We’ve been burying for weeks.”
    “I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe they wondered how long we could keep it up.”
    None of us speak for a moment. I wind the blue wires and leave them—the Society’s entrails—under a rock. “Do either of you want me to fix yours?” I ask. “It won’t take long.”
    Vick hands his over. Now that I know where the blue wires are, I can be more careful with my incisions. I make only a few small holes and pull the blue wires out. One of the holes is in the spot over his heart so I can extract the disk.
    “How are you going to get yours back together?” Vick asks, shrugging into his coat.
    “I’ll have to wear it like this and find a way to fix it later,” I say. One of the trees near us is pinyon pine and it weeps sap. I pull some off and use it to stick the cut edges of my coat back together in a few places. The sap’s smell, sharp and earthy, makes me think of the taller pines on the Hill. “I’ll probably still be warm enough as long as I’m careful about the red wires.”
    I reach for Eli’s coat but he holds it back. “No,” he says. “It’s all right. I don’t mind.”
    “All right,” I say, surprised, and then I think I understand. The tiny disk is the closest any of us might come to immortality. It’s not as good as the stored tissue samples that ideal Citizens get—a chance at living again someday when the Society has the technology.
    I don’t think they’ll ever figure out how to do it. Even the Society can’t bring people back. But it is true that in the Society our data lives on forever, rolling over and over to become whatever numbers the Society needs. It’s like what the Rising has done with the legend of the Pilot.
    I’ve known about the rebellion and its leader for as long as I can remember.
    But I never told Cassia.
    The closest I came was the day on the Hill when I told her the story of Sisyphus. Not the Rising’s adaptation of it, but the version that I like best. Cassia and I stood in that dark green forest. Both of us had red flags in our hands. I finished the story and was about to say more. Then she asked me the color of my eyes. In that moment I realized that loving each other felt more dangerous—more like a rebellion—than anything else ever could.
    I’d heard parts of the Tennyson poem all my life. But in Oria, after I saw Tennyson’s words on Cassia’s lips, I realized that the poem didn’t belong to the Rising. The poet didn’t write it for them—he wrote it long before the Society even existed. It was the same with the story of Sisyphus. It existed long before the Rising or