the Society or my father claimed it as their own.
When I spent my days in the Borough doing the same tasks over and over, I changed the story too. I decided that it was the thoughts in your own mind that mattered more than anything else.
So I never talked to her about how I’d heard the other poem before, or about the rebellion. Why? We had the Society trying to find its way into our relationship. We didn’t need anyone else there, too. The poems and stories we shared with each other could mean what we wanted them to mean. We could choose our own path together.
We finally see a sign of the Anomalies: a place where they used to climb. The ground at the base of the cliff is spotted with blue fragments. I bend down to look more closely. For a moment they look like the broken casings of some kind of beautiful insects. Blue and bruised purple underneath. Broken and mixed with red mud.
Then I realize they’re the juniper fruit from the tree growing near the wall. They’ve fallen to the ground and been crushed by someone’s boots, and the rain has blurred the footprints so that they are only vague indentations. I run my hand along the cuts in the rock and the metal bores where the Anomalies ran their climbing gear through. The ropes are gone.
CHAPTER 12
CASSIA
A s we walk, I look for something to mark Ky’s passage through this place. But I find nothing. We see no footprints, no signs of human life. Even the trees are small and stunted, and one of them bears a distinct dark scar right through its center. I feel stricken, too. Although the boy who ran to the Carving with us talked about the recent rains, I still hoped to find some of Ky’s tracks.
And I hope to find evidence of the Rising. I open my mouth to ask Indie if she’s heard of it but something holds me back and I don’t. I’m not sure what I expect a sign of a rebellion to look like, anyway.
There is a tiny stream, so small that it almost disappears when Indie and I both put our canteens in at the same time. The stream dries up or sinks underground entirely by the time it reaches the edge of the Carving. In staggering through the dark I did not notice when the stream began, only that it suddenly was. Pieces of driftwood wait on small sandy beaches, bone-dry, having floated in on a bigger river in a different time. I can’t stop wondering what this might look like from above: a shiny silver thread, pulled from one of the choices I saw in the Hundred Dresses, winding through the vastness of red rock that is the Carving.
From above, Indie and I would be too small to see at all.
“I think we’re in the wrong canyon,” I tell Indie.
Indie doesn’t answer at first; she’s bending to pick up something fragile and gray from the ground. She holds it carefully in her hands and shows it to me.
“An old wasp nest,” I say, looking at the thin, tissue-paper circles turning within and without each other.
“It looks like a seashell.” Indie opens her pack and tucks the abandoned nest safely inside. “Do you want to try and go back out?” she asks. “Go to another canyon?”
I pause. We’ve been moving for almost twenty-four hours now, and we are out of food. We have eaten most of our two days’ ration to give us strength after our long run to the Carving. I don’t want to waste tablets on going back out, especially since I don’t know what might be following, or waiting.
“I guess we should keep going,” I say. “Maybe we’ll see some sign of him soon.”
Indie nods, hoists her pack, and picks up the two knife-sharp stones she always carries while we walk. I do the same. We’ve seen the prints of animals here, though we haven’t seen a trace of an Anomaly yet.
We haven’t seen a trace of any person—alive or dead, Aberration or Anomaly, Official or rebel.
In the dark that night, I sit and work on my poem. It helps me keep from thinking about all I’ve left behind.
I write another first line.
I couldn’t find a way
When I spent my days in the Borough doing the same tasks over and over, I changed the story too. I decided that it was the thoughts in your own mind that mattered more than anything else.
So I never talked to her about how I’d heard the other poem before, or about the rebellion. Why? We had the Society trying to find its way into our relationship. We didn’t need anyone else there, too. The poems and stories we shared with each other could mean what we wanted them to mean. We could choose our own path together.
We finally see a sign of the Anomalies: a place where they used to climb. The ground at the base of the cliff is spotted with blue fragments. I bend down to look more closely. For a moment they look like the broken casings of some kind of beautiful insects. Blue and bruised purple underneath. Broken and mixed with red mud.
Then I realize they’re the juniper fruit from the tree growing near the wall. They’ve fallen to the ground and been crushed by someone’s boots, and the rain has blurred the footprints so that they are only vague indentations. I run my hand along the cuts in the rock and the metal bores where the Anomalies ran their climbing gear through. The ropes are gone.
CHAPTER 12
CASSIA
A s we walk, I look for something to mark Ky’s passage through this place. But I find nothing. We see no footprints, no signs of human life. Even the trees are small and stunted, and one of them bears a distinct dark scar right through its center. I feel stricken, too. Although the boy who ran to the Carving with us talked about the recent rains, I still hoped to find some of Ky’s tracks.
And I hope to find evidence of the Rising. I open my mouth to ask Indie if she’s heard of it but something holds me back and I don’t. I’m not sure what I expect a sign of a rebellion to look like, anyway.
There is a tiny stream, so small that it almost disappears when Indie and I both put our canteens in at the same time. The stream dries up or sinks underground entirely by the time it reaches the edge of the Carving. In staggering through the dark I did not notice when the stream began, only that it suddenly was. Pieces of driftwood wait on small sandy beaches, bone-dry, having floated in on a bigger river in a different time. I can’t stop wondering what this might look like from above: a shiny silver thread, pulled from one of the choices I saw in the Hundred Dresses, winding through the vastness of red rock that is the Carving.
From above, Indie and I would be too small to see at all.
“I think we’re in the wrong canyon,” I tell Indie.
Indie doesn’t answer at first; she’s bending to pick up something fragile and gray from the ground. She holds it carefully in her hands and shows it to me.
“An old wasp nest,” I say, looking at the thin, tissue-paper circles turning within and without each other.
“It looks like a seashell.” Indie opens her pack and tucks the abandoned nest safely inside. “Do you want to try and go back out?” she asks. “Go to another canyon?”
I pause. We’ve been moving for almost twenty-four hours now, and we are out of food. We have eaten most of our two days’ ration to give us strength after our long run to the Carving. I don’t want to waste tablets on going back out, especially since I don’t know what might be following, or waiting.
“I guess we should keep going,” I say. “Maybe we’ll see some sign of him soon.”
Indie nods, hoists her pack, and picks up the two knife-sharp stones she always carries while we walk. I do the same. We’ve seen the prints of animals here, though we haven’t seen a trace of an Anomaly yet.
We haven’t seen a trace of any person—alive or dead, Aberration or Anomaly, Official or rebel.
In the dark that night, I sit and work on my poem. It helps me keep from thinking about all I’ve left behind.
I write another first line.
I couldn’t find a way
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