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“It’s here,” I say.
“It’s real,” Vick says.
Eli beams.
The buildings before us cluster together, then split apart around rockfall or river. Houses. Bigger buildings. Tiny fields carved out where the canyon opens wider.
But something is missing. The people. The stillness is absolute. Vick glances over at me. He feels it too.
“We’re too late,” I say. “They’re gone. ”
It hasn’t been long. I can still see their tracks here and there.
I also see signs that they prepared to leave. This wasn’t a rushed departure, but one taken with care. The twisted black apple trees have been harvested; only a few golden apples still shine on the branches. Most of the farming equipment is gone—taken apart and carried away by the farmers, I’d guess. A few rusted pieces remain.
“Where did they go?” Eli asks.
“I don’t know,” I say.
Is anyone left outside of the Society?
We pass a stand of cottonwood trees on the bank of the stream. A small wiry tree grows alone at the edge.
“Hold on,” I tell the other two. “This won’t take long. ”
I don’t cut deep—I don’t want to kill the tree. I carve her name carefully on the trunk, thinking, as I always do, of when I held her hand in mine to teach her to write. Vick and Eli don’t say anything while I carve. They wait.
When I finish I step back to look at the tree.
Shallow roots. Sandy soil. The bark is gray and rough. The leaves are long gone but her name still looks beautiful to me.
We’re all drawn to the houses. It feels so long since we’ve seen a place built by real people with the intent to stay. The houses are weathered and made of pieced-together sandstone or worn gray wood. Eli climbs the steps to one of them. Vick and I follow.
“Ky,” Eli says, once we’re inside. “Look. ”
What I see inside makes me reconsider. Maybe there was an element of haste in their departure. Otherwise, would they have left their houses like this?
It’s the walls that speak of hurry. Of not quite enough time. They are covered in pictures and if the farmers had had more time, they would have washed the walls clean. They say and show too much.
In this house there is a boat painted in the sky, marooned on a pillow of white clouds. The artist signed his name in the corner of the room. Those letters claim the painting—the ideas—as his own. And although this is the place I’ve been looking for all this time, I still catch my breath.
This township is where he learned.
About writing.
And painting.
“Let’s stop here,” Eli says. “They have bunks. We could stay forever. ”
“Aren’t you forgetting something?” Vick asks him. “The people who used to live here left for a reason. ”
I nod. “We have to find a map and some food and get out. Let’s check the caves. ”
We look in all of the caves along the sides of the canyon. Some of them have painted walls, like the houses, but we don’t find a single scrap of paper.
They taught him to write. They knew how. Where would they have left their words? They couldn’t have taken all of them. It’s almost night and the colors in the paintings shift to grays in the fading light. I look up at the walls of the cave we’re searching.
“This one is weird,” Eli says, looking at the painting, too. “Some of it is missing. ” He shines his flashlight up. The walls have been damaged by water and only the top of the painting remains—part of a woman’s head. All you can see are her eyes and forehead. “She looks like my mother,” Eli says softly.
I turn in surprise to look at him. Because that’s the word that’s repeating over and over in my mind right now, even though my mother never came here. And I wonder if that word, mother, is as dangerous to Eli as it is to me. It might be even more dangerous than father. Because I feel no anger toward my mother. Only loss, and loss is a feeling you can’t fight your way out of as easily.
“I know where they must have hidden the maps,” Eli says suddenly. There’s a glint of cunning in his eyes that I haven’t seen before and I wonder if I like Eli so much not because he reminds me of Bram, but because he reminds me of myself. I was about his age when I stole the red tablets from the Carrows.
When I was new in Oria, it was strange to watch the people flood out of their houses and workplaces and air trains all at once. It made me nervous the way they moved at the same times to the same places. So I pretended the streets were dry gulches from home, and the people were the water after rain that turned the dry beds into streams. I told myself the people in their gray and blue plainclothes were nothing but another force of nature moving along.
But it didn’t do me any good. I got lost in one of the Boroughs, of all places.
And Xander saw me using the compass to try to find my way home. He threatened to turn in Patrick for letting me keep it unless I stole some red tablets.
Xander must have known then that I was an Aberration. I don’t know how he could tell so quickly, and we never talked about it after. But it doesn’t matter. The lesson was a good one to learn. Do not pretend one place is like another or look for similarities. Only look for what is.
