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In my dreams, bats fly in and out of the cave all night long. Some fly fat and heavy and I know they’re full of the blood of other living things. Others fly a little higher and I know they’re light with hunger. But they all have noisy, beating wings.
At the end of the night, near dawn, I wake up. Vick and Eli still sleep and I wonder what it was that disturbed me. A sound in the township?
I walk to the outermost door of the caves and look out.
A light flickers in the window of one of the houses below us.
Chapter 14
CASSIA
I wait for the dawn, folded inside my coat. Down here in the Carving, I walk and sleep deep in the earth and the Society doesn’t see me. I’m starting to believe they truly don’t know where I am. I’ve escaped.
It feels strange.
All my life I’ve been watched. The Society saw me go to school and learn to swim and walk up the steps to attend my Match Banquet; they sorted my dreams; when they found my data interesting, as my Official did, they altered things and recorded my reaction.
And though it was a different kind of watching, my family watched me, too.
At the end of his life, Grandfather used to sit at a window as the sun went down. I wondered, then
, if he stayed awake all night and saw the sun come back up again. During one of those long, wakeful nights, did he decide that he would give me the poems?
I pretend that Grandfather hasn’t vanished but instead floats above it all, and that of all the things in the world to see from up high he chooses to see one small girl curled up in a canyon. He wonders if I will wake and rise when it becomes clear that dawn is on its way after all.
Did Grandfather mean for me to end up here?
“Are you awake?” Indie asks.
“I never slept,” I say, but even as I say it, I can’t be sure it’s true. For what if my imagining Grandfather was really a dream?
“We can start in a few minutes,” Indie says. In the seconds since we first spoke to each other, the light has changed. I can already see her better.
Indie chooses a good spot; even I can tell that. The walls are not nearly as high and sheer as they’ve been in other places and an old rockfall left piles of boulders part of the way up.
Still, the walls of the canyon are daunting, and I haven’t had much practice—just the little time we had last night before we went to sleep.
Indie holds out her hand in a peremptory gesture. “Give me your pack. ”
“What?”
“You’re not used to climbing,” Indie says evenly. “I’ll put your things in mine and you can carry yours empty. It’ll be easier that way. I don’t want the weight to make you fall. ”
“Are you sure?” Suddenly I feel that if Indie has the pack she has too much. I don’t want to let the tablets go.
Indie looks impatient. “I know what I’m doing. Like you did with the plants. ” She frowns. “Come on. You trusted me on the air ship. ”
She’s right, and that reminds me of something. “Indie,” I ask, “what did you bring with you? What was it you had me hide on the ship?”
“Nothing,” she says.
“Nothing?” I echo, surprised.
“I didn’t think you’d trust me unless you thought I had something to lose, too,” she says, grinning.
“But in the village, you pretended to take something back from me,” I say.
“I know,” she says, not a trace of apology in her voice. I shake my head and in spite of myself I start to laugh as I slide off my pack and hand it to her.
She opens it up and dumps the contents—flashlight, plant leaves, empty canteen, blue tablets—into her own pack.
I suddenly feel guilty. I could have taken off with all the tablets and she still trusted me. “You should keep some of the tablets after this,” I say. “For yourself. ”
Indie’s expression changes. “Oh,” she says, her voice wary. “All right. ”
She hands me back my empty pack and I slide it over my shoulders. We climb wearing our coats, which makes us bulkier, but Indie thinks it easier than carrying them. She slides her own pack onto her back, over her long braid that burns almost as bright as these cliffs when the sun comes up. “Ready?” she asks.
