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I am the happiest I’ve been since the Hill. I think there’s a chance I might make it back to her after all.
“Were your parents Officers before they were Reclassified?” Vick asks me.
I laugh. My father, an Officer? Or my mother? For different reasons, the suggestion is ridiculous. “No,” I say. “Why?”
“You know about the guns,” he says. “And the wiring in the coats. I wondered if one of them had taught you. ”
“My father did teach me that,” I say. “But he wasn’t an Officer. ”
“Did he learn that from the farmers, too? Or the Rising?”
“No,” I say. “Some of it he learned from the Society for his work. ” Most of it he taught himself. “What about your parents?”
“My father was an Officer,” he says, and I’m not at all surprised. It makes sense: Vick’s bearing, his ability to command, the way he said the coats were military-grade, the fact that he once lived by the Army bases. What could have happened to cause the Reclassification of someone in such good standing—a member of a family of Officers?
“My family’s dead,” Eli says, when it’s clear that Vick doesn’t intend to say anything more.
Though I’d guessed that must be the case, I still hate to hear him say it.
“How?” Vick asks.
“My parents got sick. They died in a medical center in Central. And then I got sent away. If I’d been a Citizen, someone could have adopted me. But I wasn’t. I’ve been an Aberration for as long as I can remember. ”
His parents got sick? And died? That wasn’t supposed to happen—didn’t happen, as far as I knew—to people as young as Eli’s parents must have been, not even Aberrations. Dying that early doesn’t happen unless you live in the Outer Provinces. And it especially doesn’t happen in Central. I’d assumed they’d died like Eli was meant to, out in the villages somehow.
But Vick doesn’t seem surprised. I don’t know if that’s for Eli’s benefit or if Vick has heard something like this before.
“Eli, I’m sorry,” I say. I was lucky. If Patrick and Aida’s son hadn’t died and Patrick hadn’t pushed so hard, I never would have been brought to Oria. I might be dead right now.
“I’m sorry too,” Vick says.
Eli doesn’t answer. He scoots closer to the fire and closes his eyes as if talking has exhausted him. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” he says quietly. “I just wanted to tell you. ”
After a pause, I change the subject. “Eli,” I ask, “what
did you bring from the farmers’ cave?”
Eli opens his eyes and pulls his pack across the ground toward him. “They’re heavy, so I couldn’t bring many,” he says. “Only two. But look. They’re books. With words and pictures. ” He opens one up to show us. A painting of an enormous winged creature with colors all along its back curls through the sky above an enormous stone house.
“I think my father told me about one of these books,” I say. “The stories were for children. They could look at the pictures while their parents read them the words. Then when the kids got older they could do it all themselves. ”
“These have to be worth something,” Vick says.
What Eli’s chosen are hard to trade, I’d imagine. The stories can be replicated but the pictures cannot. But at the moment he grabbed them, Eli wasn’t thinking of trading.
We sit by the embers of the fire and read the stories over Eli’s shoulder. There are words we don’t know, but we puzzle out the meanings by looking at the pictures.
Eli yawns and closes the books. “We can look at them again tomorrow,” he says decisively, and I grin to myself as he packs them into his bag. He seems to be telling us I brought these here and you can see them on my terms.
I pick up a stick from the ground and start writing Cassia’s name in the dirt. Eli’s breathing slows as he falls asleep.
“I loved someone too,” Vick says to me a few minutes later. “Back in Camas. ” He clears his throat.
Vick’s story. I never thought he’d tell it. But there’s something about the fire tonight that makes us all talk. I wait a moment to make sure I ask the right question. A bright spot in the coals flares and goes dark. “What was her name?” I ask.
A pause. “Laney,” Vick says. “She worked at the base where we lived. She told me about the Pilot. ” He clears his throat. “I’d heard it before, of course. And on the base people used to wonder if one of the Officers could be the Pilot. But for Laney and her family it was different. When they talked about the Pilot it meant more to them. ”
He glances at the spot where I wrote Cassia’s name over and over in the dirt. “I wish I could do that,” he says. “We never had anything but scribes and ports in Camas. ”
“I can teach you how. ”
“You do it,” he says. “On this. ” He shoves a piece of wood toward me. Cottonwood, probably from the stand of trees where we fished. I start in on it with my sharp piece of stone, not looking up at Vick. Near us, Eli sleeps on.
“She used to fish, too,” Vick says. “I’d go to meet her at the stream. She—” Vick stops for a moment. “My father was so angry when he found out. I’d seen him get angry before. I knew what would happen but I did it anyway. ”
“People fall in love,” I say, my voice hoarse. “It happens. ”
