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“What about you?” Eli asks Indie.
She shakes her head. “I’ll stay like you,” she says, and Eli smiles a little.
Ky nods. He doesn’t seem surprised.
“What happens now?” Indie asks. “I don’t think we should try to cross the plain after what happened to your friend. ”
Eli flinches at her bluntness, and Ky’s voice, when he speaks, sounds tight. “That’s true. They might come back, and even if they don’t, the water out there is poisoned now. ”
“We pulled out some of the poison, though,” Eli says.
“Why?” Indie asks.
“To try to save the stream,” Ky says. “It was stupid. ”
“It wasn’t,” Eli says.
“We didn’t get enough of them out to make much of a difference. ”
“We did,” Eli says stubbornly.
Ky reaches inside his pack and rolls out a map, a beautiful thing with colors and markings. “We’re here now,” he says, pointing to a spot at the edge of the Carving.
I can’t help but smile. We are here, together. In this wide, wild world, we’ve managed to meet again. I reach out my hand and trace my finger along the path I took to get to him until my hand meets his on the map.
“I was trying to find a way to you,” Ky says. “I wanted to cross the plain and get back to the Society somehow. We took some things from the farmers’ township for trade. ”
“That old abandoned settlement,” Indie says. “We came through it too. ”
“It’s not abandoned,” Eli says. “Ky saw a light there. Someone didn’t leave. ”
I shiver, remembering that feeling of being followed. “What did you take?” I ask Ky.
“This map,” he says. “And these. ” He reaches inside his pack again and hands me something else—books.
“Oh,” I say, breathing in their smell, running my fingers along their edges. “Do they have more?”
“They have everything,” Ky says. “Stories, histories, anything you can imagine. They’ve saved them for years inside a cave in the canyon wall. ”
“Then let’s go back,” Indie says decisively. “It’s not safe on the plain yet. And Cassia and I need something to trade. ”
“We could get more food, too,” Eli says. Then he frowns. “But
that light—”
“We’ll be careful,” Indie says. “It has to be better than trying to cross to the mountains right now. ”
“What do you think?” Ky asks me.
I remember that day back in Oria at the Restoration site, and how the workers gutted the books and the pages fell out. And I imagine the papers lifting, flying, winging their way for miles until they settled somewhere safe and hidden. Another thought darts into my mind: there might even be information about the Rising among the things the farmers saved. “I want to see all the words,” I tell Ky, and he nods.
At night, Ky and Eli show us a place to camp that Indie and I did not notice on our way out of the Carving. It’s a cave, spacious and large once you’re inside; and when Ky shines his flashlight around it I catch my breath. It’s painted.
I’ve never seen pictures like this—they’re real, not on a port or printed out on a scrap of paper. So much color. So much scale—the paintings cover the walls, wash up on the ceiling. I turn to Ky. “How?” I ask him.
“The farmers must have done it,” he says. “They knew how to make their own supplies with plants and minerals. ”
“Are there more?” I ask.
“Many of the houses back in the township are painted,” he says.
“What about these?” Indie asks. She points to another set of art farther along the cave wall—carved pictures showing wild, primitive figures in motion.
“Those are older,” Ky says. “But the theme is the same. ”
He’s right. The farmers’ work is less crude, more refined: a whole wall of girls in beautiful dresses and men with colorful shirts and bare feet. But the motions of the people seem to echo those of the earlier etchings.
“Oh,” I whisper. “Do you think they painted a Match Banquet?” As soon as I’ve said it, I feel stupid. They don’t have Match Banquets here.
But Indie doesn’t laugh at me. Her expression as she runs her fingers over the walls and along the pictures is a complex one, longing and anger and hope all together in her eyes.
“What are they doing?” I ask Ky. “Both of the sets of figures are . . . moving. ” One of the girls has her hands lifted over her head. I put mine up, too, trying to figure out what she is doing.
Ky watches me with that look in his eyes, the one sad and full of love at the same time, the one he gives me when he knows something I don’t, something he thinks has been stolen from me.
“They’re dancing,” he says.
“What?” I ask.
“I’ll show you sometime,” he says, and his voice, tender and deep, sends a shiver through me.
Chapter 25
KY
My mother could dance and sing and she went out to watch the sunset every night. “They didn’t have sunsets like these in the main Provinces,” she’d say. She always found the one good part of everything and then turned her face toward it every chance she had.
