Page 68 of Crossed (Matched 2)


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“What did you trade for?” Eli asks. “You had everything in the canyons. ”

“No,” Hunter says, “we didn’t. The Society’s medicine was always better, and there were other things we needed. ”

“But if all your papers are so valuable,” Eli asks, “how could you leave so many of them behind?”

“There’s too much,” Hunter says. “We couldn’t carry it all across the plain. Many of the people tore out pages or brought books that they wanted. But it was impossible to bring everything. That’s why I had to seal off the cave and hide the rest. We didn’t want the Society to be able to destroy or take everything if they found it. ”

He finishes marking one of his arms with the lines and reaches to put the blue chalk back into his pack.

“What do those markings mean?” I ask, and he stops.

“What do they look like to you?”

“Rivers,” I say. “Veins. ”

He nods, interested. “They look like both. You can think of them that way. ”

“But what are they to you?” I asked.

“Webs,” he says.

I shake my head, confused.

“Anything that connects,” he says. “When we draw them, we usually draw them together, like this. ” He puts his hand out so that our fingers touch. I almost jump back in surprise, but I hold myself still. He traces the chalk along his fingers and then crosses over onto mine and runs the line of blue gently up my arm.

He sits back. We look at each other. “Then you would continue the lines yourself,” he says. “Along you, and then you would touch someone else and begin a line for them. And so on. ”

But what if the connection was broken? I want to ask. Like when your daughter died?

“If there is no one else for the lines,” he says, “you do this. ” He stands up and pushes his hands against the sandstone wall of the overhang. I imagine a series of tiny cracks spreading from the point of pressure. “You connect to something. ”

“But the Carving doesn’t care,” I tell him. “The canyons don’t care. ”

“No,” Hunter agrees. “But we’re still connected. ”

“I brought this,” I say to Hunter, reaching into my pack and feeling shy. “I thought you might want it. ”

It’s the poem with the line he used for Sarah’s grave. The one about across the June a wind with fingers goes. I took it from the book.

Hunter takes it and reads it aloud:

“They dropped like Flakes -

They dropped like Stars -

Like Petals from a Rose -

When suddenly across the June

A wind with fingers - goes -”

He pauses.

“It sounds like what happened to us out in the villages,” Eli says. “People died like that. They dropped like stars. ”

Ky puts his head in his hands.

Hunter reads on.

“They perished in the Seamless Grass -

No eye could find the place -

But God can summon every face

On his Repealless - List. ”

“Some of us believed in another life someday,” he says. “Catherine did, and Sarah did, too. ”

“But you don’t,” Indie says.

“I didn’t,” Hunter says. “But I never told Sarah that. How could I take that away from her? She was everything to me. ” He swallows. “I held her while she fell asleep every night, all those years of her life. ” Tears slip down his cheeks the way they did earlier in the library cave. He ignores them, as he did then.

“I had to move away little by little,” Hunter says. “Lift my arm. Pull my face away from where I tucked it into her neck; draw back so that my breath no longer ruffled her hair. I did this gradually so that when I left she didn’t know I was gone. I saw her into the night.

“In the Cavern, I thought I’d break all the tubes and then die in the dark,” Hunter says. “But I couldn’t do it. ”

He looks down at the page again and reads the line he carved for her. “Suddenly across the June a wind with fingers goes,” he says, almost sings, his voice sad and soft. He stands up and shoves the paper in his pack. “I will check the rain,” he says, and goes to stand outside.

By the time Hunter comes back in, everyone has fallen asleep except for Ky and me. I can hear Ky breathing, on the other side of Eli. It’s crowded in here, and it would be easy to reach out and touch Ky but I hold back. It is so strange to take this journey together when there is such distance between us. I can’t forget what he did. I can’t forget what I did, either. Why did I sort him?

I hear Hunter settle near the entrance of the cave and I wish I hadn’t given him that poem. I didn’t mean to bring him pain.

If I died here, and someone were to carve my epitaph on the stone of this cave, I don’t know what I would want them to write.

What would Grandfather have chosen for his epitaph?

Do not go gentle

Or

I hope to see my Pilot face to face

Source: www.allfreenovel.com
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