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“Yes,” I say, trying to think of something. Then I borrow from my own life. “About a year ago, back in the Society, there was a boy who was in love with a girl. He’d watched her for a long time. He hoped she’d be his Match. Then she was. He was happy. ”
“That’s all?” Lei asks.
“That’s all,” I say. “Too short?”
Lei begins to laugh and for a moment she sounds like herself. “It’s you,” she says. “It’s obvious. That’s no story. ”
I laugh, too. “Sorry,” I say. “I’m not very good at this. ”
“But you love your Match,” Lei says, no longer laughing. “I know that about you. You know it about me. ”
“Yes,” I say.
She looks at me. The liquid drips into the line.
“I know an old story about people who couldn’t be Matched,” she says. “He was an Aberration. She was a citizen and a pilot. It was the first of the vanishings. ”
“The vanishings?” I ask.
“Some people inside the Society wanted to get out,” Lei says. “Or wanted to get their children out. There were pilots who would fly people away in exchange for other things. ”
“I’ve never heard of anything like this,” I say.
“It happened,” Lei says. “I saw it. Some of those parents would trade anything—risk everything—because they thought sending their children away was the best way to keep them safe. ”
“But where would they take them?” I ask. “Into Enemy territory? That doesn’t make any sense. ”
“They’d take them to the edge of Enemy territory,” Lei says. “To places called the stone villages. After that, it was up to people to decide whether they’d stay in the villages, or try to cross Enemy territory to find a place known as the Otherlands. No one who went on to the Otherlands ever came back. ”
“I don’t understand it,” I say. “How would sending your children out to the middle of nowhere—closer to
the Enemy—be safer than staying in the Society?”
“Perhaps they knew about the Plague,” Lei says. “But obviously your parents didn’t feel that way. Neither did mine. ” She looks at me. “You almost sound like you’re defending the Society. ”
“I’m not,” I say.
“I know,” she says. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to tell you history. I meant to tell you a story. ”
“I’m ready,” I say. “I’m listening. ”
“The story, then. ” She lifts her arm and looks at the liquid running in. “This pilot loved the man but she had obligations at home, ones that she couldn’t break, and obligations to her leaders, too. If she left, too many people would suffer. She flew the man she loved all the way to the Otherlands, which no one had done before. ”
“What happened after that?” I ask.
“She was shot down by the Enemy on her way back,” Lei says. “She never got to tell people what she had seen in the Otherlands. But she had saved the one she loved. She knew that, no matter what else happened. ”
In the silence that follows her story, she leans against me. I don’t think she even knows she’s doing it. She’s going down.
“Do you think you could do that?” she asks.
“Fly?” I say. “Maybe. ”
“No,” she says. “Do you think you could let someone go if you thought it was best for them?”
“No,” I say. “I’d have to know it was best for them. ”
She nods, as if she expected my answer. “Almost anyone could do that,” she says. “But what if you didn’t know and you only believed?”
She doesn’t know if it’s true. But she wants it to be.
“That story would never be one of the Hundred,” she says. “It’s a Border story. The kind of thing that can only happen out here. ”
Was she a pilot once? Is that where her husband is? Did she fly him out and now she’s going down? Is this story true? Any of it?
“I’ve never heard of the Otherlands,” I say.
“You have,” she says, and I shake my head.
“Yes,” she says, challenging me. “Even if you never heard the name, you had to know they existed. The world can’t only be the Provinces. And it isn’t flat like the Society’s maps. How would the sun work? And the moon? And the stars? Didn’t you look up? Didn’t you notice that they changed?”
“Yes,” I say.
“And you didn’t think about why that might be?”
My face burns.
“Of course,” Lei says, her voice quiet. “Why would they teach you? You were meant to be an Official from the very beginning. And it’s not in the Hundred Science Lessons. ”
“How do you know?” I ask.
“My father taught me,” she says.
