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I swear under my breath. It’s a full drill. We’re actually going to take flight. I can feel my trip to Central slipping away.
Unless they send us there on our drill. There’s still a chance.
Indie leans forward to the speakers in the cockpit. “We’re missing our runner,” she says.
The door opens and another figure in black comes in. For a moment we can’t see who it is, and I think Maybe it’s Vick, or Eli. Why not? I’m paired with Indie, which feels almost as unlikely.
But Vick is dead and Eli is gone.
“You’re the runner?” Indie asks.
“Yes,” he says. He looks to be about our age, maybe a year or two older. I don’t think I’ve seen him before, but we get new people all the time in the camp. I catch sight of a few notches on his boots as he walks over to the hatch.
“You were in the decoy villages,” I say. There are a good number of us here who were decoys at one time or another.
His voice is flat. “Yes,” he says. “My name is Caleb. ”
“I don’t think I knew you there,” I say.
“You didn’t,” he says, and disappears into the hold.
Indie raises her eyebrows at me. “Maybe they put him with us to equal things out,” she says. “Two smart, one stupid. ”
“Do we have cargo for this drill?” I ask.
“Medical supplies,” Indie says.
“What kind?” I ask. “Is it real?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “The cases are all locked. ”
Moments after Indie lifts us into the sky, the computer in the cockpit starts spitting out flight code.
I pull it out and read it.
“What does it say?” Indie asks.
“Grandia City,” I say. Not Central.
But Grandia’s in the same general direction. Maybe we could keep going past Grandia and on out to Central.
I don’t say anything to Indie, not yet.
We leave behind the dark spaces near the mountains where our camps are located and soar over the Boroughs on the outskirts of Camas City. Then we move over the City itself. There’s the river that goes through the City, and the taller buildings like the Hall.
A circle of white loops around them.
“How long has that been there?” I ask. I haven’t flown directly over the City in almost a week.
“I don’t know,” Indie says. “Can you tell what it is?”
“It looks like a wall,” I say. “Around City Hall and some other buildings. ”
My uneasiness deepens. I keep my eyes on the control panel, resisting the urge to look over at Indie. Why is there a wall around the center of Camas City? And Indie and I have never been paired up to fly together before. Why now?
Is this how Cassia or Xander felt when they found out they were Matched? This can’t be right. All the odds are against it. So how is it happening?
Indie’s thoughts must be running along the same track as mine. “The Rising matched us up,” she says. And then, as Camas City disappears beneath us, she leans closer to whisper to me. “This isn’t a drill,” she says. “It’s the beginning. ”
I think she’s right.
CHAPTER 4
XANDER
The medic finishes examining the little boy and stands up. “Your son is stable,” he tells the parents. “We’ve seen this illness before. People become lethargic and drift into a sleep-like state. ” He gestures to the other medics, who come forward with a stretcher for the child. “We’ll take him to the medical center immediately, where we can give him the best possible care. ”
The mother nods, her face pale. The father stands up to help with the stretcher but the medics move around him. “You’ll need to come with us,” the medic says to the boy’s parents. He gestures at the three of us Officials, too. “You’ll all need to be quarantined as a precaution. ”
I glance over at Official Lei. She’s looking out the window now, in the direction of the mountains. People who are from this Province do that, I’ve noticed. They’re always looking to the mountains. Maybe they know something I don’t. Is that where the Pilot is?
I wish I could tell the parents of the little boy that everything is going to be fine. The fear on their faces tells me that they’re not part of the Rising. They don’t know that there’s a Pilot or a cure.
But there is. I’m sure of it. The Rising has it all planned out:
The Plague has been making inroads into the Provinces for months. The Society has managed to keep the illness contained, but one day it will break—and the Society will no longer be able to keep up with the spread of the disease. At this point, citizens will know what they have so far only suspected: there is a disease that the Society cannot cure.
When the Plague breaks, that is our beginning.
