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Her smile widens. “This whole situation. The Plague. Its mutation. You being here now. ”
“Tell me,” I say. “I’d like to be in on the joke. ” I keep my voice easy, conversational, but I’ve seen too many still to think that anything about what’s happened to them is funny.
“You all called us Anomalies,” Leyna says. “Not good enough to live among you. Not good enough to marry you. And now you need us to save you. ”
I smile back at her. “True,” I say. I lower my voice. I’m not entirely sure that Oker is asleep. “So,” I say to Leyna, “you’ve asked me plenty of questions. Let me ask you one or two. ”
“Of course,” she says, her eyes flickering. She’s enjoying this.
“Is there any chance at all you can find a cure?”
“Of course,” she says again, perfectly confident. “It’s only a matter of time. You’ll be helpful to us. I won’t lie. But we’d have found the cure without you. You’ll just help us speed up the process, which is valuable, of course. The Pilot’s not going to take us to the Otherlands if too many people die before we can save them. ”
“What if your immunity provides no clues?” I ask. “What if it turns out to be a matter of genetics?”
“It’s not,” she says. “We know that. The people in the village come from many different places. Some came generations ago, some more recently. The Pilot doesn’t want us to include the recent arrivals in the data, so we don’t, but we’re all immune. It must be environmental. ”
“Still,” I say, “an immunity and a cure aren’t the same thing. You might not figure out how to bring people back. Maybe you’ll only find out how to keep them from getting the virus in the first place. ”
“If so,” Leyna says, “that’s still an extremely valuable discovery. ”
“But only if you make it in time,” I say. “You can’t immunize people if they’ve already gotten the virus. So we’re very useful to you, actually. ”
I hear a snort from the corner. Oker stands up and walks over toward us.
“Congratulations,” Oker says to me. “You’re not just a Society boy after all. I’d been wondering. ”
“Thank you,” I say.
“You were a physic in the Society, weren’t you?” Oker asks.
“I was,” I say.
He waves one knotted hand in my direction. “Assign him to my lab when you’re done,” he tells Leyna.
She doesn’t like it, I can tell, but she nods. “All right,” she says. It’s a sign of a good leader when they know the most important player in their game, and if Oker is it, she should make sure he has what he needs to try to win.
It takes them almost all night to finish questioning me. “You should get some rest,” Leyna says. “I’ll show you where you’ll sleep. ”
She walks with me through the village and I hear the crickets singing. Their music sounds different up here than it did in the Borough, like it matters more. There aren’t many other sounds to cover it up, so you have to listen.
“Did you grow up in this village?” I ask her. “It’s beautiful. ”
“No,” Leyna says. “I used to live in Camas. Those of us in the Border Provinces were the last to go. They used to let us work at the Army base sometimes. We left for the mountains when the Society tried to gather in the last of the Anomalies and Aberrations. ”
She looks off in the distance. “The Pilot was the one who warned us that we should go,” she says. “The Society wanted us all dead. Those who didn’t come along were picked up by the Society and sent out to the Outer Provinces to die. ”
“So that’s why you trust the Pilot,” I say. “He warned you. ”
“Yes,” she says. “And he’d been part of the vanishings. I don’t know if you’ve heard about them. ”
“I have,” I say. “People who escaped from the Society and ended up either here or in the Otherlands. ”
She nods.
“And no one has ever returned from the Otherlands?”
“Not yet,” she says. She stops at a building with bars on the windows. A guard stands at the door and nods to her. “I’m afraid this is the prison,” she says. “We don’t know you well enough to trust you on your own without supervision, so there are times when we will need to keep you here, especially at night. Some of the other people the Pilot brought have been less cooperative than you have. They’re here full-time. ”
It makes sense. I’d do the same thing, if I were in charge of this situation. “And Cassia?” I ask. “Where will she stay?”
“She’ll have to sleep here, too,” Leyna says. “But we’ll come for you soon. ” She gestures for the guard to take me inside.
“Wait,” I say. “I’m trying to understand. ”
“I thought it was clear,” she says. “We don’t know you. We can’t trust you alone. ”
“It’s not that,” I say. “It’s about the Otherlands, and why you want to go there. You’re not even sure that they exist. ”
“They do,” she says.
Does she know something I don’t? It’s possible that she might not be telling me everything. Why would she? As she’s pointed out, she doesn’t know me and she can’t trust me yet. “But no one ever came back,” I say.
