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“What?” he asks. He doesn’t lift his eyes from my hands, as if they’re capable of a miracle and he can finally witness what it is.
“I thought about you in the Carving, too,” I say. “I dreamed of you. ”
Now he does look at me and I find I can’t hold his gaze; something deep I feel makes me look down, and I write:
Dark, dark, dark it was
But the Physic’s hand was light.
He knew the cure, he held the balm
To heal our wings for flight.
Xander reads it over. His lips move. “Physic,” he says softly. His expression looks pained. “You think I can heal people,” he says.
“I do. ”
Just then, some of the children from the village come down the path across from us. As if we’re one person, Xander and I stand up at the same time to watch them go by.
They are playing a game I’ve never seen before, one where they pretend to be something else. Each child is dressed as an animal. Some used grass to make fur, others used leaves for feathers, and there are still more with wings lashed together, made of branches and of blankets that will be used again to warm at night. The repurposing of nature and scraps for creation reminds me of the Gallery, and I wonder if the people back in Central have found another place to gather and share, or if they don’t have time at all for this anymore, with a mutation on the loose and no cure in sight.
“What would it have been like if we could do that?” Xander asks.
“What?” I ask.
“Be whatever we wanted,” he says. “What if they’d let us do that when we were younger?”
I’ve thought about this, especially when I was in the Carving. Who am I? What am I meant to be? I think how lucky I am, in spite of the Society, to have dreamed so many, such wild things. Part of that is, of course, because of Grandfather, who always challenged me.
“Remember Oria?” Xander asks.
Yes. Yes. I remember. All of it. It’s all clear and close again; the two of us, Matched, holding hands on the air train on the way home from the Banquet. My hand on the nape of his neck as I dropped the compass down his shirt so he could save Ky’s artifact from the Officials. Even then, the three of us were doing our best to keep faith with one another.
“Remember that day planting newroses?” he asks.
“I do,” I say, thinking of that kiss, the only one we’ve had, and my heart aches for us both. The air here in the mountains is sharp even in the summer. It bites at us, twists our hair, puts tears in our eyes. Standing here with Xander among the mountains is everything and nothing like standing with Ky out at the edge of the Carving.
I reach out my hand to take Xander’s. My palm is streaked with dirt from writing with the stick, and as I look at it and think of Xander and newrose roots hanging down, the wind moves and the children dance toward the village stone, and light as air another cottonwood seed of memory comes to me:
My mother’s hands are printed black with dirt, but I can see the white lines crossing her palms when she lifts up the seedlings. We stand in the plant nursery at the Arboretum; the glass roof overhead and the steamy mists inside belie the cool of the spring morning out.
“Bram made it to school on time,” I say.
“Thank you for letting me know,” she says, smiling at me. On the rare days when both she and my father have to go to work early, it is my responsibility to get Bram to his early train for First School. “Where are you going now? You have a few minutes left before work. ”
“I might stop by to see Grandfather,” I say. It’s all right to deviate from the usual routine this way, because Grandfather’s Banquet is coming soon. So is mine. We have so many things to discuss.
“Of course,” she says. She’s transferring the seedlings from the tubes where they started, rowed in a tray, to their new homes, little pots filled with soil. She lifts one of the seedlings out.
“It doesn’t have many roots,” I say.
“Not yet,” she says. “That will come. ”
I give her a quick kiss and start off again. I’m not supposed to linger at her workplace, and I have an air train to catch. Getting up early with Bram has given me a little extra time, but not much.
The spring wind is playful, pushing me one way, pulling me another. It spins some of last fall’s leaves up into the air, and I wonder, if I climbed up on the air-train platform and jumped, if the spiral of wind would catch me and take me up twirling.
I cannot think of falling without thinking of flying.
I could do it, I think, if I found a way to make wings.
Someone comes up next to me as I pass by the tangled world of the Hill on my way to the air-train stop. “Cassia Reyes?” the worker asks. The knees of her plainclothes are darkened with soil, like my mother’s when she’s been working. The woman is young, a few years older than me, and she has something in her hand, more roots dangling down. Pulling up or planting? I wonder.
“Yes?” I say.
“I need to speak with you,” she says. A man emerges from the Hill behind her. He is the same age as she is, and something about them makes me think, They would be a good Match. I’ve never had permission to go on the Hill, and I look back up at the riot of plants and forest behind the workers. What is it like in a place so wild?
