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“These are pictures of the flowers you wanted,” she says. “I’m sorry it took me so long. I had to make the colors. I just finished them now, so you’ll have to be careful not to smear the paints. ”
I’m stunned that she did this, with everything else that must have been on her mind tonight, and I’m touched that she still believes me capable of sorting for the cure. “Thank you,” I say.
Under the flowers she has written their names.
Ephedra, paintbrush, mariposa lily.
And others, of course. Plants and flowers.
I’m crying, and I wish I weren’t. I wrote that lullaby for so many people. And now we may lose almost all of them. Hunter. Sarah. Ky. My mother. Xander. Bram. My father.
Ephedra, Anna wrote. Underneath she drew a spiky-looking bush with small, cone-like flowers. She painted it yellow and green.
Paintbrush. Red. This one I’ve seen, in the canyons.
Mariposa lily. It’s a beautiful white flower with red and yellow coloring deep down inside its three petals.
My hands know what I’ve seen before my mind does; I’m reaching into my pocket and pulling out the paper my mother sent, recognizing the meaning in its shape. I remember Indie’s wasp nest, how it had space inside, and I pull the edges of the paper out and then I know.
I hold a paper flower in my hand. My mother made this. She cut or tore the paper carefully so that three pieces fan out from the middle, like petals.
It is the same as the flower in the picture; white, three-petaled, the edges crimped in and pointed like a star. I realize that I also saw it printed in the earth.
This is what Oker was trying to find.
He saw me take out the paper flower when I put the voting stone inside.
Anna’s picture tells me that the name of this flower is mariposa lily. But I never heard my mother speak that name. And it’s not a newrose or an oldrose or a sprig of Queen Anne’s lace. What other flowers did she tell me about?
I’m back in the room in our house in Oria, where she showed me the blue satin square from the dress she wore to her Banquet. She’s recently returned from traveling out into different Provinces to investigate rogue crops for the Society. “The second grower had a crop I’d never seen before, of white flowers even more beautiful than the first,” she says. “Sego lilies, they called them. You can eat the bulb. ”
“Anna,” I say, my heart racing, “does mariposa lily have another name?” If it does, that might account for the problem in the data. We’ve been counting this flower as two separate data points, but it was, in fact, a single variable.
“Yes,” Anna says, after a pause. “Some people call it the sego lily. ”
I pick up the datapod and search for the name. There it is. The properties are all the same. One flower, reported under two different names. Now, with its names combined, it rises right to the top of potential ingredients. It was a critical, elemental mistake made by those gathering the data, but we should have noticed it earlier. How did I miss it before? How could I fail to recognize the name, when my mother had told it to me? You only heard it once, I remind myself, and that was long ago. “Where does it grow?” I ask.
“We should be able to find some not far from here,” Anna says. “It’s early in the season, but it could be in bloom. ” She looks at the paper flower in my hand. “Did you make that?”
“No,” I say. “My mother did. ”
It’s almost dark when we finally find them, in a little field away from the village and the path.
I drop down to my knees to look closer. I’ve never seen a flower so beautiful. It’s a simple white bloom, three curved petals coming out from a sparsely leaved stalk. It’s a little white banner, like my writing, not of surrender but of survival. I pull out the crumpled paper flower.
Though my hands shake, I can tell that it’s a match. This flower growing in the ground is the one my mother made before she went still.
The real thing is much more beautiful. But that doesn’t matter. I think of Ky’s mother, who painted water on stone, who believed the important thing was to create, not capture. Even though the paper lily isn’t a perfect rendering, it’s still a tribute to its beauty that my mother tried.
I don’t know whether she intended the flower as art or message, but I choose to take it as both.
“I think,” I say, “that this might be the cure. ”
CHAPTER 46
XANDER
I can’t see Cassia herself, but the solar-cell lamps cast her shadow on the prison wall. Her voice carries from the entryway to my cell. “We think we have found a possible cure,” she tells the guards. “We need Xander to make something for us. ”
The guard laughs. “I don’t think so,” he says.
“I’m not asking you to release Xander,” Cassia says. “We just need to give him the equipment and have him prepare the cure. ”
“And then what are you going to do with it?” another guard asks.
