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“I’m not surprised,” Ky whispers. His hands go down around my waist. Something sings inside me and we begin to move. I don’t ask if I’m doing this right. I know I am.
“Cassia. ” He says the word like a song. His voice has always had that music in it.
He says my name, over and over as we move together, until I’m caught in a strange place between weak and strong, between dizziness and clarity and need and satiety and give and take and . . . “Ky,” I say back.
For so long, we cared about who saw us. Who might be watching, who might be hurt. But now, we are only dancing.
I come back to myself as the song ends, when the strings make a sound like hearts breaking. And then I can’t help but look for Xander. When I find him, I see that he watches us, but there’s no jealousy in his gaze. There is nothing but longing, but it’s not for me anymore.
You will find love, Xander, I want to tell him. The firelight flickers across Leyna’s face. She is very beautiful, very strong. Could Xander love Leyna? Someday? If they go to the Otherlands together?
“We could stay out here,” Ky says, low in my ear. “We don’t have to go back. ”
It’s a conversation we’ve had before. We know the answer. We love each other, but there are others to think of, too. Ky has to look for Patrick and Aida, in case they are still alive. I have to be with my family.
“When I was flying,” Ky says, “I used to imagine that I came down and gathered everyone up and flew us all away. ”
“Maybe we can do that someday,” I say.
“It might be,” Ky says, “that we won’t have to go so far to look for a new world. Maybe the vote really will be a beginning. ”
It is the most hopeful I have ever heard him sound.
Anna walks over to Xander and says something to him, and he follows her toward Ky and me. The light from the fire shades and lightens, flickers and holds, and when it does, I see that Anna holds a piece of blue chalk in her hand. “You did it,” she says to the three of us. “You found the cure, and you each had a part. ” Anna takes Ky’s hand and draws a blue line on it, tracing one of his veins. “The pilot,” she says. She lifts my hand and draws the line from Ky to me. “The poet. ” Then Anna takes Xander’s hand and draws the line from me to him. “The physic,” she says.
Evening in the mountain, with its fresh pine and burning wood smells, its lights and music, gathers around us as Anna steps back. I hold on to Xander and Ky at the same time, the three of us standing in a little circle at the edge of the known world, and even as the moment exists I find myself mourning its passing.
The little girl Xander and I saw in the village dances over, wearing the wings we saw her in before. She looks up at the three of us. It’s plain she wants to dance with one of the boys, and Ky lets her lead him away, leaving me alone with Xander to say good-bye.
The music, this time lively, runs along us, over us, into us, and Xander is here with me. “You can dance,” he says. “And you can sing. ”
“Yes,” I say.
“I can’t,” Xander says.
“You will,” I say, taking his hands.
He moves smoothly. Despite what he thinks, the music is in him. He’s never been taught to dance, and yet he’s guiding me. He doesn’t notice because he’s concentrating so hard on what he doesn’t have—what he thinks he can’
t do.
“Can I ask you about something?”
“Of course,” he says.
“I remember something I shouldn’t,” I say. “From a day when I took the red tablet. ” I tell him about the way I reclaimed the red garden day memory.
“How could I get part of my memory back?” I ask him.
“It might have something to do with the green tablet,” Xander says. His voice sounds very kind and very tired. “Maybe your not taking it, ever, means you could get your memories back somehow. And, you walked through the blue. Oker told me that the blue tablet and the Plague are related. Maybe you helped yourself become immune. ” He shakes his head. “The Society made the tablets like a puzzle. Everything is a piece. I’m learning from the pharmics and scientists how complicated it all is. The way medications work together, and the ways they work differently in different people—it’s something you could spend your whole life trying to figure out. ”
“So what you’re saying,” I tell him, “is that I might never know. ”
“Yes,” he says. “You might always have to wonder. ”
“‘It’s all right to wonder,’” I say. Besides the words on the microcard, that was the last thing Grandfather said to me before he died. He gave me the poems. And he told me that it was all right to wonder. So it’s fine that I don’t know which poem he meant for me to follow. Perhaps that’s even what he intended. It’s all right that I can’t figure everything out right here, right now.
“It might also just be you,” Xander says. I think he’s smiling. “You’ve always been one of the strongest people I know. ”
Eli has joined Ky and the little girl in their dance. They have linked hands and are laughing, the firelight shimmering on the girl’s wings. She reminds me of Indie—the abandoned way she moves, the way the fire turns her hair to red. I wish Indie was here, I think, and my father, and everyone else we’ve lost.
Xander and I stop dancing. We stand very close and still in the middle of people moving. “Back in the Borough,” he says, “I asked you, if we could choose, would you ever have chosen me?”
“I remember,” I say. “I told you that I would. ”
“Yes,” he says. “But we can’t go back. ”
“No,” I agree.
Xander’s journeys happened in those walled rooms and long hallways of the sick, when he worked with Lei. When I saw him again in the Pilot’s air ship, Xander had already been places I would never go and become someone else. But I didn’t see it. I believed him unchanging, a stone in all good senses of the word, solid, dependable, something and someone you could build upon. But he is as we all are: light as air, transient as wisps of cloud before the sun, beautiful and fleeting, and if I ever did truly have hold of him, that has ended now.
“Xander,” I say, and he pulls me close, one last time.
The ships lift into the sky, dark on stars. The bonfire burns; some of the villagers, mostly those from the Carving, have decided to stay in the mountains.
Xander is going out to a place that is Other, a place so distant I can’t even be certain there is a coming back.
