How can I go with them? My mind sorts the numbers. How many miles, how many variables there are against my getting this close again. I couldn’t seem to get to the Outer Provinces on my own, but perhaps the Society will take me there now.
Two Officers push open the door. “We need two girls from this cabin,” one of them says. “Bunk 8 and Bunk 3. ” The girl from Bunk 8 sits up, looking startled and tired.
Bunk 3, Indie’s bunk, is empty.
The Officers exclaim and I look out the window. Someone stands alone on the edge of the trees that grow near the path. It’s Indie. Even in the light-leaking dawn, I know who she is by her bright hair, by the way she stands. She must have heard too and slipped out somehow. I didn’t see her leave.
She’s going to run.
While the Officers are distracted with pulling the girl from Bunk 8 and calling into their miniports about Indie, I move fast. I slip the three tablets from my container—green, blue, red—and wrap them up inside my packet of blue tablets. I hide the tablets under the messages in my bag and pray no one will search too deep. The container I tuck underneath my mattress. I have to get rid of as many signs of Citizenship as I can.
And then I realize.
Something is missing from my bag.
The silver box from my Match Banquet.
I rifle once more through the papers; feel my way along the blankets on the bed; look down at the floor. I haven’t dropped it or lost it; it’s gone.
I would have had to get rid of it anyway; that’s what I planned to do; but the loss is unsettling.
Where could it be?
There’s no time to worry about it now. I slip down from my bunk to follow the Officers and the crying girl. The others in the cabin pretend to sleep, just like the people in the Borough on the morning they took Ky.
“Run, Indie,” I whisper under my breath. I hope we both get what we want.
If you love someone, if someone loved you, if they taught you to write and made it so you could speak, how can you do nothing at all? You might as well take their words out of the dirt and try to snatch them from the wind.
Because once you love, it is gone. You love and you cannot call it back.
Ky is heavy in my mind, deep in my heart, his palms warm on my empty hands. I have to try to find him. Loving him gave me wings and all my wo
rk has given me the strength to move them.
An air ship lands in the center of the camp. The Officers, some of whom I haven’t seen before, look harried, worried. The one wearing a pilot’s uniform says something curt and looks at the sky. The sun will rise soon.
“We’re missing one,” I hear him say quietly, and then I slip into line.
“Are you sure?” the other Officer asks, running her eyes over us. Counting. Her expression changes and she looks relieved. She has long lovely brown hair and seems gentle, for an Officer.
“No,” she says. “We have enough. ”
“We do?” asks the first Officer. He counts for himself. Do I imagine that his eyes linger on my face, remembering that I wasn’t there before? Not for the first time, I wonder how much of what I do is known and predicted by my Official. Does she still watch? Does the Society?
Another Officer hauls Indie on board as the rest of us finish filing through the door. There are claw marks on his face. Field dirt streaks his uniform and her plainclothes, like wounds seeping soil.
“She tried to run,” he says, pushing her into the seat next to me. He snaps a pair of handlocks onto Indie’s wrists. She doesn’t flinch at the sound of them snapping shut, but I do.
“Now we have too many,” the female Officer says.
“They’re Aberrations,” he snaps. “Does it matter? We have to go. ”
“Should we search them now?” she asks.
No. They’ll find the tablets in my bag.
“We’ll do it in the air. Let’s go. ”
Indie looks over at me and our eyes meet. For the first time since I’ve known her, I feel a strange sense of kinship with her, of familiarity that’s as close to friendship as we’ve come. We knew each other in the work camp. Now, we’re crossing into a new experience together.
Something about all of this feels strange—harried, unorganized, unlike the Society. Even though I’m grateful for the chance to slip through the crack, I still feel their walls pressing in on every side, their presence both crushing and comforting.
An Official boards the air ship. “Everything ready?” he asks, and the Officers nod. I wait for more Officials to climb on—they almost always move in threes—but the door closes. Only one Official, and three Officers, one of them the pilot. By the way the Officers react to the Official, I can tell that he is the highest-ranking of the group.
The air ship lifts into the sky. It’s my first time traveling like this—I’ve only been in air cars and on air trains and transports before—and my stomach sinks with disappointment when I realize there are no windows.
This is not how I thought it would be to fly high. No sight of what lies below or where the stars might be when night comes. The pilot in the front compartment of the air ship looks out; but the Society keeps the rest of us from the sight of our own flight.
Chapter 7
KY
Everyone’s watching you,” Vick tells me.
I ignore him. Some of the cylinders the Enemy shot down at us last night didn’t explode completely. They still had powder inside. I push some of it into the barrel of a gun. The Enemy puzzles me—their ammunition seems to become more and more primitive and less and less effective the longer we’re out here. Maybe they really are losing.
“What are you doing?” Vick asks.