“You are using them to wear out the hill,” the child said, noticing the long deep groove worn where the stone had turned.
“I am making something,” the man said. “When I am finished, it will be your turn to take my place. ”
The child was not afraid. “What are you making?”
“A river,” the man said.
The child went back down the hill, puzzling at how one could make a river. But not long after, when the rains came and the flood flashed through the long trough and washed the man somewhere far away, the child saw that the man had been right, and she took her place pushing the stone and piloting the sorrows of the world.
This is how the Pilot came to be.
The Pilot is a man who pushed a stone and washed away in the water. It is a woman who crossed the river and looked to the sky. The Pilot is old and young and has eyes of every color and hair of every shade; lives in deserts, islands, forests, mountains, and plains.
The Pilot leads the Rising—the rebellion against the Society—and the Pilot never dies. When one Pilot’s time has finished, another comes to lead.
And so it goes on, over and over like a stone rolling.
Someone in the room turns and stirs and I freeze, waiting for the girl’s breathing to even back into sleep. When it does, I look down at the last line on the page:
In a place past the edge of the Society’s map, the Pilot will always live and move.
The hot pain of hope shoots unexpectedly through me as I realize what this truly says, what I’ve been given.
There’s a rebellion. Something real and organized and longstanding, with a leader.
Ky and I are not alone.
The word Pilot was the link. Did Grandfather know this? Is that why he gave me the paper before he died? Have I been wrong all along about the poem he meant me to follow?
I can’t sit still.
“Wake up,” I whisper so softly that I can barely hear myself. “We’re not alone. ” I put one foot over the edge of my bed. I could climb down and wake the other girls and tell them about the Rising. Maybe they already know. I don’t think so. They seem so hopeless. Except for Indie. But, though she has more fire to her than the others, she also doesn’t have purpose. I don’t think she knows either.
I should tell Indie.
For a moment I think I’ll do it. My feet hit the ground softly as I reach the bottom of the ladder, and I open my mouth. Then I hear the sound of an Officer on patrol walking past our door and I freeze, the dangerous paper like a small white flag in my hand.
In that moment I know that I won’t tell the others. I’ll do what I always do when someone trusts me with dangerous words:
I’ll destroy.
“What are you doing?” Indie asks softly behind me. I didn’t hear her coming across the room, and I almost jump but I catch myself in time.
“Washing my hands again,” I whisper, resisting the urge to turn around. The icy water streams over my fingers, making a river sound in the dark of the cabin. “I didn’t get them clean enough earlier. You know how the Officers are about getting dirt on the beds. ”
“You’ll wake the others,” she says. “They had a hard time getting to sleep. ”
“I’m sorry,” I say, and I am. But I could think of no other way to drown the words.
It took me long agonizing moments to rip the paper into tiny bits. First I held it against my lips, breathed on it so that the tearing wouldn’t be so loud. I hope I’ve torn the pieces small enough that they won’t choke and flood the sink.
Indie reaches across and turns off the water. For a moment I think she does know something. Perhaps she doesn’t know about the Rising, the rebellion, but I have the strangest feeling she knows something about me.
Click. Click. The heels of the patrol Officer’s boots on the cement. Indie and I both dart for our beds, and I climb the rungs as fast as I can and peer out the window.
The Officer pauses by our cabin for a moment, listening, and then walks on.
I stay sitting up for a moment, watching her go back along the path. She pauses at the door of another cabin.
A rebellion. A Pilot.
Who could it be?
Does Ky know about any of this?
He might. The man in the story who pushes the stone sounds like Sisyphus, and Ky told me about him back in the Borough. And I remember how Ky gave me his own story in pieces. I have never thought I had all of it.
Finding him has been the only thing for so long. Even without a map, even without the compass, I know I can do it. I’ve imagined the moment of meeting over and over again; how he’ll pull me close, how I’ll whisper a poem to him. The only flaw in my dream is that I haven’t finished writing anything for him yet; I can never get past the first line. I’ve written so many beginnings over these months out here and yet the middle and the end of our kind of love are things I haven’t seen yet for myself.
I pull the bag tight against my side and lie down as gently as I can, cell by cell, it feels, until the bed bears all my weight, from the light ends of my hair to the heaviness of my legs, my feet. I won’t sleep tonight.
They come in the early dawn, the way they came for Ky.
I don’t hear any screams but something else alerts me. Some heaviness in the air, perhaps; some change in the notes of the birds who sing the morning in as they pause in the trees while traveling south.
I sit up and look out the window. Officers bring girls from other cabins, some of whom cry and try to twist away. I press close to the glass to see more, my heart pounding, sure that I know the girls’ destination.