Ally Condie - Crossed

“There was snow up there this morning and they went up to get it,” I say. “We’re always thirsty.”

“You’re sure that’s the only reason they were up there?”

“There aren’t many reasons to do anything,” Vick says. “Hunger. Thirst. Not dying. That’s all there is. So if you don’t believe us, take your pick from the other two.”

“Maybe they hiked up there for the view,” the Officer suggests.

Vick laughs, and it’s not a good sound. “Where are the replacements?”

“They’re on the ship,” the Officer says. “We’re going to take you all to a new village, and we’ll give you more supplies.”

“And more water,” Vick says. Though he’s unarmed and at the mercy of the Officer he sounds like he’s the one giving the orders. The Officer smiles. The Society isn’t human but the people who work for it sometimes are.

“And more water,” the Officer says.

Vick and I both curse under our breath when we see the replacements on the air ship. They are young, much younger than us. They look to be fourteen, thirteen. Their eyes are wide. Frightened. One of them, the youngest-looking kid, looks a little like Cassia’s brother, Bram. He’s darker-skinned than Bram, darker than me, even, but his eyes are bright like Bram’s. Before it was cut, his hair must have been curly like Bram’s.

“The Society must be running out of bodies,” I say to Vick, keeping my voice low.

“Maybe that’s the plan,” he says.

We both know the Society wants the Aberrations dead. It explains why we’re dumped out here. Why we don’t get to fight. But there’s another question, one I can’t answer:

Why do they hate us so much?

We fly blind. The air ship is windowless except for the pilot’s compartment.

So it’s not until we step outside that I know where we are.

I don’t know the village itself but I know the area. The field we walk is orange-sanded and black-rocked, yellow-grassed with plants that grew green this summer. There are fields like this one all over the Outer Provinces. But I still know exactly where I am because of what I see in front of me.

I’m home.

It hurts.

There it is on the horizon — the landmark of my childhood.

The Carving.

From where we are now, I can’t see all of it — just pieces of red or orange sandstone jutting up here and there. But when you get closer — when you reach the edge and look into the Carving — you realize that the stones aren’t small at all. They’re the tips of formations as large as mountains.

The Carving isn’t one canyon, one mountain, but many — a network of interlocking formations that goes on for miles. The land rises and falls like water, its high jagged peaks and deep slot canyons striped with the colors of the Outer Provinces — gradations of orange, red, white. In the faraway stretches of the Carving the fire colors of the sandstone grow shadowed with blue from distant clouds.

I know all of this because I’ve been to the edge several times.

But I’ve never been inside.

“What are you grinning about?” Vick asks me, but before I can answer, the Bram kid comes up to us and gets right in Vick’s face.

“I’m Eli,” the kid says.

“All right,” Vick says, and then turns away in irritation, back to the row of faces who have selected him as their leader even when he never wanted to be one. Some people can’t help being leaders. It’s in their blood and bones and brains, and there’s no getting around it.

And some people follow.

You have a better chance of surviving if you follow, I remind myself. Your father thought he was a leader. Couldn’t get enough of being a leader, and look what happened to him. I stand one step behind Vick.

“Aren’t you going to give us a speech or anything?” Eli asks. “We just got here.”

“I’m not in charge of this mess,” Vick says. And there it is. The anger that he spends most of his energy keeping in check shows a little. “I’m not the Society’s spokesman.”

“But you’re the only one with one of those,” Eli says, pointing at the port clipped to Vick’s belt.

“You want a speech?” Vick asks, and all the new kids nod and stare at him. They’ll have heard the same lecture we did when we came in on the air ships about how the Society needs us to act like villagers and civilians to draw out the Enemy. How it’s only a six-month job, and once we go back to Society our Aberration status will be wiped clean.

It will take exactly one day of firing for them to realize that no one has lasted six months. Not even Vick comes close to having that many notches on his boots.

“Watch the rest of us,” Vick says. “Act like a villager. That’s what we’re supposed to do here.” He pauses. Then he pulls the port from his belt and tosses it to a decoy who has been around a couple of weeks. “Take this for a run,” he says. “Make sure it still works out by the end of the town.”

The kid takes off. As soon as the port is out of earshot, Vick says, “The ammunition is all blanks. So don’t bother trying to defend yourselves.”

Eli interrupts. “But we practiced firing with them back in training camp,” he protests. I start grinning, in spite of myself and the fact that I should and do feel sick that someone so young ended up out here. This kid is like Bram.

“Doesn’t matter,” Vick says. “They’re all blanks now.”

Eli digests this, but then he has another question. “If this is a village, where are all the women and kids?”

“ You’re a kid,” Vick says.

“Am not,” Eli says. “And I’m not a girl. Where are they?”

“No girls,” Vick says. “No women here.”

“But the Enemy must know we’re not real villagers, then,” Eli says. “They must have figured it out.”

“Right,” Vick says. “They’re killing us anyway. No one cares. And now we’ve got work to do. We’re supposed to be a village full of farmers. So let’s get farming.”

We start toward the fields. The sun shines hot overhead. I can feel Eli’s angry gaze even after we turn away from him.

“At least we have enough water to drink,” I say to Vick, gesturing to the full canteen. “Thanks to you.”

“Don’t thank me,” Vick says. He lowers his voice. “There’s not even enough to drown in.”

The crop here is cotton — nearly impossible to grow. The poor-quality wisps inside the cotton bolls come apart easily.

“No wonder we don’t worry about there being no girls or kids,” Eli says behind me. “The Enemy must know this isn’t a real village just from looking at it. No one would be stupid enough to farm cotton out here.”

At first I don’t answer him. I haven’t fallen into the trap of talking to anyone while we work, except for Vick. I’ve stayed away from all the others.

But I’m weak right now. The cotton today and the snow yesterday have made me think again of Cassia’s story of the cottonwood seeds snowing in June. The Society hated the cottonwood trees, but they are exactly the kind of trees that are right in the Outer Provinces. The wood is good for carving. If I could find one, I would cover the bark with her name the way I used to cover her hand with mine on the Hill.

I start talking to Eli to keep from wanting what’s too hard to have.

“It’s stupid,” I tell Eli, “but it’s more realistic than some of the stuff the Society has done. A few of the villages around here started as farming communities for Aberrations. Cotton was one of the crops the Society had them try to grow. This was back when there was more water. So it’s not completely impossible that someone would be farming here.”