Ally Condie - Crossed

“Oh,” Eli says. And then he falls silent. I don’t know why I’m trying to give him hope. Maybe it was remembering the cottonwood seeds.

Or remembering her.

When I look over later, I see that Eli is crying, but it’s not enough to drown in so I don’t do anything yet.

On our walk back into the village from the field, I jerk my head at Vick, our signal that I want to talk without the port. “Here,” he says, tossing the port to Eli, who has stopped crying. “Take this for a run.” Eli nods and takes off.

“What is it?” Vick asks.

“I used to live near here,” I say, trying to keep any emotion from my voice. This part of the world used to be my home. I hate what the Society has done to it. “My village was only a few miles away. I know the area.”

“So are you going to run?” Vick asks.

There it is. The real question. The one we all ask ourselves all the time. Am I going to run? I’ve thought about it every day, every hour.

“Are you thinking about going back to your village?” Vick asks. “Can someone there help you?”

“No,” I say. “It’s gone.”

Vick shakes his head. “Then there’s no point in running. We can’t go far without someone seeing us.”

“And the closest river is too far away,” I say. “We can’t escape that way.”

“Then how?” Vick asks.

“We’re not going to go across or down. We’re going to go through.”

Vick turns. “Through what ?”

“The canyons,” I tell him, pointing to the Carving near us, miles long and cut with little openings impossible to see from here. “If you hike in far enough there’s fresh water.”

“The Officers always tell us that the canyons in the Outer Provinces are crawling with Anomalies,” Vick says.

“I’ve heard that, too,” I admit. “But some of them have built a settlement and they help travelers. I heard that from people who’d been inside.”

“Wait. You know people who’ve gone into the canyons?” Vick asks.

“I knew people who had been there,” I say.

“People you could trust?”

“My father,” I say, as if that ends the conversation and Vick nods.

We walk a few steps more. “So when do we leave?” Vick asks.

“That’s the problem,” I say, trying not to let him see how relieved I am that he’ll come. Facing those canyons is something I’d rather not do alone. “To keep the Society from hunting us down and making an example of us, the best time to go is during a firing when there’s chaos. Like a night firing. But with a full moon, so that we can see. They might think we died instead of escaped.”

Vick laughs. “Both the Society and the Enemy have infrared. Whoever’s above will see us run.”

“I know, but they might miss three little bodies when there’s plenty more right here.”

“Three?” Vick asks.

“Eli’s coming with us.” I hadn’t known until I said it.

Silence.

“You’re crazy,” Vick says. “There’s no way that kid will last until then.”

“I know,” I tell Vick. He’s right. It’s only a matter of time before Eli goes down. He’s small. He’s impulsive. He asks too many questions. Then again, it’s only a matter of time for all of us.

“So why keep him around? Why bring him along?”

“There’s a girl I know back in Oria,” I say. “He reminds me of her brother.”

“That’s not reason enough.”

“It is for me,” I say.

Silence stretches between us.

“You’re getting weak,” Vick says finally. “And that might kill you. Might mean you never see her again.”

“If I don’t look out for him,” I tell Vick, “I’d be someone she didn’t know, even if she did see me again.”

Once I’m sure the others sleep, their breathing heavy in the room, I roll over onto my side and slip the Archivist’s paper from my pocket.

The page feels pulpy and cheap, not like the thick cream-colored sheet with Grandfather’s poems. It’s old, but not as old as Grandfather’s paper. My father might be able to tell me the age; but he’s not here, he let me go. As I unfold the page carefully it makes small sounds that seem loud, and I hope the other girls will think it is the rustling of blankets or an insect singing its wings.

It took a long time for everyone to fall asleep tonight. When I came back from my outing they told me that none of us have received our transfer assignments yet; that the Officer said they would tell us our destinations in the morning. I understood the girls’ uneasiness — I feel it, too. We’ve always known the night before where we’d be sent the next day. Why the change? With the Society, there’s always a reason.

I slide the paper into a square of spilled-white light from the moon outside. My heart pounds quickly, a running beat though I am still. Please let this be worth the cost, I think to nothing and no one, and then I look at the page.

No.

I push my fist against my mouth to keep from saying the word out loud into the sleeping room.

It’s not a map, or even a set of directions.

It’s a story, and I know the moment I read the first line that it’s not one of the Hundred:

A man pushed a rock up the hill. When he reached the top, the stone rolled down to the bottom of the hill and he began again. In the village nearby, the people took note. “A judgment,” they said. They never joined him or tried to help because they feared those who issued the punishment. He pushed. They watched.

Years later, a new generation noticed that the man and his stone were sinking into the hill, like the setting of the sun and moon. They could only see part of the rock and part of the man as he rolled the stone along to the top of the hill.

One of the children became curious. So, one day, the child walked up the hill. As she drew closer, she was surprised to see that the stone was carved with names and dates and places.

“What are all these words?” the child asked.

“The sorrows of the world,” the man told her. “I pilot them up the hill over and over again.”

“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.