It takes me a moment, but I do. The flowers are a little dead and dry, but they’re purple like he said.
“You can dig here,” he says. “Don’t take them all. Dig up every other plant. We don’t need the flowers, just the roots. Wrap the roots in burlap and wet them at the stream.” He points to a tiny rivulet of water winding through the grass, turning it marshy. “Be as fast as you can about it.”
I kneel down and start digging around the plant. When I pull up the bulb, it’s brown and dirty, with tangles of roots coming out. It reminds me of Cassia, and how the two of us planted those flowers the day we kissed in the Borough. That kiss has kept me going for months.
At the stream, I wet the strips of burlap and wrap up the bulbs one after the other. I keep digging, and the sun shines down on me, and I decide that I like the smell of the dirt. My back aches a little, so I stand up to stretch it out. I’m almost out of space in the bag.
Oker’s impatient for me to finish. He crouches down next to me and starts sawing at a plant, his motions clumsy. The flowers bob back and forth, back and forth. He pulls up the roots, fumbling with his twisted hands, and then gives the plants to me. “Can’t wrap it,” he says. “You’ll have to do it for me.”
I wrap up Oker’s harvest and finish filling our bags. When I start to sling his bag over my shoulder with mine—I should carry it for him now that it’s full—Oker shakes his head. “I can carry my own.”
I nod and hand it over. “Do you think this camassia is really the cure?”
“I think there’s a very good chance,” Oker says. “Let’s go.”
Oker has to stop and rest on the way back to the village. “Forgot to eat this morning,” he says. It’s the first time I’ve seen him worn out. He leans up against a rock, his face twisted into a scowl of impatience as he waits for his heart to stop racing.
“I’ve been wondering something,” I say. Oker grunts but doesn’t tell me I can’t ask, so I go ahead. “How did the villagers know that they were immune to the Plague in the first place, before the mutation?”
“They’ve known about their immunity to the original Plague for years,” Oker says. “When the Society first sent it out to the Enemy, one of the pilots who dropped the virus ran away from his Army base and came to the first stone village, the one nearest Camas.”
Oker takes a moment to catch his breath. “What the idiot didn’t realize when he came,” Oker says, “is that he himself had caught the Plague. He thought it could only come through water, because that’s how he’d distributed it in the Enemy’s rivers and streams. But it can also be transmitted from person to person, and he’d had contact with some of the Enemy. Apparently he’d tried to help them before he came to the stone village.”
“Why did he run to the village?” I ask.
“He was one of the pilots who took part in the vanishings,” Oker says, “so he knew the people in the village and they knew him. A week after he took refuge there, he became sick.” Oker pushes himself away from the rock. “Let’s get going.”
Birds chatter in the trees around us and the grass grows so long over the path that it whisk-whisks against our pant legs. “Of course, the Society had cures for any of their workers who happened to contract the disease,” Oker says. “But since the pilot didn’t go back to the Society, he didn’t get the cure. He came to the stone villages, and he died.”
“Because the villagers didn’t have a cure,” I say, “or because they killed him?”
Oker looks at me, his glance sharp. “They left him out in the woods with food and water, but they knew he’d die.”
“They had to,” I say. “They thought he could infect their whole village.”
Oker nods. “When the pilot became sick, he told them about the Plague and the Enemy and what had happened. He begged the villagers to go back into the Society and get him a cure. By that time, he’d already exposed most of the village. The entire community thought they were going to die, and they knew they’d never get their hands on the cure in time. They had to try to do what they could.” Oker laughs. “Of course, at the time they had no idea that they would turn out to be immune.”
“Did they exile anyone else?” I ask.
“No,” Oker says. “They quarantined those who’d been exposed, but no one ever got sick.”
I breathe out a sigh of relief.
“Their immunity wouldn’t have mattered to the Society, of course,” Oker says, “since they already had a cure. But it meant something to the villagers. They knew that if the Society tried to put the Plague in the villagers’ waters, they wouldn’t die. For the most part, they kept their immunity a secret. Someone told the Pilot, but he didn’t do anything with the knowledge until the mutation happened.”
“And then he wondered if the villagers might be immune to the mutation, too,” I say.
“Right,” Oker says. “He came out here to ask if anyone was willing to test their immunity, and to find out if we could help discover a cure.”
“I know people volunteered to be exposed to the mutated virus,” I say. “Why?”
“Foilware meals,” Oker says, sounding disgusted. “He brought us an entire cargo hold full of them and said that he could bring more.”
“Why would anyone want those?” I ask. “The food here is so much better.”
“For the trip to the Otherlands,” he says. “Those meals last for years. They’d be perfect for the journey. The Pilot promised he could get enough for all the travelers to take, if only a few of us would volunteer for exposure to the virus. They injected people with the mutation and had them go stay in one of the other villages just in case. But no one got sick.” Now Oker’s grinning from ear to ear. “You should have seen the look on the Pilot’s face. He couldn’t believe there was a chance. That’s when he offered us the ships if we could find a cure.”
Oker steps over a puddle of blue flowers growing right in the center of the path. “Your friends who try to walk through the illness are closer to the truth about the virus and the blue tablets than you might think. Those tablets aren’t poison. They’re a trigger.”
“A trigger?” I ask.
“When the Society made the Plague to use on the Enemy,” Oker says, “they engineered several other viruses as experiments. One of them had a very similar effect to what the Plague does—it made people stop and go still—but it couldn’t be transmitted from person to person. It only affected the person who had direct contact with the tablet. The Society decided not to use that particular virus on the Enemy. They used it on their own people instead.”
Oker glances over his shoulder to look back at me. “The Society named the viruses,” he says. “That one was called the Cerulean virus.”
“Why?”
“It’s another word for blue,” Oker says, “and they used blue labels for that virus in the lab so they could easily tell it apart from the others. I wonder sometimes if that’s what gave the Officials the idea to use it in the blue tablet. The Society modified the Cerulean virus and put it in the babies’ immunizations. Then, if they needed to, they could trigger the virus later with the blue tablet.”
“It’s perfect Society logic,” I say. “While they’re protecting you, they also implant a virus so that they can still control you if they need to. But why didn’t more people go still before now?”
“Because it’s latent,” Oker says. “It works its way into your DNA, but then it lies dormant. The virus doesn’t become active until you take the trigger, which is the blue tablet. If you take one, you’ll go still until the Society helps you, if they find you in time. If they don’t, you die. They had a cure for the Cerulean virus as well as the Plague. But that was the limit of their science. They haven’t found a cure for the mutation.”
“Why are you telling me all of this?” I ask.
“Because I could drop dead at any minute,” Oker says. “Someone needs to know what’s going on.”
“And why’d you pick me?” I ask. “You don’t even know me.”
“You know people who have the mutation,” Oker says. “You’ve got family or friends on the inside, and that friend of yours here now. You want people to get better for personal reasons. And you know that if you don’t get your friend cured, you’ll always wonder who she would have chosen out of the two of you.”
Oker’s right, of course. He’s noticed more than I thought he would have, although I shouldn’t be surprised. A true pilot would have to be that way.
We don’t talk the rest of the way back.
When we get to the lab, we sling the bulbs out on the table. “Wash them,” Oker tells Tess and Noah. “But don’t scrub them. We just want them clean from dirt.”
They nod.
“I’ll sort out the best bulbs,” he says to me, pushing through the assortment with his knuckles. “You gather equipment. We need knives, a cutting board, and mortar and pestle. Make sure it’s all sterilized.”
I hurry to get the equipment ready. Oker’s already finished sorting by the time I’m done. He taps a little pile of bulbs. “These are the best ones,” he says. “We’ll start with them.” He pushes one toward me. “Cut it open. You’re going to have to do this part. I can’t.”
So I make the incision down the middle of the bulb. When we’ve laid it open, I draw in my breath. It’s layered like an onion inside, and the color is beautiful: a pearly, almost glittery white.
Oker hands me the mortar and pestle. “Pulverize it,” he says. “We’re going to need enough for everyone.”
The door to Oker’s lab slams open. “There you are,” Leyna says, her face pale. “I sent someone out of the village to find you.”
“We just got back,” I say. “We must have missed them.”
“What is it?” Oker asks.
“It’s the still,” Leyna says. “They’ve started to die.”
The room goes completely silent. “Is it one of the patients from that first group the Pilot brought in?” Oker asks.
“Yes,” Leyna says. I exhale in relief. That means it isn’t Ky.
“This had to happen eventually,” Oker says. “That first group has been holding on for weeks now. Let’s go see what we can do.”
Leyna nods. But before we go, Oker has me wrap the bulbs back up and lock them away. “Get back to the bags,” he tells Noah and Tess. “But I don’t want anyone working on the actual cure unless I’m here.”
They nod. Oker takes the key back from me. Only then do we follow Leyna toward the infirmary, where people have gathered outside. The crowd parts for Oker and Leyna to come through. I follow behind them, acting like I belong here, and I’m lucky as usual, because no one stops me or asks me what I’m doing. If they did, I’d tell them the truth and say that I’ve found my real Pilot, and I’m not letting him out of my sight until we’ve got the cure.