Crossed recap

Ky is in the Outer Provinces, quartered with other boys classed as Aberrations in a village that exists to be bombed so the Society can measure the enemy's attacks. When the village is destroyed he escapes into the canyons known as the Carving with Vick and young Eli. Cassia, having engineered her own transfer to a nearby work camp, escapes with a girl named Indie and follows him. Both parties cross the canyons on foot, short of water, and find the settlement of the farmers abandoned and its people gone. Cassia and Indie meet Hunter, a grieving survivor, and Cassia learns that the blue tablets the Society promises will save a citizen's life in an emergency will in fact leave anyone who relies on them helpless. Cassia and Ky finally reunite and argue about the Rising, the rebellion Ky's father died for. Vick is killed on the way. They reach the Rising, are accepted and are immediately split up: Ky and Indie to fly, Cassia back into the Society as a sorter, and Cassia learns that Xander has been part of the rebellion all along.

Previously: in the Society, data decides what citizens eat, what work they do, whom they marry and the day they die. Cassia Reyes was Matched with her friend Xander Carrow, but a second face flickered on her official microcard: Ky Markham, a neighbour classed as an Aberration and therefore barred from ever being Matched. Her grandfather, killed on his eightieth birthday under the rules, secretly left her two poems the Society had not preserved. Put in the same hiking group, Ky taught Cassia the forbidden skill of handwriting and told her, in fragments, the story the Society had erased from his record: a childhood in the Outer Provinces and a father punished for rebellion. Officials noticed. Ky was taken away to serve as an expendable decoy in a war the Society does not admit exists, and Cassia's family was demoted to farm labour. Cassia manipulated her own records so that she would be sent to a work camp near the Outer Provinces, intending to find him.

The story alternates between Ky and Cassia. Ky is in a village in the Outer Provinces with other boys the Society has classed as Aberrations. They have been issued uniforms and told they are soldiers, but their weapons do not work: they are decoys, put into villages the enemy bombs so the Society can observe the attacks and count the casualties. Ky understands this and says almost nothing. Cassia, meanwhile, is at a work camp, sorting and labouring, memorizing the routines and watching for the gap that will let her get out and into the canyons where the boys are being sent.

The village is destroyed from the air and almost everyone in it is killed. Ky survives with two others: Vick, who is older and capable, and Eli, a boy young enough that his presence there is indefensible. Rather than wait to be resupplied and used again, the three walk into the Carving, a vast canyon system outside the Society's control. Cassia escapes the work camp with Indie, a girl from her own group whose reasons are entirely her own, and the two cross into the canyons after the boys with stolen supplies and very little idea where they are going.

Both parties move through the Carving on foot, short of water and food, reading the marks other people have left. Cassia and Indie find a settlement in the canyons that has been abandoned: the farmers, a community living outside the Society for generations, have gone, leaving graves behind them. Indie proves resourceful and unreadable, quick to take whatever is useful and slow to explain anything. Cassia trades on the only thing she owns outright, her memory of poems the Society destroyed, which are worth a great deal to anyone who deals in forbidden things.

In the canyons Cassia and Indie meet Hunter, one of the farmers, who stayed behind after burying his young daughter. He is grieving, dangerous and knows the Carving better than anyone. From him they learn what became of his community and why it scattered. Cassia also learns something that undercuts the Society's whole promise of care: the blue tablets every citizen is told will keep them alive in an emergency do nothing of the kind, and anyone who relies on them will be slowed, stopped and left wherever they happen to be.

Cassia and Ky find each other in the canyons, and the reunion is not simple. Ky has spent months watching people die for the Society's convenience and wants only to get as far from all of it as possible; Cassia wants to find the Rising, the rebellion she has heard of and half believes in. Ky explains why he will not: his father died for the Rising, and he has seen what it costs the people who follow it. Eli, Vick and Indie each take a side, and the group's argument about which direction to walk is really an argument about whether anything can be changed at all.

The group heads for the place where the Rising is said to take in recruits. Vick's own history comes out on the way, including the girl he was separated from when he was reclassified, and he is killed before they arrive, shot down from the air. His death settles the argument. Indie turns out to have been keeping her own secrets the whole journey, including things she took and hid rather than handed over, and Ky, who has argued against the Rising every step of the way, has to choose between joining it and being alone in the canyons with winter coming.

They reach the Rising and are accepted, and are immediately separated. The rebellion assigns people where it wants them: Ky and Indie are sent to train as pilots, Eli is placed somewhere safer, and Cassia is sent back into the Society, to work as a sorter in the central city and wait for a signal. Cassia also learns that Xander, the boy the Society Matched her with, has been part of the Rising for years, which means the friend she thought she knew completely had a whole hidden life. All three end the book back inside the Society, apart, obedient on the surface, waiting on orders from a leader known only as the Pilot, whom none of them has met.

The survivors reach the Rising and are accepted into it, and are immediately separated, because the rebellion places people where it needs them rather than where they want to be. Ky and Indie are sent to train as pilots. Eli is placed somewhere safer than the canyons. Cassia is sent back into the Society itself, to work as a sorter in the central city and wait for a signal, which means that having crossed a desert to reach Ky she is returned to almost exactly the life she escaped. Vick is dead, shot down before they arrived, and Hunter has gone his own way into the canyons. Cassia also learns that Xander, the boy the Society Matched her with and whom she left behind without explanation, has been a member of the Rising for years, so the friend she believed she knew completely had an entire hidden life. Ky, who spent the whole journey arguing that the Rising will use people exactly as the Society did, joins it anyway, on the grounds that there is nothing else left to join. All three end the book inside the Society again, apart, obedient on the surface, waiting for orders from a leader none of them has ever met.