chapter 16
I’m getting good at C. When I arrive at hiking I practically sprint to the top of the hill. After I check in with the Officer, I hurry to my spot next to Ky. Before he can say anything, I pick up a stick and draw a C right there in the mud next to him.
“What’s next?” I ask, and he laughs a little.
“You know, you don’t need me. You could teach yourself,” he says. “You could look at the letters on your scribe or your reader.”
“They’re not the same,” I tell him. “They don’t connect like yours do. I’ve seen your kind of writing before, but I don’t know what it’s called.”
“Cursive,” he says softly. “It’s harder to read, but it’s beautiful. It’s one of the old ways of writing.”
“That’s what I want to learn.” I don’t want to copy the blocky, flat symbols of the letters we use now. I like the curves and sweeps of the ones Ky knows.
Ky glances over at the Officer, who stares fiercely into the trees as though daring someone else to fall and get hurt today. We don’t have long before the others arrive.
“What’s next?” I ask again.
“A,” says Ky, showing me how to make a small letter a, embraced by a little swoop at the beginning and at the end, to attach it to what comes before and after. “Because it’s the next letter in your name.” He reaches and takes hold of the stick above my hand.
Up, around, down.
Guiding, gentle, his hand presses against mine on the downward strokes, releases a little on the upward ones. I bite my lip in concentration; or maybe it’s that I don’t dare to breathe until the a is finished, which it is, all too soon.
The letter looks perfect. I exhale, a little shakily. I want to look up at him, but instead I look down at our hands, right next to each other. In this light, his don’t look so red. They look brown, strong. Purposeful.
Someone is coming through the trees. We both let go at the same time.
Livy bursts into the clearing. She’s never been third before, and she’s almost beside herself with excitement. While she chatters at the Officer, Ky and I stand up and casually trample what we’ve written into oblivion.
“Why am I learning to write the letters in my name first?”
“Because even if that’s all you learn to write you’ll still have something,” he says, bending his head down to look at me, making sure I know what he’s saying, what he’s about to ask. “Was there anything else you wanted to learn to write instead?”
I nod and his eyes brighten with understanding.
“The words from that paper,” he whispers, his eyes moving to Livy and the Officer.
“Yes.”
“Do you still remember them?”
I nod again.
“Tell me a little every day,” he says, “and I’ll remember it for you. Then there will be two of us who know.”
Even though the time is short before Livy or the Officer or someone else comes over to talk to us, I pause for a moment. If I tell Ky these words, I step into an even more dangerous place than I was before. It will put Ky in danger. And I will have to trust him.
Can I do it? I look out at the view from the top of the hill. The sky does not have an answer for me. The dome of City Hall in the distance certainly doesn’t. I remember thinking of the angels from the stories when I went to my Match Banquet. I don’t see any angels and they don’t fly down on their cotton-soft wings to whisper in my ear. Can I trust this boy who writes in the earth?
Someplace deep within me—Is it my heart? Or perhaps my soul, the mythical part of humans that the angels cared about?—tells me that I can.
I lean closer to Ky. Neither of us looks at the other; we both gaze straight ahead to make sure that no one will suspect anything if they glance our way. That’s when I whisper the words to him, my heart so full it’s about to burst because I’m saying them, really saying them out loud to another person: “Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.”
Ky closes his eyes.
When he opens them again he slips something rough and papery into my hand. “Look at this for practice,” Ky says. “Destroy it when you’re done.”
I can hardly wait for Second School and sorting to end so that I can look at what Ky has given me. I wait until I’m at home in the kitchen, eating my dinner alone because my work hours were long tonight. I hear my father and Bram playing a game on the port in the foyer and I feel safe enough to reach into my pocket and pull out Ky’s gift.
A napkin. My first reaction is disappointment. Why this? It’s a normal napkin, the kind we get from the meal halls at Second School or the Arboretum or anywhere else. Brown and pulpy. Smeared and used. I have the impulse to incinerate it right away.
But.
When I open it up there are words inside. Gorgeous words. Cursive words. They were beautiful up on the green hill with the sound of wind in trees and they are beautiful here in my gray-and-blue kitchen with the grumbling of the incinerator in the background. Dark, curling, swirling words curve across the brown paper. Where dampness has touched them the words are slightly blurred.
And it’s not just words. He’s drawn things, too. The surface is covered with lines and meaning. Not a picture, not a poem, not the lyrics to a song, although my sorting mind notices the pattern of all these things. But I can’t classify them. This is nothing I have seen before.
I realize that I don’t even know what you would use to make marks like this. All of the words I practice are written in the air or traced in the dirt. There used to be tools for writing but I don’t know what they were. Even our paintbrushes in school were tethered to artscreens, our pictures wiped away almost immediately after we finished them. Somehow, Ky must know a secret, older than Grandfather and his mother and people before them. How to make. Create.
Two lives, he’s written.
Two lives, I whisper to myself. The words hush and hang in the room, too soft for the port to hear above the other sounds in the house. Almost too soft for me to hear above my heart beating fast. Faster than it ever has in the woods or on the tracker.
I should go to my room, to the relative privacy of that little place with my bed, my window. My closet where plainclothes hang, dead and still. But I can’t stop staring. It’s hard, at first, for me to figure out what the picture is meant to be; but then I realize it’s him. Ky. Drawn twice, once on each side of the fold of the napkin. The line of his jaw gives it away; the shape of his eyes, the spareness and strength of his body. The spaces left empty; his hands and the nothing they hold, though they are cupped, tipped skyward, in both pictures.
That’s where the similarity between the pictures ends. In the first picture, he looks up at something in the sky, and he looks younger, his face is open. The figure there seems to think his hands might still be filled. In the second, he is older, his face narrower, and he looks down at the ground.
Along the bottom he has written Which one is the true one, I don’t ask, they don’t tell.
Two lives. I think I understand this—his life before he came here, and his life after. But what does he mean by the line of song or poetry or plea at the end?
“Cassia?” my father calls from the doorway, behind me. I scoop the napkin up with my foilware from dinner and take it all toward the incinerator and the recycling bin.
“Yes?”
Even if he sees it, it’s a napkin, I tell myself, looking at the brown square on my tray. We incinerate them after every meal, and it’s even the right kind of paper, not like the one Grandfather gave me. The incineration tube won’t register the difference. Ky is keeping you safe. I lift my eyes to my father.
“It’s a message for you on the port,” my father says. He doesn’t look down at what I carry; he’s focused on my face, to see what I’m thinking. Maybe it’s there that the real danger lies. I smile, try to look unconcerned.
“Is it from Em?” I slide my foilware into the recycling bin. Only the napkin left.
“No,” my father says. “An Official from the Match Department.”
“Oh.” Just like that, I push the napkin down the incineration tube. “I’ll be right there,” I say to my father. I feel the faintest hint of heat from the fire below as Ky’s story burns, and I wonder if I will ever have the strength to hold onto something. Grandfather’s poems. Ky’s story. Or if I will always be someone who destroys.
Ky told you to destroy it, I tell myself. The man who wrote the poem is gone, but Ky is not. We have to keep it that way. Keep him safe.
I follow my father into the foyer. Bram glares at me on his way out of the foyer because this message has interrupted his game. Hoping to hide my nervousness, I give him a playful shove as I walk toward the port.
The Official on the screen is not one I’ve seen before. He’s a cheerful, burly looking man, not at all the cerebral, ascetic type I imagine hovering over datascreens in the Match Department. “Hello, Cassia,” he says. The collar of his white uniform seems tight around his neck, and he has laugh lines near his eyes.
“Hello.” I want to look down and see if my hands are stained from the drawings, the words, but I keep my eyes on the Official.
“It’s been over a month since your Match.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Other Matchees are arranging their first port-to-port communications now. I’ve spent the day putting those together for your peers. Of course, it would be rather ludicrous for you and Xander to have a formal port-to-port communication.” The Official laughs cheerfully. “Don’t you think?”
“I agree, sir.”
“The other Officials on the Matching Committee and I decided it makes the most sense for the two of you to have an outing together instead. Supervised, of course, by an Official, as are communications for the other Matchees.”
“Of course.” Out of the corner of my eye I see my father standing in the door of his room, watching me. Watching over me. I’m glad he’s there. Even though the idea of spending time with Xander isn’t at all new or scary, the idea of an Official at our meeting feels a little strange.
I hope it isn’t the Official from the greenspace, I think suddenly.
“Excellent. You’ll be eating outside of your home tomorrow night. Xander and the Official assigned to your Match will pick you up at your regular mealtime.”
“I’ll be ready.”
The Official signs off and the port beeps, indicating that we have another call waiting. “We’re popular this evening,” I say to my father, glad of the distraction so we don’t have to talk about my outing with Xander. My father already looks hopeful and hurries to stand next to me. It is my mother.
“Cassia, can I speak with your father alone for a few minutes?” she asks me after we exchange hellos. “I don’t have much time to talk tonight. I have some things I need to tell him.” She looks tired, and she still wears her uniform and insignia from work.
“Of course,” I say.
A knock sounds at the door and I go to answer it. It’s Xander. “We still have a few minutes before curfew,” he says. “Do you want to come talk on the steps with me?”
“Of course.” I close the door behind me and go outside. The porch light shines bright above us and we are in full view of the world—or at least the world of Mapletree Borough—as we sit down on the cement steps side by side. It feels good to be with Xander, in a different way than it feels good to be with Ky.
Still. Being with Ky, being with Xander—both things feel like standing in the light. Different types of light, but neither feels dark.
“It sounds like the two of us have an outing tomorrow night,” Xander says.
“The three of us,” I say, and when he looks puzzled, I add, “Don’t forget the Official.”
Xander groans. “Right. How could I forget?”
“I wish we could go alone.”
“Me too.” Neither of us says anything for a moment. The wind sails along our street, ruffling the leaves on the maple trees. In the evening light the leaves look silver-gray; their colors are gone, sucked away for now by the night. I think of the night I sat with Grandfather and thought the same thing; I think of the old disease of color blindness, eliminated generations ago, and how the world might have looked to those people.
“Do you ever daydream?” Xander asks me.
“All the time.”
“Did you ever daydream about your Match? Before the Banquet, I mean?”
“Sometimes,” I say. I stop watching the play of the wind on the leaves of the maple tree and glance at Xander.
I should have looked at Xander before I answered. It’s too late now. Now I can tell by his eyes that my answer wasn’t what he hoped, that by saying what I did I closed a door instead of opening it. Perhaps Xander dreamed about me and wanted to know if I dreamed about him. Perhaps he has moments of uncertainty, as I do, and needs me to tell him that I feel sure about the Match.
This is the problem with being an uncommon Match. We know each other too well. We feel the uncertainties in our touch, see them in each other’s eyes. We don’t work them out on our own miles away from each other the way the other Matches do. They don’t see the day-to-day. We do.
Still, we are a Match, and a deep understanding runs through us even in the midst of a misunderstanding. Xander reaches for my hand and I lace my fingers through his. This is the known. This is good. When I think about sitting on a porch with him on other nights in this life we’ve been given, I can picture it easily and happily.
I want Xander to kiss me again. It’s late evening and there’s even a newrose smell in the air the way there was for our first kiss. I want him to kiss me again so that I know that what I feel for him is real, if it is more or less real than Ky’s hand brushing mine on top of the little hill.
Down the street, the last air train from the City sighs into the station. A few moments later we see the figures of late workers hurrying down the sidewalks to get back to their houses by curfew.
Xander stands up. “I’d better get back. See you tomorrow at school.”
“See you tomorrow,” I say. He squeezes my hand and joins the others on the sidewalk walking toward home.
I don’t go inside. I watch the figures and wave to a few of them. I know who I’m waiting for. Just when I think I won’t see him, Ky pauses in front of my house. Almost before he’s stopped, I walk down the steps and over to talk to him.
“I’ve been meaning to do this for the last few days,” Ky says. At first I think he’s reaching for my hand and my heart pauses, but then I see that he’s holding out something. One of the brown paper envelopes that people who work in offices sometimes use. He must have gotten it from his father. I realize right away that my compact might be inside, so I reach to take the envelope from him. Our hands do not touch and I find myself wishing that they had.
What is wrong with me?
“I have your ...” I pause because I don’t know what to call the case that holds the spinning arrow.
“I know.” Ky smiles at me. The moon, hanging heavy and low in the sky near the horizon, is a harvest-yellow slice like the melon we get to eat during the Autumn Holiday. The moon’s light brightens Ky’s face a little but his smile does even more.
“It’s inside.” I gesture behind me, at the steps and the lighted porch. “If you want to stay here, I can run in and get it.”
“That’s all right,” Ky says. “It can wait. You can give it to me later.” His voice sounds quiet, almost shy. “I want you to have a chance to look at it.”
I wonder what color his eyes are right now. Do they reflect the black of the night or the light of the moon?
I move closer to try to see, but as I do, the almost-curfew bell rings down the street and we both jump. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” Ky says as he turns to leave.
“See you then.”
I have five more minutes before I have to be inside, so I stay out and do not move. I watch him all the way down the street and then I look up at the moon in the sky and close my eyes. In my mind, I see the words I read earlier:
Two lives.
Ever since the day of the mistake with my Match, I’ve never known which life is my true one. Even with the reassurances of the Official that day in the greenspace, I think a part of me hasn’t felt at peace. It was as though I saw for the first time that life could branch into different paths, take different directions.
Back inside the house, I tip my compact out of the envelope and take Ky’s artifact from its hiding place deep in the pocket of one of my extra sets of plainclothes. When I place them side by side, it’s easy to tell the difference between the two golden circles. The surface of Ky’s artifact is plain, scratched. The compact shines brighter, and its engraved letters catch my eye.
On a whim, I pick up my artifact, twist the base, look inside. I know Ky saw me reading the poems in the forest. Did he also see me open the compact?
What if Ky left a message for me?
Nothing.
I put the compact away on its shelf.
I decide to keep the envelope, to put Ky’s artifact inside before I put it back in the pocket of my extra plainclothes for safekeeping. But before I do, I open the case and watch the spinning arrow. It settles on a point, but I still spin, wondering where to go.